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Oakland police block off upper Broadway after breaking up the Occupy Oakland camps in Frank Ogawa Plaza and Snow Park on Tuesday. Oct. 25, 2011 in Oakland, Calif. Police in riot gear began clearing anti-Wall Street protesters on Tuesday morning from the plaza in front of Oakland's City Hall where they have been camped out for about two weeks. City officials had originally been supportive of the protesters, but the city later warned the protesters that they were breaking the law and could not stay in the encampment overnight. (AP Photo/Bay Area News Group, Jane Tyska)
Rodney King, who was found dead this weekend in a swimming pool at his house, once said that he believed his beating by Los Angeles police officers back in 1991 had “made the world a better place,” by bringing attention to the problem of police abuse.
Following the King incident and other scandals, LAPD entered a consent decree with the Justice Department that imposed major reforms, including more aggressive internal audits and officer training. But in the 20 years since King’s beating, allegations of police misconduct have remained a serious problem in several cities nationwide.
What impact, if any, did the King case have on the problem? “Not enough,” said Ezekiel Edwards, director of the criminal law reform project at the American Civil Liberties Union.
Edwards said that better training has made the police more professional and that there are more opportunities for accountability with the proliferation of cellphone cameras. But, he said, “This is still a significant problem around the country.
“People that have to deal with excessive force are often the most disenfranchised, living in communities that don’t have a lot of political power,” he said. “A lot of things happen in those communities that people aren’t seeing.”
The most recent data from the National Police Misconduct Reporting Project, which offers one of the only comprehensive accountings of misconduct allegations against the 18,000-some law enforcement agencies nationwide, showed a slight uptick in the number incidents of reported misconduct and a 6 percent increase in the number of reported incidents involving excessive force from 2009 to 2010 (the most recent years for which data is available).
Under the Obama administration, the Justice Department has taken on more active role in pursuing abuse allegations, which has brought some changes on state or city levels.
Last year, we noted that the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division had 17 ongoing investigations into law enforcement agencies to pursue allegations of excessive force or discrimination — more than at any time in the division’s history. Those investigations are still open.
The DOJ also has entered into a consent decree to require major reforms, or a memorandum of understanding to address specific concerns, with seven departments: Los Angeles, Detroit, the Virgin Islands, Beacon, NY; Warren, Ohio; Easton, Penn.; and the Orange Country Sheriff’s office in California.
In Seattle, a federal investigation found last December that the Seattle Police Department engaged in “a pattern or practice of unnecessary and excessive use of force,” and that about 20 percent of the cases suspects’ civil rights were violated.
In Chicago, police paid $45.5 million in damages in cases of police misconduct between January 2009 and November 2011, according to a recent investigation by the Chicago Reporter, with 75 percent of those cases involving excessive force. Meanwhile, an independent commission set up to investigate allegations of two decades of torture by police has lost its funding after following up on only five cases. The court filings detail repeated, brutal abuse of suspects by police.
The Newark, N.J. police department is currently under investigation by the DOJ for an alleged pattern of excessive force and discrimination after the ACLU documented 407 allegations of police shootings, sexual assault, false arrests and other abuses.
And then there’s the investigation into police misconduct in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, which we’ve been following since 2009 in our Law and Disorder project. The DOJ has accused the department of a “systemic violations of civil rights,” and is working to establish a consent decree with the department. One of the incidents that drew the attention of the Justice Department: the conviction of five officers in the shooting deaths and cover-up of two civilians on the Danziger Bridge.
In September, Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez, who heads the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, said the bridge shooting was the “most high-profile incident” since the beating of Rodney King.
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Founded in July 1999, WhyQuit is home to cold turkey quitting. Visited by 2.2 million unique annual visitors, most are trying to stop smoking and seek motivation enhancement, insightful articles, free quitting e-books, tips guides, video counseling or group support. But WhyQuit is broader than just smoking. It's a nicotine cessation site. So, whether addicted to smoked nicotine from cigarettes, cigars, beedies, a pipe or hookah, or slave to vaping e-cigs or dependent upon smokeless products such as dip, chewing tobacco or snus, or whether hooked nicotine replacement products such as the gum, lozenge, spray, patch or inhaler, you're in the right place!
Why cold turkey?
Because it works. Each year more nicotine addicts arrest their chemical dependence by going cold turkey than by all other quitting methods combined. Cold turkey is fast, free, safe, effective and highly productive. But don't take our word for it. Ask all ex-smoking friends who have not allowed any nicotine into their bloodstream for at least one year how they quit. You'll discover a giant elephant or turkey in the room.
How is cold turkey defined?
Cold turkey is the abrupt and complete cessation of nicotine use, without resort to any quitting product or procedure, including but not limited to: replacement nicotine (the nicotine patch, gum, lozenge, spray or inhaler), any smoking cessation medication (Chantix, Champix or Zyban), any shots, herbs or other pills, any smokeless or other tobacco product, any type of e-cigarette (including reliance upon nicotine-free juices), or any form of hypnosis, acupuncture, or other procedure.
What is smart turkey?
Imagine becoming smarter and wiser than nicotine's grip upon us. Real drug addicts in every sense, we'll never be stronger than nicotine. But then we don't need to be. Nicotine is simply a chemical with an I.Q. of zero. It cannot think, plan, plot or conspire and is not some monster or demon that dwells within. Our greatest weapon has always been our intelligence but only if put to work.
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Protesters call for the release of Jonathan Pollard (pictured on the flier), who has been in prison for 30 years on charges of spying on the United States, during a demonstration outside U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s hotel in Jerusalem on April 8, 2013. Photo by Ahmad Gharabli/AFP/Getty Images
Jonathan Pollard, who’s been in prison the past 30 years for selling secrets to Israel, will be released on parole this November. Two things are worth noting. First, contrary to many skeptics, his release is not a political ploy to relax Israel’s opposition to the Iran nuclear deal. Second, contrary to claims by Pollard’s supporters, his punishment has been completely justified; he ranks as one of the 20th century’s most appalling American spies.
The first myth is easy to puncture. Pollard’s life sentence came with a mandatory-parole clause after 30 years. He started serving time in November 1985. So, 30 years is up in November 2015. It’s math.
The second myth takes longer to unravel. At his sentencing hearing, Pollard, who’d been a U.S. Navy intelligence official, painted himself as a devout Jew who’d stolen classified documents dealing only with Arab military might in order to help Israel stave off an invasion; none of his actions, he claimed, harmed American security.
Judge Aubrey Robinson Jr. called Pollard to the bench, showed him a classified affidavit that the Department of Defense had submitted, listing the range of sensitive secrets that he’d stolen, pointed to one of the items, and said, “What about this?” Pollard was silenced. Robinson sentenced him to life.
We now know (and M.E. Bowman, a senior counterintelligence officer who was working the Pollard case, has since confirmed) that the item in question was a National Security Agency manual called the RASIN, short for “Radio Signal Notations.” The RASIN was a guide to the physical parameters of every radio signal that the NSA was intercepting—a guide on how the NSA was tracking military communications, not just Israel’s but any and every country’s, including the Soviet Union’s. The RASIN was 10 volumes, and Pollard gave his Israeli handlers every single page of it.
An article by Seymour Hersh, in the Jan. 18, 1999, issue of the New Yorker, titled “The Traitor,” listed some other beyond-top-secret documents—among the tens of thousands—that Pollard had stolen and sold. They included the “National SIGINT Requirements List” (SIGINT standing for Signals Intelligence), which revealed which communications channels of which military powers, in which regions, the NSA was intercepting in what order of priority. In other words, it would give the reader a heads up on where and what actions the U.S. military might take next.
Pollard also provided a year’s worth of memos by intelligence officers in the U.S. Navy’s 6th Fleet, recording all their observations of Soviet planes, ships, and submarines in the Mediterranean Sea. He provided documents on how Navy intelligence was tracking Soviet submarines. He provided material revealing that one of America’s most highly classified photo-reconnaissance satellites could take pictures not just straight down but from an angle: Israeli or Russian or some other country’s officers might think they could take a missile out of hiding once the satellite passed over, but no, the satellite was still snapping pictures—and now, thanks to Pollard, they knew this, too.
In other words, much of this material would be of use to more countries than just Israel. And Hersh quoted senior U.S. intelligence officials saying that some of these documents made their way to Moscow, perhaps through a KGB mole in Mossad (who was also later arrested), perhaps by Israeli officials who gave the Soviet Union the documents in exchange for letting more Jews emigrate to Israel. Officials have told me, in the years since, that they suspected such an exchange but never found hard evidence. Nonetheless, senior officials told Hersh that Pollard’s handlers had asked him to get certain types of documents that seemed of little use to Israel but of great value to the Soviet Union.
Many of Hersh’s sources on the story were veteran intelligence officials who were worried that President Bill Clinton was about to free Pollard—a move that, they thought, would be dangerous to national security (Pollard was thought to carry many more secrets in his head) and a severe blow to morale within the agencies. So they gave Hersh a lot of material—much more than anyone had yet made public—on what Pollard had done.
A few weeks before Hersh’s story, four retired admirals—all of whom had served as directors of U.S. Naval Intelligence—wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post warning that Pollard’s idealistic image was a “clever public-relations campaign.” In fact, they revealed, Pollard had offered highly classified documents to three other countries before hitting up Israel. (Those countries were later reported to be Pakistan, South Africa, and Australia.)
Furthermore, the admirals wrote, Pollard was well-paid for his efforts—a monthly stipend of $2,500, more than $10,000 in gifts, and other favors, in exchange for a commitment to spy for 10 years—and he was asking his handlers for a raise when he got caught. An official investigation revealed that Pollard was constantly broke, in serious debt, borrowing money from colleagues, and spending it just as fast. Just a few months after Pollard went to work for a secret unit of U.S. Naval Intelligence, he was approached by an Israeli air force officer, and the arrangement began.
Finally, the admirals wrote, Pollard was lying when he said that he’d taken only documents that would help Israel defend itself from Arab countries. In fact, he stole entire databases, “suitcase-loads” of documents that he couldn’t have had time to examine before delivering them to his handlers, often on a nightly basis. Many of these documents, they added, had nothing to do with Israel or the Middle East.
There is another disturbing element to this story. For more than 12 years after his arrest, senior Israeli officials told their American allies that Pollard had been a “rogue” who had no contact with the Israeli government. Finally, in 1998, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted to President Clinton that Pollard had been an Israeli agent all along, handled by senior officials in the Bureau of Scientific Relations.
Around the time the admirals wrote their op-ed and intelligence officials were telling Hersh all about Pollard, Bill Clinton was thinking seriously about letting the spy go. Israeli leaders and many Jewish activists had been leading a “Free Pollard” campaign for years. Clinton figured that if he gave in to the pressure, he could get Netanyahu to sign an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord.
However, CIA Director George Tenet, alerted to the possibility, told Clinton that he would resign in protest if Pollard were freed. Seven former secretaries of defense signed a letter opposing a pardon as well. Clinton told Netanyahu there was no chance that Pollard would be released soon.
Every few years, a story appears that the president—be it Clinton, Bush, or now Obama—is considering, or has agreed to sign, a Pollard pardon. All of the stories have been false. The latest round is false, too. When he leaves prison, his movements will be restricted; it’s a parole, not a pardon. More to the point, he’ll be leaving prison not because he’s a hero, a martyr, or a victim of injustice—he is none of those things—but rather, simply, because his time is up.
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If you want 5G, there’s a good chance you'll need a small cell nearby to deliver it. Putting up that cell may be hard because of a host of problems, but Nokia Bell Labs thinks it can solve some of them with drones and tiny solar panels.
Nokia's F-Cell is an experimental LTE small cell that doesn't need any wires. It gets power from solar panels on its surface and communicates with the carrier's core network over a high-speed wireless connection. No one even needs to climb up on a roof to install it: The company recently delivered an F-Cell to the roof of one of its buildings in Sunnyvale, Calif. using a drone.
F-Cells won’t start showing up everywhere tomorrow, but anything to speed up small-cell deployment could make a big difference when 5G starts going live in 2020. The next generation of cellular will probably require dense networks of small cells to deliver the gigabit speeds being promised, and carriers will face both legal and technical hurdles when they try to put them up.
Though 5G is expected to improve mobile services in several areas, including the internet of things, it will be the technology's eye-popping speeds of 5Gbps (bits per second) to 10Gbps that will call for small cells using millimeter-wave frequencies, said Tom Keathley, senior vice president of wireless network architecture and design at AT&T. They will be deployed first in dense urban areas, he said.
Most cells today are mounted on towers placed an average of two kilometers (1.2 miles) apart, according to AT&T. Carriers typically have to get clearance from local governments, pay rent and run fiber or copper cables from the towers to their wired networks.
In order to offer better performance to more subscribers, 5G networks are expected to use much higher frequencies that are harder to send over long distances. That will take smaller cells, spaced only about 250 meters (820 feet) apart, so all the headaches of deploying a cell will be repeated many more times.
There are about 200,000 cells in the U.S. now, but there may be millions in the coming 5G era, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler warned last month. Neighborhoods that block small cells because of health or aesthetic concerns could miss out on 5G, he said. The FCC is now working to streamline cell site approvals.
The F-Cell is designed to solve the technical challenges. It doesn't need a power cord because it’s powered by the sun, and it doesn't need a cable because it connects to the wired network through a central wireless hub that can serve several F-Cells.
In Nokia’s demonstration, a drone carried an F-Cell to the roof of the building and dropped it off, leaving the cell to turn itself on, configure itself and automatically connect to the wireless backhaul network.
That network is built around a closed-loop, 64-antenna system that uses massive MIMO (multiple in, multiple out) technology. It forms eight radio beams to communicate with eight F-Cells.
Each cell has a total system throughput of about 1Gbps and, with enhancements and higher frequencies, that could grow to tens of gigabits per second, Nokia says.
A "drop and forget" cell like the F-Cell would make small-cell deployments simpler and cheaper, said Tolaga Research analyst Phil Marshall. But it wouldn’t help with issues like zoning and negotiations with landlords, which are already big challenges, he said.
AT&T is already making deals with municipalities to mount LTE small cells on light poles and other sites, Keathley said. One such deal can give the carrier access to small-cell locations throughout a city, and by the time 5G is available, AT&T will have laid much of the groundwork for that next deployment, he said.
Marshall doesn't think current methods for getting small cells into cities will suffice for 5G. Carriers need new approaches, like sharing sites with rival operators, offering free Wi-Fi from the sites or using them to help cities deliver services, he said. "5G will need a heap of sites."
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According to a Gilani Research Foundation Survey carried out by Gallup & Gilani Pakistan, 2 in 3 Pakistanis opine that Sharia should be the only law practiced in the country.
A nationally representative sample of men and women from across the four provinces was asked, “In your opinion, which sentence describes your understanding of Sharia and its implementation in Pakistan?” In response to this question, 67% said that according to their understanding Sharia should be the only law, 24% said that Sharia should be the law but not the only law i.e. other legislation is also possible, 5% said Sharia should not be the law of the land while 4% did not know.
Trend Analysis:
The same question was asked in 2010. In 2010, 51% said that according to their understanding Sharia should be the only law, 30% said that Sharia should be the law but not the only law i.e. other legislation is also possible, 8% said Sharia should not be the law of the land while 11% did not know.
Comparing the two years, there is a 16% increase in the proportion of Pakistanis who believe Sharia should be the only law, a 6% decrease in the proportion of Pakistanis who believe Sharia should be the law but not the only law and a 3% decrease in the proportion of Pakistanis who believe Sharia should not be the law of the land.
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A former caretaker at the Prime Minister’s Residence was mistreated while working for Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife, the Jerusalem Labor Court ruled Wednesday, awarding Menny Naftali damages over claims of verbal and emotional abuse at the hands of Sara Netanyahu.
The court awarded Naftali NIS 170,000 compensation (about $43,735) for the years of mistreatment while working at the Jerusalem mansion, and also ruled he had been misled over his terms of employment at the residence.
“I knew I’d win,” Naftali said following the ruling. “The amount of compensation does not matter to me because I am in much bigger debt than this sentence, but this is just the beginning for me. I am waiting for the libel suits concerning anyone who spoke against me. To me this is just a small victory along the way.”
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Naftali had sued the state, the Netanyahus, and the deputy director of the Prime Minister’s Office for NIS 1 million ($258,000) in 2014.
Accusations by Naftali, as well as by another maintenance worker, Guy Eliyahu, ranged from claims of verbal abuse and what he called irrational demands by Sara Netanyahu regarding the management of the residence to allegations that the prime minister’s wife made him return wine bottles to supermarkets and then pocketed the deposits.
On one occasion, Naftali said, she called him at 3 a.m. to berate him for buying milk in a bag rather than a cartoon. On another occasion, she demanded that a table, freshly laid for a meal outside the residence, be cleared and set afresh because somebody had opened an electric awning above it, sending some dust down.
Mrs. Netanyahu also threw a vase of day-old flowers on the floor, scolding him that they were not fresh enough, he said.
Naftali has also claimed that Sara Netanyahu derided his ethnicity when he ordered food for them in a hotel, implying that his Middle Eastern background was somehow uncouth.
Naftali claimed that Ms. Netanyahu made him undertake chores at all hours of the day. He accused the Netanyahus of spending money on food and drink ordered from outside the residence, despite the fact that a cook working at the Prime Minister’s Residence is paid for by the state.
The judge wrote in her ruling that “numerous testimonies presented to the court point to an atmosphere of harmful work conditions at the residence due to the behavior of Mrs. Netanyahu and her attitude toward the workers. These included irrational demands, insults, humiliation and outbursts of rage.”
In March, Naftali testified against the Netanyahus, who in turn countered that the suit was born of the former caretaker’s frustration over not having received tenure in the position after working as a temporary caretaker for two years.
After Naftali’s allegations went public, Sara Netanyahu claimed the former caretaker was seeking to extort money from the state’s coffers. She also said Naftali “threatened and blackmailed” the Prime Minister’s Office, adding that she had text messages to prove it.
Wednesday’s court ruling, however, determined that Sara Netanyahu’s claims were not based in fact, and stated that “it is regrettable that Mrs. Netanyahu chose to discredit so severely a former employee of the Prime Minister’s Residence.”
In response to the verdict the Prime Minister’s Office issued a statement which said “the picture drawn by the ruling is far from the reality in the Prime Minister’s Residence. It is regrettable that even though the court rejected 90 percent of Menny Naftali’s monetary claims, the court elected to devote a significant portion of its ruling to Mrs. Netanyahu, who was not a side in the case.”
It went on to claim that “many employees at the Prime Minister’s Residence testify to the excellent, warm and humane treatment they receive from the prime minister’s wife.”
Naftali and Eliyahu’s allegations were widely covered by the Hebrew-language media, which has often reported on the Netanyahus’ lavish lifestyle, including outsize expenses charged to state coffers, and has also portrayed Sara Netanyahu as a difficult person who wields great influence over her husband.
Last month, Sara Netanyahu was questioned for a second time by police’s high-profile crimes unit, days after she was grilled for more than six hours over alleged spending irregularities at the prime minister’s official and private residences, some of which came to light based on Naftali’s testimony.
The investigation went forward despite a request by the family’s lawyer to close the probe. The decision to launch the investigation followed a recommendation from State Prosecutor Shai Nitzan, after allegations were raised in a February 2015 report by State Comptroller Yosef Shapira that detailed wasteful spending by Netanyahu and his wife at their official residence in Jerusalem and private home in Caesarea. The report also alleged possible criminal misdeeds.
The investigation highlighted multiple suspected irregularities, including in the hiring of electrician Avi Fahima, a Likud Central Committee member. A committee charged with overseeing residence expenditures — and which included the Prime Minister’s Office legal adviser — had ruled against the hiring of Fahima, but he was employed nonetheless.
The report also alleged that between 2009 and 2013 Sara Netanyahu pocketed thousands of shekels of refunds for recycling of empty bottles from the Prime Minister’s Residence.
The report on the expenditures came out in the midst of an election campaign and found that the residence operated for years without an audited budget. It raised questions about the use of public funds, which were spent on — among other things — the upkeep of the Netanyahus’ pool at their private home.
The report also noted that, beginning in 2013 — when criticism led to heightened awareness of the issue among the prime minister’s staff — a systematic, audited budget was instituted and expenditures declined precipitously.
AP contributed to this report.
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Surgeons were stunned to find a five-inch object inside the woman (Picture: The Journal of Sexual Medicine)
Surgeons at an Aberdeen hospital were left stunned when they X-rayed a patient and found a sex toy inside her that had been there for 10 years.
A 38-year-old woman went to Aberdeen Royal Infirmary after experiencing a variety of bizarre symptons, including rapid and severe weight loss, constant lethargy and uncontrollable shaking.
Baffled medics put her through an x-ray and spotted a five-inch long oval object – which they found to be a sex toy that the woman claims not to have used in over a decade.
The woman said she did not remember if the sex toy was removed or not (Picture: The Journal of Sexual Medicine)
The sex toy, which was protruding into the woman’s bladder from her vagina, had caused her to suffer from rare ‘vesicovaginal fistula’, where urine is allowed to flow into the vagina.
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And doctors were surprised that, although the woman admitted to being drunk when she and her partner used the toy, she had no recollection of whether it had been removed.
The case was reported in The Journal of Sexual Medicine, where it was noted that this was the first time a sex toy has been left inside a woman for that length of time.
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The brain is super quick in establishing connections — it can jump from one idea to the other in a fraction of a second. Your mind is a holding tank for all the memories, experiences, and thoughts you’ve had at some point in your life that haven’t been forgotten. Unfortunately, you can’t hook your brain up to a computer to download information from it… not yet, anyway.
With so much information passing through our brains everyday, it’s impossible to manually record everything that comes to mind. But once in a while, you have that gem — that one idea that sparks your creativity.
Still, if your brain is like mine, the idea will be gone by tomorrow unless I do something about it. Over the years, I’ve developed a system that allows for me to record anything noteworthy, enabling me to look through my thoughts and take action or even expand upon my original idea.
Capture and storage
One of the important elements is the ability to capture thoughts from anywhere I am. Therefore, I not only require a system that functions on every device I own, but also one that allows for the sync of data across these devices so I have an exact, up to date version of my notes wherever I am.
iPhone
I have my iPhone almost everywhere I am, but any smartphone you own will work fine if you set it up in a way that stores your files in a cloud, thus enabling access across your devices.
Keeping your phone handy is helpful because ideas can come from anywhere — while you’re out for lunch, working out, walking to meet up with friends, or taking a train home. Jot down anything you can think of — you never know if your thoughts, questions, or other curiosities can become something bigger when you have the time to think about it some more.
Drafts
My workflow on my iPhone involves two different apps working together. The first is a an app called Drafts, which was specifically built for text capture.
I personally like Drafts because you don’t have to fiddle around with buttons or a UI — launch the app and just begin typing. When you’re done, you have the option of exporting the text to a variety of services such as Evernote, Dropbox, Omnifocus, Tweetbot, and basically any app that accepts plain text as an input.
Once I’ve typed out my idea, I export the note to an app called 1Writer using a custom URL within Drafts.
1Writer
After looking at several note taking apps, 1Writer has become my favorite. 1Writer will take the text from Drafts, name my new note, and allow for me to add more to the note if needed.
1Writer also has Markdown support, meaning that I can add some basic styles (bold, italic, etc) and 1Writer will allow for me to preview the document with the styles applied.
When I’m done with the note, I simply hit the “Done” button and it automatically saves to Dropbox (more on sync later). Whenever I’m not capturing an idea, I can also use 1Writer to look at my older notes. 1Writer comes with a search feature that is quick and searches the entire document (not just the title).
Voice recorder
As proficient a texter you might be, sometimes your thoughts are too complex to type down quickly. Voice recording apps can be useful in a scenario when your stroke of genius arrives at an inconvenient time.
Additionally, it can be helpful to verbally express yourself out loud, if only to re-listen to your tone later. Were you excited by your ideas? Confused? Angry? Passionate? These emotions can help you formulate what to do with your ideas later on — whether it’s a problem you want to try to solve, or a concept you want to design.
iMac
When I’m at home, the full sized keyboard connected to my iMac provides a huge advantage over my iPhone for note taking. That’s why when I’m at home, I also need a way to capture ideas (and view old ones) in an efficient manner.
This is where nvALT steps in. nvALT is based on another app, Notational Velocity, hence the name. nvALT take a different approach to note taking with its search/new note bar. In other applications, there is typically a dedicated area for searching, and a dedicated button for creating a new note. nvALT compresses these two tools into one.
Start typing and you’ll get a list of notes that show up as a result for your search, and if you hit enter, you can start a new note using the text you just typed. Super simple, super fast.
nvALT is great for viewing notes since the search is extremely quick and notes can be pulled up with one click. On the left is a list of notes that will either contain all of my notes, or only the notes that show up for my search. On the right I can see and edit my notes.
Sync
I picked nvALT and 1Writer because they both support synchronization. The beauty of working with plain text files is that sync is very fast since the files are tiny (my average note is .5KB).
I rely on Dropbox to sync all of my files silently and in the background.
Sync with 1Writer
Setting up Dropbox to work with 1Writer is simple: all you have to do is access the settings within 1Writer and enable Dropbox as a service.
I created a dedicated folder on my Dropbox’s root directory (/Write) to store my notes, but you can call it anything you’d like. Once you’ve got it set up, 1Writer will begin to save all of your precious notes to the cloud.
Sync with nvALT
nvALT, unlike 1Writer, does not come with built in Dropbox sync. But there is a workaround.
First, you have to have Dropbox installed on your computer. Next, go to nvALT’s preferences and select the Notes tab. Now select the folder you made in Dropbox that holds all of your notes.
Just a little rerouting gets nvALT to import your notes into the correct folder. In order to make sure everything syncs properly, make sure that under the storage tab within the Notes tab, change the “Store and read notes on disk as:” setting to “Plain text files.”
Revisit
Every once in a while, you should revisit your notes (or voice recordings) to see what you’ve saved. I was looking over my notes recently and didn’t even remember writing down half of the stuff (glad I did, though!)
Revisiting allows you to add to the current notes you have and to continue thinking about previous ideas. Your thoughts are worth exploring — you just have to remember to remember them.
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Technology holds promise and peril.
Google self-driving cars in Mountain View, Calif., in 2014. (Photo11: Eric Risberg, AP)
When Ford President Mark Fields announced this month that his company would produce a driverless car — with no steering wheel and no gas pedal — in five years, he did not mince words. Driverless cars, he said, “would have as significant an impact on society as Ford’s moving assembly line did 100 years ago.”
A truly driverless car by Labor Day weekend of 2021 seems like a tall order. But autonomous technologies are already being added to existing cars at breakneck speed, and the early data suggest they are making cars safer. The much-publicized fatal accident in May involving a Tesla on "autopilot" was the first in 130 million miles traveled by other Teslas using the same, poorly named function.
The prospect of driverless cars poses all sorts of intriguing possibilities. Those who are sight-impaired or otherwise unable to drive would find new mobility. Traffic flows could be better managed as cars would be automatically routed to the least congested routes. And people with modest automotive needs could simply summon rides when needed, rather than wasting money on cars that spend much of their time parked in driveways.
For these and other reasons, Washington should resist the temptation to slap onerous regulations on a promising industry. At the same time, producers of driverless cars would be well advised to proceed with caution. Going too far, too fast will inevitably create a backlash against the technology.
For years, those concerned about how the world around them is changing have focused most of their ire on trade and immigration, rather than on the creative destruction of technology. With cars, that might be shifting. Driverless vehicles would go considerably further in upsetting the existing order. Taxi, Uber and Lyft drivers would join the ranks of the aggrieved, as would long-haul truckers.
Moreover, no matter what the data say, many Americans equate driverless cars with a reduction in safety. They generally trust their own instincts and judgment, and reason that if they are in control they can limit their risks. Pretty much the opposite is true. An estimated 94% of accidents are caused by human error, often involving drivers who are distracted, tired or inebriated.
Perhaps the biggest hurdle that carmakers face is the unexpected. No one really knows what traffic would be like when significant numbers of driverless cars are on the road. Most driverless cars have been programmed to be as conservative and prudent as a grandmother going to church. Most humans at the wheel tend to be more assertive. That combination could make for an unwieldy mix on America’s roads.
Driverless cars have a lot going for them. But automakers and regulators need to think carefully about how quickly, and under what circumstances, they should be brought to market. And society as a whole needs to ponder the question: How much safer is safe enough?
USA TODAY's editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff. Most editorials are coupled with an opposing view — a unique USA TODAY feature.
To read more editorials, go to the Opinion front page or sign up for the daily Opinion email newsletter. To respond to this editorial, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.
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For many people, the Linux terminal represents a substantial portion of where their most important work happens. Whether a system administrator managing multiple remote machines, a programmer trying to run a new snippet of code as they walk through the source, or simply an ordinary user who is trying to read a man page for documentation as they step through pecking out a lengthy command, it's not uncommon to need to run and see the output of multiple terminal applications at a time.
Why should keeping track of multiple applications be a difficult proposition that requires a fancy modern GUI? Sure, you can launch multiple terminal instances, or use a terminal emulator that tiles terminals for you. But there's an easier, and arguably better way, by using a native terminal application to manage your multiple applications just like you would in a traditional windowed environment. Enter tmux, the terminal multiplexer.
Before we get to tmux and why it will change the way you interact with the command line, let's talk a bit about processes. When you launch a program from the terminal, it may seem like your terminal is now entirely consumed by that process. But that's not actually the case. In a Bash shell (and many others) you can send your application to the background either at launch (by placing a & at the end of the command) or by pressing ctrl+z to suspend the job and then sending your command to the background with bg, and returning it with fg, or view a list of jobs with the jobs command.
Process control is itself an important concept in the Linux world, one that any Linux user would benefit from taking a little time to understand, but it's a big enough area to be beyond the scope of this article. I mention it here because it's a common misconception of newcomers that launching a command at the command line always “ties up” the terminal that launched it until the process is terminated, which isn't the case.
There are many problems that tmux can help solve, but the primary purpose is to allow you to run several applications within the same terminal window, either side-by-side or allowing you to easily switch between applications, or groups of applications together in the same window, with a simple keystroke. It also allows you “attach” or “detach” from a tmux instance, in effect, keeping your applications running just like you left them if you close your terminal, allowing you to come back later.
Installing tmux is easy. If it's not already on your machine, it's also certainly in your Linux distribution's default repositories, so installation with your package manager of choice will be simple. On Fedora, that means a simple $ sudo dnf install tmux -y will install it for you and you'll be ready to get up and running in seconds.
Once you've installed and launched tmux for the first time, you'll see a green bar at the bottom of your terminal. By default, the bar will give you a list of your open windows, your hostname, and the time, but you can configure it to show much more.
Commands in tmux are issued by first issuing a command prefix. By default, this is ctrl+b, but you can change this as well. After pressing ctrl+b, you can then create a new window by pressing the c key. You can then issue commands in this new window, and switch back to your original window by pressing p for the previous window, or w to list all of the windows you have created, from which you can jump between them.
You can also split a window into multiple panes by pressing ctrl+b or whatever you have assigned your command prefix to be, and then either % to split the screen vertically or " to split it horizontally. You can then jump between panes with your prefix and the arrow keys.
Those are the basics. When you're done using a pane or window, you can remove it with your command prefix and x for a pane or & for a window. Want to learn more? The prefix followed by ? will tell you quite a bit more; it's the built-in command list.
Once you've started using tmux, explored these basic commands, and begun to set up a terminal environment customized to your needs, you'll want to move beyond the basic instructions I've included here. And well you should—there's a lot of great information out there! Here are a few other resources I've found helpful:
Is tmux the only tool out there which provides this functionality? As is often the case in the open source world, the answer is no! GNU Screen is another popular tool providing similar functionality. While there are some subtle difference between GNU Screen and tmux, which one you choose to use is really a matter of individual preference. GNU Screen is decades old and very stable; the flip side of its age is that it hasn't seen nearly as much active development.
And while greybeards and other old-timers might be perfectly happy GNU Screen, tmux seems to have wider interest among the broader Linux community these days. That doesn't make it better or worse, but it does mean that I've found it's often easier to find someone who has already solved my exact problem or configuration challenge when looking around support communities and the Internet. Its unique name also makes tmux a lot easier to find plugins for when looking around GitHub and other software repositories, too.
Do you use tmux? What do you wish you had known when you were getting started? Let us know in the comments below.
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More than a dozen federal appeals court judges will hear arguments over President Trump's travel ban executive order on May 8, the court announced on Monday.
All active judges of the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit — there are 15, if none are recused — will hear the appeal over the travel ban injunction issued by a federal judge in Maryland in Richmond, Virginia.
The move to hear the case initially en banc — by the full court — rather than by a three-judge panel signifies the importance that the court places on the case and was not opposed either by the challengers to the ban or the Justice Department.
The move also guarantees that the appeals court — which includes a majority of judges nominated by Democratic presidents — will not first hear the case by a three-judge panel that might happen to include two or three conservative judges.
The arguments in the Fourth Circuit are on the narrow preliminary injunction issued by US District Judge Theodore Chuang — focused only on barring the federal government from enforcing the 90-day ban on travel from six Muslim-majority countries.
The next week, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit will hear its second arguments relating to the two executive orders Trump has issued on the topic — and over the federal government's appeal of a much more broad injunction than that issued in the Maryland case.
The injunction in Hawaii v. Trump bars the Trump administration from enforcing the entire section of his executive order relating to the travel ban, as well as the entire section relating to the 120-day halt to the refugee program.
The Ninth Circuit has scheduled the arguments on that appeal for May 15.
This is a developing story. Please check back at BuzzFeed News for the latest.
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Chinese restaurant and business owners in Toronto say they have received hundreds of hateful and racist letters in the wake of the city council's decision to ban shark fin on local menus.
"This is not about shark fin," Kai Tao said at a news conference with other leaders in the Chinese community. "This is about a community being hurt by these kind of remarks."
Toronto council recently banned the sale of shark fin, but the ban doesn't take effect until next year.
Police are investigating because a letter recieved this week included a threat to spread rat poison in food sold in Toronto-area Chinatowns.
Det. Raymond Mu, who came to the meeting, said police are taking the threat seriously and the investigation has been handed over to the hate crime unit.
Traditional dish
Shark fins are used in a soup that is often served at traditional Chinese weddings.
Those who support the ban say sharks are killed inhumanely and often thrown into the ocean alive after their fins are sliced off.
Those who opposed the ban say the soup is a traditional dish and insist the sharks are killed humanely. They also argued a ban would hurt businesses.
The proposed bylaw will prohibit any use of shark fin and will impose fines ranging from $5,000 for a first offence to $100,000 for a third offence.
One Chinatown fish market owner said shark fin sales are booming as people work to beat the ban deadline.
"They want to consume it for a long time, so they come to get a big amount, more than before," Tim Yung said.
People in the Chinese community say the issue isn't over. They plan to take their cause to Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, arguing that the federal government should overturn the city's decision.
No one from Kenney's office would comment.
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Quote Hey folks,
Below you will find the planned changes for Virulence and Dirty Fighting coming in Game Update 5.3.
Quote: Note: All changes below are currently in development and are subject to change before being released.
Sniper
Virulence Cull deals 25% less damage
Weakening Blast deals 11% more damage, costs 5 energy, and is no longer triggered by weapon damage from Cull
Increased Lethal Shot weapon damage by 13% and reduced its poison damage by 35%
Toxic Surge deals 20% more damage
In addition to its previous effects, Lethal Takedown now also reduces the energy cost of Takedown by 3
Gunslinger
Dirty Fighting Wounding Shots deals 25% less damage
Hemorrhaging Blast deals 11% more damage, costs 5 energy, and is no longer triggered by weapon damage from Wounding Shots
Increased Dirty Blast weapon damage by 13% and reduced its bleed damage by 35%
Bloody Mayhem deals 20% more damage
In addition to its previous effects, Dirty Shot now also reduces the energy cost of Quickdraw by 3
DevNotes: The changes to the Virulence Sniper / Dirty Fighting Gunslinger are meant to bring the discipline down to its target DPS. The damage reduction to Cull / Wounding Shots and the changes to Weakening Blast / Hemorrhaging Blast and Lethal Shot / Dirty Blast brought Virulence / Dirty Fighting slightly below its target DPS, so we increased the damage of Toxic Surge / Bloody Mayhem to get it back to the target.
The change to Lethal Takedown / Dirty Shot addressed a situation where it was better to use Lethal Shot / Dirty Blast while the target was under the effect of your Weakening Blast / Hemorrhaging Blast. Eric Musco | Community Manager
Follow us on Twitter @SWTOR | Like us on Facebook
[Contact Us] [Rules of Conduct] [F.A.Q.]
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As expected, Sony brought the big guns to this year's IFA. The Xperia XZ1 and XZ1 Compact are both finally official and yes, both are true flagship offers. It seems the Japanese giant has really taken the mission to saturate its flagship lineup to heart.
Starting off with the Xperia XZ1 and its 5.2-inch, FullHD display, it appears to be intended as sort of a runner-up to the XZ Premium. While the panel's resolution might be lower, it is still and excellent TRILUMINOS, X-Reality unit, with HDR support and 138% sRGB coverage. It borrows the cutting-edge Snapdragon 835 chipset and 19MP, Exmor RS, among other things as well. However, it is much more closely related to the Xperia XZ, as a more or less direct successor to its form factor.
Sony Xperia XZ1 from all angles
Speaking of which, the devil lies in the details, and both the XZ1 and its Compact sibling have quite a few interesting new design specifics to boast about. The older three-piece construction has been replaced by a new unibody two-piece setup - metal on the XZ1 and a plastic compound for the Compact. Sony refers to it as a "loop surface".
The XZ1 also comes with Gorilla Glass 5 on the front, a new distinctive antenna design and a choice of four colors: Black, Warm Silver, Moonlit Blue and Venus Pink.
Sony Xperia XZ1 color options
The side-mounted power button/fingerprint reader combo is still an integral part of the formula as well. And despite the design changes, the whole 147 x 73.4 x 7.4mm, 155-gram body is still IP65/68 certified.
In terms of hardware, besides the Snapdragon 835 chip, you also get 4GB of RAM and 64GB of fast UFS storage, expandable via microSD.
An excellent stereo audio setup completes the multimedia experience. Sony boasts a refined S-Force Front Surround setup for a more balanced stereo effect. Of course, you get a slew of other audio goodies, like Clear Audio+ and DSEE HX, to name a few.
Sony didn't skip on connectivity either. The Xperia XZ1 has LTE Cat.16, Dual-Band, MIMO Wi-Fi a/c, Bluetooth 5.0, NFC and a USB 3.1 cable connection, serviced by a Type-C port. Last, but not least, a 2,700mAh battery keeps the lights on, complete with Qnovo Adaptive charging and Quick Charge 3.0.
As expected, Sony's new flagships borrow the excellent main camera setup of the XZs and XZ Premium with a few software improvements sprinkled on top. That means the sharp 19MP, 1/2.3" Exmor RS sensor with a RAM buffer. It enables a slew of advanced features, like 960 fps HD video capture and Predictive Capture. Among the novelties is a smile-based trigger for said predictive capture, and an autofocus burst feature that refocuses between burst shots - a first on the mobile scene. Selfies on the XZ1 are covered by a 13MP, 1/3.06", Exmor RS sensor with a 22mm wide angle, f/2.0 lens.
On to the potentially even more exciting XZ1 Compact, which does mark the official return of the legendary Compact line to its flagship roots. With its 129 x 64 x 9.3 mm, 140 gram body, 4.6-inch display diagonal and decked-out speck sheet - pretty much identical to its bigger sibling - the XZ1 Compact has been a long time coming for small form factor lovers.
Sony Xperia XZ1 Compact
For the most part, the XZ1 Compact is indeed a shrunk-down version of the XZ1. The chipset, RAM, stereo audio setup and primary camera are identical on both models. They even share the same 2,700 mAh battery capacity. There are a few notable differences though. For one, the body shares the overall shape and design, but ditches metal for a glass fiber reinforced plastic compound. Dont worry, though, the side-mounted fingerprint reader and IP65/68 rating are intact. Color options are a bit different as well, and include Black, Snow Silver, Horizon Blue and Twilight Pink.
The display has also taken a hit - resolution is down to 720p, and there is no HDR support on the Compact. The same goes for connectivity: LTE is rated at Cat. 15, despite the identical chipset, and the USB Type-C port is only backed by a USB 2.0 connection this time around. Thankfully, you still get the same impressive Wi-Fi setup, as well as NFC and Bluetooth 5.0.
Sony Xperia XZ1 Compact
Finally, the XZ1 Compact also features an interesting twist in the selfie department. It is equipped with an 8MP 1/4" ExmorRS sensor, with a super wide-angle lens on top. It has a FOV of 120 degree or 12.5mm equivalent for impressive group shots. Alternatively, you can also toggle its 80 degree FOV (22mm) mode as well.
In terms of availability, you can expect the Sony Xperia XZ1 to be available globally a week or two into September (likely September 17), bundled with a pair of wireless Sony h.ear on 2 Mini headphones as a bonus. The XZ Compact should be joining its ranks a couple of weeks after. Both will also ship with a fresh new Sony-skinned Android 8 Oreo ROM.
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The following video report from the Kronen Zeitung features a woman called “Maria” who used to work as a translator for “refugees” who had recently arrived in Austria. She herself is an Iraqi refugee — a real one, a Christian — who came to Austria decades ago. Because she spoke Arabic to the new arrivals and did not immediately reveal herself as a Christian, they freely discussed with her their reasons for coming to Europe, and their expectation that eventually Islam will dominate in Austria.
Many thanks to Ava Lon for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:
Video transcript:
00:00 This is again [unintelligible] Live talk, nice to have you with us. Today we have as a guest
00:05 in the newsroom the Iraqi Christian Maria — this is a nickname,
00:10 she wants to remain anonymous — who worked in Vienna in a charity helping the refugees
00:15 because of she was fluent in Arabic, of course, and therefore understood everything the refugees
00:20 were saying to each other. And when she informed her employer about it
00:25 (she worked several months in the support of refugees),
00:30 her contract was simply no longer renewed. Yes, we’re trying to find out what exactly happened
00:35 Maria, first of all: thank you for the courage to come to us. —My pleasure. —What have you heard?
00:40 What are they saying, those refugees who arrive in Austria? What do they say to each other?
00:45 First we need to acknowledge that those refugees arrive from
00:50 a region where there has been a religious war for decades.
00:55 This means they are fleeing from their region.
01:00 They have risked their lives to come to Europe,
01:05 and not to any of the Muslim countries, partially because they really wanted
01:10 a quiet life, but the other part is already programmed and planned.
01:15 So for the refugees is it also about being able to further practice their religion?
01:20 And they heard that in Austria, where there is religious freedom, it would be possible? — Yes.
01:25 And if I understand it correctly, they were then surprised themselves, when they arrived here,
01:30 how freely in can be practised. —They were surprised themselves, that it was THIS
01:35 free, that there is so much religious freedom in Austria.
01:40 And so much freedom for their religion. And they told me: in our countries
01:45 many things wouldn’t be allowed, and Austria is allowing all that in the name of religious
01:50 freedom. —This means that the freedom to practice Islam
01:55 is greater than it ever was in their homeland? —Yes.
02:00 Because there… Why are they fleeing from those countries? Because there, there is only
02:05 religious war since the fall of Saddam Hussein: Sunni against Shia,
02:10 and then Shia against other groups, also against
02:15 the Adnan [an Arab tribe]. And they all fought against each other. And they come here,
02:20 they believe that because they come from over there, they would be welcomed
02:25 by associations and by the radicals who gave them this information,
02:30 that here they could further practice their religion
02:35 and in the future Austria will belong to them.
02:40 This means that the associations support the refugees,
02:45 concerning the effort to practice their religion in the freest possible way.
02:50 It’s come up in the National Assembly election; a fight with [Peter] Pilz [former Green leader];
02:55 there is always a subject with [unintelligible], for example. You’re a Christian. The refugees
02:59 didn’t notice that right away; you weren’t wearing a cross, but you weren’t wearing a veil either,
03:05 during all those discussions. How were you treated personally?
03:10 They hugged me at first and they greeted me in a very friendly way,
03:15 because I was one of them, and for that reason they could talk freely with me.
03:20 Because they thought that you were Muslim? — They thought that I was Muslim.
03:25 I didn’t tell them, because I have been in Austria for many years and I know that religion is
03:30 a private matter. And I meet those people as fellow humans and not as
03:36 Muslim or Christian or Jew, or something else. And then for them
03:41 religion is always a defining characteristic. They
03:46 come from there and here still it is a defining characteristic.
03:49 And they told me that that here they want to prevail with their
03:56 demands , with their… they told us
04:01 that here they can demand everything they want from the state.
04:06 Because there is religious freedom, and they can demand it all. —So not only
04:09 large financial demands now, but also from the religious point of view,
04:13 so they could practice it as much as possible. —Of course.
04:16 And they said it would be the objective — and they also discussed it with one another, when they
04:20 were observed — they wanted to get as many Austrians as possible to convert to Islam, because
04:25 Islam is — so they say — the ONLY religion. What did you hear about it? — Well,
04:31 this is the message, because they don’t know anything else.
04:36 For the last 20 years only religion rules over there. What do you expect from those
04:41 men who come to Austria, with this ideology in their heads?
04:46 And then they get the state’s support? And by the state I mean
04:51 it’s not on purpose, but in the name of democracy and freedom, and
04:56 what do they expect from the associations they go to and they say, “Send your kids to Islamic
05:01 kindergarten, send your kids to the mosque on Saturday and Sunday.”
05:06 According to the Islamic religion
05:11 an 8-year-old girl has to wear a veil, it’s a must!
05:16 I didn’t experience anything like that 20, 30 years ago in Iraq in my time.
05:21 Yes. So the refugees themselves cannot help it? They are simply taking advantage
05:26 of the very liberal laws in Austria, they are simply using them for their purpose. —Yes. —And you
05:31 Think, and you told me that before the interview, that we need to appeal to the politicians to
05:36 make the laws on religious freedom more restrictive, since refugees just take advantage of them,
05:41 of what they have right to? —Correct. —Nothing wrong with that, but it goes much further than
05:46 what they were ever allowed to do in their home countries. —Yes. I’m always saying that
05:51 special times call for special rules and special laws. And
05:56 we are in such times. —Iraq, 30 years ago, …even Egypt
06:01 were like here in Austria 30 years ago. We used to have a free
06:06 society in which we lived. And I would advise every politician
06:11 to spend a couple of days over there; and then they could get a good picture
06:16 of what is going on over there. And what the refugees are bringing with them
06:19 from there. It means that politicians here have to act.
06:26 And when a minister for example wants a law against full veils,
06:29 against full veiling, then he is harassed, slandered; well, I think
06:36 this is unacceptable. —But it would be necessary to do this. —It is necessary,
06:39 it is very necessary, otherwise in 20 years at the latest, Austria
06:47 will be the Afghanistan or Iraq of today. —Of course this is a very strong statement.
06:52 In general, to finish up, you as a Christian, when you understood all that,
06:57 you reported that to your employer, and you think that exactly for that reason
07:02 probably he didn’t renewed your contract, and you are suggesting by that it meant,
07:07 between the lines, that the aid organizations weren’t at all interested
07:12 in informing the public about what the refugees were talking about with one another.
07:17 Bottom line: they [the aid organizations] would like to sweep it under the rug. Is it the case?
07:22 Well, I think so as well, because it’s not possible otherwise: one has to be able to criticize
07:27 when there are problems, one has to be able to mention and discuss them.
07:32 And I haven’t done anything other than talk about the problems I saw.
07:37 I, as Christian, when I was in my country,
07:42 when I was persecuted, I didn’t want to leave my country, but they said: you Christians,
07:47 you don’t belong here. Go to your unbelievers!
07:52 To Europe for example. —Fine, so we acknowledged that.
07:57 We came here. We also lived here with Muslims,
08:02 in freedom. Right? Because here everybody is equal.
08:07 But through this refugee crisis, what I now experience is that I am being
08:12 discriminated against twice: because no matter where I’m going,
08:15 because of NOT wearing the veil, I am discriminated against as a Christian,
08:22 once in my country and once in an European country. —And at the very end [of the interview]
08:27 you are now unemployed. The whole thing happened last year, you were working with the refugees
08:32 for six months. And since then you haven’t been able to find work any longer.
08:35 I have no job, but I don’t depend on state welfare. Above all I’m trying
08:42 to help Austria, so this aid [to the refugees] won’t harm Austria.
08:47 Maria, thank you very much for the courage to tell us all that.
08:52 When one cannot speak Arabic, one has no access to that, and you were doing it for
08:57 half a year. Thank you for visiting the studio. And to viewers, thank you for your interest
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Backpacker murderer Ivat Milat. Credit:Darren Pateman Mrs Auchterlonie said she was "bewildered" that anyone would exercise such "poor taste" by running a ghost tour in the forest. "It is a money-making tour at our expense," she said. "I can't stop people from running these ghost tours, but I think it's disgusting. They are taking advantage of our grief." Mrs Auchterlonie said her family was only just "getting some normality back in our lives".
Backpacker murder victim Anja Habschied from Germany. "We are hurting and this is just opening up old wounds again," she said. "We are just trying to become normal people again. "It would be same for the families of all the backpackers who were murdered there." Murder victim David Auchterlonie. The chief executive officer of the Victims of Crime Assistance League NSW, Robyn Cotterell-Jones, said the Belanglo tour would impact on families of murder victims more widely.
"It will be greeted with revulsion and disgust with people who would like a bit more respect for their own suffering," she said. "While human beings seem fascinated by the macabre and frightening, for the families of victims, the impact of the death of their loved ones is never ended. For them, to hear people are using places of such horror for their amusement and profit is obviously going to cause scars to be ripped open again. Howard Brown, the vice-president of the same group, said some people who may have been killed in the forest are still classified as missing. "For the families, these are very sacred areas," he said. "For people to make profit out of others people's misery is completely inappropriate and in my point of view ghoulish."
The head of the backpacker taskforce Clive Small said he could understand the concerns of the victims of crime group and public curiosity in the site. "I think it really depends on how the tour is conducted," he said. "I can understand the public interest in the matter and in a sense the public curiosity that still exists. "But it has to be dealt with sensitively to take into account the families of the victims and other murder victims who would be reminded of their pain." The manager of the Goulburn Ghost Tour, Louise Edwards, said the new tour was run with sensitivity. She said each of the Milat victims are named along with the dates they went missing. "Lots of people know about Ivan Milat, but not about the people he murdered," Ms Edwards said. "We wanted to remind people that the victims are real people. They are not just victims of Ivan Milat. They are more than that.
"We don't want people to forget about them." Ms Edwards said she had considered introducing the new tour for a number of years. "We know that some people are not going to be happy with that tour, because everyone has an opinion on terrible tragedy. But we are not there to promote a terrible tragedy. "We thought about it for a long time before we did it. We wanted to make sure it was sensitive. We really don't want to upset anyone. That wasn't our intention." A spokeswoman for the Forestry Corporation of NSW said it was not aware of the tours and has not issued a permit for them.
"As soon as the tours were brought to our attention today, Forestry Corporation attempted to contact the organisers to find out about the activity and advise them of the requirement to apply for a permit," the spokeswoman said.
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Being a mother requires a backbone of steel and an unfathomable amount of energy. While their babies — young and old — cry, they keep it together.
These women deserve a laugh, and plenty are doing so among family chaos. The Internet is full of valuable resources for moms, but the most therapeutic might be sharing dysfunctional 140-character musings.
SEE ALSO: 12 Excellent Etsy Shops for Mother's Day Gifts
In honor of Mother's Day, we salute the realest ladies on Twitter for entertaining us with their maternal instincts. From minivans to macaroni projects, they make motherhood look hilariously cool.
1. @WendiAarons
My son's first draft of his teacher appreciation card: "I know I'm a pain in your crack, but don't throw me back." So (not) proud! — Wendi Aarons (@WendiAarons) May 7, 2013
2. @FunnyIsFamily
I've heard that different textures are good for kids, which is why my dining room table is so crumby. And sticky. — Amy (@FunnyIsFamily) April 20, 2013
3. @PaigeKellerman
Did you know, when kids go to bed, you can hear yourself think again? I sound fabulous. — Paige Kellerman (@PaigeKellerman) February 12, 2013
4. @Carbosly
My husband brought the kids to a baseball game so I woke them up at 2am to feed them candy. No way I'm losing the "favorite parent" battle. — Carbosly (@Carbosly) May 9, 2013
5. @shriekhouse
Dance like only your kid is watching, cook like no one will scream they hate it, and sneeze like you won't pee your pants. — kristin (@shriekhouse) April 19, 2012
6. @jennypentland
We Polled 100 Moms To Find Their Top 5 Favorite Hiding Spots:5. Psych Ward4. Internet3. Inside Own Head2. Costa Rica1. Bathroom — Jeply Surly (@JennyPentland) May 4, 2013
7. @KelleysBreakRm
Neat birthday party trick: dump Swedish Fish in a small fish bowl, tell all the kids the fish died, stick your face in the water & eat them. — Kelley (@KelleysBreakRm) May 6, 2013
8. @kellyoxford
If you haven't listed every single thing your kid is afraid of and hates to eat and told them "THAT'S WHAT JAIL IS" You're doing it wrong. — kelly oxford (@kellyoxford) June 8, 2011
9. @dooce
The singular sign of a parent who is doing their job is their unwillingness to let their children watch the Star Wars prequels. — Heather B. Armstrong (@dooce) November 4, 2012
10. @Smethanie
It'd be cool if my kids could make something I actually want, like a bottle of wine, out of macaroni and glue. — Stephanie McMaster (@Smethanie) April 25, 2013
11. @laneymg
You may not have candy for breakfast, now finish your pop tart. — Laney Griner (@laneymg) May 6, 2013
12. @caitlinmoran
Best thing about Harry Potter: on World Book Day you can just scribble on a kid's head and give them a bin-bag "cloak". — Caitlin Moran (@caitlinmoran) March 7, 2013
13. @jennawrites
Waking your kids up for school the first day after a break is almost as much fun as birthing them was. — jenna mccarthy (@jennawrites) January 7, 2013
14. @thepioneerwoman
I love having teenage daughters because I wouldn't otherwise ever know about songs like Just Give Me a Reason by Pink. I love it. — Ree Drummond(@thepioneerwoman) May 1, 2013
15. @MarinkaNYC
My teen just texted asking if she could go to the Met tonight. Yeah, like I've never seen an episode of Gossip Girl. — MarinkaNYC (@MarinkaNYC) April 2, 2013
16. @robinobryant
Oh HI Mom in the carpool line! I wasn't actually waving, just digging a rogue tater tot out of my bra— but HEY right back at ya. — Robin O'Bryant (@robinobryant) March 26, 2013
17. @TheBlogess
You know what I want for Mother's Day?I want to stop being bombarded with bullshit commercials about Mother's Day. — TheBloggess (@TheBloggess) May 8, 2013
BONUS: 10 Brilliant Gifts for Connected Moms
Tech Gifts Perfect for Mother's Day
Mashable composite, image via iStockphoto, SaulHerrera
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(CNN) -- Sen. John McCain on Tuesday proposed lifting the ban on offshore drilling as part of his plan to reduce dependence on foreign oil and help combat rising gas prices.
Sen. John McCain says it's time for the federal government "to put our own reserves to use."
"The stakes are high for our citizens and for our economy," McCain, the presumed Republican nominee for president, said at a press conference Tuesday in Houston, Texas.
Hours later, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino said President Bush on Wednesday will ask Congress to lift the ban on offshore drilling.
Bush has long called for opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil exploration, but Perino said he now wants to go further.
"For years, the president has pushed Congress to expand our domestic oil supply, but Democrats in Congress have consistently blocked such action," she said.
Earlier in the day, McCain, describing the high price of fuel, confused the cost of gallons versus barrels, which drew laughs from the crowd and the candidate himself. He quickly corrected himself.
"And with gasoline running at more than $4 a barrel ... a gallon ... I wish ... $4 a gallon, many do not have the luxury of waiting on the far-off plans of futurists and politicians," he said.
"We have proven oil reserves of at least 21 billion barrels in the United States. But a broad federal moratorium stands in the way of energy exploration and production. And I believe it is time for the federal government to lift these restrictions and to put our own reserves to use."
McCain's plan would let individual states decide whether to explore drilling possibilities. Watch a McCain adviser describe the proposal »
The proposal could put McCain at odds with environmentalists who say it is incongruous with his plans to combat global warning. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a McCain ally, opposes offshore drilling.
Florida Gov. Charlie Crist had expressed opposition to exploring coastal waters, but he said this week he supports McCain's plan to lift the moratorium and would not rule out letting his state choose to drill offshore.
"It's the last thing in the world I'd like to do, but I also understand what people are paying at the pump, and I understand the drag it is on our economy," Crist told the St. Petersburg Times. "Something has to be done in a responsible, pragmatic way."
The current law, which has been in effect since 1981, covers most of the country's coastal waters.
Many officials from coastal states oppose offshore drilling because of the risk of oil spills. Environmentalists want offshore drilling to stop to protect oceans and beaches from further pollution.
"The next president must be willing to break with the energy policies, not just of the current administration, but the administrations that preceded it, and lead a great national campaign to achieve energy security for America," McCain said Tuesday.
McCain on Monday said incentives could possibly be provided for states that choose to permit exploration off their coasts, adding that "exploration is a step toward the longer-term goal."
Tuesday's discussion marks the first in a series of talks about America's energy security that McCain will hold during the next two weeks as he lays out his plan to reduce the country's dependence on foreign oil.
McCain opposes drilling in some parts of the wilderness and says those areas must be left undisturbed.
"When America set aside the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, we called it a 'refuge' for a reason," he said.
McCain also criticized the energy policy of Democratic rival Sen. Barack Obama.
"He says that high oil prices are not the problem, but only that they rose too quickly. He doesn't support new domestic production. He doesn't support new nuclear plants. He doesn't support more traditional use of coal, either," McCain said.
"So what does Sen. Obama support in energy policy? Well, for starters, he supported the energy bill of 2005 -- a grab bag of corporate favors that I opposed. And now he supports new taxes on energy producers. He wants a windfall profits tax on oil, to go along with the new taxes he also plans for coal and natural gas. If the plan sounds familiar, it's because that was President Jimmy Carter's big idea too -- and a lot of good it did us."
McCain argues that a windfall profits tax will only increase the country's dependence on foreign oil and be an obstacle to domestic exploration.
"I'm all for recycling -- but it's better applied to paper and plastic than to the failed policies of the 1970s," he said.
Obama on Tuesday blasted McCain for changing his stance on offshore drilling.
"John McCain's support of the moratorium on offshore drilling during his first presidential campaign was certainly laudable, but his decision to completely change his position and tell a group of Houston oil executives exactly what they wanted to hear today was the same Washington politics that has prevented us from achieving energy independence for decades," he said.
"It's another example of short-term political posturing from Washington, not the long-term leadership we need to solve our dependence on oil," he said.
Democratic Florida Sen. Bill Nelson also criticized McCain's plan, saying it would ruin his state's tourism industry and would not solve the problem.
"I thought John McCain was serious when he said he wanted to make America less dependent on oil. I didn't think he was a flip-flopper. He knows that more drilling isn't the solution to high gas prices," Nelson said Tuesday.
Obama said a windfall profits tax would ease the burden of energy costs on working families. He also wants to invest in affordable, renewable energy sources.
Controversy over offshore drilling surfaced in the United States in 1969, after a crack in the seafloor led to a huge oil spill off Santa Barbara, California.
During the 1970s, when many Arab nations launched an oil embargo, many U.S. officials pushed for the exploration of offshore drilling of the coastal United States. Environmentalists responded with loud protests.
CNN White House Correspondent Ed Henry contributed to this report
All About Oil Production and Refining • John McCain • Barack Obama
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Recently, the US House of Representatives voted 419-3 and the US Senate voted 98-2 to lump North Korea, Iran, and Russia together in a massive, sweeping sanctions bill. Does it not strike anyone as strange that these quite different, hardly connected countries would be lumped together in one huge sanctions bill, and for no apparent or specific reason except that: “We don’t like you. We think you are evil. Therefore, we take it upon ourselves with great moral authority to punish you.”
Furthermore, this bill includes a provision that the President of the United States cannot violate or change it without notifying Congress first. Essentially, in the case of Russia in particular, what this means is that even if President Trump would like to mend relations with Russia, his hands will be tied. The fact that Russia is tied with the likes of North Korea and Iran is the most interesting feature of this new sanctions bill, especially given the anti-Russia hysteria that has so dominated American politicians and MSM ever since Trump was elected. Hence, I will focus on this feature; however, since Iran and North Korea are also included, I’ll first briefly comment on those two countries.
In general, sanctions are rarely effective, only serve to heighten tensions further, usually only affect the poor within the country targeted, and leaders often find ways around them; moreover, sanctions are often counterproductive and sometimes backfire. For example, concerning Iran, who has experienced the brunt of US sanctions for years, this new bill will do little to further punish them and will, in fact, be almost like a godsend since Iran did nothing in particular to deserve new sanctions. Though Iran has considerable influence in Iraq and has for some time been providing support for Hezbollah, both of these factors are not new, yet the USsuddenly decides to throw new sanctions at Iran (even while Hezbollah is currently driving Al-Qaeda out of Lebanon). Moreover, Iran has been abiding by the 2015 nuclear agreement, which was signed not only by the Obama administration but by the EU and the five members of the UN Security Council. Even Trump has grudgingly acknowledged that Iran has been living up to its end of the bargain. So what do you think these “other,” significant parties to the nuclear agreement are going to think about this unilateral, essentially emotional, decision to punish Iran for being Iran, and recklessly endangering the deal in the process? Of course, they are going to think it’s quite unfair and foolish: Iran comes out smelling like a rose.
Now, lets’ briefly consider North Korea. North Korea has been “sanctioned” more than any country on the earth, yet nothing has changed much, has it? In fact, it seems that the more North Korea is sanctioned, the worse they become. You cannot threaten an already paranoid North Korea, and military action is out of the question. After all, this is not a toothless Iraq, but a dangerous military power. On the other hand, history shows that when North Korea is engaged, countries stand a better chance of getting them to stop their nuclear build up. Though it’s true that the Agreed Framework of the 90s ended in failure during the early years of the Bush Administration, at the same time, North Korea did not add one atom bomb to their arsenal during the eight year period while the Agreed Framework was in effect.
Now regarding Russia, Europe is not very happy about these sanctions either since the sanctions are not only aimed at Russian companies but also apply to companies of any government that chooses to do business with Russia. Of course, since Europe does more business with Russia than the US does, this unilateral decision stands to hurt Europeans more than it does Americans. Once again, American unilateral decisions, arrogantly oblivious to the impacts on the rest of the world, are becoming a global sore spot. At this point, it’s not clear how Europe will react. For one thing, the US has too much influence over Europe for them to rebel against their master. As usual, they will probably just bow their heads and do what they are told. But who knows? Europe may eventually reach its tipping point with the US and decide that enough is enough.
One curious thing throughout this anti-Russia hysteria is the use of the word “fact.” American politicians and media emphatically pound into the public the FACT that Russian meddled in the American elections. Facts are interesting critters, aren’t they? The last time I checked, they are always accompanied by evidence, so it’s curious that one often hears the word “fact” but rarely hears anything about “evidence,” and the corporate media rarely even questions these so-called “facts” to ask for evidence. You’d think it would be common sense to merely ask for the evidence to support the facts, and the rare occasion a reporter does naively stumble upon this question, the answer is always the same: “Yes, we have evidence, but it’s ‘classified.’” How many times have you heard that song and dance? It seems to me that “classified” has become just another form of censorship; in reality, the American people and the world at large are on a “need to know” basis. Big Brother tells us what they want us to know, faithfully echoed in the lapdog media, and what they don’t want us to know is “classified.” How convenient in the land of a “free” democratic society.
When these officials and media talking heads mention these “facts,” they are usually referred to in the context of the so-called “17 intelligence agencies” who are all “highly confident” that Russia meddled in the election. Hillary Clinton mentioned the 17 agencies in the second debate with Trump, and this myth has been repeated as a mantra in the media, even though it has since been thoroughly debunked. It was not 17 intelligence agencies but three: the NSA, CIA, and FBI (four including the Office of the Director of National Intelligence). Moreover, these were Obama appointees chosen specifically for this investigation, who had vested interests in coming up with the right intelligence to fit policy. Sound familiar? Somehow, I am reminded of the way that information was manipulated in the lead up to (and in the aftermath of) the 2003 Iraq war – the way that intelligence was cherry-picked and fixed to fit policy objectives.
This Russia meddling “investigation” concluded with a report last January (which anyone can easily find and read online). Basically, it’s what Van Jones of CNN refers to as a “nothing burger.” Surprisingly, a disproportionate amount of it is focused on criticizing Russia Today (RT), the Russian-owned media outlet largely staffed with American, British, and Russian hosts of programs that offer alternative perspectives on world affairs, mostly challenging mainstream narratives. Is that what this “meddling” charge is all about? It seems incredible, doesn’t it, to think that a Russian-sponsored news network would be given such credibility, that RT is so powerful it effectively changed the election results just because it supposedly supported Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton? This would be astonishing if it were actually true. However, since I view RT news programs frequently, I can assure you that, to the contrary, RT did not give overwhelming favorable coverage of Donald Trump. Okay, Larry King did give one favorable interview of Donald Trump on his show “PolitiKing.” Yes, of course, King’s interview had such an effect on American voters that it “proves” that Russia “meddled” in the election.
“But what about ‘Russian hacking’ and ‘Russian collusion?’” you might ask. Once again I’m reminded of the numerous Iraq War justifications. One narrative falls apart only to be replaced by another: “Saddam has WMDs!”, “Saddam is a tyrant!”, “We’re promoting democracy!” Like each of the Iraq War narratives, the Russian hacking narrative fell apart because no evidence was ever presented. I specifically remember how the NSA was conspicuously silent when this charge first surfaced; instead, it was the CIA making this accusation, and of course everyone knows how trustworthy the CIA is, right? Regardless, the NSA’s initial silence does strike one as peculiar when the presumed hacking fell directly into their domain; as a matter of fact, as Snowden revealed, nothing happens on the Internet that the NSA doesn’t know about. Undoubtedly, the NSA would have known about it and possessed hard evidence immediately. You’d think that it would be in the US’ best interest to publicly disclose such a finding in order to gain international support for retaliatory action, wouldn’t you? However, that didn’t happen because the “hack” never happened; instead, as Julian Assange, Craig Murray, and the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity all definitively declared: it was a “leak” – not a hack. And this leak was so damaging to the Clinton campaign and DNC that they had to create a new narrative in order to hide the real “collusion,” which was the rigging of the primaries and the cover up in the aftermath. Now that’s the real “collusion” story that the media should have been focusing on all this time.
So once the Russian hacking narrative fell apart, the Russian collusion narrative rises to take its place, similar to the way that various narratives emerged consecutively to justify “Dubya’s” Iraq War. It’s the same “one-lie-replaces-another” tactic; however, this time it’s the democrats who are egging on the new McCarthyite fishing expedition and witch hunt. Nevertheless, the Russian collusion story has recently also started to fall apart to become just another “nothing burger.” I’ll spare you the details except to say that upon a bit of investigation and the application of critical analysis, I’m sure you’ll discover for yourself how little substance lies in this allegation. It involves nothing out of the ordinary; in fact, if you want “collusion,” you’d have much better luck with the DNC collusion with Ukraine to gather dirt on Trump. I’m not sure how much hay you can make out of that story, but it certainly looks at least as substantial (if not more) than the supposed Russian collusion to spread political dirt on Clinton.
As for the media running with all these false, anti-Russian narratives, it’s somewhat understandable. As Jeff Zucker, CEO of the CNN said (captured in the undercover video by Project Veritas): It’s “bullshit” – but this bullshit is “good for the ratings.” The tabloid media knows that its “news” is often phony, but they could care less, for fake news is what they specialize in. However, what gets me is the irresponsible politicians who are either “zuckered” in by it or else privately know that it’s nonsense but are in on it out of cowardice or greed.
I don’t know how this is going to play out eventually, but I’m confident that these renewed sanctions will backfire on the US. Perhaps this will prompt the rest of the world to say, “You know what? We’ve had enough of this insane, hypocritical global empire, which has a long history of ‘meddling’ in other country’s elections and internal affairs and yet has the gall to accuse other countries of it without presenting a shred of evidence. Maybe the US should tend to the predicament of its own ailing democracy and stop bullying the world with these meaningless but hurtful sanctions.” As a matter of fact, tending to its own ailing democracy is the best medicine. Doesn’t history show that empire building and democracy do not mix well? It is an irreconcilable contradiction, and countries that persist in that path eventually collapse. All of this hysteria is but the symptoms of a sick nation, like a spoiled child, throwing a temper tantrum because she can’t have her way, then blaming and taking it out on others. There are number of valid reasons to oppose the Trump presidency – this isn’t one of them.
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Yesterday, my mother told me that my grandmother (who is in the hospital) was about to pass on. I then rushed to the hospital, but found myself unable to stay with her until the end.
I wanted to write that I got through prelims because of her, that I always thanked her, that I always hoped she found herself in a happier place and that we supported each other - but she constantly worried that I would not be well-off even though she always cheered me on and was there for me when I fell.
My parents always told me she was doing well, so that I would not worry about her. I feel terrible that I did not treat her better and that I was not there for when she needed me. I must believe that she is in a better place now.
I could have kept this private, but I wanted to share what I am going through so that everyone can understand that my grandmother was so proud of me and my accomplishments, and so that my fans can understand me a bit better. I am asking you to please send good thoughts my way.
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My mom and I went to go see him shortly after I’d emailed to book an appointment. We were supposed to see him at the same time as another potential adopter, but luck was with us. They didn’t show. The chestnut gelding was skittish, still quite skinny and very stunted in growth compared to what he probably should’ve been, standing a mere 14.2 or 14.3 hands. But, despite his poor start, he was incredibly curious of people and had an interest in learning and meeting us. After seeing how beautiful his natural movement was, along with his natural curiosity of things, even if he was nervous of them, we were sold. We filled out an adoption application and were accepted after the SPCA performed a home check. Prior to bringing him home, we had the vet out to vaccinate him and do a basic sales exam on him. We found out that he was, in fact, not a yearling. He was two! We brought him home on July 21st, 2014 for an adoption fee of $400
We change his name pretty much immediately, I did not think Bandit suited him and didn’t particularly like the fact that the name had come with him from his previous, neglectful home. We called him Milo. Milo was a small package but full of personality… And stubbornness, attitude, fight and many other unpleasant qualities. He was hard to catch, hard to lead, impossible to hose, impossible to blanket, impossible to fly spray… The list went on. He was nervous and afraid of a lot of things and outright stubborn about others. He’d be fine with something one day and then would rear straight up or lash out the next. He was incredibly difficult and soon I grew very frustrated with him and even considered giving him up. I took a few days’ break from the barn and my mom worked with him. When I came back with a refreshed outlook and a horse who was slightly more desensitized than the last time I saw him, we got to work and boy it was work. By the beginning of fall, he tolerated hosing (though he made sure we knew he did not like it), barely tolerated being fly sprayed, would lead and lunge, was easy to catch and would blanket; but still, Milo was always sure to remind us that he had a mind of his own. Milo was also a lot different than other horses I’d worked with in that his fight reflex was a lot stronger than most. If he ever felt cornered or threatened in anyway, he would strike out or threaten to charge. He was a lot more cautious this way of strangers and still is.
Not too long after adopting this stunning gelding, I sought out more information about his previous life in an attempt to better understand him, so let's rewind in the life of this crazy chestnut horse just a couple years. From information I was able to gather from both the SPCA and an alleged neighbour of the people who'd previously owned him (the neighbour reached out to me after recognizing Milo from a social media post), Milo's story became all the more sad. The SPCA had first come out to check out the property after numerous calls from neighbours and passersby, their first visit was prior to Milo's birth but while his dam was heavily pregnant. The owners were issued a warning but legally, the SPCA could not perform a seizure just yet. They wouldn't be able to for almost another two years, shortly before Milo turned two. According to the neighbour of these people, the stud was just left to run loose with several mares. Most of the horses, including Milo, were not halter broke until they'd been seized and handled by the SPCA. Milo likely was essentially feral due to the immense lack of handling at this place. There was another colt that was about a year older than Milo and then a standardbred gelding, a couple mares and a stud. The neighbour had inquired about the amount of horses being seized and to their knowledge, there were a few that were unaccounted for, this led me to wondering where they may have gone, the thought terrifies me. I was never able to find out.
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Image copyright AP Image caption A month of public consultation will now take place ahead of any restart
Japan's nuclear regulator has given preliminary approval for two reactors at a nuclear plant in the south of the country to restart.
The Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) said the reactors at the Sendai plant had met new standards introduced after the Fukushima disaster.
These are the first two nuclear reactors to pass this hurdle.
All Japan's 48 reactors are currently stopped, but PM Shinzo Abe has been pushing for restarts where possible.
The Japanese public turned against nuclear power after the meltdowns at the Fukushima plant in 2011.
Before the accident, which was caused by a massive earthquake and tsunami, nuclear plants supplied about 30% of Japan's power.
But since then the plants have been closed, either for scheduled maintenance or because of safety fears, and have not been restarted.
Japan's last reactor, at Ohi in western Japan, went offline in September 2013.
The NRA said the Sendai plant, in southern Kyushu, had met new safety standards intended to guard against damage from natural disasters.
A month-long public consultation will now take place before the NRA issues a final decision.
Earlier this year, Mr Abe's government approved an energy plan backing the use of nuclear power, despite public anxiety.
The plan reversed an earlier decision to phase out nuclear power by a previous government.
Trade and Industry Minister Toshimitsu Motegi said at the time that Japan had to opt for an energy supply system that was "realistic, pragmatic and well balanced".
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Holiday miracles really do come true, even on airplanes.
Lucky passengers aboard two WestJet flights from southern Ontario to Calgary in November got their holiday gift wishes granted as they flew across Canada.
Before boarding, passengers were invited scan their boarding passes that allowed them to talk with a virtual Santa who asked them what they wanted for Christmas. Hidden cameras recorded their gift requests.
Items on lists included trains and dolls from the kids, but some passengers asked for things such as a snowboard, a big-screen TV –even a Samsung Galaxy phone.
While the plane was in the air, over 150 “merry WestJetters” acted as Santa’s elves, rushing out to stores and nabbing the items on the passengers’ lists, according to a release from the Canadian-based WestJet.
By the time the flights landed four hours later, the 250 unsuspecting passengers were greeted by a festive display at baggage claim and were handed gifts they had asked for.
One woman broke out into tears when she got the digital camera she asked for. A man, who asked for practical socks and underwear, seemed to be overjoyed.
"This year, we wanted to turn our holiday campaign into a tradition by doing something that's never been done before," said Richard Bartrem, WestJet vice president of communications and community relations. "Inspired by the notion of real-time giving, we wanted to surprise our guests with meaningful, personalized gifts when they least expected them. Being able to show our guests how much we care with gift-giving, a tried and true holiday tradition, resonates with WestJetters as much as our guests."
But the holiday spirit doesn’t end there. A video of the event, just released, was created for another purpose: Once it reaches 200,000 views, the airline said it would donate flights through Ronald McDonald House Charities to families and children in need. It looks like they'll be booking flights soon. The video has already gotten over 1 million views.
Have a look.
[youtube zIEIvi2MuEk]
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Photo by Dennis Wierzbicki/USA TODAY Sports
By RYAN TOLMICH
With the 2014 season all but over, the Chicago Fire have already set their sights on the 2015 campaign. However, the club will have to navigate a major portion of that campaign without starting midfielder Patrick Nyarko.
The club announced Wednesday that Nyarko will miss the next six to eight months after suffering a torn Anterior cruciate ligament and sprained Medial collateral ligament in the 81st minute of Saturday’s 2-1 defeat to D.C. United. Surgery on the 28-year-old will be held at a later date due to current swelling.
“Knowing the work he put in to get back and help us this season, we feel awful for Patrick,” said head coach Frank Yallop. “We saw his return to form over the past few weeks and fully support him in his recovery efforts.”
Nyarko, who has made 200 appearance for the club since being drafted in 2008, scored one goal and provided three assists in 17 games after missing the start of the 2014 campaign due to injury. Most recently, the Ghanian midfielder assisted rookie Harrison Shipp on the Fire’s lone goal in Saturday’s defeat.
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How will the Fire cope without Nyarko heading into the 2015 season?
Share your thoughts below.
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A Detroit Police Department detective has been demoted and an internal investigation has been launched after his Facebook post deriding the Black Lives Matter movement went viral and drew harsh public criticism.
Detective Nathan Weekley of the Detroit Police Department has been busted back to ordinary officer, losing his gold shield for something he posted on Facebook. Katrease Stafford of the Detroit Free Press writes:
Chief James Craig identified the detective as Nathan Weekley, the brother of Officer Joseph Weekley, who fatally shot 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones during a police raid in 2010. All charges including a felony charge of involuntary manslaughter and a separate misdemeanor charge were dropped against Joseph Weekley after two mistrials. "I became aware the night of the posting on social media," Craig said Monday. "And once becoming aware of it I notified my team so we could have a discussion. And based on the preliminary discussion assessment of it, Detective Weekley has been de-appointed down from the ranking of detective to police officer and he has been reassigned and we have opened an internal investigation into the matter."
Here is what he wrote and later deleted:
For the first time in my nearly 17 years as a law enforcement officer, I contemplated calling into work in response to the outrageous act perpetrated against my brothers[.] ... It seems like the only response that will demonstrate our importance to society as a whole. The only racists here are the piece of s--t Black Lives Matter terrorists and their supporters.
We certainly hear such sentiments from both sides in even stronger terms. But Weekley is a representative of the DPD, which must interact with angry supporters of BLM every day.
Sarah Larrimore of the Washington Post garnered outraged rections to the post from, among others, a representative of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network. (I suppose Sharpton’s people are presumed to know about inflammatory rhetoric, because Al agitated against “outside interlopers” in Harlem shortly before Freddie’s Fashion Mart there was attacked by arsonists, with loss of life.)
“In these times, we believe that the chief should take swift and direction action,” the Rev. Charles Williams II, president of the Michigan chapter of the National Action Network, told The Washington Post in a phone interview Monday. “So we’re glad that the chief has decided to demote him, and he will not be on the streets of Detroit. However, this type of talk should be no-tolerance, especially in light of what we’ve seen happen across the country.”
“We don’t want to see a vacation, we don’t want to see administrative leave … we want to see termination,” Williams said. “If that means that the city of Detroit has to fight the union, then that just means the city of Detroit should fight the union.”
Raw Story bluntly headlines:
Detroit detective rants about ‘piece of sh*t Black Lives Matter terrorists’ — and only gets demoted
Weekley has lots of due process protections and presumably has the union behind him. This story will play out over time, and it represents another milestone in the story of the alienation of cops.
screen grab via Raw Story
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To make it sound less problematic that its stores are opening at 6 pm on Thanksgiving, Walmart has been telling anyone who'll listen that it's giving "an extra day's pay" to those working the holiday. Awesome! Now tell me what you mean by "day."
No, silly, Walmart doesn't mean everyone who works Thanksgiving gets eight hours of extra pay. They get the average of the hours they've worked over the previous two weeks. And that's where some Walmart workers say the problems lie:
Gertz and other Wal-Mart workers say their hours are cut prior to the holidays, so their average daily wage also goes down. Last year, Gertz's hours were cut by five hours a week before the holiday. Her hours were also cut in the weeks after the holiday, which bit into her paychecks further. She said some associates in her store had their hours slashed from 40 per week to 24 in the weeks after.
Raise your hand if this sounds like something Walmartdo. [A handful of Walmart spokespeople raise their hands, alone.] Because that's Walmart: consistently adding the insult of pretending they're really generous to the injury of poverty wages and poor treatment. Not unlike pretending it's a kind, caring thing to hold a food drive for their workers who can't afford Thanksgiving dinner on Walmart pay.
Walmart points out that the worker quoted in this story didn't work Thanksgiving last year. It continues to not rebut the claim that it cuts workers' hours ahead of giving them "extra" pay.
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Planet Hollywood Observatory at Disney Springs will be opening soon and reservations can now be made for December 1st and beyond.
The restaurant closed earlier this year for a full makeover to better fit into the storyline of Disney Springs. The observatory theme will be carried into the inside, with stars and constellations on the ceiling, just like you’ve stepped into a planetarium. The four-floor restaurant will also feature an outdoor terrace, the Stargazers Bar, a 4,000-square-foot video wall, live entertainment, plus a new merchandise line.
Celebrity Chef Guy Fieri has developed a new burger and sandwich menu for the reopening. Some of his new menu items include a Prime Time American Kobe-Inspired Burger, a Mac and Cheese Burger, and the Turkey Pic-a-nic Sandwich.
A new line of “Supernova Milkshakes” has also been created.
Photos: Planet Hollywood Observatory Facebook
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Former Scottish professional player Paul Dalglish will lead the Ottawa Fury FC in 2016, the soccer club announced Friday afternoon.
Dalglish, the son of Scottish football legend Kenny Dalglish, takes the reins from Marc Dos Santos, who announced in the fall he would be leaving for a position with Major League Soccer.
Dalglish will also be the team's general manager, said Fury FC president John Pugh.
"He has the contacts and reputation within soccer to attract players worldwide," said Pugh at a press conference Friday afternoon.
'Unique' opportunity
In only their second year in the North American Soccer League, Fury FC surprised many fans by finishing first in the league's fall season and making it all the way to the league final. They lost that match 3-2 to the New York Cosmos.
Paul Dalglish will take the reins of Ottawa Fury FC for the 2016 season, the team announced Friday afternoon. (Andrew Foote/CBC)
Dalglish said Friday the chance to take over a team coming off such recent success was "unique" in the soccer world.
"I know there's not many opportunities you can get in this game [to] follow success," said Dalglish.
"You're either starting at an expansion team...or you've got to rebuild. Well, this is pretty unique opportunity."
Dalglish also promised to bring more offense to a team he described as "the best defensive team in the country."
Played in top English, Scottish leagues
The 38-year-old spent more than a decade playing professional soccer for teams like Blackpool, Hibernian and Newcastle United.
In addition to stints in the English Premier League and the Scottish Premier League, Dalglish also played for two seasons in Major League Soccer from 2006-2007 with the Houston Dynamo.
His father Kenny is considered one of the best footballers in Scottish history, having played more than 200 international games for the country. He also scored more than 200 goals for top-flight clubs Celtic and Liverpool during a career that spanned two decades.
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Efforts by congressional Republicans to block new laws in Washington, D.C., decriminalizing marijuana possession and tightening restrictions on guns have provoked a summer tempest between residents of the capital and U.S. lawmakers.
The District of Columbia’s non-voting representative in the House, Eleanor Holmes Norton and its residents are taking on Maryland Representative Andrew Harris, who is attempting to overturn a law that took effect last month making possession of small amounts of marijuana a civil, rather than criminal, offense. They also are focusing on Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie, who wants to cut off funding to enforce a ban on assault weapons in the city.
“No red-blooded American would take what these members have tried to do to this city,” Norton said in a July 25 speech on the House floor, adding that residents of the liberal-leaning district were being treated as second-class citizens.
A 1973 law gave Washington an elected mayor and council and the city has had a non-voting House delegate since 1971. But Congress, which has constitutional oversight over the district, still must approve its laws and budget.
Harris and Massie’s moves to block district laws through riders to a budget bill were an attempt to limit the autonomy of the city of 646,449 people, Norton said.
Massie’s budget amendment struck funding to enforce the ban on assault weapons, as well as a rule forbidding the private sale of guns without background checks. About a week after his amendment passed on July 16, a federal judge also ruled unconstitutional the district’s ban on carrying handguns outside the home.
The district was once known as the U.S. murder capital but in recent years the homicide rate has fallen to 50-year lows.
Massie said he did not believe “home rule means that you get to violate somebody’s rights, basic civil rights” regarding guns.
Harris said he wants to safeguard children’s health from the “devastating effects” of marijuana and that Congress was authorized “to stop irresponsible actions by local officials.”
Although Washington voters ratified an act last year to release the city from congressional budget approval, a U.S. District Court ruled in May that only Congress could take that step.
Last month, a Senate Appropriations subcommittee proposed a district budget bill including self-rule for its laws and budget. President Barack Obama gave residents hope when he said last month he supported the idea of statehood for Washington but he conceded it was politically unlikely.
The fate of the gun and marijuana laws likely will be decided in compromise talks over the House and Senate versions of the bill in September.
Representative Jan Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat, said the city council should be able to make its own decisions.
“I have long resented the fact that some lawmakers treat D.C. like a colony,” Schakowsky said.
In July a group of residents stormed Harris’ office to complain about more mundane district issues - potholes, an outdated sewer system and the need for more health clinics.
Residents met in small groups with Harris’ chief of staff.
“If you’re saying we’re your constituents, then start helping our city,” resident Barbara Helmick said. “We wish you cared just as much about potholes as you do about pot.”
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Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Nick Thorpe reports from an abattoir in Romania
Agriculture ministers from European countries linked to a widening scandal over mislabelled horsemeat have been meeting to discuss the crisis.
The emergency talks in Brussels were seeking ways to restore consumer confidence in meat products.
It follows the discovery that meat sold in up to 16 European countries labelled as beef contained horsemeat.
On Tuesday, a slaughterhouse and a meat firm were raided by police in the UK probing alleged horsemeat mislabelling.
UK Environment Secretary Owen Paterson said it was unacceptable if British firms were defrauding the public.
The scandal has raised questions about the complexity of the food industry's supply chains across the 27-member EU bloc, with a number of supermarket chains withdrawing frozen beef meals.
Analysis The EU has not had compulsory "country of origin" labelling since 1981, when a European court struck down laws in member states that contravened the bloc's single market rules. But the events of recent weeks have shifted the debate to the issue of safety. How can a consumer make an informed choice if they have no idea where their food has come from? The new law that will be outlined today would bring greater transparency - but many are opposed. German footwear companies say no-one would buy their high-end trainers if they knew they were largely produced in China. Food processors, like those who make frozen pizzas, argue many of their ingredients are sourced on a daily basis - changing the labelling accordingly every day would be complex and expensive. And then there's the opposition of the World Trade Organization, which believes labelling makes little sense in our globalised supply chain. EU Health Commissioner Tonio Borg says the rules of full traceability in the EU make our food safety system one of the safest in the world - but the facts speak differently. Pressure is building, irrespective of the opposition.
In the UK, the supermarket giant Tesco, frozen food firm Findus and budget chain Aldi received horsemeat-tainted mince from Comigel, based in northeastern France.
Horsemeat has now been confirmed in some frozen lasagne on sale in France too.
In Germany, officials announced that a shipment of frozen lasagne suspected of containing horsemeat had arrived in the country. They were notified of the delivery by authorities in Luxembourg on Tuesday.
Web of suppliers
Comigel denied wrongdoing, saying it had ordered the meat from Spanghero, a firm in southern France, via a Comigel subsidiary in Luxembourg - Tavola.
The supply chain reportedly led back to traders in Cyprus and the Netherlands, then to abattoirs in Romania.
There are now calls for more specific labelling on processed meat products in the EU, to show country of origin, as in the case of fresh meat. But the cost of doing that may trigger opposition from food manufacturers.
Romania has denied claims that it was to blame for the mislabelling of horsemeat.
"There are plants and companies in Romania exporting horsemeat but everything was according to the standards, and the source and the kind of meat was very clearly put as being horsemeat," Romanian Prime Minister Victor Ponta told the BBC's Newsnight programme.
"Somewhere in the network to the UK and other countries it seems that something illegal happened and we will fully co-operate to punish any Romanian company involved - but up to now it has not been like this," Mr Ponta added.
The Kravys abattoir, named as the source of the Comigel meat, insists that its labelling is correct, with horsemeat and beef kept clearly apart. It exports horsemeat to Sweden, the Netherlands, Bulgaria and Poland in its own trucks, the BBC's Nick Thorpe reports.
Meat scandal In mid-January, Irish food inspectors announced they had found horsemeat in some burgers stocked by UK supermarket chains
Subsequently, up to 100% horsemeat found in several ranges of prepared frozen food in Britain, France and Sweden
Up to 16 countries involved
Concerns that drug used to treat horses, and which is harmful to humans, could be in food chain
Meat traced from France through Cyprus and The Netherlands to Romanian abattoirs
Investigation suggests contamination was not accidental but the work of a criminal conspiracy
The abattoir is in Botosani, northeastern Romania, and slaughters 3-4,000 horses annually.
Agriculture ministers from the UK, France, Ireland, Luxembourg, Poland, Romania and Sweden took part in the talks in Brussels, along with European Commission officials.
Retailers in some countries so far unaffected by the scandal have removed some processed foods from sale, as a precaution. That has been done in Germany and Switzerland.
In the UK the supermarket chain Waitrose removed its Essential British Frozen Meatballs, labelled as beef, after pork was found in two batches.
The EU meeting is an opportunity to exchange ideas on where the problem might have originated and how to stop it in the future, the BBC's Christian Fraser reports.
Tighter restrictions for the labelling of processed food are now in the pipeline, our correspondent adds.
"We are looking at whether (such labelling) is possible... but nothing is fixed yet," said a spokesman for EU Health and Consumer Affairs Commissioner Tonio Borg.
There are growing concerns that that a drug used to treat horses - and which is harmful to humans - could be in the food chain.
But EU officials say public health is not at stake, and the problem is instead one of mislabelling.
They say it is up to national regulators to take action.
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Chinese Renewable Energy Companies Advised to Increase Investments in the US
December 8th, 2010 by Mridul Chadha
During the recent China-US Renewable Energy Investment Forum, a senior official of China’s National Energy Administration (NEA) advised the local renewable energy firms to think global and increase their investments in the American renewable energy sector. The official encouraged the companies to take steps to increase their competitiveness by expanding their operations in other countries, especially the United States.
Wang Jun, head of the department of new energy and renewable energy at the NEA, made this statement while addressing a gathering of Chinese and American officials in Beijing. In attendance were officials from the U.S. Department of Energy and the Department of Commerce.
Jun pointed out that the foreign companies including those from the United States are taking advantage of the low manufacturing costs and cheap labor in China and expanding their core manufacturing businesses in China, this giving them an edge over the other companies. These companies are among the leading energy equipment manufacturing companies like General Electric, Ceradyne and others. Several American solar and wind energy companies have landed several order for building large-scale power plants.
China has attracted such a massive stream of investment for several reasons. One, they have very favorable financial policies with regard to renewable energy investments. The Chinese government offers a wide range of subsidies to manufacturers as well as project developers. Second, the government has made sure that there is ample demand for the power generated from renewable energy sources. Therefore, it has obligated industries to buy all the power generated from renewable energy power plants. China has set a target of generating 15 percent of its power demand from renewable energy sources by 2020. China is planning to add 500 GW of renewable power by 2020.
Third, China is on the rising curve of economic development and has been excessively aggressive in opening it industrial sectors and markets to foreign investment. And fourth, the Chinese government seems to have acknowledged the strategic importance of investing in renewable energy technologies. By taking the lead in investment in this sector China can potentially offset at least some pressure to agree to an international binding carbon emission reduction target. China is the largest emitter of carbon emissions but it is also the largest spender in the renewable energy sector.
During his address, Jun noted the immense wind energy potential that exists in the United States, both inland and offshore. But the high fiscal deficit, economic crisis and the political coherence are proving to be major hurdles in the acceleration of investment in the wind energy sector (and renewable energy sector as a whole). According to a report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the Unites States has enough offshore wind energy resource to power itself four times over. Citing this very opportunity, Google announced a massive project to lay 350 miles of transmission lines off the Atlantic Coast from New Jersey to Virginia to connect 6,000 MW of wind energy turbines.
Jun also recognized the fact that the potential expansion plans of Chinese firms in the US markets would face some resistance. The Chinese learnt this valuable lesson from CNOOC’s failed bid for Unocal which it had withdraw after facing “unprecedented political opposition”. Chinese renewable energy policies is the latest issue of contention between the two countries. The United States government is investigating a complaint registered by the Steelmakers Union against subsidies offered by China’s clean energy policies.
Image: yunheisapunk (Flickr)/CC
Follow Mridul Chadha at Twitter and Facebook
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Story highlights Rapper 2 Chainz helps disabled veteran
He agreed to pay her rent and provided furniture.
(CNN) One disabled veteran has a famous rapper to thank for making her holiday season much easier.
Single mother Deirdre Plater of Palmetto, Georgia, has been having trouble making ends meet, and hasn't been able to find a job for the past year. 2 Chainz, a native of nearby College Park, Georgia, learned of her predicament and paid her a visit Saturday.
But he didn't come alone : the rapper brought new furniture for Plater's apartment and offered to pay her rent for the year.
"Last week was my son's birthday and his mentor sister brought us something to eat for Thanksgiving while dropping off money for some groceries and she noticed that we didn't have any furniture in the house," Plater explained.
"I guess that sparked my son's mentor Mark Barnes to do something special for us and when he got the call from 2 Chainz about helping a family it all fell into place."
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Thin privilege is being able to get paid to have your photo taken.
I have a longtime friend who does some modeling. She isn’t a normal model type, not tall and willowy. She’s actually short (5’ tall in shoes) and a size 6. So, still skinny, but def not stereotypical model skinny. She’s done this work for five years or so now and has lots of fun doing it and earns easily $200 - $600 per gig and sometimes more. (And no, she doesn’t do porn! She does artistic and alternative modeling and sometimes artistic nude.) She honestly loves doing it and talks about it so fondly that after a lot of thought, I decided I’d go ahead and try it myself. I’ve always loved photography, art, makeup, and fashion, so it seemed like a good idea.
I’m a tiny bit (like two inches) taller than she is, but I’m also a size 18/20. I know there’s still some demand for “plus-sized models” and it actually means PLUS-SIZED in many of the alternative circles my friend has worked in. But after six months going through all the avenues my friend suggested to me, talking to all the people she thought might help, and looking for model calls and ads within 50-miles of my area, I haven’t been able to find much work. One of the two photographers I talked with was only willing to pay $50 to take pictures of me and the other said they didn’t want to work together after I showed them pictures. I know I’m conventionally pretty (not to deliberately sound concieted or anything, just based on what lots of people tell me), I do my hair and makeup really well, and I think I have really good dress sense. I even look good (I think, anyway) in pictures. The only difference between me and my friend is our sizes. She is “skinny” and I am UNACCEPTABLY FAT and NOBODY wants to take pictures of me, or if they do they think they can pay a steep discount because I’m “less” than a skinny girl.
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Midwest Fishing Report: When and where to drop a line
LAKEFRONT PERCH: Steve Palmisano, Henry’s: ‘‘Up and down,’’ better numbers but smaller ones in river; harbors spotty. Arden Katz: One day caught perch on first 13 casts, then none at slip north of 87th; one morning good at Navy Pier, others slow. Larry Green: Some quality (10-12 inches) Sunday at a North Side harbor. Mik-Lurch: Plan to test Gary Light this week by boat; good numbers in the river.
PIER PASSES: Henry’s has the $6 passes for legal access to select Chicago harbors.
AREA RIVERS: FOX: Johnny “Sunshine’’ Pajak: Still walleye in deeper holes when guides don’t freeze up.
ILLINOIS: Time on the Water Outdoors: Sauger being caught in deeper holes; focus upstream from Spring Valley.
KANKAKEE: Norm Minas: Water levels and temperatures dropping; walleye at inflows and point pools on minnow baits and darter-head jigs with paddle tail flukes.
AREA LAKES: Some lakes and ponds have fishable ice; others are open water.
CHAIN O’LAKES AREA: Hermann’s: Two fishermen on 2 inches of ice at Nielsen’s Tuesday. Arden Katz: Move around at Nielsen’s, fish whole water column. Greg Dickson, Triangle: It’s backwaters ice fishing (T Channel, Nielsen’s, etc.); ice should hold and build.
DELAVAN/GENEVA LAKES, WIS.: Variable ice. Brian Gates, Geneva Lake Bait & Tackle: Small pike at Delavan boat launch; some legal pike off south side of Como, which should be walkable; small bluegill on west side of Lorraine.
GREEN/STURGEON BAYS, WIS.: Lance LaVine, Howie’s Tackle: Ice forming on inner bays: Little Sturgeon, Sawyer Harbor, inside cup in Dykesville. Expect more to ice fish by weekend.
MADISON LAKES, WIS.: Gene Dellinger, D&S Bait: On the ice, primarily for bluegill, at Cherokee Marsh, Monona Bay, parts of Squaw Bay, Mud Lake and parts of Waubesa.
N. WIS.: EAGLE RIVER: Chamber of Commerce: Ice fishing underway in shoreline areas and bays by foot travel. MINOCQUA: Kurt Justice, Island Sportshop: Ice conditions improving (7-8 inches in most areas, some thicker) with crappie (tip-downs with small minnows or No. 8 rockers with sliver of Chena or plastic), bluegill (with crappie but shallower in 5-8) and largemouth (weedy bays) are very good; walleye and pike are good.
NW IND.: A few whitefish at Michigan City. When weather allows, lakers on rocks and reefs. Mik-Lurch: Better steelhead in Trail, but some coming in Salt, too.
ST. JOSEPH AREA, MICH.: Phil Schuman, Tackle Haven: A few whitefish and steelhead off piers; steelhead being caught in the river.
SHABBONA LAKE: Lake is half open.
BUCK OF THE WEEK:
Mike Fleming (left), of Hawthorn Woods, arrowed a beautiful 13-pointer on Nov. 11 in the Galena area. Then his brother Rob, of Ingleside, did the same on a monster eight-pointer the next day.
‘‘The freezing mornings [in early November] didn’t deter these guys,’’ proud mom Norma Fleming emailed.
Their dad, Bob, is waiting on his mountable buck, she added.
Submit nominations on Facebook (Dale Bowman), on Twitter (@BowmanOutside) or by email (straycasts@sbcglobal.net).
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Breitbart, the right-wing website once helmed by Steve Bannon, now chief strategist to President Donald Trump, skyrocketed into prominence during the 2016 election, but has since been faced with cratering traffic and fleeing advertisers.
According to a new Digiday report, Breitbart has seen a sharp decline — of nearly 90% — in the number of advertisers on its site:
There were just 26 brands appearing on Breitbart in May, down from a high of 242 in March, according to MediaRadar, which tracks ads on websites. Many conservative sites, including Townhall, The Blaze and National Review, have also had declines, although those declines are much less pronounced than Breitbart, according to MediaRadar.
As Digiday notes, the “decline also coincides with boycotts aimed at getting advertisers to stop running ads on the site.” Per Sleeping Giants, a Twitter account tracking companies that have stopped advertising on Breitbart, counts 2,200 companies as having ceased to advertise on the website.
News that Breitbart’s advertisers have plummeted 90% in three months follows a Vanity Fair report that the website’s traffic has declined since President Trump’s inauguration.
At the height of its popularity, Breitbart boasted 45 million unique monthly visitors, with more than two billion pageviews in 2016, according to a post written on the website.
By January, Breitbart was the 45th most trafficked U.S. website, surpassing “Fox News (#47), Huffington Post (#50), Washington Post (#53), and Buzzfeed (#64).”
A month later, per Vanity Fair, the website celebrated its ascension to 29th place in the Alexa.com rankings, beating out PornHub and ESPN.
But just a couple of months later, Breitbart fell from its peak in the traffic rankings to 59th place by the end of May. A previous version of the Vanity Fair story reported Breitbart had plummeted to 281st place, but this appears to have been the result of a glitch in Alexa’s system.
According to ComScore, another web analytics company, while Breitbart had 23 million visitors in November 2016, that number dropped to “10.7 million in April 2017, a 53 percent drop,” as Vanity Fair notes.
Another fascinating nugget from the Vanity Fair piece: Breitbart’s cratering traffic could have something to do with a “decline in the number of times Breitbart stories receive a link from Matt Drudge.”
Receiving a coveted link on the Drudge Report “can fuel an entire month’s worth of web traffic,” but since Bannon’s departure from Breitbart, the website has struggled to maintain a steady flow of Drudge links.
Maybe after reading the report Matt Drudge will throw Breitbart a bone — but with a sudden dearth of advertisers, it appears Breitbart suffers from more salient problems than day-to-day traffic woes.
Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.com
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It's not something you've ever truly been able to measure, until now, as we've added Sprint Speed to the list of publicly available Statcast™ metrics. You can, and should, read the introduction here to get a sense of how it works , but the short version is that we measure speed in "feet per second, in a player's fastest one-second window," and 27 feet per second is the Major League average. The elite speedsters touch 30 feet per second, and the slowest of the slow are down around 23-24 feet per second. Olympian Usain Bolt, by comparison, has reached up to 37 feet per second in his first 40 meters.
Where do baseball's biggest speed demons live? You probably have a rough idea in your mind of which positions are home to the speediest players, just due to the types of players who get placed there, but by how much?
Where do baseball's biggest speed demons live? You probably have a rough idea in your mind of which positions are home to the speediest players, just due to the types of players who get placed there, but by how much?
It's not something you've ever truly been able to measure, until now, as we've added Sprint Speed to the list of publicly available Statcast™ metrics. You can, and should, read the introduction here to get a sense of how it works, but the short version is that we measure speed in "feet per second, in a player's fastest one-second window," and 27 feet per second is the Major League average. The elite speedsters touch 30 feet per second, and the slowest of the slow are down around 23-24 feet per second. Olympian Usain Bolt, by comparison, has reached up to 37 feet per second in his first 40 meters.
As we noted in the introduction, "12 of the fastest 14 play center field; at the bottom, 24 of the slowest 25 are catchers, first basemen, or designated hitters," and really, isn't that exactly what you'd expect? Of course slower runners play positions that demand less speed. What's interesting, however, is to look at each position and see where the outliers are.
While we said the Major League average is 27 ft/sec, that's across all baserunners. Per position, center fielders average 28.2 ft/sec, and catchers and designated hitters are just below 26 ft/sec.
But what about the spread within positions? For example, the leaders at third base and right field are barely ahead of their competition, but the leaders at catcher, first base, and shortstop are practically miles ahead of anyone else. There's an interactive tool for this, feel free to give it a spin.
So, who are the leaders and trailers at each position? Let's take a spin through the Majors, with the fastest positions first.
(A note on how we defined positions, in the age of increasing versatility: A player's primary position is simply the position where he's made the most starts this year. So even though Jason Heyward, for example, has started 10 games in center field, all of his baserunning time is considered in right field, where he's made 42 starts so far.)
CENTER FIELD
Video: OAK@MIN: Statcast™ analyzes Buxton's speed on triple
1. Billy Hamilton, 30.1 ft/sec
2. Byron Buxton, 29.9
3. Bradley Zimmer, 29.8
Position average: 28.2
There's two things you shouldn't be surprised about here: First, that center field is by far baseball's speediest position, and second, that Hamilton is atop the list. He tops every runner in the game, so of course he's atop his own position. But it really can't be overstated enough how full of speed this position is. Beyond Hamilton, there's Buxton, and Keon Broxton. There's Mallex Smith and Kevin Kiermaier. There's Lorenzo Cain and Jarrod Dyson. Now there's rookies like Franchy Cordero and Ian Happ, and Cardinals rookie Magneuris Sierra would have been the third-fastest if he'd qualified.
It's especially interesting to note that Cleveland rookie Zimmer is showing this much speed early on, because he recently challenged Atlanta's "The Freeze" to a race. Based on this data, Zimmer might actually have a shot.
There is just so much speed here. It's how someone like Adam Jones (27.4 ft/sec) can be above average overall yet slower than most of his center field contemporaries. Of the 43 qualified center fielders included, 39 were at or above the 27 ft/sec Major League average, the highest percentage of any position. Of the ones below, at least Curtis Granderson (26.6) has an excuse: He's 36, hasn't played primarily center since 2012, and is only doing so now due to the construction of the Mets lineup. All things considered, he's performing admirably at a tough position.
SHORTSTOP
Video: WSH@NYM: Statcast™ analyzes Turner's sprint home
1. Trea Turner, 29.1 ft/sec
2. [tie] Wilmer Difo, 28.5
2. [tie] Tim Anderson, 28.5
Position average: 27.5
When Turner took the bigs by storm last summer, we received a near-endless amount of requests seeking to prove that Turner was baseball's fastest man. We couldn't do it, of course, because Hamilton and Buxton are both slightly faster, as are a few others. But what we can say is that Turner is baseball's fastest shortstop, and that's satisfying enough.
Not only that, he's the fastest by a lot, by more than a half a foot over the second-place Difo and Anderson. Most shortstops are bunched in the above-average range between 27.5 and 28.5 ft/sec, and the few regular shortstops who are below the 27 ft/sec average (Troy Tulowitzki, Asdrubal Cabrera, J.J. Hardy, and Brandon Crawford) are all at least 30 years old. Age matters a lot when it comes to speed.
LEFT FIELD
Video: TEX@WSH: Statcast™ analyzes DeShields' speed to third
1. Delino DeShields, 29.1 ft/sec
2. Allen Cordoba, 29.0
3. Ben Revere, 28.8
Position average: 27.5
If you don't know DeShields, you should, since he was one of the five fastest runners in the game as a rookie in 2015, and he stole 101 across two Minor League levels in 2012. While he's had more time in center in his career, the presence of Carlos Gomez has pushed him to left for Texas. The 21-year-old Cordoba, a Rule Draft 5 pick from the Cardinals, is baseball's youngest regular hitter this year, while the veteran Revere has been known for his plus speed for years.
There's two pretty clear groups of left fielders, as the position is a mix of speed types (Cameron Maybin, Peter Bourjos) and power bats (Adam Duvall, Ryan Braun, Khris Davis). That Matt Kemp pulls up the rear is no surprise, given that he'll soon be 33 and has stolen just one base in the last two seasons, his once-elite speed affected by multiple injuries to both hamstrings.
SECOND BASE
Video: MIA@OAK: Statcast™ analyzes Gordon's speedy triple
1. Dee Gordon, 29.3 ft/sec
2. Alen Hanson, 28.7
3. Whit Merrifield, 28.6
Position average: 27.4
Second is similar to shortstop both in overall average and in that there's a National League East infielder leading the pack by far. Gordon has long been known as one of baseball's most dangerous speed threats, and he's been a Top 10 speedster in each of the three years of Statcast™. Young utility players Hanson and Merrifield haven't had much of a chance to show off in the bigs, but each has at least one 30-steal season in the Minors under his belt. Otherwise, this is a position tightly clustered around "above-average."
The bottom is interesting because Robinson Cano is essentially tied with Daniel Murphy and Dustin Pedroia, at 26.2 ft/sec apiece. That makes sense, as all three are 32 or older, and unlike Gordon, none of them are starters because of their speed. They're there to smash, and they do it very well.
RIGHT FIELD
Video: LAD@CLE: Robertson shows speed going first to third
1. [tie] Daniel Robertson 28.3 ft/sec
1. [tie] Ben Gamel, 28.3
3. Scott Schebler, 28.2
Position average: 27.3
Robertson and Gamel have combined for eight career stolen bases, good evidence that speed can lead to steals, but it doesn't have to. (Robertson does have five Minor league seasons with 20 or more steals.) With no real positive outliers here, right field is a position where most runners are near the Major League average or slightly above it, though it's interesting to see how well Schebler ranks here, given his calling card is his power.
As will become a running theme, at the end here is an older player (Jose Bautista will be 37 this fall) who has a recent history of leg injuries (knee and toe). Health plays such a big role in speed.
THIRD BASE
Video: CHC@BOS: Statcast™ analyzes Bryant's sprint on double
1. Kris Bryant, 28.2 ft/sec
2. [tie] Jose Ramirez, 28.0
2. [tie] Eduardo Escobar, 28.0
Position average: 26.8
Interestingly, third base has the slowest leader of any non-DH position. Bryant's 28.2 ft/sec is a solidly above-average mark, as you'd expect from a young player athletic enough to also see time in the outfield corners, but this is a relatively tightly-bunched position that's as close to "average," overall, than any other position.
At the other end of this, Adrian Beltre has basically the exact same story as Bautista. In addition to being 38 years old, he missed a chunk of the season with a calf injury, which tied him with Josh Donaldson (calf injury) and Luis Valbuena (hamstring) for the biggest decline in foot speed from 2016 of any player in the game. Age saps speed, and so does injury.
FIRST BASE
Video: SD@COL: Statcast™ looks at Myers' triple for the cycle
1. Wil Myers, 28.5 ft/sec
2. [tie] Eric Hosmer, 27.5
2. [tie] Jefry Marte, 27.5
Position average: 26.2
Of the 36 qualified first basemen here, only five are above the 27 ft/sec Major League average. This isn't surprising; first basemen aren't expected to be fast. We do have one huge outlier, however, and that's Myers, who is a full foot per second faster than second-place Hosmer. Of course, Myers is only 26 years old, and he was primarily an outfielder as recently as 2015. He's not exactly the prototypical first baseman, and this shows it better than anything.
DESIGNATED HITTER
Video: TB@TOR: Statcast™ analyzes Dickerson's speedy triple
1. Corey Dickerson, 27.9 ft/sec
2. Robbie Grossman, 27.5
3. Rickie Weeks Jr., 26.9
Position average: 25.9
Designated hitters, as absolutely no one should be surprised to hear, are not fast. This is a position mostly manned by older sluggers like Nelson Cruz, Kendrys Morales, Carlos Beltran, and Victor Martinez, players who are either long past their speed peak or never really had one to begin with. That's not their job; that's not why they're here.
This is one position where the average could actually change, at some point. There's only two DHs here who are above the Major League average, and it's at least possible neither one remains a DH all year. Grossman is only 27, but due to the presence of Max Kepler and Eddie Rosario in the corners and his own defensive shortcomings, he's seen more starts at DH than anywhere else this year. That said, he's seen only one in the last two weeks, so his classification may change.
CATCHER
Video: LAA@MIA: Statcast™ measures Realmuto's speed on double
1. J.T. Realmuto, 28.7 ft/sec
2. Willson Contreras, 27.5
3. Austin Barnes, 27.3
Position average: 25.9
Like first base, catchers are a very slow group, but there's also one huge outlier here in Realmuto, who is almost certainly baseball's most athletic catcher. As we noted above, age can cause speed to decline, so it's worth pointing out here that the only five catchers who are at or above the Major League average are all 28 years old or younger, with Contreras, Barnes, Andrew Knapp, and Travis d'Arnaud following Realmuto. It's hard to be a catcher and be fast, and it's nearly impossible once you've been doing it for enough years.
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“For the business, Botox has been an incredible medication. We call it our pipeline in a vial,” Dr. Whitcup said. “People still think about it as a cosmetic product, but the therapeutic indications in the next five years will far surpass its cosmetic use.”
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Industry analysts have forecast worldwide sales of the drug for the severe migraine condition at $250 million to more than $1 billion annually by 2015.
Unlike the occasional headache, the chronic migraine condition is often accompanied by nausea, vomiting, dizziness, intense sensitivity to light and noise, and moderate to severe pain.
The audience for Botox headache shots could be significant because some chronic migraine patients do not improve when they take the pills that are now the standard treatment, neurologists said. Treatments include pills like Topamax, taken daily to prevent migraine, and the triptan family of drugs, taken to ease an existing migraine.
Botox is a purified form of botulinum toxin, a nerve poison produced by the bacteria that causes botulism. Injections of Botox typically act to temporarily blunt nerve signals to certain muscles or glands. Researchers are still exploring how the drug works on migraines. Dr. Whitcup said one theory was that it blocked pain signals from reaching nerve endings.
A Botox migraine treatment generally involves a total of 31 injections in seven areas — including the forehead, temples, the back of the head, the neck and shoulders. To treat the chronic condition, injections are given about every three months.
Industry analysts estimated that the migraine treatment would cost $1,000 to $2,000, depending on the amount of the drug used and the physician’s fee. Some private insurers are likely to cover the migraine treatment now that it has received F.D.A. approval, analysts said, although patients may have to cover a significant co-payment.
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“The cost is prohibitive for some,” Randall Stanicky, a vice president for global research at Goldman Sachs, said in an interview earlier this year. “But given the debilitating challenges of having migraines more than 15 days a month, if Botox can cut down on that, it’s clearly going to be a big opportunity.”
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Other analysts have expressed skepticism that doctors and patients would embrace the drug, arguing that Botox has a marginal effect on headaches compared with a placebo.
“The true drug effect is minimal,” Corey Davis, an analyst at Jefferies & Company, said in an interview earlier this year.
Patients in one study financed by Allergan, for example, typically experienced about five fewer headache episodes a month than they had before the study — no matter whether they had injections of Botox or a placebo.
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After Allergan reviewed the results of that first study, the company changed the primary end point — the scientific goal post — on a second study so that it would focus on the drug’s effect on the number of headache days rather than the number of headache episodes that a person experienced each month. Dr. Whitcup said it was easier for patients to remember how many headache days as opposed to how many headache episodes they had every month.
The second study reported that patients who received Botox injections typically experienced about 2.3 fewer headache days than the placebo group, a statistically significant difference. But the placebo group also experienced considerable improvement — a common feature in pain studies — raising questions among some doctors about the magnitude of the Botox effect.
Dr. Whitcup said Botox had consistently beaten the placebo at different time points in the study and that patients had reported an improvement in their daily functioning and quality of life.
Although the F.D.A. approved the drug for the chronic condition, the agency said in its statement Friday that Botox had not been shown to work for the occasional headache or migraine.
Common side effects were neck pain and headaches. But neurologists point to a more welcome side effect for some — fewer wrinkles.
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In a Channel 4 documentary called What Britain’s Muslims Really Think, presenter Trevor Phillips presented survey evidence suggesting that large numbers of British Muslims don’t want to integrate and dislike Jews and that many thousands of them support extremist views including terrorism and suicide bombing.
The British Muslim community has responded in the usual way…
Smear the polling company
“Lets not forget ICM is one of the polling companies that wrongly predicted the 2015 general election. The stats just don’t hold enough weight.” (Nazia, 35, W. Yorkshire)
Cast doubt on the methodology
“Other issues include the fact that the study targeted areas that were at least 20% Muslim and a large chunk of the sample were born abroad. If the study was conducted where English is not widely spoken, how do we know the participants fully understood what they were being asked?” (Nazia, 35, W. Yorkshire)
Hint that even asking these questions is divisive and Islamophobic
What is going to happen to our stated desire to build robust social cohesion if we keep singling out British Muslims as unique special cases? And what is it that is really underlying such constant scrutiny? (Rachel Shabi, Al Jazeera)
Nothing to do with Islam. It’s ‘cultural’, innit?
Moreover, Trevor Philips and the show portrayed segregated schools as an Islamic problem, that somehow where a school finds itself admitting children of a certain colour, that it is a religious issue. I would argue that this is a cultural and geographical issue and conflating religion with state school segregation is ridiculous. (Ibraham Ilyas, 18, Birmingham)
There’s no such thing as a ‘Muslim’
Being a Shia Muslim I wish Wahhabi or Salafi elements of society weren’t able to answer on my behalf. (Zaynab Mirza, 32, London)
I have a degree in social sciences, majoring in grievance studies
“We were presented in an extremely negative light. We were othered.” (Ismail, 32, Dewsbury)
Some Muslims are doctors, nurses, and teachers – so that makes everything nice
The show did not look at all at the positive contribution Muslims have made to Britain; that we serve as doctors, nurses, teachers and we actually aid the community we live in. (white convert Sarah Ward Khan, 36, London)
Whatabout…?
None of this is to give sexism, homophobia or any other prejudices a free pass. Nobody is suggesting that it’s brilliant that a minority of British Muslims support stoning – or, for that matter, that 45 percent of the overall British population would bring back hanging. (Rachel Shabi, Al Jazeera)
Lovely Nadija from Great British Bake Off make everything nice
But when there are 13 Muslim MPs, a British Muslim candidate for mayor of London, a Muslim dragon in the Dragons’ Den, and a Muslim winner of the Great British Bake Off, it seems that in reality, Muslims are very much part of British society. (Miqdaad Versi, Muslim Council of Britain)
Nothing to do with Islam. Did we mention this already? Well, it isn’t. And here’s some made-up stasticoids from a parti-pris organisation with affiliations to the Muslim Brotherhood…
The Muslim Council of Britain’s own research has shown that far more serious concerns relate to poverty, gender, criminality and Islamophobia. (Miqdaad Versi, Muslim Council of Britain)
Have you noticed something glaringly absent from these responses?
At no point does anyone seem to be suggesting that there is a serious problem here which Muslims need to address.
Perhaps there isn’t.
Perhaps, for example, you think it’s perfectly OK that – as the programme reported – a nine-year old boy at one of the Trojan Horse schools in Birmingham suggested that his middle-aged Muslim headmistress was a “slag” because she wasn’t wearing a headscarf.
Or that boys at the same Birmingham state primary school would act like religious police and clout girls not wearing the veil over the head.
Or that there are now 85 Sharia councils in Britain which – according to Zurich professor Elham Manea, herself a Muslim – are enforcing on Muslim communities (especially with regard to marriage) a version of Islam as extreme as that practised by the Taliban or in Manea’s native Yemen.
Or that over 40 per cent of the mosques in Britain are controlled by the Deobandis, promoters of the same form of fundamentalist Islam as the Taliban.
Or that in part two of BBC Radio 4’s excellent investigation into the Deobandis, researchers found literature in a London mosque aggressively promoting the kind of hatred against the supposedly heretical Ahmadi sect which led to the recent murder of a peaceful Muslim Glasgow shopkeeper?
Call me an Islamophobe but I’m not sure that any of the above represent shining examples of a community that is bending over backwards to accommodate itself with the host culture.
Isn’t about time we heard a bit more from British Muslims about what they plan to do remedy this?
I worry, you see, that if they’re not careful that harmless, peace-loving religion of theirs might start to get a bad rap.
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INNISFAIL, Australia (Reuters) - One of the most powerful cyclones on record slammed into Australia’s northeast coast on Thursday, tearing off roofs and bringing down power lines but there were no reports of deaths as first light broke.
A farm shed stands under water next to a ruined banana plantation near the northern Australian town of Innisfail February 3, 2011. REUTERS/Tim Wimborne
Cyclone Yasi, packing winds of up to 300 km (186 miles) an hour near its core, came ashore along hundreds of kilometers of coastline in Queensland state.
Mines, rail lines and coal ports have been shut, with officials warning the storm could drive far inland, hitting mining areas struggling to recover from recent devastating floods.
Queensland accounts for about a fifth of Australia’s economy and 90 percent of its steelmaking coal exports but the extent of the damage might not be known for many hours.
The eye of the cyclone crossed the coast close to the tourist town of Mission Beach at around midnight.
“It sounds like a roaring train going over the top of the house. There are trees cracking outside,” Hayley Leonard told Seven Network television from a concrete bunker beneath her home in the town of Innisfail.
Despite the ferocity of the cyclone, Queensland Premier Anna Bligh said there had been no reports of deaths.
“What I’m very relieved about is that we have yet to hear any reports from any police or any other source of any serious injury or fatality,” Bligh told Sky TV.
She said evacuation centers, where more than 10,000 people had sheltered across the state, had not reported structural damage.
Major towns in the area including Cairns and Townsville appeared to escape the full brunt of the storm, but Bligh said “devastating damage” was expected in smaller communities.
Power was cut in the western side of Cairns and a power official said more than 170,000 residents were without power.
Yasi was rated a maximum-strength category five storm and drew comparisons with Hurricane Katrina, which wrecked New Orleans in 2005.
It has been downgraded to a category two storm as it moves inland. But its core remained very destructive, the Bureau of Meteorology said.
Almost everyone in the storm zone was bunkered down at home or in cyclone shelters. Tens of thousands of people were evacuated in the hours before the storm struck.
A Bureau of Meteorology spokesman said a storm surge of two meters (six feet) above the normal level of the tide had inundated one stretch of coast but reporters said the surges were not as severe as feared.
More than 400,000 people live in the cyclone’s path. The entire stretch is popular with tourists, includes the Great Barrier Reef, and is home to major coal and sugar ports.
The storm could inflate world sugar, copper and coal prices, after forcing a copper refinery to close and paralyzing sugar and coal exports. It even prompted a major mining community at Mt Isa, almost 1,000 km (620 miles) inland, to go on alert.
Global miners BHP Billiton and Peabody Energy had shut several coal mines, an official for the union representing Queensland coal miners told Reuters.
“BANG, BANG, BANG”
Engineers warned that Yasi could even blow apart “cyclone proof” homes when its center moved overland, despite building standards designed to protect homes from a growing number of giant storms.
“I think all the roof is gone,” Ray, one resident of a town south of Innisfail, told ABC news. “It just sounded like an automatic rifle going bang, bang, bang, bang as it went.”
Bligh said the cyclone could batter the state for up to three days as it moved inland.
She said a giant nine-meter (30-foot) wave had been recorded off the coast on Wednesday.
Satellite images showed Yasi as a massive storm system covering an area bigger than Italy. It is predicted to be the strongest ever to hit Australia.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard has put 4,000 soldiers based in Townsville on standby to help once the cyclone passes, as well as military ships and helicopters.
Queensland has had a cruel summer, with floods sweeping across it and other eastern states in recent months, killing 35 people.
The state is also home to most of Australia’s sugar industry and losses for the industry from Yasi could exceed A$500 million, including crop losses and damage to farming infrastructure, industry group Queensland Canegrowers said.
Bligh said there had been reports of damage to crops. Near the town of Innisfail, banana plantations had been ripped out of the ground.
Slideshow (23 Images)
($1=.9888 Australian dollar)
(Additional reporting by Amy Pyett in SYDNEY)
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And that’s not good news for either of the Clintons, not now and certainly not for 2016 when Hillary Clinton plans to run for the nomination of the party that’s made class warfare its central strategy. The problem began almost three weeks ago, when Hillary began insisting that the Clintons were “dead broke” at the end of their time in the White House and are not “truly well off” now despite having made at least $100 million in book sales and speaking fees over the last 13 years. As she “struggled” to differentiate herself from the Democrats’ class-warfare bête noir Mitt Romney, Bill attempted to backstop his wife.
And all of that gave the media yet another opening to explore the Clintons’ wealth and the manner in which it was acquired. The Washington Post today dissected Bill Clinton’s income in a manner which will hardly look attractive to the Democratic base that fulminates over the One Percent:
Over seven frenetic days, Bill Clinton addressed corporate executives in Switzerland and Denmark, an investors’ group in Sweden and a cluster ofbusiness and political leaders in Austria. The former president wrapped up his European trip in the triumphant Spanish Hall at Prague Castle, where he shared his thoughts on energy to a Czech business summit. His pay: $1.4 million. That lucrative week in May 2012 offers a glimpse into the way Clinton has leveraged his global popularity into a personal fortune. Starting just two weeks after exiting the Oval Office, Clinton has delivered hundreds of paid speeches, lifting a family that was “dead broke,” as wife Hillary Rodham Clinton phrased it earlier this month, to a point of such extraordinary wealth that it is now seen as a potential political liability if she runs for president in 2016.
Bill Clinton has earned more than $100 million just for his speeches between 2001 and 2013, apart from what Hillary Clinton earns for hers or from what both receive from their memoirs. He has earned more speaking abroad ($56.3 million) than he has at home, which may raise more than a few eyebrows about the baggage that could carry in a presidential campaign. Combined with Hillary Clinton’s speech income — which is not public — and her massive bonuses for her two memoirs (more than $20 million combined), it’s clear that the Clintons are very truly well off.
Plus, as Chuck Todd pointed out today on Morning Joe, it’s not as if this wealth came from wise business investment and job-creating risk acumen. It entirely trades on their celebrity and connection to power:
And let’s remember how they acquired their wealth. They didn’t do it in some incredible business, creating jobs and all this. They just acquired wealth for being the Clintons. … This is not like shoveling coal, this is not like building a factory.
Yes, that’s a bit emblematic of the disengaged One Percent, no? Plus, the Washington Post notes who actually pays Bill Clinton the most for his time, too, and it’s not going to make the base any happier:
The financial industry has been Clinton’s most frequent sponsor. The Post review showed that Wall Street banks and other financial services firms have hired Clinton for at least 102 appearances and paid him a total of $19.6 million.
Maybe they can argue that Bill Clinton occupied Wall Street before Occupy was cool … but I doubt it.
Joe Scarborough also pointed to the nearly $20 million Bill Clinton earned from speeches to the financial industry as perhaps the most damaging part of the story for Hillary’s political aspirations:
Maybe, but I think he gets closer to it at the end. “I’m sorry, that is disconnected,” Scarborough concludes, “when you don’t think you’re that rich because the billionaires you hang out with all the time are paying 14% taxes.”
At some point, the Clintons will have to either come up with a better explanation or just shut up about the poverty of seven-figure incomes. Perhaps Bill felt like he had no choice but to attempt to rescue Hillary from the trap she’s created for herself, but now he’s ensnared by it and it’s just giving the media even more reason to scrutinize their class-warfare hypocrisy. And with that attention comes the obvious conclusion that a Democratic Party that supports Hillary Clinton is just demagoguing on income inequality, a conclusion that steps all over the midterm strategy of the Clintons’ colleagues.
Update: At the Daily Beast, Keli Goff outlines the danger for 2016, too:
Now, two decades, later the Clintons find themselves confronting the same problem. And just like former President Bush, the problem will only be amplified should Hillary find herself facing a contender who, like her husband 20 years ago, is more representative of America’s little guy. Though in recent years the GOP nominees have been scions of privilege (think Bush, McCain and Romney) the current GOP lineup has more middle- and working-class bona fides. Chris Christie, Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal, Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio all come from backgrounds that make it likely they know how to operate a grocery store scanner. They also come from backgrounds in which the meaning of “dead broke” probably has a very different meaning for them than it appears to for the former secretary of state, especially since unlike her they are all still relying on government salaries.
That’s an aspect that hadn’t occurred to me, but which makes a very good point … unless Jeb Bush wins the nomination.
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Melwyn Pinto SJ
Mangaluru, Mar 17 : In a startling episode, reminiscent of the recent gang rape of a nun in Kolkata, a young nun was allegedly kidnapped and manhandled in a broad daylight by four men here on Monday March 16. However, as luck would have it, the nun in this case managed to escape from the clutches of the assailants, just in nick of time.
The nun doing her physiotherapy course in a city private hospital was allegedly waylaid by four men near Pumpwell as she alighted from the bus she was travelling. It is learnt that the men pushed her into an auto where they gagged and manhandled her. The courageous nun, though, used her presence of mind and when the auto reached Kadri-Nantoor area found it slowing down near a road hump and jumped out and ran for life. In the melee, though, she sustained minor injuries and lost her hand bag and watch.
She was later offered a helping hand by a passer-by who took her to the hospital.
It is alleged that when she went to register a complaint to Mangalore East (Kadri) police station, her complaint was not accepted. She was rather sent to Mangalore rural police station.
Prominent Christian religious and lay leaders have expressed displeasure at the slackness of the police in assessing the seriousness of the case as the FIR was registered only at 6 p.m. at Mangalore rural police station, though the incident took place at noon. The case has been booked under sections 392 (robbery) and 363 (kidnap) of IPC.
The nun is admitted in a city private hospital where her condition is reported to be stable, though she is still in a state of shock.
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Trump Will Now Become the War President
Trump Will Now Become the War President
Paul Craig Roberts
President Trump has been defeated by the military/security complex and forced into continuing the orchestrated and dangerous tensions with Russia. Trump’s defeat has taught the Russians the lesson I have been trying to teach them for years, and that is that Russia is much more valuable to Washington as an enemy than as a friend.
Do we now conclude with Russia’s Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev that Trump is washed up and “utterly powerless?” I think not. Trump is by nature a leader. He wants to be out front, and that is where his personality will compel him to be. Having been prevented by the military/security complex, both US political parties, the presstitute media, the liberal-progressive-left, and Washington’s European vassals from being out front as a leader for peace, Trump will now be the leader for war. This is the only permissible role that the CIA and armaments industry will permit him to have.
Losing the chance for peace might cost all of us our lives. Now that Russia and China see that Washington is unwilling to share the world stage with them, Russia and China will have to become more confrontational with Washington in order to prevent Washington from marginalizing them. Preparations for war will become central in order to protect the interests of the two countries. The situation is far more dangerous than at any time of the Cold War.
The foolish American liberal-progressive-left, wrapped up as they are in Identity Politics and hatred of “the Trump deplorables,” joined the military/security complex’s attack on Trump. So did the whores, who pretend to be a Western media, and Washington’s European vassals, not one of whom had enough intelligence to see that the outcome of the attack on Trump would be an escalation of conflict with Russia, conflict that is not in Europe’s business and security interests.
Washington is already raising the violence threshold. The same lies that Washington told about Saddam Hussein, Gadaffi, Assad, Iran, Serbia and Russia are now being told about Venezuela. The American presstitutes duly report the lies handed to them by the CIA just as Udo Ulfkotte and Seymour Hersh report. These lies comprise the propaganda that conditions Western peoples to accept the coming US coup against the democratic government in Venezuela and its replacement with a Washington-compliant government that will permit the renewal of US corporate exploitation of Venezuela.
As the productive elements of American capitalism fall away, the exploitative elements become its essence. After Venezuela, there will be more South American victims. As reduced tensions with Russia are no longer in prospect, there is no reason for the US to abandon its and Israel’s determination to overthrow the Syrian government and then the Iranian government.
The easy wars against Iraq, Libya, and Somalia are to be followed by far more perilous conflict with Iran, Russia, and China
This is the outcome of John Brennan’s defeat of President Trump.
UPDATE: The escalation of the conflict with Russia has begun. US vice president Mike Pence made false allegations against Russia yesterday (Aug. 2) in Montenegro designed to panic Montenegrins into joining NATO. The two-decade march of NATO eastward despite Washington’s promise to the contrary, surely has taught Russia that no agreement with Washington can ever be trusted. So why does Russia continue to seek agreements with Washington? https://sputniknews.com/politics/201708021056112385-pence-russia-montenegro-prime-minister/
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Related News
The federal government on Thursday pledged to continue to support the development of Nollywood health insurance scheme meant to provide favourable healthcare conditions for actors and actresses.
The Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, gave the assurance on Thursday at the launch of the NollyHealthInsured by the artists at the News Agency of Nigeria Media Centre, Iganmu, Lagos State.
The association also signed a Memorandum of Understanding, MoU, with Leadway Insurance, Leadway Pensions and Pinewood Medicare respectively.
NAN reports that the Leadway Insurance would take care of the artists’ Life General Insurance, LGI policy; Leadway Pension would create an affordable package to cater for their pension funds while Pinewood Medicare would take care of the artists’ health insurance.
The minister, represented by Chidia Maduekwe, Managing Director, Nigerian Film Corporation, NFC; said that there was the urgent need for both stakeholders to discuss health insurance and health issues pertaining to Nollywood members.
“We shall not stand by and watch your health and the health of your family members to slack by without providing a solution to it,” he said.
The minister assured them that the present administration, as part of its efforts in ensuring a holistic development for Nigerians, would not shy away from its responsibilities.
Earlier, Fred Amata, President, Directors Guild of Nigeria, DGN, in his address said that the provision of adequate healthcare for his members had continued to be a great challenge.
He recalled that movie practitioners were being constantly clawed by the icy cold hands of death.
“Great screen darlings have succumbed to poor health, critical illness and poor healthcare service in the sector,” he said.
The president said that NollyInsured would be a progressive inclusive initiative with an intervention in three categories namely: Life General Insurance (LGI), Health Insurance and Pension to preserve the health of its members.
“The initiative is about unifying various guilds and associations within the creative sector into becoming a body that is able to negotiate positive favourable position for the industry,” he said.
Mr. Amata said that the development will help offer immediate care to members who were in critical stage of their health, thereby, saving a life as and when due.
“Barely months ago, the sector mourned great talents like Mr Adeshina Adesanya, popularly known as Pastor Ajidara, Abela Pupa and Moji Olaiya to poor state of their health.
“How long shall we continue to watch our colleagues succumb to death due to lack of funds or due to the inability to raise funds for urgent treatment.
“However, with this kind of policy in place, we do not have to wait for the health of our members to deteriorate to a critical stage before help can come,” the president said.
Also, Olasimbo Davidson, the Managing Director, Pinewood Medicare, commended the initiative.
She said that this was the first time that a private sector group within a single industry had united to drive health reforms which meet the World Health Organisation’s standard.
Ms. Davidson said that the Nolly-care Programme was designed to end healthcare inequalities that pertained to income differences and prevent deaths which could stem from high healthcare costs.
“I am honoured to be part of this great project because this is an example of adopting a unified approach to solving Nigeria’s healthcare challenges,” she said.
Tunji Amokade, Head of Commercial Routine, Leadway Assurance Company Limited, said that Leadway was excited to be part of this development in sustaining good health for actors and actresses.
“We are excited because they are beginning to take initiative of the healthcare of their members more seriously than what they used to have in the past,” he said.
Mr. Amokade said that partnering DGN and Nollywood would go a long way at building a good relationship with both organisations and ensure good mileage in the preservation of health.
(NAN)
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The southern Israeli city of Beersheba prevented the screening of the documentary film "Shivering in Gaza," which deals with trauma therapy in Gaza after the 2014 war with Israel. Following Mayor Ruvik Danilovich's decision to cancel the Sunday screening, artists' organizations expressed their dismay and criticized him in a letter.
They claimed stopping the showing of the film was illegal and called on Danilovich to reverse his decision. A group of 50 professors and students from Ben Gurion University also signed a separate letter sent Danilovich, in which they too expressed their discontent on Tuesday.
The criticism comes among a heightened awareness of censorship among some in Israel following the appointment of Culture Minister Miri Regev after March elections.
During a theater awards ceremony held in Tel Aviv last month, Regev announced: "Whoever wants to slander this country will do it alone. We will not be partners to it, and we will not fund it."
Not taking sides
"Shivering in Gaza" is a Dutch production documenting the work of trauma treatment expert Jan Andreae, who meets with Gaza-based aid workers after the 2014 Israel-Gaza war and helps them to cope with fear, trauma and grief.
The movie was planned to be shown in Tel Aviv, Sderot, Beersheba and Gaza, followed by Q&A with Andreae and the film's director, Geert Van Kesteren.
While the screening was held as planned in Tel Aviv and in Gaza, the Sderot event was canceled due to pressure exerted by right-wing activists using a text messaging campaign addressed to the city's mayor, Alon Davidi. Davidi ordered the local cinema director to cancel the screening.
Part of a personal treatment of a medical staff member, committed by Jan Andreae in Gaza
In response, Amnesty decided to show the movie in a small Beersheba movie theater, which is also used by the "coexistence forum" in the city, but yet another massive number of text messages were sent to the city's mayor and he decided to cancel that event, claiming the film was "political" and that, according to Interior Ministry, it is forbidden to use public buildings to promote political causes.
Amnesty adopted the texting method, and posted Danilovich's phone number on Facebook along with a call to text him in protest of the cancellation. So far, he has not altered his decision.
Van Kesteren said he is disappointed that the documentary will not be shown to the people in southern Israel who suffered during the war and he said would be able to relate to the film.
"It is a shame that my film has been hijacked by Israeli politics and banned from being screened at the cinematheque in Sderot and Beersheba," he told DW. "It is true that the film is not dealing with the Israeli side, but it deals with what happens to you as a person, an individual, in war time. This is a film about a war that rages on in your head after the ceasefire. And how to deal with that."
Freedom of expression at risk
The letter sent by the artists' groups called the strict adherence to freedom of expression the essence of all art and a crucial part of any democracy.
"Freedom of expression is a legal right which should be absolute, and except from statements that explicitly violate the country's laws, no single person or institution has the right to determine what content is not legitimate in a democratic state," the artists' letter said.
In calling for officials to reverse their decision and screen the "Shivering in Gaza," the artists claimed that in the current public atmosphere and following steps taking by the Israeli government curbing freedom of expression, "it seems like local authorities, similar to governmental ones, allow themselves to extend their competences beyond what is legitimate and beyond the law."
A patient squeezed to Jan Andreae's body as part of a treatment in Gaza
Yonatan Gher, director of Amnesty International Israel, said the government's policy, as well as current public discourse, represent "an organized assault on freedom of expression in Israel."
"We can't have mayors acting as chief censors of their town, allowing events to take place only if they fit the leading party's platform," Gher added.
He also called Beersheba's twin cities of Rosenheim and Wuppertal in Germany to join the protest and invited the leaders of the two German cities to join him in calling Beersheba to assure that freedom of expression is maintained and afforded to all.
Van Kesteren insists that the film is not political, and does not blame or shame anyone. "There are no images of war, violence or destruction, and the word 'Israel' is not even mentioned once. It only shows Gazan citizens in their trauma therapy."
However, some Israeli mayors disagree. "This is a movie in which the hero, Jan Andreae, blatantly goes against Israel and blames it for the situation of residents and children in Gaza," Sderot's mayor Davidi told DW. "This is a biased, anti-Zionist and anti-Israeli film and therefore is not screened at our cinema."
"It takes a lot of gall and cynicism to bring a movie as such to the Qassam-stricken Sderot, and trample on the feelings of its residents and children," he said, referring to the rockets fired into Israel. "Our children are suffering from anxiety and receive psychotherapy. Hamas has been firing on Sderot for years. We will not be told who is the good side and the bad in this story."
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Starbucks mobile payments hit 42 million
Anyone who has to question the viability of using a smartphone instead of a credit card to pay at the register need look no further than Starbucks, a company that has already been allowing customers to do just that for more than a year. And in those past 15 months, it has managed to process 42 million mobile payment transactions. Not bad for a little coffeehouse, right?
The Starbucks customer loyalty program is one of the least (financially) rewarding programs that exist. It takes 45 purchases before you earn your first free drink (then it takes 15 purchases every time thereafter). But for people who visit Starbucks every day, it’s about something else – convenience. The way the program works is that members register a Starbucks gift card to their account, and then fill it up with money. Rather than fumbling around with cash or needing to sort through countless small transactions on a credit card statement, you can just swipe your gift card every time. You can even set it to auto-reload.
That was taken to the next level with the flagship Starbucks app, which puts the same gift card bardcode information on a smartphone screen, allowing users to scan that to pay for their coffee. To be clear, this is a completely different kind of mobile payment technology than what everyone is talking about right now, but it has pioneered the way for being able to pay for a purchase at the register without any cash or cards in your possession. 42 million scans later, perhaps it’s on to something.
[via VentureBeat]
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This article is over 1 year old
Following protests last month, Cambridge University’s publishing house reversed its decision to censor articles in academic journal China Quarterly
Cambridge University Press is heading for a showdown with Chinese authorities after the government reaffirmed its commitment to block certain content following an outcry last month when it was revealed the publisher has restricted articles in China.
A Chinese state-owned importer asked CUP, the world’s oldest publisher, to block articles from the American Political Science Review.
Cambridge University Press censorship 'exposes Xi Jinping's authoritarian shift' Read more
“A request was indeed made by the Chinese importer, but was not acted upon by Cambridge University Press, so no content was blocked,” a spokeswoman for CUP said in a statement. It is unclear which articles were specifically targeted.
The request was made “around late July, early August”, Hannah Gregory, head of communications for CUP, said separately.
In August it was revealed that CUP had blocked more than 300 articles from appearing in China at the request of its state-owned publisher, drawing widespread criticism from academics and activists.
Gregory declined to elaborate on why CUP agreed to censor some content but rebuffed a separate request to block American Political Science Review articles.
The request to censor material within China highlights the government’s determination to block content it deems inappropriate or contradicts the Community party line.
China’s State Council, the country’s cabinet, said late on Friday that importers were responsible for filtering content and hinted it may declare some articles published by CUP in China illegal.
Cambridge University Press faces boycott over China censorship Read more
“All publications imported into China’s market must adhere to Chinese laws and regulations. Publication importers are responsible for checking the content of their imported publications,” the State Council said in a statement. It did not directly mention CUP.
Cambridge University’s publishing house eventually reversed its decision to censor articles in the prestigious academic journal China Quarterly. Pieces singled out covered topics considered taboo by Chinese authorities, including Tibet, the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.
The publisher’s change of heart followed growing international protests, including a petition signed by hundreds of academics, and the threat of having its publications boycotted. Its U-turn was notable for CUP taking to Chinese social media to explain its decision, a provocative move rare for foreign publishers in China.
Since coming to power in 2012, President Xi Jinping has led a push to further tighten control over information in China, already one of the most restricted media and publishing environments in the world.
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Don’t expect any hugs when Jae Crowder and J.R. Smith first line up opposite one another next season.
Smith’s backhanded slap prematurely ended Crowder’s 2014-15 campaign in the opening round of the NBA playoffs, and while the Boston Celtics forward avoided serious injury on the play, it’s clear he hasn’t fully forgiven the perpetrator.
“I don’t intend to call him, that’s for sure,” Crowder told the Boston Herald. “Nothing like that.”
The Cleveland Cavaliers officially eliminated the Celtics a few hours after Smith’s right hand made contact with Crowder’s face, and Crowder has spend the ensuing weeks rehabbing his sprained knee.
“I obviously would have been very worried if I had torn something, but once I got the results from the MRI it was all fine,” he told the Herald. “I found out all of the information in the same day. Thank God I didn’t tear it. I’m very lucky that it wasn’t worse.
“I’ve been putting in a lot of time on the bike, but I feel like I could play today. But right now, I’m focused on my body.”
Smith, meanwhile, is coming off an underwhelming performance in Game 2 of the NBA Finals. The Cavaliers defeated the Golden State Warriors 95-93 in overtime, but Smith went 5-for-13 from the floor and committed six fouls, including two costly ones down the stretch that nearly gifted a win to the Warriors.
In speaking with reporters after the game, Smith shouldered the blame for his boneheaded plays.
#Cavs JR Smith takes responsibility for the blown lead in final minutes of regulation. "It was my fault," he said, "I did some dumb things." —
Rachel Nichols (@Rachel__Nichols) June 08, 2015
“Please win this game,” Smith said, via CBSSports.com, when asked what was going to through his mind as he watched the final minutes of overtime from the bench. “I don’t want the phone calls, the emails, Instagrams, tweets, memes. I don’t want none of that right now.”
Thumbnail photo via Mark J. Rebilas/USA TODAY Sports Images
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By Sahil Patel
Netflix wants to be HBO (yes, this is one of those stories). Part of that strategy involves getting TV distributors to bundle the streaming service as part of their overall TV offering, just like any other premium pay-TV channel currently does.
While that’s going to be a bit tougher in the US, Netflix is making some headway in this department across the Atlantic — specifically in the UK, where it’s reportedly surpassed 3 million subscribers.
For instance, UK telecom giant BT just confirmed that it will include Netflix in its bundle. This means that the company’s customers will be able to sign up and pay for Netflix alongside other products and services — spanning TV, broadband, and phones — on the same monthly bill.
BT confirmed the news, which has been rumored for quite some time, during its latest quarterly earnings report. “We continue to focus on strengthening our TV proposition and are excited to announce we have entered into a partnership with Netflix that will allow our customers to sign up for Netflix alongside our other products and services, with the added convenience of paying on one bill directly through BT,” the company said.
With the integration, Netflix will also be available via set-tops provided by the telecom giant. The service will be included on the YouView Internet TV service, which is owned by a group of British telecom operators and broadcasters including BT and ITV Group.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it’s the latest in a series of distribution partnerships between Netflix and British TV distributors. The company already has agreements in place with Virgin Media and Vodafone in the country, and is said to be in talks with BT rival TalkTalk.
Netflix’s Q3 earnings were not well-received by Wall Street. As the company tries to expand in the US and abroad, it will need to find new distribution means to continue building its subscriber base. One way to do that is certainly by making it easy for people to sign up for the service via their TV providers. And along the way, those Netflix/HBO comparisons will get even tighter.
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Involves Click & Go receiver mounts on Britax B-Agile and BOB Motion strollers being used in travel system mode.
The following model numbers are affected:
B-AGILE:
S01298600, S01298700, S01635200, S02063600, S02063700, S02063800, S02063900, S02064000, S03803400, S03803500, S03803700, S03803800, S03803900, S04144400, S04144500, S04144600, S04144700, S04144800, S04144900, S04145000, S04183700, S04183800, S04184000, S04281200, S04281300, S04402800, S04437700, S04628500, S04884200, S04884300, S04884400, S04884500, S04975600, S04978900, S05060600, S05260200, S05511600, S05511700, S865800, S865900, S874300, S874400, S874500, S877200, S890100, S896000, S896200, S896600, S907200, S907300, S907400, S907500, S907600, S910200, S910300, S910400, S910500, S912300, S914300, S914500, S914700, S914900, S915200, S915400, S917400, S921800, S921900, S923700, U341763, U341764, U341782, U341783, U341825, U341826, U341828, U341X82, U34X782, U361763, U361818, U361819, U361825, U391875, U451835, U451837, U451841, U461763, U461764, U461782, U461783, U461825, U461826, U461828, U471818, U471819, U491842, U491843, U491844, U491908, U491909, U491910, U511875, U511877, U551835, U551837, U551841, U551861, U551862, U551863, U551864, U551865, U551905, U551906, U691878, U691879, U691881, U691882, U691884, U691904, U691905, U721895, U721896
BOB Motion:
S888600, S890200, S890300, S890400, S890500, S909700, S910600, S910700, S910800, S910900, S912600, U391820, U391821, U391822, U481820, U481821, U481822, U501820, U501821, U501822, U501907
If your seat meets the requirements of this recall please contact consumer services at 1-844-227-0300 or email us at [email protected]
In order to be informed directly whether your product has been involved in a safety advisory or recall, be sure to register your product.
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David M. Gross Yesterday I finished off Andrew Oldenquist’s ethics reader Readings in Moral Philosophy . It’s a good collection of many of the baseline arguments that you need to be familiar with in order to understand what people are arguing about when they argue ethical philosophy. It’s got your Plato, your Aristotle, your Hume, Kant, and Mill. Along with this are a set of sermons by Joseph Butler that I wasn’t at all familiar with, and a handful of more-modern bits: G.E. Moore, A.J. Ayer, and Stephen Toulmin. The excerpts from Plato’s Republic were the liveliest translation I’ve read (Benjamin Jowett’s from 1892 ), and I’m happy to report the whole thing is on-line, thanks to The Internet Classics Archive. One of the things I was keeping an eye out for while I was reading was for indications of the shift from ethical philosophy being seen as a practical pursuit — learning with the goal of becoming a better person — to ethical philosophy being seen as an abstract pursuit of knowledge about what ethical questions mean and how they might be consistently answered. I didn’t find much of note here, except two quotes that might as well mark either endpoint of this shift. First, Aristotle: Since the branch of philosophy on which we are at present engaged differs from the others in not being a subject of merely intellectual interest — I mean we are not concerned to know what goodness essentially is, but how we are to become good men, for this alone gives the study its practical value — we must apply our minds to the solution of the problems of conduct. And second, Stephen Edelston Toulmin: To show that you ought to choose certain actions is one thing: to make you want to do what you ought to do is another, and not a philosopher’s task. Not precisely on-point, but characteristic of the spirit of recent ethical philosophy, which seems to want to defer all of the ethical action until all of the loose ends have been tied up in ethical theory.
Which is a shame, because it seems to me that this would be an especially fruitful time to develop a practical discipline of ethics. While some of the great human weaknesses and temptations have been known and discussed for ages, we have never had such precise investigation of ethical blind spots and illusions as we have today.
Let me give an example of what I mean. The illustration below is an optical illusion. The parallelograms marked “A” and “B” are the exact same color, although one looks like a “light” parallelogram and one looks like a “dark” parallelogram.
The illustration plays with our expectations about shadows and light and such to fool us. Parts of the illustration that aren’t directly part of the comparison between the two parallelograms, that aren’t really relevant to the decision of whether or not they are of the same color, influence our perception. Here’s an illustration that makes it clearer, if you don’t believe me that the parallelograms are the same color:
We have similar illusions that confuse our sense of right and wrong. Compare the optical illusion above to the ethical illusion I mentioned a few months ago :
In the 1970s, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling used to put some questions to his students at Harvard when he wanted to show how people’s ethical preferences on public policy can be turned around. Suppose, he said, that you were designing a tax code and wanted to provide a credit — a rebate, in effect — for couples with children. (I’m simplifying a bit.) In a progressive tax system such as ours, we try to ease the burden on the less well off, so it might make sense to adjust the child credit accordingly. Would it be fair, do you think, to give poor parents a bigger credit than rich parents? Schelling’s students were inclined to think so. If the credit was going to vary with income, it seemed fair to award struggling families the bigger tax break. It would certainly be unfair, they agreed, for richer families to get a bigger one. Then Schelling asked his students to think about things in a different way. Instead of giving families with children a credit, you’d impose a surcharge on couples with no children. Now then: Would it be fair to make the childless rich pay a bigger surcharge than the childless poor? Schelling’s students thought so. But — hang on a sec — a bonus for those who have a child amounts to a penalty for those who don’t have one. (Saying that those with children should be taxed less than the childless is another way of saying that the childless should be taxed more than those with children.) So when poor parents receive a smaller credit than rich ones, that is, in effect, the same as the childless poor paying a smaller surcharge than the childless rich. To many, the first deal sounds unfair and the second sounds fair — but they’re the very same tax scheme.
Here’s another follow-up illustration for the skeptical. Note that plan #1 and plan #2 have exactly the same results (everybody pays the same amount of tax, and the government gets the same amount of revenue). In plan #1, the poor family with kids gets a bigger tax credit than the rich family with kids (that sounds fair); in plan #2 the rich family is hit with a smaller penalty for childlessness than the poor family is (that’s unfair!):
Plan #1 (the “fair” plan) household income tax credit total owed Government ends up with: $235 Poor family with kids $500 $50 −$40 $10 Poor family without kids $500 $50 −$0 $50 Rich family with kids $1000 $100 −$25 $75 Rich family without kids $1000 $100 −$0 $100
Plan #2 (the “unfair” plan) household income tax surcharge total owed Government ends up with: $235 Poor family with kids $500 $10 +$0 $10 Poor family without kids $500 $10 +$40 $50 Rich family with kids $1000 $75 +$0 $75 Rich family without kids $1000 $75 +$25 $100
Here again, two outcomes that are identical in the real world are perceived as starkly different — one is fair, the other unfair — based not on any characteristic of the outcomes themselves but only on expectations and descriptions that, in a similar way to the green cylinder in the optical illusion, overshadow the facts of the case. The “government” in this example can transform an “unfair” tax system into a “fair” one, or vice versa, just by describing it differently.
The science of manipulating people by identifying and then exploiting these conceptual flaws (which crop up not only in optical and ethical illusions, but in all sorts of assessments of what is really going on around us and what is in our best interests) has been running far ahead of any efforts to teach people any sort of self-defense. I don’t see why we shouldn’t start trying to catch up.
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Hey, there is a new hot fix out! You should totally be playing it! Already have? I guess we can go on with the State of the Game then 🙂
It has been a very exciting week! With the release of the October content update, I have been having a blast playing matches with everyone with the new parts.
The forums are FILLED with amazing new builds:
There has also been a very interesting trend in the MAV community. The ‘Running of the Scouts’ Siege challenge!
It started with Serges video here:
And quickly grew from there!
And the best attempt:
For actual work, I am nose to the grindstone on the next content update, which should be available in November! So far I am only working on secret stuff, but I should be able to talk a bit more about some of the bigger development tasks soon!
See you next week!
[Anyone know when Easter is this year?]
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AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Support for the anti-Islamic Freedom Party of Dutch populist Geert Wilders has jumped to its highest level in more than a year after the Islamist militant attacks in Paris.
Wilders, known for his inflammatory rhetoric, said after the Paris bloodshed that the West was “at war” with Islam, drawing a rebuke from Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte on Sunday.
If elections were held now, his party would be the single largest in the Netherlands, with 31 seats in the 150-member parliament, more than twice as many as it won in the last elections, according to a Sunday poll.
The governing Liberal and Labour parties, damaged by persistent sluggish growth, would have just 28 seats between them, compared to the 79 they held after the 2012 elections.
The Freedom Party was polling 30 seats just prior to the Jan. 7-9 Paris attacks, in which 17 people including journalists and policemen were killed by three Islamist gunmen who were later shot dead by French special forces.
Wilders this week called in an interview for measures against Islam: “If we don’t do anything, it will happen here,” he was quoted by the newspaper Het Parool as saying.
But speaking to Dutch public television shortly before leaving to attend a peace rally in Paris, the Dutch prime minister distanced himself from Wilders’s comments.
“I would never use the word ‘war,’” he said. “We are in a struggle with extremists who are using a belief as an excuse for attacks.”
More than 80 percent of respondents to the De Hond poll said people who left the Netherlands to wage jihad (holy war) in Syria should lose their Dutch citizenship and those returning from fighting in Syria or Iraq should face lengthy jail terms.
The attack on the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo had particular resonance in the Netherlands. In 2004, Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, known for making anti-Islam remarks that were designed to offend, was stabbed to death by an Islamic radical as he cycled down an Amsterdam street.
Wilders, who has described Islam as a “lie” and the prophet Muhammad as a “criminal”, has lived in hiding and under 24-hour armed guard since van Gogh’s murder.
He is currently facing prosecution over remarks he made at an election rally last year, when he appeared to call for “fewer Moroccans” in the city of The Hague, and later referred in a television interview to “Moroccan scum”.
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Winning a game against great odds is certainly satisfying, but why do we keep playing QWOP or The Binding of Isaac after hundreds of failed tries? In an interview with Kill Screen, ludologist Jesper Juul discusses the draw of failure. Juul sees games as a place where it's possible to take on challenges and fail without fear. "We have this freedom in games to take it seriously, even though it may not matter financially or whatever to you," he says. "But there’s also a freedom to not take it seriously." Juul recounts times when his self-esteem has taken a hit from losing at something like StarCraft, but says it's easier in many games to not see failure as "a reflection of who I am or my identity."
Like any number of old-school gamers, Juul thinks that games have become easier, but it's not because of more linear maps or weaker enemies. "I think that games have become easier in one way; there’s that guiding line from your current state to incompetence to becoming competent. There are more signals. There used to be a longer time where you’re just sort of practicing blind. Now I think there are many more attempts at steering you toward improvement." In a game like Guitar Hero, for example, "you know that you’re messing up because the song isn’t playing right," while older games like Rhythm Heaven "will just go on without you." Click through to the source for more discussion of different types of failure and why they matter.
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“Recent theories suggest that Latinos are generally perceived in the same ways as African Americans when compared against Asian Americans,” said Park. “These white student respondents tended to rate Asian Americans more highly than Latinos on qualities that reflect competence. When we analyzed this perception with beliefs about Latino inequality, the same relationship found for beliefs about African American inequality appeared also: These respondents tend to agree that Latinos do not work hard enough to improve their life circumstances.”
Worth noting: While an overwhelming majority of respondents had only one or no Asian, black, or Latino friends, there was no definitive correlation between the students’ friendship composition and their views toward specific racial minorities.
In reality, the perceived performance of some minority students might have less to do with personal effort and more to do with structural inequalities that go unchecked, Park said. “Residential segregation and low-income jobs work together to reduce the taxes available for poor neighborhoods with children. This results in poor quality education for many minority students.”
Of all minority groups, Asians are the least segregated in schools, and Latinos in the West are the most segregated, said Patricia Gándara, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA.
“Yes, they do perform very differently, but it’s class, not race, that drives this,” she wrote in an email. “And those stereotypes get reified, and even the students carry those stereotypes and many Latinos and African Americans are afraid to try to compete with them—and then you get stereotype threat. So it gets replicated over and over.”
Park pointed out that many “immigrant Asian Americans are recruited because of their specialized education and skills that result in the kind of ‘human capital’ that promotes educational pursuits in children… The stereotype presumes that this achievement is a result of inherent intelligence and/or competence, when in reality it is due to selective migration of the very smart individuals and families from various countries in Asia.”
To combat these stereotypes, Park said Americans would do well to first acknowledge that these ideas influence their thoughts and behavior and educate themselves on the history and contemporary realities of American minorities.
Desegregating schools and providing poor kids with the same educational opportunities could also make a difference, Gándara said. “Unfortunately we cannot easily make up for all the social and cultural capital in the homes of these kids, but we can do what is possible to provide similar counseling, support, and out-of-school opportunities to begin to even things up.”
There’s also work to be done at the higher-education level, suggested Loyola University Chicago Assistant Professor OiYan Poon, whose research focuses on racial inequalities in higher education and Asian American students.
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Audio: Ben Jenkins speaks with Nathan Heffel
Hiker Ben Jenkins Packs Up For The Colorado Trail retro_colorado_trail_ben_jenkins.jpg Hiker Ben Jenkins modeled 19th-century style clothes before he started his hike on the Colorado Trail. (Courtesy Ben Jenkins)
retro_colorado_trail_kit.jpg Vintage supplies for Ben Jenkins' planned hike on the Colorado Trail. (Courtesy Ben Jenkins)
retro_colorado_trail_glasses.jpg Hiker Ben Jenkins bought old eyeglasses and refitted them with lenses that match his prescription. (Courtesy of Ben Jenkins)
retro_colorado_trail_shoes.jpg These lightweight shoes are similar to those hikers would have worn for some trail conditions in the 1860s. (Courtesy of Ben Jenkins)
retro_colorado_trail_vintage_photo.jpg A photo Ben Jenkins used to design clothing and gear for his trip. (Courtesy of Ben Jenkins)
Ben Jenkins is a stickler for detail.
To get ready for an upcoming hike on the Colorado Trail he found and read a miner's journal and a department store catalog from the 1860s. He bought antique glasses and re-fitted them with modern-day prescription lenses. Now, Jenkins and a friend are ready to tackle the 500-mile trail dressed in period clothes and fitted out with vintage camping gear and tools. "There's something so unique and cool," about the era, he said. "It screams early America, the era of the great westward expansion."
Jenkins hopes they'll draw a lot of curiosity from the people they meet on the trail. He wants to share the history of the miners and trappers, surveyors and travelers who walked through Colorado's mountains in the years before Colorado became a state. When the trip is over he plans to make a documentary about what went right, or wrong.
Historical re-enactment is Jenkins' profession and his passion. His uncle was a Civil War buff who piqued his interest in the era. He's now a filmmaker who specializes in filming groups who replicate the battles of the Civil War.
While he's determined to be historically accurate, Jenkins has already made some compromises. Knowing that he'll need major calories to keep his strength up for the walk, he'll pack calorie-heavy snacks from the grocery store. And while most everybody would have carried a gun back in the day, he'll travel unarmed.
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(Thinkstock)
April 15 is rapidly approaching, and taxpayers who have put off writing a check to Uncle Sam will soon have to face the music. That is, unless they avoid paying altogether.
Did that last bit grab your attention? Believe it or not, there is a small segment of the population that found loopholes in the system to avoid paying taxes legally.
Unbelievable Ways People Have Managed to Avoid Paying Taxes
One way or another, most Americans are expected to pay taxes. Usually, the money comes out of workers’ paychecks — and those who overpaid might receive a refund.
But if taxpayers are able to take large enough deductions or receive sizable credits, they might be able to legally avoid paying taxes. The following people were lucky enough to have this experience:
1. DUI Turned Tax Deduction
Some people have all the luck — or maybe it’s persistence. Justin Rohrs managed to slide his truck off an embankment in 2005, only to be later slapped with a DUI for driving while intoxicated. Despite the circumstance under which his car was damaged, he decided to file an insurance claim for his truck for $33,629. After his insurer denied his claim, he attempted to claim his vehicle loss as a tax deduction.
At first, the IRS wasn’t having any of it. So Rohrs took the matter to the U.S. Tax Court, stating that he deserved a casualty loss deduction for his damaged truck. Shockingly, the judge agreed and allowed him to take the deduction.
2. Cats Can Be Worth Big Money
Jan Van Dusen, a cat lover with over 70 felines in the home, spent much of her time caring for strays she found in the wild along with those that had been injured. In some instances, after caring for the cats, she’d release them back into the wild. But more often than not, she held on to her furry treasures.
The cost of caring for the cats began to mount for Van Dusen, so when she filed her 2004 tax return, she tried to write off $12,068 for cat rescue items like food, vet bills, paper towels and more. After being alerted that her “personal” expenses could not be deducted, however, she sued the IRS.
Interestingly enough, following a long battle, Van Dusen proved her cat care was charity, resulting in the IRS finally granting deductions for most of her claims.
3. Exotic Dancer’s Breast Implants Pay for Themselves
Cynthia Hess, also known by her stage name, Tonda Marie, was an exotic dancer who wanted to improve her business by fixing her “hereditary deficiency.” In other words, she wanted bigger breasts. After getting the procedure done, her business grew along the jump in her bra size to a 56FF!
Of course, with the surgery being a “business” decision, Hess, now known as Chesty Love, decided to deduct her implants as a business expense. However, the IRS turned down her request, noting that business deductions only work in circumstances that are “ordinary and necessary.”
Hess sued the IRS, arguing that her new breasts should be considered business uniform. She went on to say that she planned to have them removed immediately after retiring from exotic dancing. After much convincing, the tax court agreed that she would have only added breasts that large for business (they were 10 pounds each) and decided to grant the deduction.
4. Even Drug Dealers Deserve Tax Deductions
A drug dealer named Jeffrey Edmondson is a man who could teach classes on how to avoid paying taxes legally. He got himself in trouble with the law after being busted and charged with drug trafficking. Eager to get even more out of the dealer, the IRS audited him for $17,000 in back taxes after failing to declare his income made from drug dealing.
Edmondson decided the government wouldn’t have the last laugh. While awaiting trial, he filed a tax return that listed his taxable net income along with a list of business deductions. He left his occupation blank, of course. After looking at his return, the IRS turned down his deductions. But Edmonson was not ready to give up.
He took the matter to Tax Court where he claimed he’d established a home business and wanted to claim home office deductions — including drugs. Surprisingly, the judge agreed to deduct his expenses, which included a $50 scale, miles driven to pick up drives and 100 pounds of weed.
3 Easy Ways You Can Avoid Paying Taxes (Legally, Of Course)
While you might not want to go around suing the IRS every time you’re turned down for tax deductions, you might benefit from learning how to pay no taxes legally. Here are a few options to consider that don’t involve standing in front of a judge:
1. Qualify for Tax Credits
Many people don’t realize that tax credits are the equivalent of free money. While tax deductions reduce the amount of taxable income you can claim, tax credits reduce the tax you owe and — in many cases — result in a nice refund.
The IRS offers a large number of tax credits that encompass everything from buying energy-efficient products for your home to being a low- to moderate-income household. The key to benefiting from them is examining very closely all of the purchases you’ve made throughout the year to see whether money is owed to you.
2. Take Itemized Deductions
Most people take the standard deduction available to them when filing taxes to avoid providing proof of all of the purchases they’ve made throughout the year. Not to mention, in most cases, itemized deductions don’t add up to more than the standard deduction.
But if you’ve made substantial payments for mortgage interest, property taxes, medical expenses, state and local taxes, or have made major charitable contributions, it could be worth it to take this step. These deductions are subtracted from your adjusted gross income (AGI), which reduces your taxable income.
3. Enroll in College
One way to take advantage of tax credits or deductions is to enroll in college. The government currently offers credits and deductions (you usually have to take one or the other) to go back to school online or in your community.
Students can take advantage of the American Opportunity Tax Credit, which offers up to $2,500 off the cost of tuition, fees and course materials paid during the taxable year per eligible student. Another credit to consider is the Lifetime Learning Credit, which offers up to $2,000 off the cost of tuition, fees and course materials. Only one credit can be claimed per year.
Students who don’t qualify for credits should consider tax deductions. The government allows qualified students to deduct up to $4,000 off the cost of tuition, fees and course materials. While not as valuable as a credit, deductions can still lower taxes considerably.
Also, keep in mind that financial aid in the form of grants and work study offer tax-free cash that doesn’t count as taxable income. Scholarships also help pay for school and are non-taxable as long as the money is used for school-related purposes.
There’s no doubt that it’s difficult to legally avoid paying taxes, but by taking advantage of credits and deductions, you could improve your chances of doing so. Or, if you’re brave enough, you could claim an outrageous deduction then, when turned down, tell Uncle Sam you’ll see him in court.
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For Immediate Release, August 17, 2016 Contact: Kristen Monsell, (510) 844-7137, kmonsell@biologicaldiversity.org Lawsuit Launched to Protect Blue Whales,
Other Endangered Animals From Offshore Fracking in California Federal Government Authorized Fracks From Oil Platforms Without
Analyzing Threats to Rare Whales, Sea Otters, Turtles, Birds or Fish SANTA BARBARA, Calif.— The Center for Biological Diversity today filed a notice of intent to sue the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement for approving fracking in federal waters off the California coast without evaluating the dangers to blue whales, sea otters, and other threatened and endangered wildlife. Sea otter photo by Michael "Mike" L. Baird. “Every offshore frack puts California’s wonderful coastal wildlife at risk from toxic chemicals or another deadly oil spill,” said Kristen Monsell, a Center attorney. “It’s disturbing to see the federal government ignore its legal responsibility to carefully consider the dangers of offshore fracking and prolonged drilling to whales, sea otters and other species already struggling to survive.” The bureaus decided to allow offshore fracking in May, after releasing a cursory environmental assessment of the practice. The federal assessment acknowledged potential threats to imperiled wildlife, including toxic risks to sea turtles and seabirds from fracking chemicals and the danger that fracking support vessels could run over sea turtles and whales. A recent study by Oregon State University researchers cites collision with ships as a reason blue whales have not recovered. The federal assessment also admitted that offshore fracking will prolong offshore oil and gas activities, extending the life of aging infrastructure and increasing the risk of yet more oil spills. A coastal pipeline that ruptured last year near Santa Barbara spilled more than 140,000 gallons of crude, killing hundreds of marine mammals and birds. But the bureaus failed to consult with the expert wildlife agencies on the risks these activities pose to threatened and endangered coastal wildlife as required by the Endangered Species Act.
The Center’s notice seeks to compel the bureaus to suspend approval of all offshore fracking and other well stimulations off California’s coast until completion of a comprehensive analysis of the impacts on imperiled species under Section 7 of the Endangered Species Act. At least 10 fracking chemicals used in offshore fracking in California could kill or harm a broad variety of marine species, including sea otters and fish, Center scientists have found. The California Council on Science and Technology has identified some common fracking chemicals to be among the most toxic in the world to marine animals.
Oil platforms in the Santa Barbara Channel have federal permission to dump up to 9 billion gallons of produced water per year — including fracking chemicals — into the ocean. The federal environmental assessment was issued as part of a legal settlement resolving a prior Center lawsuit over the federal government’s approval of fracking from offshore platforms in the wildlife-rich Santa Barbara Channel without complying with the National Environmental Policy Act. Today’s 60-day notice of intent to sue is required before a lawsuit can be filed to compel the bureaus to comply with the Endangered Species Act for their new decision to authorize offshore fracking. “Offshore fracking doesn’t belong off the California coast, and the federal government certainly has no right to let the oil industry frack in these waters without fully analyzing the risks this toxic technique poses to imperiled marine animals,” Monsell said. The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 1.1 million members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places.
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UPDATE (3/12): Markus Schulz, “America’s #1 DJ” according to DJ Times Magazine, has been added the the bill for BOOMBOX.
Datsik, Crizzly, Lazy Rich, Torro Torro and many, many more are set to perform at Tussey Mountain on April 13 for the largest outdoor EDM concert ever to hit Happy Valley.
With multiple stages and unparalleled talent, BOOMBOX is a day-long festival-style production brought to Penn State by Art of Electronica (@ArtofElectronic). The artists released are only the first wave of DJs and producers that will be making an appearance this spring. More acts will be announced in the next few weeks.
Worried about trying to make the 15 minute trip to Tussey Mountain (map), the all-season resort that’s just miles from the front door of Penn State? Ticket packages will be available with round-trip bus transportation from campus to the venue of BOOMBOX, @TusseyMountain.
Tickets are on sale now (click here to purchase) with limited pricing starting at $20. Attend the BOOMBOX Facebook event here.
Datsik (@datsik)
Grimy dubstep blended with drum and bass and 8-bit influences, British Columbia DJ, Datsik, continues to revolutionize the EDM scene with, how he describes it, “the basterdization of electronic music.” Rubbing shoulders on collaborations and remixes with some of the biggest names in both hip-hop and EDM like Diplo, Wu-Tang Clan and Bassnectar; Datsik has secured a legendary status within the dupstep movement achieving at least 7 number 1 releases on Beatport in 2009. Not only killing it in your headphones or party speakers, Datsik’s live set-up was ranked as the fifth best DJ booth in EDM by Miami New Times for it’s zooming lights and spanning, black hole design.
Crizzly (@crizzly)
Crunkstep producer, Crizzly, incorporates a rage-face mentality in his grumbling, dance-floor-ready remixes of hip-hop anthems like “Chain Hang Low.” With bass that has rings with the force of a F6 tornado and rap vocalizations that give the crowd something to scream along with, the Texas-based DJ has been gaining mainstream recognition, most recently being announced as an act at Camp Bisco alongside big names like Animal Collective, Bassnectar, Passion Pit, Umphrey’s McGee, Dan Deacon and Macklemore & Ryan Lewis. Crizzly turns every track into a bass-in-your-face rampage.
Lazy Rich (@djlazyrich)
Buzzing lows, singing treble and a beat that will cut the rug under your feet, DJ Lazy Rich, gives dubstep a fresh perspective. Just one of the EDM talents calling Vancouver home, Lazy Rich adopts a French house style to the blips and wubs of his dirty dub roots. Breathing new life into tracks by artists as obscure as Fat Boy Slim to giving his own spin on chillwave original mixes, Lazy Rich commands a dancefloor by blending in beats that rise and fall seamlessly like the ocean’s tide.
Torro Torro (@Torro_Torro)
Canadian electro duo, Torro Torro, is comprised of Mikey “Digits” Gonak and Evan “Yo Ev” Norton. Hailing from Toronto, this duo cooks up hard beats with lots of womping bass playing songs specifically in the House and Moombahton genres. Torro Torro may not be the most recognizable name in EDM, but their remixes of tracks from artists like Avicii, Diplo and Zedd will definitely leave an indelible mark on your taste for music.
Brass Knuckles (@brassknuckles1)
Miami-based trio, Brass Knucles, take EDM to another level with an authentic blend of Electro-Pop music and Traditional House music. The band’s members, Danny D’Brito, Tony Livadas, and Anthony Pisano, united in 2009 and have been consistently coming out with more original material that hooks their fans with lots of bass and catchy vocal melodies. Listen to their first single, “Bad Habits” below.
Minnesota (@minnesotaBASS)
Christian Bauhofer may be his actual name, but his fans know him better by his stage name, Minnesota. This 23 year old from Santa Cruz, California produces straight up “BASS music” with lots of energy. Even other EDM artists like Bassnectar and PANTyRAID are starting to remix his tracks and using them in their sets. Some of the artists that Minnesota has remixed include the Mamas and the Papas, Adventure Club, and Ellie Goulding.
Grandtheft (@grandtheft)
This Canadian producer is known for remixing a range of popular artists such as Justin Bieber, Calvin Harris, and Phoenix. He puts a chill twist on the music we hear on the radio every day, usually using the trap music style of repeated samples, sped up hi hats, and heavy sweeping bass-lines.
At Dawn We Rage (@atdawnwerage)
The EDM duo At Dawn We Rage puts a unique twist on the formulaic genre of dance remixes. By utilizing a live drum setup along with the traditional DJ, they break from the common EDM format and achieve a distinctive onstage sound.
Twin Syndrome (@twinsyndrome)
Slow lifting choruses and heavy dropping bass-lines are where this EDM duo excels. With a more traditional heavy dubstep style, this group can really get a crowd moving — and what more can you ask for?
Dubsef (@dubsef)
This Philadelphia producer and DJ has been blowing up the American EDM scene recently, playing with artists like Zeds Dead, Steve Aoki, Flux Pavilion, and Rusko; and playing festivals such as Starscape, Loaded, and Made in America. He is known for his dubstep style of heavy dropping beats and synths.
For updates on the rest of the Boombox line-up, follow @OnwardState on Twitter. @LeoDillingerIV and @ZackRutstein contributed to this post.
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East Renovation Continues With Approval For Sproul, Geary Halls Penn State’s Board of Trustees approved the next phase of East Halls renovations at its meeting Friday, setting the stage for construction to begin on Sproul and Geary Halls.
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The ‘Mind Free Of Drugs World League’ is a curious ‘organization’ which (if there web site is to be believed) boasts a variety of well known supporters. These include The Dalai Lama, Kofi Annan, Arnold Schwarzenegger and many more who are all considered ‘honorable members’ whether these well know honorable members know that they are actually members or not is another question.
The Mind Free Of Drugs World League was started by Jenishbek Nazaraliev. Nazaraliev has boasted about his own drug rehabilitation program on several occasions stating that his rehabilitation centre has roughly a 90% success rate. What does he believe the secret to his so called success is? While there’s no methadone or needle exchanges at Nazaraliev rehabilitation centre instead the focus is in induced coma through the use of hallucinatory drugs, chants of freeing the devil and a pilgrimage with a rock.
Jenishbek Nazaraliev is currently the leader of the World Federation for Mental Health and is a national coordinator of the Regional Office of the International Council on Drug Addiction and Alcoholism. He claims to have successfully treated 15,000 drug users. According to Nazaraliev “We do not have the moral and humanitarian right to sit idol and watch this poison eradicate our planet”. He has met with the Dalai Lama before where he presented a symbolic stone and discussed plans to ‘erect four spiritual pagodas on Tashtar-Ata.’
He runs the Nazaraliev treatment centre which charges roughly 8500 euro for a 25-30 day rehabilitation course. According to the official web site Nazaraliev promises a complete recovery and if the drug user relapses within the first year he will give them back their money.
One of the core treatments in Nazaraliev’s centre is coma sessions. The coma sessions are induced by a concoction of powerful drugs such as Antropine and other substances to keep the ‘drug user’ in a coma for several hours. This method alarms some experts though due to the side effects generally associated with Antropine such as hallucinations and amnesia. It is kind of ironic that a man who opposes methadone or any form of substitution therapy is willing to inject powerful drugs into drug users in order to induce coma’s.
The pilgrimage generally takes place in a mountain near the rehabilitation center called Tashtar-Ata. The drug user will toss the rock he/she have been carrying over their shoulder and into the pile of other rocks left behind by past pilgrimages. This is to symbolise the drug addiction being tossed away and therefore providing relief. The pilgrimages generally happen after the induced coma, the chanting and the running round a pole.
Nazaraliev though not a support of methadone substitution therapy does seem to support some form of decrim. In one question put to Nazaraliev about the Czechs allowing people to carry 15 grams and a half of gram of heroin. Nazaraliev responded by saying “I hope that Czechoslovakian experience will serve as raw model for other government to reconsider the policies in regards to illegal drug trafficking and its abuse. In my opinion, I think that it is effective!”
The World League itself has big ambitions it’s not going for the general prohibition stance of aiming to reduce drug use no it intends to make the world drug free (including tobacco and alcohol) by 2050 through the ‘three forms of realization’. The world league have obviously not had a realization their own yet though as they have not realise that they have only put two forms of realizations they are:
1)The world league will construct spiritual and architectural complexes around the world dedicated to the victims of drug abuse.
2)The World League aims to organize world campaigns attracting many participants with an aim of developing a ‘world chain reaction’.
Some other goals they have is creation of a world league ‘mind free of drugs’ fund, promotion of the mind free of drugs ideology, promoting the rituals of drug rejection to be performed in historical places and construction of international rehabilitation centres.
As well as these aims they also run another web site where they have competitions for the best drug picture, video or story complete with a rating system so you can rate each image, video etc. The Maya Planet project is a competition which asks viewers of the web site to submit their ‘anti-drug’ media’s the winner of each category wins an IPAD 2, $15,000 and lucky enough to also receive a copy of Jenishbek Nazaraliyev book ("Fatal red poppies”).
The objective of this contest is the “prevention of global drug addiction epidemic" and apparently like the world drug league is supported by lots of politicans such as Julia Gillard, Angela Merkkel and Juan Manuel Santos. The jury who will judges who has the best artwork, 'confessional story' or video are Takako Hotta (a model in Japan), Elena Malysheva (a doctor) and Konstantin Doroshenko (A curator of modern art).
As well as a compeition you can also 'ask the experts' about drug issues. The experts currently comprise of an acupuncturist, yoga instructor, journalist and a few academics. So far none of the experts have answered any question nor does there seem to be an ambundence of questions being asked.
The World League seems to have quite a few famous backers but it is unknown if they have actually endorssed it. Their goals do seem a little over the top and unachievable in particular the notion that all drugs including alchohol can be wiped off the planet by 2050. The truth is many people do indeed suffer due to drugs but they are not going to dissapear anytime soon the best that can be done is mitgating the harm asociated with drugs.
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Capital One Cup: FA charges Chelsea striker Diego Costa over 'stamp' on Liverpool's Emre Can
Diego Costa and Emre Can clash early in Chelsea's 1-0 win
Chelsea striker Diego Costa has been charged with violent conduct over his clash with Liverpool's Emre Can on Tuesday night.
A statement from the Football Association confirmed Costa's alleged stamp was missed by all four officials on duty for the second leg of the Capital One Cup semi-final at Stamford Bridge.
Referee Michael Oliver has since watched replays and told the FA the offence warranted a red card, and Costa now faces a three-match ban if the charge is proven.
That would sideline Chelsea's top scorer for the huge Saturday Night Football game against champions Manchester City, and subsequent matches against Aston Villa and Everton.
Costa has until 6pm on Thursday either to accept or contest the charge, and a final outcome will be reached before the weekend.
He will not be punished over a separate incident involving Martin Skrtel which was also reviewed by the match officials.
Speaking in the Sky Sports studio at Stamford Bridge, Thierry Henry and Jamie Redknapp both condemned Costa's stamp on Can as deliberate, and that view was shared by Liverpool boss Brendan Rodgers.
But Jose Mourinho defended his player and said Chelsea should have been awarded a penalty for a Skrtel foul on Costa.
Watch Chelsea v Manchester City live on Saturday Night Football this weekend. Coverage begins at 4.45pm on Sky Sports 1.
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Story highlights Cevallos: In offering immunity to State Department staffer who handled Hillary Clinton's email, do prosecutors have a target in mind?
The mere fact that federal investigators are talking to the staffer doesn't mean someone will be indicted, he says
Cevallos: Those involved in dealing with Clinton emails have tough choices about whether to talk to government
Danny Cevallos is a CNN legal analyst and a personal injury and criminal defense attorney practicing in Pennsylvania and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Follow him on Twitter @CevallosLaw. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely his.
(CNN) The Department of Justice has granted "immunity" to a former State Department employee who worked on Hillary Clinton's private email server. Bryan Pagliano initially invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and would not testify. Of course, the Department of Justice, known to defense attorneys simply as the "government," has many ways of getting people to talk.
The big question is whether there is a grand jury convened. The smart bet is yes. After all, the fact that there are immunity agreements logically means there's a grand jury investigation in some district. The grand jury is typically the genesis of the government's subpoena power. The next, bigger question, is whether anyone will be indicted.
The mere fact that the DOJ wants to talk to Pagliano does not mean anyone will be indicted. But if the DOJ is investigating criminal activity, they tend to find criminal activity.
In general, when the government wants to talk to someone, the person falls into one of three categories: target, subject, or witness.
If Pagliano was a "target," that generally means the prosecutor or grand jury has significant evidence connecting the person to a crime. Targets routinely become defendants. A "subject" is a midrange status; this person is part of the investigation but not quite a target; a precarious position to be in. A "witness" is a person who has valuable information, but is not (currently) believed to have committed a crime. However, "witnesses" matriculate up to "targets" very quickly, often because of the very information they provide.
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Does a search engine have the ability to kill a person? After being bombarded by the news about the death of a 21-year-old college student called Wei Zexi, many Chinese have come to the conclusion that it does.
Like numerous online debates about scandals of late, the incident devolves into an exercise of guilt rationing on a massive scale. With the absence of an impartial arbitrator, public opinion takes up the role of fact-finding and responsibility allocation, with implications hard to pin down at this very moment. The story puts Baidu, China’s largest search engine company, at the epicenter of the controversy, bearing the brunt of online criticism, which is guided as much by a complex set of moral convictions as by a vision of technology’s role in the society.
According to Wei’s own account posted on zhihu.com two months before his death (as an answer to the question “what is the greatest evil in human nature?”) , he was diagnosed of a rare tumor, synovial sarcoma. Major hospitals he visited all threw up their hands and told him no effective therapy was available. Desperate, he resorted to Baidu, and initial searches quickly rendered amazing results: a bio-research center based in one of Beijing’s well-regarded hospitals (affiliated with the People’s Armed Police) claimed that they had an advanced therapy (DC-CIK) that could help. The doctor there told him it was “Stanford technology” and promised to extend Wei’s life by “another 20 years at least”. The family invested almost its entire fortune into this last ditch effort, only to find that cancer quickly spread to his lung. Later, well-intentioned individuals on the internet helped Wei find out that DC-CIK was a shelved technology in most parts of the developed world due to limited effect in clinical application. Yet precious time and money was wasted. Wei, the only son of a Xi’an family, died on Apr 12th.
The personal tragedy of Wei Zexi puts a key business component of Baidu under a scorching national spotlight. It is called P4P (pay for performance), whereby customers bid for premium advertisement placement alongside “natural” search results of selected keywords. Although other factors such as quality of content also affect positioning of promoted links, bidding price carries significant weight in the formula, giving high-paying customers good chance of occupying prime locations on Baidu’s search page. The search engine does put a “promotion” mark under sponsored search results, but in a way that is probably not as visually distinguishable as critics and regulators want. The subtlety of the mark can get lost on eyes less experienced with Internet surfing, or those who are eager to find something.
With this background, it may be understandable that the first wave of criticism came for Baidu, even though in both Wei’s original account and the initial investigative piece that directed public attention to the case, the blame fell squarely on the Internet company and on the bio-research center, as well as the invisible yet mightily present state that loomed over the two.
In an era when books like Nudge populate bookstore shelves and people believe in step-counting mobile phone apps to keep themselves fit, the idea that search engine results determine the fate of individual users is only the natural offspring of a faith in the efficacy of technological interventions. It is further enhanced by the towering image of the do-no-evil Google, whose upholding of “enlightened” technology becomes a shining exemplar that shapes the Chinese public’s view of Baidu.
So the conversation swings back and forth between Baidu and Google. Some goes so far as to suggest that Baidu is the “fundamental culprit in dragging down the informational infrastructure of the Chinese society”, by abusing its virtual monopoly in the search market to set up roadblocks on the information highway, profiting from a slowed traffic and a misguided crowd. Google’s Adsense, its core advertising instrument, is upheld as being non-intrusive and responsible. Tales of Google’s efforts to ensure the quality of medical-related search results attracts the attention (and imagination) of Chinese netizens. Very specific ideas proposed by prominent opinion leaders, such as listing ads in a separate column on the screen, are clearly influenced by widely held perceptions of Google’s practices. But it is worth stressing that nowadays Google also puts some ads in the same column as natural search results (with clear marking as “Ads”). More sophisticated industry observers have also pointed out that the growth of Google’s business in China, back when it was still allowed to operate inside the country, was also partially driven by traffic generated by the same kind of search result tricks that Baidu deploys.
Pressed for a response, the Internet firm released a statement through one of its Weibo accounts on Apr 28: it had double-checked the paperwork submitted by the hospital and found it completely legit. This may be true, if your scrutiny stays at hospital level. Move one level below, to the department level, disturbing signs start to emerge. When investigative journalists dug deeper into the bio-research center, they came up with a shadowy web of private entities that had basically “taken over” lucrative departments in military-affiliated Chinese hospitals and ran them like joint-ventures. The public would learn of a so-called “Putian clan”, a group of businessmen who shared the same origin in Putian, a town in southern China’s Fujian province. Lurid, unverifiable stories about the ascent of this group of medical entrepreneurs spread widely on the Internet. As the story goes, they got hold of their first bucket of money in the early days of China’s economic reform. In those years, guerilla clinics prospered in street-side budget hotels, ripping off patients of venereal and skin diseases who were too ashamed to go to proper hospitals. With initial capital in hand, those “bare-foot doctors” began to eye more systematic, legitimate ways of money making. Cash-hungry public hospitals became their natural partners and a new model of “contracted departments” spread like wild fire. In order to bring in more patients, the Putian businessmen took up online marketing, taking advantage of the stellar reputation of hospitals that were hosting them. Baidu’s emergence as a dominant search engine and its offering of P4P handed them a perfect platform to reach out to an anxious, sometimes desperate, clientele. In the process, many patients like Wei Zexi fell victim to sub-par treatments.
The entering of the Putian businessmen into the scene makes the ethical water of the Wei Zexi case much muddier. How much blame should a search engine share if much larger malign interests are motivated to take advantage of its playbook and win access to premium ad slots? As Baidu has always claimed, it only collects and sorts information, not generating it. It acts like a mirror: the reflection is only as good as the Chinese society can be.
An event in 2015 seems to indicate that relationship between Baidu and the Putian clan is less than amiable. At that time, an industry group representing Putian medical interests called for a boycott of Baidu P4P services, claiming that the latter had used its dominance in the market to rip off Putian-controlled hospitals by unilaterally raising prices for promotion. Baidu search results have become a major channel through which such hospitals bring in patients. According to the industry association, P4P expenditures occupy an increasing chunk of those hospitals’ profits, in some cases as high as 60-80%. One the other side of the equation, medical advertisement makes up to 25% of the search engine’s ad revenue, making the relationship of the two parties a love-hate symbiosis. Baidu’s account for the unpleasant stand-off was completely different. It claimed that the industry group was threatening boycott because its crackdown on deceptive medical advertisement was hurting Putian interests. “The threat will not soften our resolute to keep false medical information out of our search results.”
With more information surfacing about the Putian clan, a push back against Baidu-bashing quickly collects momentum. People begin to question the society’s proclivity to blame the safer, easier and more exposed. For them, the focused attack on a publicly listed Internet company is a sign of the collective laziness of Chinese Internet. “The Putian businessmen are happily off the hook now,” as some would proclaim. The despicable deal between public hospitals and the nouveau riche, and negligence of their supervisors, can easily escape public scrutiny under the cover of an outcry directed entirely at Baidu. As a veteran Caijing journalist puts it, what the public should really chase is the regulators who turned a blind eye to the rampant, irresponsible monetization of public hospital reputations. Not only is Baidu a minor consideration in this whole scheme that condemns Chinese patients, so is the Putian clan, whose fortune is determined by the whims of powerful regulators. He predicts that a campaign-style crackdown on private interests in the medical sector would ensue to placate the public, without touching the fundamentals that have allowed the situation to spread in the first place. “It is a way for power to routinely discipline private interest groups, preventing them from growing too big, while reminding them to be more active in paying their rent.”
More methodical minds try to lead people out of this ethical swamp by actually ranking the relative moral responsibility of the parties involved: the biggest share of blame goes to the military-affiliated hospital that knowingly sold its reputation and standing for profit, while being in the best position to judge the medical merit of the technology that its “contracted” bio-research center is promoting. Second comes the center and regulators. Baidu ranks at the bottom of this ethical ladder, for “it is also in relative disadvantage when it comes to medical expertise”. Its only problem is choosing to pursue profits in this category in spite of its own blind spot.
But there are people who resist this way of assigning responsibility. They see it as a distraction or even an intentional tactic to deflect pressure from Baidu, at a point when intensive public questioning is just about to make a dent on one of China’s largest internet firms. The sentiment roots in a deep frustration over a string of Baidu-related controversies (including the one in January this year where it attempted to sell off management authority of an online patient support group to commercial interests), which the Internet giant have all weathered with impunity. “We don’t have the ability to change the root cause of the problem, but at least we can change Baidu with a concentrated effort.” This line of argument contains, at once, a deep sense of powerlessness and a great faith in public opinion: criticizing the power behind the whole corrupt situation won’t bring you much change. It’s a dissipation of precious energy. But the search engine will ultimately bow to such public pressure.
The powerlessness manifests itself in a different reading of Wei’s death. What killed him seems to be a carefully weaved web of sub-lethal elements: acting individually, no element, whether it’s the search engine or the hospital, is potent enough to bring death to a person. Yet collectively, their grip turns out inescapable for an ordinary Chinese like Wei. In the end, each individual element can deny accountability for the collective consequence.
On May 10, China’s Internet authority handed down its verdict on Baidu: it has to change its algorithm for search result presentation, give more weight to credibility, less to bidding prices. Plus, no more than 30% of a page should be given to promotional results. It is a rare occasion where the country’s web regulator publicly dictates change, albeit a noble one this time, to an Internet company’s core business, its algorithm. Earlier, commentators already made a careful-what-you-wish type warning about a more empowered Internet police coming out of this case. But for most part of the cyberspace, vindication is the predominant mood.
The complexity of Baidu’s response to the whole saga is best captured by an article published on the company’s intranet days before the final result. While pledging to collaborate with regulators, it also questioned why the bio-research center could obtain all the certificates and official documents. “As a great enterprise, we sometimes have to shoulder responsibilities that once belong to the state and the medical industry, because with more power comes more responsibility.”
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Child soldiers from the Islamic State group have been seen in a video executing five prisoners of the Islamist group in Iraq.
The video shows the children beheading the five prisoners — all of them Kurdish nationals, including an old man — while verbally as well as physically abusing them. A local report has identified one of the five children as being of British origin.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), in a statement released on Saturday, Aug. 27, said the five people were among the 14 "atheists Kurds, and the Awakening and Nusayris soldiers" shown killed in a video released by the Islamic State group, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Isis) or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil).
The SOHR said the video, of which it has a copy, shows five children from a section of Isis, it chooses to call "Caliphate Cubs," executing the five people. While executing the five Kurds, one of the children is heard saying: "It does not matter which country, demon or humans [are] by your side. They will not be of help to you at all. So dig your graves and await a fate as the fate of these [prisoners]."
A report from Iraqi News confirmed the killing, adding that the children "appear to be" of five different nationalities — British, Kurdish, Tunisian, Egyptian, and Uzbekistani. The report also said the five Kurdish men were executed "in retaliation for recent Kurdish advances in Syria."
The video also showed other deaths, said to be 14-15 in total. Isis seems to be on a fresh execution spree, which observers see as a method to offset their losses and subjugate people using fear as a tool. Only recently had they executed six people with flamethrowers. However, these were its own people, who were attempting to break free. A couple of weeks ago, it had executed six people by boiling them in tar.
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A strong majority of Americans—including 63% of Hispanics—do not think America should accept Muslim Syrian refugees.
A YouGov/Economist poll that was conducted November 19-23 asked respondents, “Do you think the United States should or should not accept Syrian refugees who are Muslim?” The poll found that 62% of Americans believe America “should not accept Muslim Syrian refugees” while 38% said the country should. The poll also found that 63% of Hispanics, 64% of whites, and 55% of blacks did not want America to accept more Muslim Syrian refugees. In addition, 66% of females did not want more Muslim Syrian refugees compared to 58% of males who believed the same.
Though a slim majority of Democrats (52%) felt that the United States should admit Muslim Syrian refugees, independents (62%) and Republicans (83%) overwhelmingly did not want the country to accept Muslim Syrian refugees.
In addition, an overwhelming majority of Americans (67%) felt that “all refugees should be subject to more security screenings.”
Though a majority of the nation’s governors have opposed accepting Syrian refugees after at least two of the Paris terrorists entered Europe while posing as refugees, the Obama administration has vowed to admit at least 10,000 Syrian refugees. All of the 132 Syrian refugees that have been admitted to the United States since the Paris terror attacks on November 13 have reportedly been Sunni Muslims.
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WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton’s closest aide, Huma Abedin, is catching heat for dismissing the American Israel Public Affairs Council as “that crowd” in a newly revealed email exchange.
In a 2009 email to Bill Clinton aide Doug Band, Abedin recommended that former President Clinton turn down an invitation to speak before the pro-Israel lobbying group.
“U really want to consider sending him into that crowd?” Abedin asked.
The email exchanges were unearthed by The Daily Caller, which reported various Jewish leaders have taken offense to the “that crowd” reference as open hostility to Israel and its allies.
“Appalling,” Morton Klein, national president of the Zionist Organization of America, told the conservative news website. The reference “shows hostility toward Jews and Israel in light of the fact that ‘that crowd’ gives huge ovations to White House speakers.”
It was Hillary Clinton herself who spoke at the next AIPAC conference in 2010.
She and Donald Trump both delivered major speeches to the group in March. Bill Clinton has previously addressed AIPAC as president in the 1990s.
It’s unclear from the email exchange what drove the reluctance.
The email exchange started with Band writing Abedin that Bill Clinton was hesitant to attend the AIPAC forum that year.
“Aipac begging for wjc to come speak at conference. He doesn’t think he should unless you all do,” Band wrote to Abedin and Cheryl Mills, Hillary’s former chief of staff.
Mills said it was up to Hillary and she would check with the secretary of state.
Meantime, Abedin wrote: “U really want to consider sending him into that crowd?”
Band pressed for an answer: “Go or not go?”
Abedin responded: “No go to aipac.”
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WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. securities regulators have taken the unprecedented step of asking high-frequency trading firms to hand over the details of their trading strategies, and in some cases, their secret computer codes.
Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange August 29, 2011. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson
The requests for proprietary code and algorithm parameters by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), a Wall Street brokerage regulator, are part of investigations into suspicious market activity, said Tom Gira, executive vice president of FINRA’s market regulation unit.
“It’s not a fishing expedition or educational exercise. It’s because there’s something that’s troubling us in the marketplace,” he said in an interview.
The Securities and Exchange Commission, meanwhile, has also begun making requests for proprietary algorithmic trading data as part of its authority to examine financial firms for compliance with U.S. regulations, according to agency officials and outside lawyers.
The requests by SEC examiners are not necessarily related to any suspicions of specific wrong-doing, although the decision to ask for it can be triggered by a tip, complaint or referral.
According to interviews with attorneys, traders, industry executives and regulators, the unusual requests for algo code and other computerized trading strategies really ramped up this year and have targeted stock-trading firms such as broker dealers and hedge funds.
It has alarmed some traders who are afraid their “secret sauce” — intellectual property sometimes developed over years and at great cost — could get into the wrong hands, especially when SEC and FINRA examiners leave for the private sector.
“I’d be disappointed and upset” if they asked for code, said a high-frequency trading firm executive who declined to be named. “I mean, are these people all going to work at the SEC forever?”
The SEC’s new focus on algo strategies will likely help inform any new structural rules the government agency applies to an electronic market, criticized by some as unstable or unfair, especially after the “flash crash” on May 6, 2010.
While anything the regulators find could lead to legal action such as market manipulation suits, FINRA’s effort appears more targeted at wrong-doing.
FINRA, which reports to the SEC, usually focuses its requests on flawed codes in an effort to better understand how they are constructed, operate, and how they are supervised, Gira said. An unusually large wave of orders for a lightly traded stock, for example, could lead to a request, he said.
“THE NEXT LEVEL”
Trading code is a high-stakes secret for high-frequency firms that battle each other to earn razor-thin profits on tiny price imbalances in the market. Such firms can make thousands of trades per second and provide much liquidity to the market.
High-frequency trading is estimated to be involved in more than half of all U.S. stock trading. Regulators have said the algos behind such trading were a factor in the flash crash, but that they did not cause it.
Carlo di Florio, who heads the SEC’s Office of Compliance, Inspections and Examinations, said the agency started asking firms for proprietary algorithmic trading data over a year ago, and has since more broadly incorporated such requests into its risk-based exams.
Most of the algo-related requests, he said, have been made to hedge funds that use quantitative trading strategies.
Although some lawyers and industry sources have said the SEC has asked for the actual computer code itself, di Florio said such a request is “very rare.” Instead, most of the time the SEC has been asking for research papers containing sensitive information about trade reasoning and proprietary formulas.
“When we go in ... we are thinking about what is the most critical information that will give us the insights we need, and often times, that is not the code itself,” di Florio said in an interview. He said so-called white papers, which detail the purpose and strategy of a trading model, are often most helpful.
SEC examiners want the information to ensure that hedge funds are actually using the strategies they market to investors. They also review it to make sure that algos are not being used to manipulate the market.
An industry attorney said that FINRA and the SEC have also been asking firms specifically how their algos react to different market conditions, and what data feeds they use.
“They’ve certainly taken this to the next level,” the attorney said.
Last year, SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro said regulators were investigating whether traders manipulated prices, encouraged volatility, or committed fraud by flooding the market with rapid-fire orders that were almost immediately canceled.
FINRA, meanwhile, has made market manipulation a high priority since it fined a small firm called Trillium Brokerage Services $1 million last year for “baiting” other traders with a high volume of “illegitimate orders” in 2006 and 2007.
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
The requests by regulators for what is often considered intellectual property are making some firms nervous.
Since Schapiro took the helm of the SEC in early 2009, she has pushed to revamp its enforcement and examination programs. Part of that effort is hiring outside industry experts — some of whom will likely one day return to the private sector to work for these firms’ competitors.
Some high-profile industry hires include Rick Bookstaber, a former hedge fund manager who works in the SEC’s Risk, Strategy and Financial Innovation Division, the SEC’s “think tank” unit that often assists with exams and inspections.
Other agency hires have included Erozan Kurtas, a former Standard & Poor’s staffer with multiple degrees who has algo design experience, and Tim Techathuvanan, who previously worked at a hedge fund coding quantitative trading models.
Although the agency currently only has about a half-dozen algo experts on staff, di Florio said he hopes to hire more people with these kinds of backgrounds — especially as the number of firms using such automated trading strategies grows.
Gira said FINRA also recently beefed up its staff to add people who better understand codes and their market impact.
Underscoring the sensitivity of the matter, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc programer, Sergey Aleynikov, was sentenced in March to eight years in prison for stealing code from the bank as he left for a job at start-up trading firm Teza Technologies.
Both the SEC and FINRA said they understand that firms are concerned about confidentiality of intellectual property, noting they have policies barring employees from using sensitive information like codes to their advantage. Criminal laws also serve to deter people from stealing such data, they said.
Still, one industry attorney said his client has lingering concerns that a staffer might remember something he saw in an exam and use it down the road.
Even though the SEC believes it needs this algorithm information to help it police the market, many on Wall Street are still not convinced the agency will know what to do with the data.
“Let’s just say the good developers in the industry are being hired by the industry — not by an SEC salary,” a trader said.
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The accident in Turn 5 was reminiscent of Dan Wheldon's fatal 2011 crash at Las Vegas; in both cases, competitors had to drive through the wreckage.
It was a sobering moment for race winner Will Power, who broke his back in the Las Vegas crash, and Scott Dixon, who took control of the IndyCar championship race Sunday but passed by teammate Franchitti's car and waved in an attempt to get an update on his condition.
"The smells and the visuals, for me, and even talking to Will, you have the remnants of Vegas popping into your head with you coming around the corner and you can't drive through it because there's a field of debris," Dixon said. "There was no near the amount of damage that we saw [in 2011], but seeing the replay was a big shock."
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The Conservatives have been widely criticised for the numerous apparent U-turns that they have made since the election. They have seen their policy shifting from within as a result of both the DUP coalition and public pressure. During the campaign, the Conservatives and Theresa May were targeted by members of the press for their constant turnaround on policy positions such as the “dementia tax” or energy price caps. However, post-election, the Conservative U-turns on issues like fox hunting, tuition fees, and public sector pay are a sign of a functioning democracy, senior Conservatives who would have been utterly unwilling to compromise on many of these issues have now seen the electoral consequences of blindly ignoring public opinion.
The first murmurings of post-election U-turns came as Conservative MPs began to realise that they need to offer young people a reason to vote for them after a disastrous election result – over 60% of 18-40 year olds voted Labour according to YouGov, a worrying trend for the future of the party. The Telegraph reported a Tory MP admitting that there was “clearly some alienation” between young people and the party, since neither their own children nor their friends’ children had backed the Conservatives. Whilst you can criticise them for being out of touch (as they clearly are), at least the political shock waves that have been caused by Jeremy Corbyn’s surge in popularity seem to have woken up Conservatives to the issues that matter most to the people.
Scrapping tuition fees is an admission that student debt and the skills shortage in this country are both serious issues that we need to face up to as a nation. The Conservatives have been reluctant to acknowledge the scale of some issues facing the country, it is part of the reason that Labour and Jeremy Corbyn won so many votes, so to see them even open to discussing the problem is a marked move forward. The 2017 Labour manifesto promised to make UK one of the most highly skilled workforce’s in the world, they pledged to:
“Create an innovation nation with the highest proportion of high-skilled jobs in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development by 2030. we will meet the OECD target of 3 per cent of GDP spent on research and development by 2030.”
Numerous senior Conservatives have been pressuring May and Hammond since June 9th to ease austerity; Damian Green, First Secretary of State, acknowledged in a speech at think tank Bright Blue’s conference that student debt was a “huge issue” and has called for a “national debate” on tuition fees.
“If you wanted to say you want to reduce that (fees) then either fewer people go to university or the experience would be less. Because the only other way you can get extra money to go in, if you wanted the same number of people, the same kind of teaching, would be to take it from working people through their taxes.” Green said at the conference, “Governments have to take money from everyone at work and companies that provide jobs to provide those essential services. And it may well be that this is a national debate that we need to have.”
Whilst this seems a long way from the tuition free university education seen in parts of Europe, it is the beginning of a debate, one which the Tories are far more willing to take part in than they would have been just a few months ago.
The public sector pay cap is another issue that seems to be causing stirs within the party. Public sector workers have had their pay rate frozen at 1% since 2010 and Labour had tabled an amendment to the Queen’s Speech to reverse this, however it was voted down by the newly formed Conservative-DUP alliance by 323 votes to 309. There was talk from Conservative MPs that they opposed the cap in theory, but they would not support the Labour motion.
Whilst many Tory MPs were verbally crucified by the left wing for not voting against the government, it seems highly unlikely that they would oppose the government so early on. This was the first tabled amendment to the Queen’s Speech and the party would risk the humiliation of defeat on the very first vote of the new parliament. Since the vote Sir Michael Fallon, Boris Johnson, and Chris Grayling, have all suggested the Government will have to take another look at the issue, so the coming weeks should give a good idea of just how serious this proposal is. The Guardian reported that a Senior government source had told them:
“The foreign secretary supports the idea of public-sector workers getting a better pay deal and believes the findings of the pay review bodies should be respected”
Theresa May’s office played down talk of lifting the cap and insisted “the policy has not changed”, despite an earlier statement that she was ready to listen to recommendations from the independent public sector pay review bodies. It is clear that Number 10 has accepted that the public is “weary” of austerity, Education secretary, Justine Greening, has even reportedly demanded £1 billion in extra schools funding. These are not the actions of the same government we saw during the campaign pledging to maintain the cap until 2020, claiming that doing so would save £5 billion.
These are not the only compromises that have been made by the vulnerable Conservative government, they agreed to fund abortions for Northern Irish women on the NHS in England (Scotland and Wales have also made the same promise), they have withdrawn their plans to hold a vote on fox hunting, and they have managed to rapidly find new housing for the victims of the Grenfell fire following mass protests and pressure from within Parliament. There is no way to deny that they election and the Labour campaign have fundamentally changed the political landscape of the country.
Protests over austerity, Donald Trump, the Grenfell fire, and the DUP deal are clearly ringing in the ears of senior Tories as they scramble to find ways of winning back public support. The new found confidence of Labour in their message and their leader has seen them functioning as the effective opposition that politicians and journalists alike have been calling for since Corbyn’s election as leader. In April of this year Blair questioned whether Corbyn was up to the job, stating that “We’ve got to make them wake up every morning and fear us”, the Economist declared them “unfit to lose”, whilst Nick Clegg commented that he didn’t know what the party even stood for.
Fast-forward 12 weeks and the election result has Labour pressing the Conservatives at every turn, forcing them to compromise, bargain, and deal. Public protests, the ageing Tory base, and a re-energised Labour have forced the Conservatives to play politics and concede to public opinion, something that is highly underrated.
In the US, there was a massive study done from the 80’s right through to 2002, to understand what bearing public opinion had on the issues that were being legislated on in Congress. Shockingly, when the influence of lobbyists and special interest groups was weighted in, the opinion of the general public has absolutely no bearing on government. There are some in the UK that would suggest that we are in the same position, that we are powerless to influence government and policy. Thankfully, the policy backtracking that the Conservatives have done since the election is proof that public opinion and protest matters, that voting really can change the political landscape if you inspire enough people.
Whether or not you believe that Conservatives care about the issues that they are suddenly championing, like public sector pay, is another conversation entirely. What we can be confident of is that these issues have now been tabled as major talking points, ones that the public want addressed, and that is far more than we had at the turn of the year. All sides of the political spectrum will clearly have different ideologically driven solutions to these issues, but at least now we can have a discussion about it.
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A few years ago I was standing on the deck of a beach house on the 4th of July and a person who had obviously drunk too much told me, “The secret of my life is that I always need someone to hate.”
I was reminded of this exchange while watching the stupendously ruthless Republican National Convention over the last several days. Is there anything that conservatives do not hate? Maybe drilling. In fact, they appear utterly phallically obsessed with drilling (a practice that, in about 10 years or so, might reduce gas prices by 2 or 3 cents per gallon). But otherwise, what we learned from the recent hatefest is that Republicans hate community organizers, liberals (surprise!), Madonna, the “east coast elite,” the “angry left” , trial lawyers, people who are too smart, people who are “cosmopolitan”—the list goes on into eternity.
Listening to this litany on Wednesday night in particular reminded me of a research article that came out roughly 5 years ago on political conservatism and motivated social (Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski & Sulloway, “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition,” Psychological Bulletin). In a nutshell, the article—by Stanford and UC Berkeley researchers—seems to suggest that conservatism is a mild form of insanity.
Here are the facts. A meta-analysis culled from 88 samples in 12 countries, and with an N of 22,818, revealed that “several psychological variables predicted political conservatism.” Which variables exactly? In order of predictive power: Death , system instability, dogmatism/intolerance of ambiguity, closed-mindedness, low tolerance of uncertainty, high needs for order, structure, and closure, low integrative complexity, of threat and loss, and low . The researchers conclude, a little chillingly, that “the core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and a justification of inequality.”
The above list of variables is more than a little unsavory. We are talking about someone full of fear, with a poor sense of self, and a lack of mental dexterity. I always tell my students that tolerance of ambiguity is one especially excellent mark of psychological maturity. It isn’t a black and white world. According to the research, conservatives possess precisely the opposite: an intolerance of ambiguity and an inability to deal with complexity. Maybe that’s one reason why Obama seems so distasteful to them: he is a nuanced, multi-faceted thinker who can see things from several different perspectives simultaneously. And he isn’t preaching fear, either.
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Various artists have laid down some covers for a special ‘Decades Of Destruction‘ compilation set for inclusion with the upcoming 30th anniversary issue of the UK’s ‘Metal Hammer‘ magazine. The issue will be on sale on September 13th and feature the following songs:
Korn – “We Care A Lot” (Faith No More cover)
Asking Alexandria – “Duality” (Slipknot cover)
Devin Townsend – “Fast As A Shark” (Accept cover) (feat. Wolf Hoffmann of Accept and Fredrik Thordendal of Meshuggah)
New Years Day – “mOBSCENE” (Marilyn Manson cover)
Sabaton – “Kingdom Come” (Manowar)
Katatonia – “Night Comes Down” (Judas Priest cover)
Cane Hill – “We Die Young” (Alice In Chains cover)
Hacktivist – “Break Stuff” (Limp Bizkit cover)
Wilson – “Sleep Now In The Fire” (Rage Against The Machine cover)
The Qemists – “Blind” (Korn cover)
Employed – “Memphis Will Be Laid To Waste” (Norma Jean cover)
Counting Days – “Disciple” (Slayer cover)
Stoneghost – “I Disappear” (Metallica cover)
Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard – “Scum” (Napalm Death cover)
No Consequence – “The Pot” (Tool cover)
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There are three hopes in many circles about the testimony of former FBI Director James Comey before the Senate Intelligence Committee, and all track back to one thing: will there be anything to come out of it to provide grounds for bringing impeachment charges against #45? The first is that Comey can back up his now famed memo in which he asserts Trump demanded that he stand down from investigations into then National Security Advisor Mike Flynn and the Russia meddling/election connection. The second tracks back to the first hope. That’s that Comey has added documents or even a tape in which Trump actually orders him to back off. The third is that Comey can provide just enough drama in his testimony to make it good media theater.
Those hopes almost certainly will be dashed. The so-called “impeachment clause” in the Constitution lists the thoroughly ambiguous “high crimes and misdemeanors” as one of the crimes that a sitting president must commit for the House to initiate the action, and then the Senate to convict. In Trump’s case, this would fall into the category of obstruction of justice. The Comey memo isn’t enough. Trump will continue to hotly deny that he ordered him to back off from the investigation. Short of a signature from Trump on a memo ordering Comey to back off, it will just be another case of “he said, she said.” Even if the conversation did take place as Comey claims, Trump will pooh-pooh it by claiming that this was just shop talk banter, and there was no malicious intent behind it. The keywords in the alleged memo are “I hope you can let this go.” This comes nowhere near the requirement to bring a criminal case against Trump, that could only come as a direct order.
The only drama so far in the Comey-Trump tit-for-tat is Comey’s firing. This has gotten tons of print ink and hour after hour of cable news chatter. However, testimony before a congressional committee is an entirely different matter. Most of it is long-winded, dry, and almost never produces anything close to the required “gotcha moment,” or a quote that can change the course of political events. Comey is the consummate “just the facts, Ma’am” bureaucrat. The only fact that he’s alleged about Trump is that he made a note about the conversation that he had with him about Flynn. This is hardly Nixonian Watergate stuff. That came complete with tapes of Nixon blatantly orchestrating ways to obstruct justice in the criminal probes of his henchmen.
The only drama so far in the Comey-Trump tit-for-tat is Comey’s firing.
The ones who have beat the drums loudest for something, anything from Comey, to nail Trump on have been congressional Democrats. The few Republican senators who have raised eyebrows about Trump’s conduct have given absolutely no indication that they see anything in Comey’s dealings with Trump that rise to the level of criminal misconduct. The worst that can happen is that GOP leaders will continue to try and figure out ways to further distance themselves from Trump and figure out more ways to get around his antics to ram through their retrograde health care and tax reform plans.
What’s left after Comey is the independent probe by former FBI director Robert Mueller. He’ll be looking at wide-ranging and entangled business and political dealings of Trump and his associates with the Russians to determine if there was perjury, witness intimidation or obstruction of justice by Trump or any of the others in the Russia connection. Or, at the very least, blatant favoritism.
Trump has been battered so long by the allegations of playing footsie with the Russians to steal the election, engage in sordid business deals, and jeopardize national security in the process that he’s developed effective duck and dodge countermeasures. They include pointed denials, blame and finger pointing at his political enemies, mostly Democrats, and at a “fake news media” that’s out to smear him to bump up ratings.
He has a crack legal team that is well-versed on the rules about what public officials can do when it comes to business and government here. They know that eyes are carefully watching him to catch him in any dirty dealing. So, him doing something crudely illegal is almost unimaginable. This brings it back to the hope that somewhere there’s a smoking gun tape or memo with Trump’s voice or signature that proves beyond any legal doubt that he committed some act that falls within the constitutional parameter of what is an impeachable act.
The saving grace in the Comey testimony is that he is testifying and that he did keep a memo of the conversation with Trump about Flynn and Russia. It doesn’t prove criminal malice and it’s not enough to impeach. But it does pile on even more doubt about Trump’s dubious conduct and dealings, and more importantly, his fitness to be called president.
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When we talk about racism in American schools, we’re usually talking about numbers and statistics: demography, student-to-teacher ratios, test scores, graduation rates. Last week, that conversation got a name and a sweetly serious face in Ahmed Mohamed. The 14-year-old Texas student was arrested for bringing a homemade clock into school, which his teacher thought to be a bomb. The charges have been dropped, but the conversation continues about how Islamophobia and other forms of bigotry pervade teacher-student relationships.
The stakes are high: Arbitrary or racist disciplinary measures can derail students’ careers and lives, sending them into the school-to-prison pipeline. And although most Americans under the age of 6 are nonwhite, they are entering a school system in which minority teachers number less than one in five. Teenagers rarely feel understood by their teachers and administrators, but the poor representation makes it all but impossible to report and address classroom racism. And, thanks to the heightened visibility of issues like police brutality on social media, young people are paying close attention to how race and social status manifest in their personal lives, says Nina Daoud, a Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland researching the role of identity on the educational experiences of students of color.
I went to a high school in a rapidly Asian-izing suburb of Boston called Lexington in the early 2000s, when the fear of Muslims was still protozoan. Muslims were in the news for all the wrong reasons, and I remember distinctly how in class I would often be pitted against my teachers and classmates when it came to airing out their opinions of Islam. Once, in intermediate jazz class, my teacher put his trumpet to the side and began lamenting the lack of value Muslims place on human life. So, yeah, I stopped being as enthusiastic about jazz class after that.
Here, 10 other nonwhite Americans reflect on the discrimination and the discouragement they experienced in school.
We were accused of cheating.
Morgan (23, Williamstown, New Jersey): In middle school I had a teacher who had us come up with presentations every week; it was a vital part of our grade. I remember how if she thought we didn’t know what a word meant she would stop us and ask us to define it. If we didn’t know how to define it she would say we plagiarized it and give us a bad grade. I remember noticing that mainly she would interrupt students of color. During my presentation, she asked me to define “formulation,” so I did, and didn’t think much of it. But then, at a parent teacher conference, she said to my parents that she thought that I had been cheating. My parents looked at each other dumbfounded. My late stepfather, who was alive at the time, said, “No, she was not cheating.” I had a feeling about that teacher.
This teacher lived in the same neighborhood as me: a nice neighborhood, with two-story residential houses, in a very nice part of town. I remember I was walking home with a bookbag. I had just got off the bus and I saw her driving by so I waved to her, and she looked out the window and asked “What are you doing here?” in a funny way. And I said, “I live here.” I didn’t catch it because I was 13, but I have learned to read between the lines.
Anjali (27, Dracut, Massachusetts):I grew up speaking/reading/writing mostly in English. But when I started elementary school, teachers still put me in an ESL class anyways because my parents were immigrants with accents (even though they listed my first language as English on all of my school forms, and even though I was the first one to learn how to read in my kindergarten classroom). I later got moved to a regular English class with all of my other classmates because they realized they'd made a mistake. I got the highest grade in my new class on the first spelling test I took, but I wound up with a detention slip because the teacher assumed I had cheated. (I hadn’t.)
When I wound up doing poorly on math or science assignments and exams, several teachers made remarks along the lines of "I thought you Indian kids were all supposed to be good at this stuff/Aren't Asians supposed to know this better than others?" It made me feel constantly trapped in the model minority stereotype. It made me nervous every time I'd take exams, because I'd constantly worry about failing their expectations.
We were asked to represent our entire culture — and a few others.
Dishon (28, Boston): I lived in Boston and was bused out to a suburban neighborhood, Wellesley, to get a better education, as part of a program called METCO. Anyone who knows anything about Wellesley knows that it's a bubble town; it's very white. One thing about METCO was to expose kids to diversity. There were moments where I was the only POC in my entire class, and at times the only POC in my entire grade. There were many times I was in class, and I would be the “expert” on anything black. Anytime we talked about even a country — like there was a study of Angola — and they would all look to me as an expert. My parents are Cape Verdean and Jamaican.
Urooj (27, Long Island, New York): I remember a social studies teacher who, after 9/11, said she didn’t think Islam was good to women. And I asked her what she meant. She said she was out at a grocery store and there was a woman in Islamic dress whose kids were being disrespectful toward her. This was why she thought Islam was bad to women. I was 12 or 13 at the time, and I didn’t realize that was so racist. That happened in the class a lot, where I had to be the representative to explain my culture to the students, which I thought was inappropriate. I was a student like anyone else.
We were bullied — and blamed for it.
Sana (28, Long Island, New York): I was in a public school in the '90s in a town called Port Washington, where I was one of a handful of nonwhite students. I think I was the only Muslim in the entire elementary school. From my very first day of class, I would get questions like “Why does your nose look like that?” and “What type of name is Sana?” I felt isolated and didn’t break out of my shell until fifth or sixth grade. I got into drama, and expressing myself in theatre. I would get teased a lot, and the teachers knew this. And I was treated as if the problem was me, and not the kids who were bullying me.
One thing I realized however, was that when I told stories, kids would listen to me. The school thought I had some kind of lying problem; they made me start seeing a school psychologist. They said I was a pathological liar. And I was upfront with them about what was going on, how I was continuously treated as the problem. They blamed me for having a hard time making friends.
Dishon: Once a week, the students from Boston would stay with different families in the suburbs, called “host families.” In late elementary school, this kid who was the child of a host family asked me where "my tail" was.
Anytime I got harassed, I couldn’t go to authorities. Like one time in middle school, this kid was harassing me, he kept poking me. I got tired of it, and I told him to stop. And he kept poking me so I hit him. Then I got in trouble, and called into an administrator’s office, and I was wondering why I was the one being punished and not that kid. A lot of kids I’ve spoken to in the METCO program said they were always afraid of randomly being put in detention for being outspoken. One of the vice principals, we knew if went to her she would send us to detention, because she always sent the black kids to detention. She always suspended us.
Anjali: I was waiting outside one of the teachers' lounges to get a signature from someone for something, and I overheard two teachers making racist jokes. One was about BFI, which was the name of the school’s waste management company; it was printed on the dumpsters and recycling bins. Something like: "What does BFI stand for? Black family inside."
Our culture was openly denigrated.
Urooj: I grew up in a mostly white, middle-class town in Long Island. When you have places like “white liberal bastions,” where the racism was more subtle, the texts we studied were almost all by white men. It wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I actually read a text by a writer who was not white. There were no black kids; there was a handful of people of color at all. Mostly Asian, South Asian, and white kids would talk about us were like we were an invasive species. They would call it an “Asian Invasion,” and a lot of people didn’t appreciate the hard work we put into school. If a particular kid performed well, the white kids would say, “Oh well, she’s Asian, of course she will do well.” Meanwhile all the clubs at school were dominated by white kids, with no Asian kids being elected. Still, it was a culture where it was acceptable to say “Asians are taking over the school.” The mentality was very xenophobic.
Basima (22, Arlington, Texas): I remember a time in the sixth grade when I was paired to work with a Jewish boy I wasn't particularly fond of due to some typical 11-year-old drama that I can't even remember now. Being a sassy prepubescent girl I kissed my teeth, let out a groan, and rolled my eyes when I found out he was my partner. I was sternly told to stay after class while everyone else went off to lunch. That was the day I learned about anti-Semitism. I was accused of not wanting to be paired with him because of my natural Muslim hate for Jews. The teacher said something along the lines of, "I've heard of you Muslims and y’alls hate for his people. I think it's disgusting that it's been passed down to you even though you're in America!!" I had always been raised to love and respect everyone no matter what their background was. I had never heard any form of anti-Semitism in my life. I had even celebrated Hanukkah with my neighbors a couple times! She proceeded to give me three days of detention, and I spent the rest of the day on the verge of tears, confused and angry. I will always remember that as a pivotal point in my first-generation immigrant child soul search growing up in post-9/11 Texas.
The police wouldn’t help us.
D’Angelo (24, Chicago): I went to high school in Chicago’s South Side. It was a racially mixed school, with immigrants, blacks, whites, you name it. It was a challenge because of the area it was in. Even then, you had some of the teachers take some students in as their own kids, and others who did not care at all. What I learned was that if you’re a minority in America, then you’re not really American. You have to work twice as hard just to get a little farther than where you need to be. You would see this play out in different ways, sometimes by feeling alone, like when you notice who’s the favorite of the teacher. You would rely on vibes, sometimes the vibes teachers gave off was racist, and sometimes you weren’t that far off.
My high school was in a gang area, but the way police factored in was heavily due to stereotypes. This one time in high school, a fight broke out between the black kids and the Mexicans. Even though everyone involved had some kind of gang affiliation, it was the black kids that got locked up. Later, those who weren’t rounded up met up again to finish their fight. We solved nothing — just some of us arbitrarily ended up with a record.
Abe (24, Chicago): My private Muslim school in the Chicago 'burbs had to be evacuated after 9/11 and shut down for a couple weeks afterward because we kept getting death threats/bomb threats from angry white people. Years later we moved to a different Chicago suburb and in 2012 someone threw an acid bomb at the window of my little sister's new private Muslim school during taraweeh prayer in Ramadan. It ended up not not getting inside the school because dumbasses didn't throw it hard enough to break the window, so it exploded outside. Thank god. Cars that were parked outside our school were also regularly keyed.
Our ambitions were stifled.
Keisha (31, Chicago): My upbringing in a mostly black neighborhood and public school was so devoid of tech programs I didn't realize that I even lacked that part of my education until adulthood. It's hard to disentangle racism from the public school system. The system is full of whiteness, from teachers that bring a mostly unexplored cultural bias to urban classrooms, extending to the harsher punishments and reactions to students of color.
As a woman of color, it's been difficult for me to even understand that I am able to be part of the tech industry because I was never really pushed to know there was a place for me there. I didn't know that I battled with a sense of inferiority that was so ingrained in how I progressed through life. I'd look at certain industries and just know they weren't for me.
Morgan: When I was applying to colleges, Princeton was at the top of my list. And my guidance counselor, who was a white woman, began asking me how much my parents made and said that I wouldn’t be able to afford that. (In fact, one of the main reasons I went to Princeton was because they gave me a second-to-none financial aid package.) She basically said, "Why don’t you look at a community college?" I was offended about it, because you shouldn’t ask someone with close to a 4.0 GPA, someone who is in the top 1% of her class, to go to community college. But these are instances where I kept my mouth shut, because she had a lot of power.
You don’t realize that it’s racist at the time, you feel like... a twitch in your heart — like, Ouch! You don’t realize what it is until you are distant from it. When I was in a film studies class, I was really into it, it wasn’t just an elective. I would bring a Screenwriting for Dummies book to class every single day. And I was speaking with my back to the teacher and I mentioned how one day I wanted to direct. He flat-out told me I wouldn’t be able to do that, that instead I should be preparing to work behind the scenes. I was so surprised and so caught off-guard; it really hurt me. If I recall, I stopped bringing my book to class. I thought that maybe I shouldn’t be so excited or passionate.
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Cover of the Fortsas Catalog Cover of the Fortsas Catalog
A manuscript note attributes this work to Pere Felix Grebard, private secretary to the noted Huet, bishop of Avranches. This Pere Grebard is likewise the author of a very rare tragedy, 'La mort de Henry le grand,' which I have had in my collection, but of which I rid myself, having learned that Mons. J. Ketele of Audenarde had another copy of it.
In 1855, M. Hoyois issued a prospectus for a reimpression of the Fortsas Catalogue, with the orders and correspondence of various bibliophiles with regard to the supposed sale, and a facsimile of a letter from the Count de Fortsas. M. Chalons forbade this re-impression, and a division arose between the friends. M. Chalons took legal measures to prevent M. Hoyois from reprinting the Catalogue, and also influenced the Societe des Bibliophiles Belges to refuse their subscription to the book.
Another account of the hoax
In the year 1840, the book collectors in Europe were greatly excited by the publication of the sale catalogue of the Count J.N.A. de Fortsas. This little volume of only fourteen pages contained a list of the books which formed the Count's collection, composed of only fifty-two articles, each of them unique. The Count would keep no book in his collection, if he found it mentioned by any bibliographer. No wonder the bibliographical world was excited.
The sale was to take place in the office of a notary of Binche, an insignificant village of Belgium. The catalogues were sent to the great collectors of France and England, and each recipient supposed himself specially favored, and each kept his own secret. It is said that Brunet, Nodier, Techener, Renouard and other bibliophiles of Paris met in the stage to Binche, each one having hoped to steal away unnoticed and have the game all to himself.
M. Castian, of Lisle, who was greatly interested in the treasures of this sale (particularly in a work published by Castman, of Tournay, relating to the Belgian revolution of 1830, the entire edition of which had been suppressed, this copy fortuitously being saved), seemed a little incredulous about this wonderful collection, and took the precaution to make some inquiries as he was passing through Tournay concerning the book, and called on the publisher. M. Castman had forgotten it, but his foreman recollected it, and the author, M. Ch. Lecocq, perfectly. This at once silenced his suspicions.
The Baron de Reiffenberg, then the Director of the Royal Library of Brussels, asked for an appropriation to purchase some of these treasures, which was granted. His commission to purchase covered the entire catalogue, save seven articles which were thought to be too free for a public library. One enthusiastic bookseller made the journey to Binche from Amsterdam, only to see one volume, the Corpus Juris Civilis, printed by the Elzevirs on vellum. The Princess de Ligne, anxious to destroy the record of her ancestor's achievements, and to protect the reputation of the grandmothers of the best families in the state, wrote to M. Voisin to buy No. 48 at any price: "Achetez, je vous en conjure, a tout prix, les Sottises de Notre Polisson de Grandpere."
The Roxburghe Club was represented; and, singularly enough, every book from the catalogue appealed with peculiar force to the taste or weakness of some distinguished collector, and each one was the fortunate possessor of a catalogue through the post.
Tradition says that the good people of Binche, seeing their town invaded by a rusty and serious-looking set of strangers, all inquiring for the office of the same notary who had no existence, began to suspect some plot against the liberties of the state, and consulted about the propriety of putting as many of them as their limited accommodations would permit under confinement.
On the morning of the sale the newspapers contained a notice that the bibliographical world would learn with regret that the library of Count de Fortsas would not be sold, the town of Binche having resolved to keep it together in honor of the Collector, their townsman.
The force of the hoax could go no further. For the whole affair was a hoax. The Count de Fortsas was a myth -- his chateau, his passion, his success in bibliographical pursuits, were apocryphal. And yet M. Chalons, a French collector, admitted to a stageful of bibliophiles, whom he met on the road, to have had the pleasure of a long personal acquaintance with the count.
He is said to have been the author of this witty practical joke.
Links and References
The Fortsas Hoax, University of Delaware Library.
Chalon, Renier Hubert Ghislain (1840). Catalogue d'une très-riche mais peu nombreuse collection de livres provenant de la bibliothèque de feu M.r le comte J.- N.-A. de Forstas. Mons: Typographie d'Em. Hoyois, Libraire.
Klinefelter, Walter. (1942). The Fortsas Bibliohoax. New York, Press of the Wooly Whale. 1942.
Tredwell, Daniel M. (1882). A monograph on Privately illustrated books. A plea for bibliomania. Brooklyn: 81-82
The Fortsas Catalogue. (June, 1884). The Bibliographer: A Journal of Book-Lore (June, 1884) No. 31: 8-12.
Jean Nepomucene Auguste Pichauld, Comte de Fortsas, was a man with a singular passion. He collected books of which only one copy was known to exist. If he ever discovered that one of the volumes in his library had a duplicate anywhere in the world, he would immediately dispose of it. So when he died on September 1, 1839 he possessed only fifty-two books, but each of them was absolutely unique.His heir, not sharing the old man's passion for book collecting, arranged for an auction to sell off the library, and so a catalog of this small but highly unusual collection was mailed to bibliophiles throughout Europe. The auction, the collectors were told, was to be held in the offices of Mâitre Mourlon, notary, 9 rue de l'Église, in Binche, Belgium on August 10, 1840.When Europe's librarians and intellectuals received the catalog, they could scarcely believe their eyes. The books would have been valuable even if duplicate copies had existed, but the fact that each one was unique made them priceless. The catalog contained detailed descriptions of the books, as well as numerous comments. A typical comment read:On August 9, the day before the auction, the collectors descended on Binche like a pack of vultures. The Belgian government even sent an official representative, believing that the collection was so valuable that it should be bought in its entirety and kept in the country.But only disappointment greeted the hopeful buyers. Try as they might, they could not locate any street named "rue de l'Église" in the town of Binche.Their spirits sunk even lower when they read an announcement in the newspaper informing them that the town of Binche had decided to purchase the entire collection for its public library.Disheartened, some of the collectors returned home, but others stayed, curious to view the unique books in their new home. But although they searched and searched, they couldn't find the library anywhere. Only then did it gradually dawn on them. There was no Binche public library. There was no Comte de Fortsas. The entire auction and list of unique books had been an enormous, elaborately designed hoax.The man behind the hoax was a local antiquarian named Renier Hubert Ghislain Chalon (1802-1889). The planning that had gone into the deception was incredible. He had carefully researched the interests of all the major bibliophiles in Europe in order to ensure that they would make the long and fruitless trek to Binche. And he had done all this merely for the sake of a practical joke.The hoax proved not to be a total loss for its victims. The catalog they had received itself became a highly coveted collector's item. Within a few decades it had more than quadrupled in price.There was such demand for the catalog, that the printer of the original catalog, M. Hoyois, decided to publish a few more copies of it. However, Chalon forbade him from doing so, leading to a legal battle between the two men. This dispute is described in(June, 1884):An account of the Fortsas Bibliohoax, from Daniel Tredwell's 1882(which, in turn, is extracted from Philes' Philobiblion, volume II., page 75), is excerpted below:
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Troy Brown booking photo.jpg
Louisiana state Senator Troy Brown, 44, was booked Sunday (Nov. 29) at 1:55 a.m. into the Orleans Parish jail, following his arrest on suspicion of domestic abuse battery. Court records show Judge Arthur Hunter gave Brown a preset bond amount of $3,000, which was posted within minutes of his booking.
(Orleans Parish Sheriff's Office)
Louisiana state Sen. Troy Brown, D-Geismar, punched a woman in the eye during an argument Saturday night (Nov. 28) inside the Hyatt Regency New Orleans on Loyola Avenue, New Orleans police said.
Brown, 44, was arrested and charged with domestic simple battery following the incident, which police said took place around 9:40 p.m. According to police, Brown and a woman were arguing inside his hotel room. She and a female friend left the room and were waiting for an elevator, police said, when Brown walked up and started arguing with the woman's friend.
The woman stepped in to stop the argument, police said, and Brown "struck the victim with a closed fist in her right eye." She had "minor swelling" to her face when police arrived to investigate.
Brown was booked early Sunday morning and is expected to appear in court Monday after posting bond.
Last Spring, Brown sponsored legislation establishing the Louisiana Domestic Violence Commission. Similar legislation passed in the Louisiana House that same year.
Brown, in a statement to our news partners at WVUE Fox 8 News, said he had attended the Bayou Classic earlier Saturday.
"I am not able to recall all the details of what transpired, but I do know there was an altercation involving myself and two or three other individuals. Security was called and I was arrested for misdemeanor simple battery by NOPD," the statement reads, though using the wrong charge. Brown was arrested for domestic simple battery.
"Back in 1991 I suffered a life-threatening automobile accident which resulted in brain damage which caused some short term memory loss which I have always considered to be minor," Brown added in his statement. "However, as a result of this incident and other recent memory concerns I am consulting with a neurosurgeon to see if social alcohol consumption is now affecting my cognitive functions in ways it has not previously."
Staff writers Emily Lane and Ken Daley contributed to this report.
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The Koreans earn themselves third place in the Olympic tournament, and exemption from military service, thanks to a goal in each half from two of their star players
South Korea earned the Olympic bronze medal against Japan thanks to a 2-0 victory in a keenly contested match.
The game began with both sides playing an intense, uncompromising brand of football, and after several yellow cards, it was South Korea who took the lead through Arsenal striker Park Chu-Young in the 38th minute.
The second half saw South Korea double their advantage in the 56th minute through captain Koo Ja-Cheol, before holding off multiple Japanese attacks to earn themselves third place in the tournament.
South Korea made three changes to the team that lost 3-0 to Brazil in the semi-finals, with a recall for Park up front in place of Hyun-Sung Kim and also for first-choice goalkeeper Sung Ryong-Jung after he returned from injury.
Meanwhile, the Japanese named an unchanged side from their 3-1 defeat to Mexico in the other semi-final, with Kensuke Nagai retained as the lone striker.
A cagey first half began with the Millennium Stadium bathed in sunshine, as both sides struggled to keep the ball on a slightly inferior pitch.
The South Koreans initially enjoyed slightly more possession in the opening stages, but neither side managed to create any real openings, other than a skied volley by Japan’s Keigo Higashi in the 16th minute.
Despite the lack of clear chances, the game had a very intense feel to it, with Korea’s Oh Jaesuk and Sung Yong-Ki both being cautioned within a couple of minutes of each other for fouls on Japan’s Yuki Otsu around the 25th minute.
It took until the 27th minute for either side to create a first opening, as Japanese midfielder Hiroshi Kiyotake tried to curl a shot around Sung-Ryong Jung in goal, but the Korea managed to push the ball clear.
The game then descended into near-chaos in the 34th minute, as Korea’s captain Koo Ja-Cheol slid in with a bad tackle on Otsu right in front of the Japanese bench, earning the skipper a yellow card and sparking some minor scuffles between the two teams.
However, Japan created a good chance of their own minutes later as, from a corner, Gotoku Saki found himself unmarked but could only put his header wide of the post.
Immediately, Korea staged a breakaway move, and after receiving a long ball through, Park Chu-Young managed to wriggle past several Japanese defenders and slot home for a superb individual goal in the 38th minute.
It was perhaps slightly against the run of play, but the Koreans had a chance to double their lead just a minute later, as the ball dropped to left-back Yun Suk-Young inside the penalty area, but he sent his shot wide of the post as the half drew to a close.
Japan had a golden opportunity to level early in the second period through Otsu, who was instrumental in a number of intricate passes in the build-up, but he scuffed his shot and was not supported by the rest of his team-mates as the ball trickled away from danger.
However, just a minute later, the Koreans were celebrating again, as a long ball was taken on by captain Ja-Cheol, who controlled the ball and calmly stroked it home to give his side a 2-0 lead just before the hour mark.
The Koreans clearly had the momentum, and Kim Bo-Kyung tried to curl a shot into the top corner moments later, but saw it clawed onto the post superbly by Gonda, who managed to keep his side in the game by his fingertips.
The game then descended into something of a midfield battle, as both teams struggled to gain any supremacy in the match and were unable to keep possession for a good amount of time.
In the 87th minute, Japan thought they had pulled a goal back through Yoshida’s header from a corner, but the referee ruled that South Korea’s goalkeeper Sung-Ryong had been impeded.
However, the Japanese could not create any further chances, and it was South Korea who took the bronze medal at the final whistle.
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In the end, Dale Weise chose the better deal over the opportunity to return to the Montreal Canadiens.
Hopeful of making a return to the bleu, blanc, et rouge as an unrestricted free agent on July 1, the 28-year-old ended up signing a four-year, $9.4-million contract with the Philadelphia Flyers after not liking what he saw in Montreal's offer.
"When the negotiation period opened up, we put a call into (Montreal) because we figured they’d have some interest," Weise told Stu Cowan of Hockey Inside/Out. "We didn’t talk all week long until the morning of July 1, and then they made an offer. But it wasn’t really a substantial one and that was kind of the only one they made and we said: 'OK, that’s not going to work.' And that was kind of the extent of it.
"It was a three-year deal, but it was nowhere near what I was getting paid in Philly," added Weise. "So I said: 'You guys are going to have to come up a lot more.' I’m not going to take less money to play there."
A Canadiens fan growing up, Weise played 152 games over parts of three seasons with Montreal before being traded to Chicago prior to the 2016 trade deadline.
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A little over a week ago, a Kentucky state trooper resigned following allegations that he’d had sex with a woman he apprehended in exchange for not bringing her into jail. Days earlier, a Bay Area paper reported that an officer stepped down after assaulting a 17-year-old girl participating in the San Leandro “police explorer” program. In early November, the two NYPD detectives who were accused of raping a teenager in the back of a police van resigned rather rather than face trial.
It’s been estimated that every five days, a police officer is caught in an act of sexual abuse or harassment—a number cobbled together from victim reports and press inquiries, and one that’s certainly much higher given that only around one-third of women who are raped in this country report an incident at all. Despite dozens of investigations and a 2011 special report from the International Association of Chiefs of Police on the problem of sexual violence, reform efforts have ranged from ignoring the problem entirely to implementing periodic harassment training. An inquiry from Al Jazeera found only three out of 20 departments had taken the IACP’s rather pointed recommendations, which included “victim-centered” investigations carried out by outside agencies.
As powerful and well-compensated men are toppling across industries, the question of what happens to abusers too obscure or protected to become a part of the mass reorganization remains: For every famous name cornered, harassed, and abused, there are hundreds of women unable to share in the recalibrations happening in more conspicuous industries. Rebecca Traister, overcome with messages from women whose lives and careers had been ruined, wrote recently of having to explain to women their abusers’ names were just on the wrong side of a Weinstein or a Lauer.
Moving beyond a movement that ejects men by destroying their reputations and taking their money requires looking at professions with more power and less spotlight.
Moving beyond a movement that ejects men by destroying their reputations and taking their money requires looking at positions with more power and less spotlight, professions by decades of institutional practice that let abusers go unchecked. As Timothy Mahr, a former cop and criminologist at the University of Missouri–St. Louis recently says, the police “have policies for everything—they’re two volumes thick.” But they don’t have many that halt sexual misconduct, and their collective bargaining agreements negotiate pay raises and vacation along with state accountability in the same breath.
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For many women, particularly in service-oriented professions like hospitality, collective action can force management to fire harassers and create avenues for redress. But police unions have often found themselves at odds with the broader labor movement. On a theoretical level, they serve to protect private property and were arguably created to control the working class; more practically, they have been instrumental in battling affirmative action and striking down reforms to curb abuses of power like these.
Organizations like the Fraternal Order of Police—so named in the early 20th century to distance itself from the associations with the lowly term “union”—are powerful political lobbies, and the contracts they negotiate with city agencies are often the standard-bearers for how officers are disciplined. They’ve been criticized by mainstream outlets for protecting bad cops who use deadly force against unarmed black men. Those papers have paid less attention to how they create safe haven for serial harassers—and given the available data there are a large number of abusers on the force. Even the IACP listed the factors that give cops “opportunities for sexual misconduct,” among them that cops are in a position to exercise power, with little oversight, over vulnerable populations.
A few years ago, an AP investigation in 41 states suggested sexual misconduct was among “the most prevalent type of complaint among law officers.” The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, report from 2010 found harassment and abuse to be a prevalent complaint against officers, second only to “excessive force.” For women who are targeted by the police, the two often go together. As Andrea Ritchie, a writer and advocate for women of color assaulted by police, told Splinter last year, the sexual violence women experience at the hands of the police can sometimes be overlooked to focus rage on fatal encounters.
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Another recent investigation among the string of projects addressing sexual violence and American police found 70 percent of assailants targeted crime victims, informants, motorists, and participants in youth programs—people who already facing barriers to speaking up, never mind having to report the crime to another member of the PD. “Officers will go after people they oftentimes don’t think are credible,” like sex workers, people who are addicted to drugs, and those with long criminal histories, says Timothy Mahr.
And even if survivors do report, the same rules that shield officers from other charges prevent serial offenders from being recognized. Collective bargaining agreements, often negotiated behind closed doors, usually require that misconduct records are purged after a period of 18 months to five years; if an officer is investigated by his department, he is often given access to materials including body cam footage and witness statements prior to being called to testify. And in many states with police officer bills of rights, even recommendations from civilian review boards—police reformists’ favored solution to police brutality and abuse—can be easily appealed, sometimes under the eye of a department-appointed arbitrator.
There’s the “pattern of similar behavior” that’s lost when officer records are purged.
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All of which protects cops whose use of force has proven to be inappropriate or deadly, from a single reported incident to repeated offenses, but proves particularly difficult for rooting out sexual misconduct. Sexual assaulters have high rates of repeat offenses. Domestic violence is one of the greatest indicators of sexual harassment and abuse.
Advocates of keeping disciplinary records out of sight say it keeps cops from being falsely accused or having their reputations ruined by a single anonymous source—the kinds of sources that have inspired women in other circumstances to come forward. But in 62 of the 82 large cities where Reuters recently reviewed police contracts and local law, officer misconduct records are purged, many regardless of what the source is. Of the thousands of contracts in effect, very few—if any—make significant exception for officers accused of sexual harassment or on-duty assault.
Stephen Rushin is a researcher and criminologist at the Loyola School of Law in Chicago. He’s spent the last couple of years collecting police union contracts, analyzing more than 800 individual documents from across the country. He says he’s seen only one contract in his research that made direct reference to discipline for sexual misconduct, but worries more generally about the “pattern of similar behavior” that’s lost when officer records are purged.
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Of the 81 cities’ contracts with local police departments collected by Campaign Zero, a Black Lives Matter-affiliated campaign to increase police transparency, only two contracts address the problem: They have startling ramifications for an officer accused of sexual misconduct, and happen to be in Louisiana, a state that’s only revoked six officer licenses in the last dozen years.
When unions like these negotiate contracts, it’s usually only the police in the room: an overwhelmingly male voting bloc making rules to keep its own installed and free of reprimand.
In Baton Rouge, the police department’s agreement with the city stipulates that any complaint that involves “sexual misconduct, sexual harassment, or domestic violence” be destroyed after five years unless there are similar complaints—a period of time Rushin says is generally on the longer end. (The city’s latest contract is still under negotiation, following pushback from the activist group Together Baton Rouge; the proposed 2018 agreement would have shortened that period of time, in some cases, to 18 months.) In accordance with the state of Louisiana’s officer bill of rights, an officer has the right to request instances of any violation, including domestic violence or “domestic dispute,” be deleted from his file.
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None of which should be a surprise: Police unions have thrown their political weight around elsewhere to ensure officers accused of sexual misconduct aren’t punished, even in the imperfect civilian system. In September, under threat of a new oversight board, both the Chicago and Illinois chapters of the Fraternal Order of Police invested heavily in lobbyists to soften the Law Enforcement Sexaul Assault Investigation Act, resulting in an amendment that would functionally gut the bill, removing the requirement for Chicago police accused of rape to be investigated by an outside arbitrator.
As Rushin points out, when unions like these negotiate contracts, it’s usually only the police in the room: an overwhelmingly male voting bloc making rules to keep its own installed and free of reprimand. City agencies offer such “employment protections” as these in lieu of pay raises, an odd bastardization of the labor movement’s goals. And when records are purged regularly, there is little chance of reform within the department, even if women did want to come forward—which they simply aren’t likely to, given the balance of risk and reward if you’re a person considering going to the police to report a policeman who assaulted you.
“Will this moment result in a larger number of cases against the PD?” Mahr asks. “If officers are selecting victims with respect to those that have ‘credibility’ issues, or if a woman was assaulted 8 years ago by the police?Probably not.”
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EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. - The Giants today added an experienced defensive tackle to their roster when they signed free agent Corbin Bryant, who played the previous four seasons with the Buffalo Bills.
Bryant joins a tackle group that includes All-Pro Damon Harrison, Jay Bromley, Robert Thomas, and second-round draft choice Dalvin Tomlinson.
Bryant, 6-4 and 300 pounds, has played in 56 regular-season games with 18 starts. His career totals include 84 tackles (41 solo), 2.5 sacks, two passes defensed, and one forced fumble.
In 2016, Bryant played in eight games with six starts at nose tackle for the Bills; he started each of the first five games. He totaled 11 tackles (five solo) before suffering a shoulder injury against New England on Oct. 20. Buffalo placed Bryant on injured reserve on Nov. 29.
Bryant, a former standout at Northwestern, entered the NFL as a rookie free agent with the Pittsburgh Steelers in 2011. He played in one game as a rookie and none in 2012 while going on and off the Steelers’ practice squad several times.
On Dec. 31, 2012, Bryant signed a reserve/future contract with the Bills. He played in 15 games with two starts in 2013 and in all 16 games without a start the following year (when he had 1.5 sacks). Bryant’s most productive season was in 2015, when he played in every game, started 10, and had a career-high 45 tackles (24 solo).
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REGINA–Canada's premiers are firmly behind Prime Minister Stephen Harper in his bid to counter protectionist trade policies being adopted in the U.S. In a rare show of unity, premiers of all political stripes yesterday vowed to help Harper as he fights the so-called Buy America provisions being applied by American state and local governments that prevent Canadian companies from bidding on projects funded by President Barack Obama's $787 billion (U.S.) stimulus package.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper, leader of the Conservative Party of Canada. ( TONY BOCK / TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO )
Harper is to meet with Obama on Sunday in Mexico, and with the premiers' endorsement in hand, he is expected to tell the president Canada is ready to move ahead in the effort to neutralize the Buy America problem. This will lay the groundwork, sources say, for International Trade Minister Stockwell Day to send a letter to U.S. Trade Representative Ronald Kirk next week indicating that Ottawa is ready to begin bilateral negotiations aimed at solving the issue. Premier Dalton McGuinty said it's essential the premiers give Harper a "strong hand" for the meeting with the U.S. president and Mexican President Felipe Calderon in Guadalajara, Mexico. "We cannot escape our interdependence. This is an era of globalization. We're in this together," McGuinty said at the annual Council of the Federation meeting.
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"The appeal that we have to make to our American cousins is one based on their enlightened self-interest," said the Ontario Liberal. Manitoba Premier Gary Doer, a New Democrat, strongly opposed calls from unions for retaliatory Buy Canada policies to protect Canadian jobs. "We have to back up our prime minister and I believe all premiers will," said Doer. "We should back Canada up by ensuring that it's clear that we have nothing to fear on procurement in provinces and municipalities and we want access to states and cities in the United States," he said. Quebec Liberal Premier Jean Charest criticized Obama for failing to live up to trade agreements designed to prevent discriminatory policies against Canadian firms.
"If they cannot on this issue come to an agreement with their major trading partner, their ally, their friend, their neighbour, then what does that say about the Americans' attitude worldwide?" said Charest. "We will speak forcefully and we will speak with great determination on this issue, but we will also do it having in mind that the Americans will have a test in front of them
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British Columbia Premier Gordon Campbell said the onus is on Canadian jurisdictions not to respond with similar trade sanctions. "We have to speak with one voice and we have to act. We can't say to Americans: `have no exceptions, make an exception for Canada,' make sure we have free open access to their markets. We still have work to do in Canada," said Campbell. Darrell Dexter, Nova Scotia's newly elected NDP premier, distanced himself from a crusade by the Canadian Labour Congress, Canadian Auto Workers, and other groups to attach Buy Canada conditions to domestic infrastructure funding. "We're looking at protecting Canadian jobs that are in manufacturing, that are in technology industries that need access to that marketplace in order to be successful," said Dexter. Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall said "working people, whether they're unionized or not, benefit" from freer trade in exporting nations like Canada. But the nationalist Council of Canadians recommended that "Canadian governments should increase and speed up funding for public infrastructure projects and attach `Buy Canadian' conditions to this funding." With files from Les Whittington
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Source: PA
From early on, Hütter had declared that rather than just play songs, Kraftwerk’s ambition was to perform Musikgemälde (musical paintings)
In November 1974, one of the most ground-breaking albums in contemporary music was released: Kraftwerk’s Autobahn.
The Düsseldorf quartet changed the course of popular music by discarding drums and guitars, along with all the other attributes of Anglo-American rock’n’roll. Clad in sober suits, they stood motionless onstage while they operated their electronic machinery. Their lyrics were mostly in German and delivered with the robotic voice of a vocoder. Some dismissed Kraftwerk as a Teutonic novelty act. Others realised that their machine music, in a literal sense, represented the sound of the future. Many of the band’s central concerns can now be seen as startlingly prophetic.
Kraftwerk’s electronic sound was so ahead of its time that the band did not even have a name for it; “techno pop” was one suggestion, “robot pop” another. Ralf Hütter, the artistic force behind the band alongside Florian Schneider, liked to describe their style as elektronische Volksmusik (electronic people’s music), ie, an electrified type of German folk music fit for the late 20th and 21st centuries. Given the country’s Nazi past, young Germans such as Hütter and Schneider sought a cultural identity that was not tainted by Fascism or American pop culture and looked towards a brighter future – one that would inevitably be dominated by technology.
Skip forward 40 years from Autobahn to today and Kraftwerk’s future music has proved to be revolutionary: “Synthetic electronic sounds/Industrial rhythms all around”, as they put it in Musique Non-Stop (1986), and that is indeed the case. Chart music from hip hop and R&B to manufactured pop is being produced on computers. Techno and house music have spawned a vibrant club culture, ranging from commercial super-clubs to experimental sub-genres. Just as Kraftwerk first claimed and demonstrated, the development of popular music is inseparably linked to technology. And even more so today, as both the production and the distribution of music have gone digital.
With a remarkable run of four pioneering concept albums from 1975 to 1981, Kraftwerk provided the blueprint for electronic music. But Hütter and Schneider, who liked to present themselves as robots, were only human after all. From the early 1980s, the rest of the musical world on both sides of the Atlantic caught up with the pioneers from North Rhine-Westphalia and their musical creativity stalled. Their secluded Kling Klang studio in the Düsseldorf red-light district needed a digital upgrade. And so did their back catalogue: Kraftwerk’s sound engineer Fritz Hilpert spent years faithfully transferring analogue tapes to digital equipment while Hütter and Schneider were cycling along the Rhine valleys. Meanwhile, Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flür left the band, frustrated about the creative dead end. The musical man-machine had broken down. Kraftwerk, to all intents and purposes, seemed finished by the late 1980s.
Yet, although it lasted some 15 years, this technical glitch proved to be temporary. Kraftwerk’s artistic hibernation ended in 2003 when Tour de France Soundtracks was released, their first album of original material since 1986. In Germany, it shot straight to number one. A promotional world tour resulted in the live double-album Minimum-Maximum (2005), while the centrepiece of Kraftwerk’s astonishing comeback came in 2009: a lavish box set containing all eight albums from Autobahn to Tour de France Soundtracks titled Der Katalog (The Catalogue).
This groundbreaking body of music was presented in improved sound quality thanks to careful digital remastering, while the cover artwork received a minimalist design makeover. Der Katalog served as a reminder of Kraftwerk’s immense musical achievements, and it was widely acknowledged as such. However, it also coincided with another crucial event in the history of the band as Schneider quit his partnership with Hütter – acrimoniously, by all accounts – soon after its release. Once again, Kraftwerk seemed finished.
Despite looking like an epilogue, however, Der Katalog heralded a decisive phase in the artistic evolution of the band. Under the sole leadership of Hütter, it now focused on the visual side with the aim of transforming the band into what Richard Wagner called a Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art), fusing music, performance and visuals. From early on, Hütter had declared that rather than just play songs, their ambition was to perform Musikgemälde (musical paintings) through the marriage of music and projections onstage.
Working with his long-time collaborator, the artist Emil Schult, he revised and enhanced these video projections. This update stressed the retro-futurist concept that had characterised the band’s identity from the beginning: a hybrid of nostalgic and ultra-modern imagery that created a disjointed sense of time. In recognition of the manifold influences of modern and contemporary art, the new visuals were exhibited for the first time in 2011 as stand-alone works of art in galleries.
Appropriately, the band moved from performing in music venues to retrospectives that showcased their albums, “exhibiting” their Musikgemälde in global art institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Tate Modern in London. The equipment used to create a live mix onstage represents the latest in surround sound technology. Furthermore, since 2011 Kraftwerk have employed 3D technology to create amazing visual effects. Their current performances are striking vindications of their efforts to deliver a 21st-century update of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk.
The thematic core of Kraftwerk’s artistic project – which draws on sources such as German Expressionist cinema, (Post) Modern architecture, Russian Constructivism, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s experimental music and the Bauhaus – is the notion of the man-machine. The conceptual climax of Kraftwerk concerts is the stage appearance of their mechanical doppelgängers performing the signature song The Robots from the album The Man-Machine (1978). Although they incorporate a large element of irony into their work, Kraftwerk’s oeuvre explores the various interactions between humans and machines as a key feature of modernity. For Hütter and Schneider, there was never any doubt that technology would revolutionise our lives.
With hindsight, it is astonishing how prophetic their 1970s concept albums were in anticipating a future that has become our present. This prophetic quality is even more impressive given that it was delivered through songs that did not so much predict as actually change the musical future. Take the album Computer World. Its cold electronic beats provided the blueprint for the techno music that originated in Detroit. But when the album was released in May 1981, IBM hadn’t yet released the “personal computer” that would revolutionise our everyday lives. What the track Home Computer predicted became reality when the BBC Micro was released later that year: “I programme my home computer/Beam myself into the future.” While Computer Love envisaged the use of digital machines for all sorts of erotic purposes, the title track anticipated the use of technology for surveillance purposes by government agencies.
Kraftwerk’s visionary qualities are not restricted to the realm of cyberspace and computers. Their only UK number one single, The Model (1978), pointed to the rise of celebrity culture, while the Radio-Activity album (1975) raised ecological concerns that were mirrored in German society five years later when the Green Party was founded on an anti-nuclear energy agenda.
In the light of events such as the NSA scandal and the Fukushima disaster, Kraftwerk’s art retains its relevance. The band played Radio-Activity at a recent concert in Tokyo with new lyrics sung in Japanese that referenced Fukushima. Contrary to common perceptions, Kraftwerk never idealised technology. On the contrary, their work was always pervaded by an awareness of technology’s ambivalent nature and potential for creating disaster. It continues to provide a fitting soundtrack to a future that poses more challenges to mankind than technology may be able to overcome.
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Many Indians believe in karma, believing that as you sow you will reap. When Devyani Khobragade was arrested by the US law enforcement authorities on serious charges of visa fraud, the news of her being an allottee in the infamous Adarsh scam came out fairly instantly.
Adarsh was a co-operative housing society formed supposedly for Kargil war widows and Indian war veterans, but considering it stood on some of Mumbai's most expensive real estate, politicians and bureaucrats made a beeline to grab flats by making a mockery of the law.
When many read about Devyani and Adarsh, and given middle-class India's utter frustration with India's endemic corruption, many gleefully said the US arrest was payback time and karma had worked.
Whether karma works or not, things have just gotten worse for Devyani and new revelations may mean that the Indian government's vociferous defence of Devyani and actively fanning flames to bring things to a boil may actually be something that may come back to burn India.
First up, while earlier Devyani's involvement in the Adarsh scam was just a serious allegation, a respected commission set up to investigate Adarsh has now said in its detailed 670-page report that Devyani furnished false information to own a flat in the Adarsh Co-operative housing society. She had falsely claimed that she did not own a flat anywhere else at the time of her application for Adarsh membership, the commission has said, according to The Indian Express.
"Devyani told the Commission that she owned the Jogeshwari flat only in 2005. This statement is false since the 2004 application MEM-392-A mentions her to be a member of the society (Meera), which she said she would resign from when she gets the Adarsh allotment," the report says, according to the newspaper. Worse, she also sold her earlier government-allocated flat at Jogeshwari for Rs 1.9 crore and possibly at a fat profit.
To be exact, the Adarsh Commission report was rejected by the Maharashtra cabinet considering it also raised serious questions on the murky doings of past Maharashtra Chief Ministers, one of whom is India's current home minister Sushil Kumar Shinde.
But despite the official rejection, even the most shameless from India's political class would believe that the report is a lie and deserves to be a rejected. So much so that despite members of the Opposition being trapped in the Adarsh net, the BJP has sensed a perfect opportunity put the Congress on the mat and is planning to appeal to the courts to overturn Maharashtra Governor K Sankaranarayanan's refusal to allow the CBI to prosecute former Maharashtra CM Ashok Chavan despite the CBI saying it had proof.
On Sunday, the Times of India carried another story that brought another skeleton tumbling out. India's Supreme Court had noted that the rules for allotment of foreign language to Indian Foreign Service officers on the basis of their rank in the select list was changed only for Devyani's batch in 1999 to ensure she got her chosen language.
According to the ToI, the Supreme Court noted this in a judgment while reinstating a dismissed IFS officer Mahaveer V Singhvi in Devyani's batch, and imposing a fine of Rs 25,000 on the Union government for wrongfully terminating his services. The article quotes the SC bench of then Justices Altamas Kabir, J M Panchal and Cyriac Joseph as saying, "The Union government and ministry of external affairs have not been able to satisfactorily explain why the rules/norms for allotment of languages were departed from only for the year 1999 so that the Singhvi was denied his right of option for German and such choice was given to Khobragade who was at two stages below Singhvi in the gradation list...The mode of allotment was amended for the 1999 Batch in such a calculated fashion that Ms Khobragade, who was at Serial No.7, was given her choice of German over and above Singhvi, who was graded at two stages above her."
Singhvi's lawyer Jayant Bhushan has alleged that the unwarranted change in rules for which the Union government received a slap on the wrist from the Supreme Court was done thanks of Devyani's father Uttam Khobragade's IAS and political connections.
While some commentators have said that Adarsh, Devyani's Indian assets and Devyani's US arrest are two separate matters, another news story today may inadvertently pull the rug from underneath the Devyani's feet. Devyani's father Uttam Khobragade has been quoted as saying that the salary of the maid in question, Sangeeta Richard was more than his daughter's take home salary, and many have seen that as reason enough for Devyani to possibly lie on the US visa form out of sheer practical necessity.
However, the Times of India also revealed that Devyani's husband Aakash Singh Rathore has deep roots in the US, is a US citizen and a Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has been teaching for the past year and may have business interests in his family-owned winery in Michigan.
Considering that Devyani's maid was hired in the first place to care for her children and her father and others in government have questioned how she could afford to pay US wages to her maid while earning an Indian government salary, there now rises the critical question of whether the income and citizenship of Devyani's husband and the father of her children is irrelevant to the case.
Surely Preet Bharara, the US Attorney prosecuting Devyani and who has a near 100 percent record of success will not ignore these issues when the case comes up in court. He may also use Devyani's significant assets in India which shows she has a net worth of several crores and possibly many more.
The Adarsh Commission report may also come in handy since the Commission has observed that Devyani's "Income Tax (return) discloses that she is a well-to-do person since she owns agricultural land, flats in Aurangabad, Pune, Delhi, Thane and investments of large amounts."
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0 D.A. drops charge against woman who accused officer of excessive force
HICKORY, N.C. - A Lincolnton woman's family is demanding answers after she says a former Hickory police officer slammed her to the ground busting her lip and even breaking her teeth.
Last month, Robert George was fired after he indicted on felony assault charges.
Prosecutors dropped one of the original charges filed against Chelsea Doolittle during the November arrest.
As she walked to the front of the courtroom, it was difficult to see any of the injuries Doolittle received the night of her arrest in Hickory last November.
"It is a reaction you can't describe. You're crying mad but you got to take her to get her some help," said her father, Brian Doolittle.
Prosecutors said the case centers on what happened in a parking lot.
Doolittle said George didn't like the way she parked her car.
He asked for her registration and when she couldn't find it, he asked to search her car.
Her attorney said when she asked if he had a search warrant, he got upset, pulled her out of the car and threw her to the ground.
A camera at the Police Department recorded part of the arrest that night. Chelsea Doolittle and her attorney want to see that video.
The city of Hickory filed a motion to keep it out of their hands.
"Our position is that they are protected and cannot be released,” said city attorney Arnita Dula.
Hickory police fired George in January and last month a grand jury indicted him on assault charges.
Brian Doolittle is not only Chelsea's father but also a police officer in Cherryville.
"To me, he went overboard. He went way overboard. I don't know what in the world with her being handcuffed he would have to hit or throw or whatever he did,” he said.
TheDistrict Attorney’s Office dismissed the resisting arrest charge George filed that night against Doolittle.
She still faces two other misdemeanor charges filed by another officer that same night.
Her attorney said he won't stop fighting to get the video.
"The video is crucial to defending her because the video shows … There is nothing more objective then what happens in a criminal case then a video,” said attorney Brad Smith.
A judge from Mecklenburg County will hear the case later this month.
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Over 30 species of cetaceans – or whales and dolphins – have been observed swimming in mixed groups, but because most of such observations are brief and occur only rarely, the majority of these reports are anecdotal and not robustly studied. One such grouping, however, bucks this trend. Off the Bahamas, there are two species of dolphin, the bottlenose and the spotted, that regularly hang out together.
Researchers have been studying the associations of these dolphins and estimate that the two species spend about 15% of their time mixing with each other. This is not an insignificant amount of time, with the animals observed socializing, playing, and fighting with members of the opposite species. This level of interaction between the two species of cetacean is unheard of.
“They have quite a complex relationship,” explained Denise Herzing, from the Wild Dolphin Project, who coauthored a study looking into the association patterns of the species, published in Marine Mammal Science. “Lots of times they cooperate, other times they fight, and we’re not sure what they’re fighting about.” The Wild Dolphin Project has been studying the dolphins in the Bahamas for over 30 years.
It’s unlikely to be about food and could be about territory, but, as Herzing told IFLScience, “we suspect part of the battle is to keep cross-species mating from happening.” They think that the bottlenose dolphins are probably mating with the female spotted dolphins, using their larger size to dominate the male “spotteds.” But why would the bottlenose dolphins want to mate with females from a different species?
“Well, dolphins are very sexual in general,” says Herzing, but it could simply be just because they can. Because it turns out that the male bottlenoses don’t only limit themselves to the females. “They also will dominate the ‘spotteds’ by copulating and mounting with the males, so we have a dominance display between the species with the bottlenose going after the male spotted dolphins.”
In order to counter the larger bottlenose dolphins, the spotteds have their own strategy. The males have synchronization abilities, and are able to faultlessly synchronize their behavior as small organized, coordinated and threatening groups. But that’s what it takes to stop the bottlenose dolphins from having complete dominance.
“But at the same time they know each other, probably as individuals to a certain extent, and can help each other,” explained Herzing. “We have pregnant bottlenose and pregnant spotted hanging out together sometimes, we have interspecies babysitting, which is really interesting. So they’re like neighbors who run into each other occasionally and have figured out a way to live compatibly with each other.”
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A few weeks ago, Comedy Central announced that it had a new program in development called “JC” that is about Jesus Christ who moves to New York to “escape his father’s enormous shadow.”
In response, a collection of Religious Right leaders have banded together to form Citizens Against Religious Bigotry and urge advertisers not to support the program:
Citizens Against Religious Bigotry will unveil a campaign Thursday to protest Comedy Central’s new animated show about Jesus Christ called “JC.” The coalition of Jewish and Christian leaders are urging advertisers to boycott the show, based on Comedy Central programs, such as South Park, which have mocked or disparaged Christ and other religious leaders. “After we reveal the vile and offensive nature of Comedy Central’s previous characterizations of Jesus Christ and God the Father, we expect these advertisers to agree wholeheartedly to end their advertising on Comedy Central and discontinue their support for unabashed, anti-Christian discrimination,” said Brent Bozell, president of Media Research Center and founding member of Citizens Against Religious Bigotry. Bowell said his group will publicize advertisers who agree to boycott the Comedy Central show and those who refuse. Bozell will be joined at a Thursday press conference to protest the show by Tony Perkins, Family Research Council president; Michael Medved, syndicated talk radio host; Bill Donohue, Catholic League president; Tim Winter, Parents Television Council president; and Rabbi Daniel Lapin, The American Alliance of Jews and Christians president.
The group is sending a letter to potential advertisers, giving them two weeks to report on whether they will agree to boycott the program, warning that failure to respond will mean they support religious bigotry:
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NEW BOOK ON LIFE OF RODDY PIPER, NEW MEXICAN WRESTLING THEMED SHOW TO DEBUT, LADY BLOSSOM AND MORE
Random House is publishing "Rowdy - The Roddy Piper Story" this October. The book is being written by Piper's son Colt and his daughter Ariel. I'll have more on this ASAP.
Former WCW star Lady Blossom, Jeannie Clarke, is releasing a book soon.
The Create-A-Pro Wrestling Academy announced the following....Create A Pro Wrestling Open Houses in NY & NJ!
Ever want to become a pro wrestler?! Here's your chance. Create A Pro Wrestling Academy is hosting 2 OPEN HOUSES this week in New York & New Jersey. We're inviting all potential new students to come down & observe a live wrestling practice. CAP New York is owned & operated by Brian Myers (former WWE Tag Team Champion Curt Hawkins) & CAP New Jersey is owned & operated by Pat Buck (OVW/FCW alumni & owner of WRESTLEPRO). Start making your dream a reality! Visit www.createprowrestling.com.
A new Mexican wrestling theatrical show "Superkick", put together by Lucha Libre USA head Steven Ship and Alex Abrahantes is debuting on 4/16 in Asbury, NJ. Here are the complete details:
NEW YORK, NY. - April 5, 2016 – SuperKick, the Mexican-Style Pro Wrestling Show, is coming to Asbury Park, NJ. When it debuts at the House of Independents on April 16, the fun and irreverent theatrical production promises to address some of the age-old questions wrestling fans have forever been asking: Is wrestling a legit sport? Why do Mexican wrestlers always wear masks?
Different than wrestling companies like WWE or TNA Wrestling who continually produce the same old formula for their wrestling extravaganzas, SuperKick, with its emphasis on Mexican-style pro-wrestling, aka Lucha Libre, is an actual theatrical production aimed at demystifying the genre.
Lucha Libre has been a tradition in Mexico for over 75 years and is the second largest live sport in the country after soccer. It is entertainment that pits good against evil, while storylines are told inside of the ring. Originally, Mexican wrestlers donned masks to hide their identities because they had day jobs as bankers or doctors. The professionals were sidelining as pro wrestlers. The masks of course, were also meant to evoke fear in their opponents. Unlike typical US Pro Wrestling, Mexican wrestlers, aka Luchadores, come in all shapes, sizes and genders, donning capes and masks to add an extra element of showmanship. The cast of characters range from wrestlers who are under 5 feet tall to cross-dressers, high flyers and heavyweights, while the in-ring action is more acrobatic and sensational than the traditional U.S wrestling featured on television.
SuperKick Superstars who will be performing at the House of Independents next month include ”The Spanish Fly” Juan Casanova, who is known for romancing his audiences both inside and outside the ring. “Classico” El Dorado, a Luchadore as famous for eating over 50 tacos in one sitting as for his willingness to take on any challenger, both at the Taqueira and in the wrestling ring, will also be featured in the production.
The central story of SuperKick focuses on a third generation promoter who is breaking away from his father's very successful wrestling company to create a new wrestling league called SuperKick, based on Lucha Libre. The show’s storyline has plot twists and turns as any play would, while featuring lots of in-ring, high-flying wrestling action. Television interviews that would normally take place backstage will be performed on stage in front of the live audience. This is another unique element that differentiates this show.
SuperKick is the brainchild of Lucha Libre USA: Masked Warriors creators and producers, Steven Ship and Alex Abrahantes. This team has produced some of the largest arena tours and TV shows in the Pro Wrestling genre. The SuperKick show promises to deliver a totally unique experience by blending the best of Lucha Libre with comedy and theatrics, while adding a healthy dose of audience participation.
“SuperKick is unlike any other Lucha Libre or Pro Wrestling show,” says Abrahantes. “This is a theatrical production where the audience is very much a part of the show. There has never been a Pro Wrestling or Lucha Libre show that encourages the audience to participate and interact in the performance as this one does. With elements of music, comedy and breathtaking in-ring performances, SuperKick is a show that anyone, regardless of whether they're a fan of wrestling or not, will enjoy.”
Co-Producer Steven Ship feels that this format of entertainment is perfect for the Millennial audience. “It’s one of those shows that you must see,” says Ship. “Action will take place onstage, in the ring, and virtually around the entire venue, right in there with the audience. You never know if the person next to you might be a wrestler or if the action will end up taking place right in front of you,” continues Ship. The audience is encouraged to participate with the in-ring antics and to attend the production wearing their own wrestlers' masks, wigs, or anything they want to best express their inner Lucha warrior.”
Ticket prices range from $30 for General Admission to $50 for VIP ringside seats, which also include an autograph session at the end of the show. Doors open at 7PM. The show begins at 8PM.
For more details, visit www.SuperKickIt.com.
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Every book reflects the beliefs of its author, at least indirectly. But some books are the very apotheosis of their authors' philosophies, often containing long sections devoted to ethical or moral analysis. Here's what it looks like when your favorite authors get philosophical.
Monomania is a trait shared by science fiction authors and science fiction fans. One group writes books about their obsessions, and the other makes those books into their obsessions. Over time, the latter can get quite a good picture of the philosophy of the former. These aren't always the fan favorite books, nor the most popular ones by a given author. Instead, they are a sort of symbolic culmination of all the ideas that float around inside the authors' heads. Some books just seem to be the embodiment of different author's philosophies.
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The Political Philosophers
Science fiction works are often set against a backdrop of politics, but not everyone makes those politics the central point of their novels. These authors are obsessed with what makes society tick, rather than what makes people tick.
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One of the best books to demonstrate this is Railsea, by China Miéville. Railsea is neither his best book nor his most popular book, but the twist at the end perfectly explains what many of Miéville's books are about. The book is an homage to Moby Dick, set on a dust sea criss-crossed by rails which trains use to hunt giant moles. Why the rails are there, and how they are maintained, is the subject of much speculation - most of which is religious in nature. When one train heads to the end of the rails, they battle mechanical "angels," and discover a moldering city of the gods. There, the descendants of the great engineers who built the rails wait, with bills that they expect to be paid with interest. Miéville has been open both about his atheism and his socialism, and while these come out in most of his books, no other book so suddenly represents both ideas. One of the characters literally turns to the capitalist gods and says, "We owe you nothing."
Railsea is a young adult book, and, while it's not an attempt at propaganda, it has the vehemence of youthful idealism. Its whole purpose, after a long, strange journey, is to let kids know that no matter how weird and seemingly anarchic their adventures are, there are social and economic forces underpinning everything, and those forces have a bill handy.
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Another book falls into this category, far more than some people realize is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K Dick was a mind-bogglingly prolific author, and this was his most famous work, but those who see Blade Runner only get part of the politics. Androids isn't just about humans and androids and quiet introspection about the nature of consciousness. Deckard, in the book, doesn't just have a electric femme fatale. He has an electric pet - a sheep. He knows its a machine, but can't bring himself to not care for it. He still wants a real animal to love. All humans do. With resources so scarce, having, and loving, a real pet is an aspiration and a status symbol. The question of real versus artificial isn't just something that's to be pondered by people deep into the night, it's a commodity and a part of society.
Two political books that I think duel (quietly) with each other are George Orwell's book, 1984, and Ursula K Le Guin's book, The Dispossessed. Both are tough reads by authors that take a square look at human nature and at politics, and believe that the latter arises, inescapably, from the follies of the former. They both seem to come to two semi-conflicting points. Although 1984 makes us watch the slow breakdown of a man's mind under the constraints of a totalitarian regime, it ends with an epilogue that makes it look like we've been reading a historical document of a time long past. The regime has ended. Orwell's uber-depressing political book ends with a wink - humans inevitably break down the chains that they make for themselves. It represents his hopes, as well as his fears.
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The Dispossessed, on the other hand, takes a look at a anarchic society. Colonists go to a barren moon vowing to surrender possessions and rules, and even deliberately re-shape their speech, so that people will understand that they have no right to oppress other people. They will be totally free. Inevitably, power structures and methods of dealing with those who oppose those power structures, creep into this egalitarian society. Le Guin seems sure, in this and other writing, that we will always rebuild the chains that we have to escape.
The Philosophy of Style
While few authors leave politics completely out of their books, for many, the reality of their world isn't so much one of politics as it is one of experience. And they communicate that experience through style. That style conveys the feeling with which we are meant to walk away from the page, still buzzing. The most famous of these is probably William Gibson, who used Neuromancer to create the future aesthetic he wanted. He wasn't just an author, he was the leader of the charge of the cyberpunks, and his novel perfectly reflected that. Kurt Vonnegut, with Slaughterhouse Five, did the same. The novel might be considered political, but its cynicism and exploded narrative sidestep political treatise and turn it towards counterculture. In that way, it's a nearly literal representation of its author. Vonnegut and the protagonist both experienced the bombing of Dresden, and then the protagonist experiences literally the counterculture philosophy that Vonnegut turned to figuratively.
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Like Vonnegut, Octavia Butler deals in areas that can be viewed as political, but that she tries to get readers to experience. This is uncomfortably evident in her book, Kindred, about a modern African-American woman who is transported, seemingly at random, back to a plantation in the American south in 1815. Butler said, of the book, "I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people." Like Vonnegut and Gibson, her books are written in such a way to communicate the experience of a science fictional situation. Her goal was not to see slavery as a set of laws, but as a horror that could be unleashed on the body, the mind, and the heart. In order to understand, the reader has to experience it with the characters. The effects of different situations on the body, mind, and heart, run through many of her books, and although Kindred may be her most famous, the book that embodied her stylistic philosophy most is, Lilith's Brood. The Earth is destroyed ecologically, and physically repugnant yet strangely seductive aliens want to have sex with humans to rebuild a hybrid population. That could be the set-up for something cheap, but Butler's style makes it real, with all the immediate physical and emotional impact such a situation would have. The book represents her more than her more-famous work by being the book that allows her to share a body, and a world, with the reader.
The Author's Personal Philosophy
And lastly, some people just decide to live their life and the books in unison. The philosophies that the books represent aren't political or aesthetic, but representations of the way the authors want to live their lives. These are books that come closest to enthusiasms, loves, and quirks of the authors that write them.
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Although Ray Bradbury is best known for Fahrenheit 451, I think the book that carries the largest quotient of Bradbury's personal philosophy is The Martian Chronicles. This is a guy who said, "I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, side shows, or gorillas. When that happens I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room." The collection of stories, some of the haunting science fiction tales, some of them stories of alien miracles, and some of them Poe-like tales of horror, contain as much relish as can be packed into a book. You can't tell me that Bradbury didn't spend at least one day pacing back and forth in his room muttering, "For the love of God, Montresor." These are stories that came from pure love.
Madeleine L'Engle's most famous book is A Wrinkle In Time, but although it deserves its reputation and its laurels, the book that packs as much L'Engle as it is possible to get between two covers is A Ring of Endless Light.
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L'Engle's books were coming-of-age books back when coming-of-age didn't mean marrying a vampire or living in a dystopia, but opening yourself up to everything life had to offer. L'Engle opened up her heroes to everything all at once. Her books were filled to the brim with plots and themes, all about finding one's place in the world. A religious person in a genre not particular given to the type, L'Engle was both passionate and wholesome in her writing - and famously adopted a 'story as truth' philosophy when people asked her about the difference between fiction and memoirs. She liked her life crammed full of stuff, and her stories tended to get her heroes to a place where their lives are crammed full of stuff, too. A Ring of Endless Light included family fighting and forgiveness, three different love interests, an uncomfortable awareness of death, awakening sexuality, and technology that let the heroine communicate telepathically with dolphins. And it was only halfway through a series.
Possibly the most obscure book on this list is Douglas Adams' Last Chance to See. For the most part, Adams was a fiction writer. This book, however, was a series of nonfiction stories about Adams going around the world for a year with a zoologist, and checking out different critically-endangered species. Considering the strongly connected themes in Adams' other work (it's tragically ironic that so many of his books deal with a sort of cursed immortality when Adams himself died so far before his time), what makes this book so much him?
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Adams himself listed it as his favorite, but I think the real clue as to why this represents him is in an answer he gave to an interviewer who asked him about the long gaps between his novels. He said that he had become wary of writing novels that contained jokes about scientists. He'd been listening to a tedious comic talking about how stupid scientists were, for some specious reason, and had a horror that his absurdist books might provoke the same feeling. That they would do such a thing is doubtful, as his enthusiasm for all the sciences shows in all his novels, but whenever he wrote about technology nerds, science breakthroughs, or gifted researchers, there was a wistfulness to the writing that showed through.
Last Chance to See was a book in which he had the bizarre adventures he wrote about in fiction - like trying to buy a condom as an improvised microphone cover in rural China, and after much miming to a shopkeeper, receiving birth control pills. But it also had him working with actual scientists, doing the kind of conservation work he was passionate about. His admiration for the scientists' work and their eccentricities shows through on every page. It's basically a book in which a fanboy is, for one year, given the keys to the kingdom. Although it will never be his most famous book, or even his best, its clearly the one that allowed him to revel in his own personal ideas of what life in general, and his life in particular, should be.
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Of the four manufacturers that will be vying for outright victory at La Sarthe in June, Toyota is the only one with two, instead of three, cars entered.
But Davidson insists that this is the correct approach for the Japanese auto giant to take, as the financial costs of an extra car would compromise the competitiveness of the Toyota TS040 Hybrid.
“You could be running three cars, but none of them being at the level needed to win because of the cost implications," the 35-year-old explained to Motorsport.com.
“It adds up quickly running an extra car – the cost of engines, super-capacitors, personnel, logistics, and manufacture – and you’d need two or three extra chassis, not just one.
“Perhaps we would have won last year with an extra car, but that’s hypothetical as there’d have been no guarantee we’d have been quick enough to be in a position to fight for the win running with three cars.”
Less pressure
Davidson added that, on a personal level, the pressure to win at Le Mans is lesser having secured the WEC crown last season alongside team-mate Sebastien Buemi.
“I’m over trying to win it, because I’ve realised that no matter how much you try, sometimes it just doesn’t go your way,” he said.
“This year, I’m approaching it as just another race, much as I would like to win it – putting extra pressure on yourself isn’t worth it, because it’s just such a fickle race.”
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Medical Electronics, Present and Future
Medical Electronics: Present & Future Technology
Death is the ultimate end of the living being. No person in this world can stay alive forever. All accept this ultimate truth. However, the need of the hour is to make the life worth living. It is necessary that while you are alive, you stay healthy and fit. In the old age, people used to have lesser medication and lots of diseases. They would end up suffering from the diseases and ultimately dying a horrible death. Most of the people used to treat their diseases with home remedies that were obviously not much effective. Only some few people would get lucky and get fit and healthy as ever with the help of homemade or natural remedies.
The past was not so bright:
As the time has passed and the human being got better with the technologies, various electronic devices have been introduced to the world of medicine. Where it was almost impossible to treat even a small disease like herpes, now we have found cures of the biggest and most evil diseases like cancer and hepatitis. The latest medical electronics have come up with lots of benefits and advantages. They, obviously, are high in cost and take a major toll on the pocket of the patient yet at the same time they guarantee the future good health of the enduring person. The cost of the health care techniques is definitely higher than what it was before. At the same time, the treatments make sure that the suffering person gets a better and healthy life style.
The present is shining:
The medical electronics have no doubt come a long way. Initially, the medical electronics were always huge and intangible. They were so large that moving them from one place to another was almost impossible. The huge size of the medical electronics also made it difficult for the doctors to use them. Along with that, the major concern was the low rate of precision. One could never get sure about the correctness of the method used to cure a particular disease. This would also make a way to lots of deaths. Initially, whenever a medical electronic is used, the rate of deaths is high.
Advancement of technologies:
People are now educated enough to come up with devices that enhance the level of precision and accuracy. This however, does not come easily. Years of research are required and the researches come with extreme hard work to come up with one new mechanism. The amount of money that is required in each project is extremely high. Most of the countries have allocated a prominent amount of portion to the health sector and the research and development activities. In order to have a proficient health care system for people, one needs to have a huge amount of money.
The present conditions:
Most of the countries have started giving priority to the medical health care of their citizens. Japan is the leading country in this regard. It has allocated a huge amount of money to the information technology and has linked it with the health care.
Innovation is necessary in ever field of life. However, in the field of medicine, it can turn out to be revolutionary. If information technology and health care services continue to work together, they can help each other and the nations by bringing great advancements in the field of medicine. Many technologies have proved to be life changing for people.
3D bioprinting
3D bioprinting is something that has brought a great amount of revolution in the medical perspective. This technology comes up with something that could never be imagined in past. The bioprinting is basically the process through which the tissues of a human body can be literally printed. Tissues can be printed and in the similar manner, complete organs can be brought into the existence. If a person has a ruptured organ, that can be rebuilt with the help of 3D printing. One does not need to get organs from a different body as the tissues from his own body can make new organs.
Robotics
One of the most advanced medical techniques that are quite successful as well is Robotics. This technology has come up with a ray of hope for the people who are paralyzed. Most of the people who were paralyzed for many years and had almost forgotten how to walk could finally walk with the help of this technique. They do not need to sit on the wheelchairs anymore as the medical science has come up with the perfect solutions for them. It includes the EP system that is also known as enhanced product system.
Electrocardiograph
Electrocardiograph is one of the most revolutionary medical electronics invented in the history of the medical science. This system has not been used that vigorously until now but it comes with a promise of great futures and holds some amazing future prospects. It is basically a device that gauges most of the functional articulations of a human body. It measure the pace maker pulse along with detecting the leads off. It can also protect the defibrillation that might occur in a patient’s body. There are extreme high hopes from this device in terms of the future.
Advanced interaction technologies
When a patient meets his doctor, a lot of time is wasted when the doctor examines the paper as well as the electronic record of the patient. This might cause lots of wastage of time if the doctor has many patients to meet. The vitals of the patient can now be checked electrically. The past record of the data as well as the past communication can all be checked automatically. It saves a lot of time. These interaction technologies are now becoming popular in the world of medicine. This advanced system uses the Bluetooth technology. It utilizes the Bluetooth protocols. These protocols are low in the energy requirements. It makes the whole system even more competent and proficient. Batteries that are small in size can also be used in this system.
The future is dazzling
The advancement in the field of medicine has come up with an enhanced level of satisfaction of the patients. Not only for the patients, are these newly invented medical electronics also a ray of hope for doctors. The future of the field of medical science is indeed bright.
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On the one hand, I love boats. There are few things more soothing to me than being surrounded by open water; unplugged from the world and soothed by the sounds of crashing waves. On the other hand, I completely understand other peoples’ apprehension to sailing. It’s a rough business and it’s even rougher for Dick Greyson, who’s found himself trapped on a submarine filled with some of the most dangerous villains in the DC Universe! Will he be able to escape to shore with his life?
Check out the Comics Beat’s exclusive preview of Nightwing #24 after the jump!
Writer: Tim Seeley Penciller: Miguel Mendonca Inker: Diana Conesa Colorist: Chris Sotomayor Letterer: Carlos M. Mangual “BLOCKBUSTER” part three! Nightwing is trapped on a submarine, and in order to escape he must defeat the most lethal villains in the DCU, led by Tiger Shark! And if he can’t escape, Blockbuster will get what he wants: all of his criminal competition at the bottom of the sea, along with Nightwing!
Alex is the Managing Editor of the Comics Beat. He is also a freelance comics editor with previous credits at Papercutz. He is your go-to fella for creator interviews, conversations about comic book structure, and general DC Comics nerding. Currently geeking out over movies, too.
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The possible spread of a disease impacting finches and other birds in Atlantic Canada has wildlife experts asking people to take down their bird feeders.
Known as trichomonosis, the Canadian Wildlife Health Cooperative (CWHC) says in a blog post that recent reports of sick and dying birds could mean possible outbreaks of the disease.
The infection is a result of a parasite that infects the upper digestive tract of birds, as well as other organs including the lungs. It does not pose a risk to humans or other animals.
David Currie, president of the Nova Scotia Bird Society, says a number of birds — particularly goldfinches and purple finches — are suffering from trichomonosis and not just in this province.
READ MORE: Ducks and waterfowl are starving to death due to frigid temperatures
“This particular disease is fatal to birds and is very contagious,” Currie said. “So it’s contracted by birds that are brought together and congregate at feeders in particular or bird baths.”
The disease is spread through food or water contaminated by saliva, regurgitated food or even bird droppings. Feeders and baths can also be potential sites, the CWHC says.
He said sick birds can appear to be motionless on the ground or show difficulty getting around. They can have a “puffed out” appearance, which is something birds commonly do during the winter but not summer. The feathers could also look matted and its eyes could appear closed.
Reports have come in about birds in Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick, Currie said. He said it’s widespread and he’s never seen an outbreak of “this magnitude” in 38 years of birding.
He said they’ve had reports of cases year to year but not to this extent and believes it’s exacerbated due to the amount of summer bird feeding.
Feeding is typically done during fall and the winter to supplement food for the birds and during the summer there is plenty of food.
‘Could barely make a sound’
In Sydney, N.S., one such finch infected with the parasite was found as Tyler Day’s girlfriend Kelly Willar was checking their bird feeders on Monday evening, when a finch jumped out of the tall grass.
“It started following her and trying to like chirp at her but could barely make a sound,” he said in a phone interview.
The bird then started following Day around until they were able to get the finch in a box to take to the animal hospital.
Day took video of the bird and posted it on a Facebook group asking what to do to help the bird and he was advised about the parasite and to take his bird feeders down. He was also told to call Hope for Wildlife, an animal rehabilitation centre in Nova Scotia.
He said he was informed the bird did die the next day, but the rehab centre still collected the finch.
Prior to Monday, Day had never heard of the parasite and had never had an incident like this happen before to the between 50 to 70 gold and purple finches that make their homes on his property.
In the video provided to Global News by Day, little noise can be heard coming from the finch.
“It’s like they’re trying to breathe but their esophagus expands, so they’re short of breath,” Day said.
To limit the amount of infection, it’s advised people should remove their bird feeders and cover bird baths for the summer.
If someone finds a sick bird, it will likely die, he said. The best thing to do is find a safe place for the bird “to die on its own” and bury it, using gloves, if they want.
Currie added people should not bring the bird inside their homes to avoid passing it to any pet birds they may have.
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Nine months after announcing the Overwatch League (OWL), Blizzard has revealed the first seven franchise owners and their teams' cities.
The current list of teams features seven franchise owners, but according to OWL commissioner Nate Nanzer, Activision Blizzard is currently negotiating with more investors to expand the league before the beginning of the first season.
"These are just the first seven teams that we've finalized deals with and are ready to announce," Nanzer told theScore esports. "Ever since the announcement of the league back at BlizzCon, we've been having conversations with potential owners all over the world. From endemic esports, traditional sports, tech and media entrepreneurs, really the whole gamut. And this represents the first seven teams that we're ready to announce. We're in active conversation with additional potential owners around the world, including Europe, which is not part of this announcement, and other regions. We hope to have more announcements about additional teams joining before the start of the first season."
There are only two traditional sports executives associated with the OWL right now. Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, will own the Boston team, and Jeff Wilpon, COO of the New York Mets, will own the New York City team. Wilpon is also the co-founder of Sterling VC, and the venture capital fund will be part of the operating group, not the Mets. Similarly, the Robert Kraft Group will operate the Boston Overwatch team, not the Patriots.
Related: Overwatch League Commissioner Nate Nanzer on teams dropping out of Overwatch, picking cities and player scouting
Three endemic esport teams will also participate in the OWL's first season. Noah Whinston, the CEO of Immortals, will own the Los Angeles spot, Ben Spoont, CEO of Misfits Gaming, will own the Miami franchise, and Andy Miller, chairman of NRG Esports will hold the San Francisco spot.
There will be at least two spots in Asia when the league launches. Kevin Chou, the co-founder of mobile game publisher Kabam will own the Seoul spot, and NetEase, an internet technology company, will own the Shanghai franchise. Kabam is best known for developing the popular mobile game Marvel: Contest of Champions, while NetEase is primarily known in the West for distributing Blizzard games in China, including Overwatch. Chou recently founded KSV, an organization that "owns and manages top Korean esports teams."
The league will not feature a draft process, and will be a "free market" for the time being, Nanzer also told theScore esports. Teams will be allowed to sign any players not currently signed to a roster, while existing teams will not be broken up ahead of the first season. Nanzer also said that there will be no import restrictions on teams. Spoont told theScore esports that Misfits have the ability to retain their current roster.
"We intend to field the strongest possible roster entering Overwatch League, which will include us carrying over and adding as many assets as possible in order to achieve that goal," he said in a statement.
As for the league's format, the press release states that teams will play on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays each week, with all games in Southern California during the first season.
Blizzard's press release states that the company wants to move the league to a home and away game system, with each team having a local venue in their city and the ability to profit off of tickets and merchandise. Each team will have a local venue future seasons and Spoont said Misfits' partnership with the Miami Heat will help in that regard.
"We are very fortunate enough to have great partners in the Miami Heat and so we have use of the American Airlines arena which the Miami Heat operate and so we are able to, depending upon the size and scale of the event, use the entire bowl, use part of the bowl, use some of their other related venues at the arena for space," Spoont said. "So for Miami, we are clearly well-positioned with our fantastic partner."
Nanzer noted that the schedule and format might change for those seasons, given that teams will have to fly to Asia and potentially Europe.
"I think from a logistics standpoint, we view that challenge as a real opportunity to get esports played in more places around the world and give fans an opportunity to engage with content live and connect with other members of the community," Nanzer said.
"We definitely are going to take steps to ensure that players don't spend half of their lives on planes back and forth. As the league grows and we add more teams and regions, that will also open up more possibilities for scheduling."
Teams will have profit sharing in place from day one, according to Blizzard's press release. Teams will receive an equal share of the league's net revenue and keep local revenue earned from ticket and merchandise sales up to an unspecified amount each year. A percentage of money earned above this revenue cap will be sent to the league's shared revenue pool.
Additionally, teams will be able to monetize up to five amateur Overwatch events in their home market each year, and 50 percent of revenue earned from the sale of Overwatch League affiliated items in-game will go into the shared revenue pool.
The Overwatch League still does not have a set start date, but Nanzer told theScore esports that it is still scheduled to begin later this year.
Daniel Rosen is a news editor for theScore esports. You can follow him on Twitter.
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On his show Tuesday night, The Daily Show host Jon Stewart expressed his bafflement over conservatives who refused to even consider any new restrictions on gun ownership in the wake of multiple mass shootings.
He noted that conservatives had blamed gun violence on movies, video games, mental health, and even sin.
“Is this about me masturbating?” Stewart joked. “Look, I didn’t know that that was considered a national issue.”
The late-night comedian mocked politicians and others who claimed that numerous gun laws already existed, saying that McDonald’s hot coffee was more regulated than firearms.
“Why is it that there is no other issue in this country with as dire public safety consequences as this that we are unable to make even the most basic steps towards putting together a complex plan of action to slow this epidemic spread? What is really going on here?”
For Stewart, Alex Jones’ crazed rant about gun rights on CNN seemed to sum up the die-hard opposition to gun control. For conspiratorial gun advocates like Jones, absolute tyranny was the inevitable result of anything other than unlimited access to firearms.
“No one is taking away all the guns,” Stewart said. “But now I get it. Now I see what is happening. So this is what it is, their paranoid fear of a possible dystopic future prevents us from addressing our actual dystopic present. We can’t even begin to address 30,000 gun deaths that are actually in reality happening in this country every year because a few of us must remain vigilant against the rise of imaginary Hitler.”
Watch video, via Comedy Central, below:
Part One:
Part Two:
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As a joke (I think), one of my friends posted “You 1%-er!” when I mentioned a business trip that I took in one of our company’s planes. My company isn’t all that large – maybe 2000 employees total, and the division that I direct has THREE full-time employees: The president, who is one of the principals of the main corporation, an engineering student who works for us full-time while going to school, and me. We partner with another company that has a dozen employees, and contract out a great deal of technical work. A big part of my job is managing the contractors and subs and projects that run tens of millions of dollars.
Having some airplanes helps us manage this workload, in an economical way. If we have a meeting with a client, and need to inspect progress on a big project, we may have three, four, or six people going to the same location at the same time.
We know exactly what the operating cost of is – how much fuel, the amortization and depreciation on the equipment, the salaries of the pilots, the annualized maintenance, and can compare the cost of six commercial tickets, plus overnight expenses and a few extra meals. Many of the places we travel to are far away from airport hubs. For example, if you need to go to a location outside of Casper, Wyoming from Houston, you must go to and through IAH, fly to Denver, make a connection on a little commuter flight that only runs two or three times a day, into Casper. It is going to take most of the day, so you probably can’t get your meetings set up or do any real work before quitting time. The trip can use up three days, which is typical of many of our locations.
With the plane resources, I could do that trip one day, and go in the opposite direction the next, and probably sleep in my own bed in between. Of course, if your work runs a bit longer, you aren’t scrambling to figure out if there is another flight that evening, or whether you have to pay United $200 to change your flight (since it costs them a LOT of electricity to run that website!)
One of our workhorses is a Learjet 31, 2000 model, that seats 6 people plus the pilots, and can carry overnight luggage for everyone if you stick to smaller-than-carry-on bags. At 550 mph, we can reach quite a few places within a couple of hours. Much longer than that, you have to pre-plan to not drink any coffee that morning, as it’s rather inconvenient to find a place to set down for a rest stop. The other plane is a Piper Meridian, also a few years old, that will seat up to 5 passengers. Passenger limits on it depend on how far you must go and how much fuel you have to carry without stopping, but regularly we can take 3-4 passengers to many of our work sites.
The Meridian is a single engine turbo prop, and land on much shorter airstrips, without a tower, making it really convenient for our work sites that are far from any towns with a commercial airport. Where at one time our construction managers spent hundreds of hours per year driving tens of thousands of miles, wearing out pick-ups nearly every year, e can allocate the aircraft to the remote jobs.
Being a company with a relatively small workforce, we make sure the economics of our decisions make sense. While it sometimes feels, and certainly sound, like a complete luxury, and is no doubt used as a perk for executives at some big corporations, the aircraft usually are based on sound economic analysis. I no longer gather enough frequent flier points to cover my personal vacations, but they have made a difference in the amount and quality of work we can accomplish.
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Back in 2006, the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona noticed that a mysterious body had begun orbiting the Earth. This object had a spectrum that was remarkably similar to the titanium white paint used on Saturn V rocket stages and, indeed, a number of rocket stages are known to orbit the Sun close to Earth.
But this was not an object of ours. Instead, 2006 RH120, as it became known, turned out to be a tiny asteroid just a few metres across–a natural satellite like the Moon. It was captured by Earth’s gravity in September 2006 and orbited us until June 2007 when it wandered off into the Solar System in search of a more interesting neighbour.
2006 RH120 was the first reliably documented example of a temporary moon.
But there should be many more examples, say Mikael Granvik and buddies at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. Today these guys say they have modelled the way the Earth-Moon system captures these objects to understand how frequently we can expect to have additional moons and how long they should stay in orbit.
The answer is straightforward to state. “At any given time, there should be at least one natural Earth satellite of 1-meter diameter orbiting the Earth,” say Granvik and co. These objects should hang around for about 10 months and make about three revolutions of the planet. That means Earth ought to have a metre-sized moon right now.
This is of more than academic interest. NASA has repeatedly said it is interested in sending humans to a near Earth asteroid. What better than to kick off with one that is in orbit here?
Finding a suitable candidate will be tricky though. Asteroids that are likely to become temporary satellites in the near future will be small and therefore hard to see. What’s more, they will be subject to many forces pushing and pulling them so that predicting when and if they will ever be captured will be next to impossible.
But improved monitoring might help spot them when they get here, which might allow a launch to be planned in advance. Granvik and co conclude: “The scientific potential of being able to first remotely characterize a meteoroid and then visit and bring it back to Earth would be unprecedented.”
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1112.3781: The Population Of Natural Earth Satellites
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VitalBet proudly announces the launch of its full sportsbook. Users will now be able to bet on various sports as well as events such as politics and other areas such as the price of bitcoin. The in-house trading team of VitalBet aims to offer the best odds and provide the most events daily. The Manny Pacquiao backed sportsbook offers a modern interface, as well as unique features such as full and partial bet cashouts, sports Mystery and Progessive Jackpots, Multi-tier VIP player system.
"We are really happy to finally launch our sportsbook product. Since we are the official gaming site of Manny Pacquiao, we feel obliged to offer a huge variety of boxing and MMA betting, and we hope to become the go to place for betting on these sports." commented David Blatt, sportsbook manager of VitalBet.
VitalBet's sportsbook is powered by UltraPlay software.
"We wish all the best to VitalBet, and we are glad they have chosen us as a software partner in their endeavor." stated Dariy Margaritov, CEO of UltraPlay.
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The largest anti-submarine warfare exercise hosted in Canadian waters in two decades is now underway off Nova Scotia's coast.
The exercise is called Cutlass Fury. It involves 11 warships and more than 24 aircraft simulating military activities approximately 160 kilometres southeast of Halifax.
Much of the exercise is aimed at detecting and evading submarines.
"As this exercise progresses, it becomes more complex," said Petty Officer Shawn Swinimer, the underwater warfare director onboard HMCS Fredericton.
HMCS Fredericton is one of the 11 ships taking part in the exercise. (The Canadian Press)
"It's close to a real warfare scenario," he said. "It is the world's biggest game of hide-and-seek."
For the next two weeks, ships from Canada, the United States, Britain, France and Spain will criss-cross a vast area of ocean.
From the deck of HMCS Fredericton, at least three large warships loom on the horizon at any given time. Some have helicopters circling overhead, while others practise mid-ocean refuelling.
At one point during the exercises, three helicopters converged on a specific point off the starboard side of HMCS Fredericton. They were hunting a submarine.
CBC's Brett Ruskin joined Canadian military forces as they embark on an NATO anti-submarine warfare exercises off Nova Scotia's coast. 1:02
Finding something you can't see
Anti-submarine warfare rewards strategy and intelligence over brute force.
Often, submarines know a ship's location before the ship detects the sub.
The main point of the exercise is to try and track submarines. (Darren Calabrese/Canadian Press)
Ships can usually outrun subs, but first they must find them. To do this, ships rely on high-powered binoculars, sonar and even helicopters.
Each Canadian frigate is equipped with a Sea King helicopter. The aircraft can be deployed to search the surrounding waters for the sub.
Naval helicopters use sonar by dipping a sensor into the ocean. The aircraft have the advantage of being able to take multiple readings from different locations.
Plus, they can't be hit by a sub's deadly torpedoes.
"Just one of the torpedoes could take out a ship," said Capt. Craig Skjerpen, task group commander for exercise Cutlass Fury.
"It could take out an aircraft carrier."
Military officials say that's why anti-submarine exercises like these are so important.
More subs, more problems
Submarine activity by countries like Russia has ramped up in recent years. Subs are also a relatively inexpensive way for poorer governments to bolster their navy, and are now used by many countries with authoritarian regimes.
Naval experts estimate there are up to 300 submarines operating at all times around the world.
The exercise continues until late next week, finishing up in St. John's. (Submitted by Maritime Forces Atlantic)
During this month's exercise off Canada's coast, commanders have a plan should any of these uninvited foreign submarines drift toward the exercise.
"It does happen and we do have procedures," said Swinimer.
"We'll contact them and then authenticate that they are not an exercise player, and then pass that information on to command," he said.
Swinimer said the exercises are starting with simple search and reconnaissance. As the exercise progresses, it will escalate to full war games with simulated weapons launches.
"It can be stressful from time to time. It's very fast paced," said Swinimer. "But it's not chaotic. Everyone has a set of rules and knows their role."
The exercise continues until late next week, wrapping up in St. John's.
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A laptop computer, often abbreviated to laptop alone, also called a notebook computer or notebook, is a small, portable personal computer with a "clamshell" form factor, having, typically, a thin LCD or LED computer screen mounted on the inside of the upper lid of the "clamshell" and an alphanumeric keyboard on the inside of the lower lid. The "clamshell" is opened up to use the computer. Laptops are folded shut for transportation, and thus are suitable for mobile use.[1] Its name comes from "lap", as it was deemed to be placed for use on a person's lap. Although originally there was a distinction between laptops and notebooks, the former being bigger and heavier than the latter, as of 2014, there is often no longer any difference.[2] Laptops are commonly used in a variety of settings, such as at work, in education, in playing games, Internet surfing, for personal multimedia and general home computer use.
Laptops combine all the input/output components and capabilities of a desktop computer, including the display screen, small speakers, a keyboard, hard disk drive, optical disc drive, pointing devices (such as a touchpad or trackpad), a processor, and memory into a single unit. Most modern laptops feature integrated webcams and built-in microphones, while many also have touchscreens. Laptops can be powered either from an internal battery or by an external power supply from an AC adapter. Hardware specifications, such as the processor speed and memory capacity, significantly vary between different types, makes, models and price points.
Design elements, form factor and construction can also vary significantly between models depending on intended use. Examples of specialized models of laptops include rugged notebooks for use in construction or military applications, as well as low production cost laptops such as those from the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) organization, which incorporate features like solar charging and semi-flexible components not found on most laptop computers. Portable computers, which later developed into modern laptops, were originally considered to be a small niche market, mostly for specialized field applications, such as in the military, for accountants, or for traveling sales representatives. As the portable computers evolved into the modern laptop, they became widely used for a variety of purposes.[3]
Terminology variants [ edit ]
The terms laptop and notebook are used interchangeably to describe a portable computer in English, although in some parts of the world one or the other may be preferred. There is some question as to the original etymology and specificity of either term—the term laptop appears to have been coined in the early 1980s to describe a mobile computer which could be used on one's lap, and to distinguish these devices from earlier, much heavier, portable computers (informally called "luggables"). The term "notebook" appears to have gained currency somewhat later as manufacturers started producing even smaller portable devices, further reducing their weight and size and incorporating a display roughly the size of A4 paper; these were marketed as notebooks to distinguish them from bulkier laptops.[4] Regardless of the etymology, by the late 1990s, the terms were interchangeable.
History [ edit ]
The Epson HX-20 , the first laptop computer, was invented in 1980 and introduced in 1981
As the personal computer (PC) became feasible in 1971, the idea of a portable personal computer soon followed. A "personal, portable information manipulator" was imagined by Alan Kay at Xerox PARC in 1968,[5] and described in his 1972 paper as the "Dynabook".[6] The IBM Special Computer APL Machine Portable (SCAMP) was demonstrated in 1973. This prototype was based on the IBM PALM processor.[7] The IBM 5100, the first commercially available portable computer, appeared in September 1975, and was based on the SCAMP prototype.[8]
As 8-bit CPU machines became widely accepted, the number of portables increased rapidly. The first laptop-sized notebook computer was the Epson HX-20,[9][10] invented (patented) by Suwa Seikosha's Yukio Yokozawa in July 1980,[11] introduced at the COMDEX computer show in Las Vegas by Japanese company Seiko Epson in 1981,[12][10] and released in July 1982.[10][13] It had an LCD screen, a rechargeable battery, and a calculator-size printer, in a 1.6 kg (3.5 lb) chassis, the size of an A4 notebook.[10] It was described as a "laptop" and "notebook" computer in its patent.[11]
The portable micro computer Portal of the French company R2E Micral CCMC officially appeared in September 1980 at the Sicob show in Paris. It was a portable microcomputer designed and marketed by the studies and developments department of R2E Micral at the request of company CCMC specializing in payroll and accounting. It was based on an Intel 8085 processor, 8-bit, clocked at 2 MHz. It was equipped with a central 64 KB RAM, a keyboard with 58 alpha numeric keys and 11 numeric keys ( separate blocks ), a 32-character screen, a floppy disk : capacity = 140 00 characters, of a thermal printer : speed = 28 characters / second, an asynchronous channel, a synchronous channel, a 220 V power supply. It weighed 12 kg and its dimensions were 45 x 45 x 15 cm. It provided total mobility. Its operating system was the aptly named Prologue.
The Osborne 1, released in 1981, was a luggable computer that used the Zilog Z80 and weighed 24.5 pounds (11.1 kg).[14] It had no battery, a 5 in (13 cm) cathode ray tube (CRT) screen, and dual 5.25 in (13.3 cm) single-density floppy drives. Both Tandy/RadioShack and Hewlett Packard (HP) also produced portable computers of varying designs during this period.[15][16] The first laptops using the flip form factor appeared in the early 1980s. The Dulmont Magnum was released in Australia in 1981–82, but was not marketed internationally until 1984–85. The US$8,150 (US$21,160 today) GRiD Compass 1101, released in 1982, was used at NASA and by the military, among others. The Sharp PC-5000,[17] Ampere[18] and Gavilan SC released in 1983. The Gavilan SC was described as a "laptop" by its manufacturer,[19] while the Ampere had a modern clamshell design.[18][20] The Toshiba T1100 won acceptance not only among PC experts but the mass market as a way to have PC portability.[21]
From 1983 onward, several new input techniques were developed and included in laptops, including the touchpad (Gavilan SC, 1983), the pointing stick (IBM ThinkPad 700, 1992), and handwriting recognition (Linus Write-Top,[22] 1987). Some CPUs, such as the 1990 Intel i386SL, were designed to use minimum power to increase battery life of portable computers and were supported by dynamic power management features such as Intel SpeedStep and AMD PowerNow! in some designs.
Displays reached 640x480 (VGA) resolution by 1988 (Compaq SLT/286), and color screens started becoming a common upgrade in 1991, with increases in resolution and screen size occurring frequently until the introduction of 17" screen laptops in 2003. Hard drives started to be used in portables, encouraged by the introduction of 3.5" drives in the late 1980s, and became common in laptops starting with the introduction of 2.5" and smaller drives around 1990; capacities have typically lagged behind physically larger desktop drives. Optical storage, read-only CD-ROM followed by writeable CD and later read-only or writeable DVD and Blu-ray players, became common in laptops early in the 2000s.
Types [ edit ]
Compaq Armada laptop from the late 1990s
Apple MacBook Air , an ultraportable laptop weighing under 3.0 lb (1.36 kg)
Since the introduction of portable computers during late 1970s, their form has changed significantly, spawning a variety of visually and technologically differing subclasses. Except where there is a distinct legal trademark around a term (notably Ultrabook), there are rarely hard distinctions between these classes and their usage has varied over time and between different sources. Despite these setbacks, the laptop computer market continues to expand, introducing a number of laptops like Acer's Aspire and TravelMate, Asus' Transformer Book, VivoBook and Zenbook, Dell's Inspiron, Latitude and XPS, HP's EliteBook, Envy, Pavilion and ProBook, Lenovo's IdeaPad and ThinkPad and Toshiba's Portégé, Satellite and Tecra that incorporate the use of laptop computers.
Traditional laptop [ edit ]
The form of the traditional laptop computer is a clamshell, with a screen on one of its inner sides and a keyboard on the opposite, facing the screen. It can be easily folded to conserve space while traveling. The screen and keyboard are inaccessible while closed. Devices of this form are commonly called a 'traditional laptop' or notebook, particularly if they have a screen size of 11 to 17 inches measured diagonally and run a full-featured operating system like Windows 10, macOS, or Linux. Traditional laptops are the most common form of laptops, although Chromebooks, Ultrabooks, convertibles and 2-in-1s (described below) are becoming more common, with similar performance being achieved in their more portable or affordable forms.
Subnotebook [ edit ]
A subnotebook or an ultraportable, is a laptop designed and marketed with an emphasis on portability (small size, low weight, and often longer battery life). Subnotebooks are usually smaller and lighter than standard laptops, weighing between 0.8 and 2 kg (2-5 lb),[23] with a battery life exceeding 10 hours.[24] Since the introduction of netbooks and ultrabooks, the line between subnotebooks and either category has blurred. Netbooks are a more basic and cheap type of subnotebook, and while some ultrabooks have a screen size too large to qualify as subnotebooks, certain ultrabooks fit in the subnotebook category. One notable example of a subnotebook is the Apple MacBook Air.
Netbook [ edit ]
The netbook is an inexpensive, light-weight, energy-efficient form of laptop, especially suited for wireless communication and Internet access.[25][26] Netbooks first became commercially available around 2008, weighing under 1 kg, with a display size of under 9". The name netbook (with net short for Internet) is used as "the device excels in web-based computing performance".[27] Netbooks were initially sold with light-weight variants of the Linux operating system, although later versions often have the Windows XP or Windows 7 operating systems. The term "netbook" is largely obsolete,[28] although machines that would have once been called netbooks—small, inexpensive, and low powered—never ceased being sold, in particular the smaller Chromebook models.
The latest trend of technological convergence in the portable computer industry spawned a broad range of devices, which combined features of several previously separate device types. The hybrids, convertibles and 2-in-1s emerged as crossover devices, which share traits of both tablets and laptops. All such devices have a touchscreen display designed to allow users to work in a tablet mode, using either multi-touch gestures or a stylus/digital pen.
Convertibles are devices with the ability to conceal a hardware keyboard. Keyboards on such devices can be flipped, rotated, or slid behind the back of the chassis, thus transforming from a laptop into a tablet. Hybrids have a keyboard detachment mechanism, and due to this feature, all critical components are situated in the part with the display. 2-in-1s can have a hybrid or a convertible form, often dubbed 2-in-1 detachables and 2-in-1 convertibles respectively, but are distinguished by the ability to run a desktop OS, such as Windows 10. 2-in-1s are often marketed as laptop replacement tablets.
2-in-1s are often very thin, around 10 millimetres (0.39 in), and light devices with a long battery life. 2-in-1s are distinguished from mainstream tablets as they feature an x86-architecture CPU (typically a low- or ultra-low-voltage model), such as the Intel Core i5, run a full-featured desktop OS like Windows 10, and have a number of typical laptop I/O ports, such as USB 3 and Mini DisplayPort.
2-in-1s are designed to be used not only as a media consumption device, but also as valid desktop or laptop replacements, due to their ability to run desktop applications, such as Adobe Photoshop. It is possible to connect multiple peripheral devices, such as a mouse, keyboard and a number of external displays to a modern 2-in-1.
Microsoft Surface Pro-series devices and Surface Book are examples of modern 2-in-1 detachables, whereas Lenovo Yoga-series computers are a variant of 2-in-1 convertibles. While the older Surface RT and Surface 2 have the same chassis design as the Surface Pro, their use of ARM processors and Windows RT do not classify them as 2-in-1s, but as hybrid tablets. Similarly, a number of hybrid laptops run a mobile operating system, such as Android. These include Asus's Transformer Pad devices, examples of hybrids with a detachable keyboard design, which do not fall in the category of 2-in-1s.
Desktop replacement [ edit ]
A desktop-replacement laptop is a class of large device which is not intended primarily for mobile use. These devices are bulkier and not as portable as other laptops, and are intended for use as compact and transportable alternatives to a desktop computer.[29] Desktop replacements are larger and typically heavier than other classes of laptops. They are capable of containing more powerful components and have a 15-inch or larger display.[29] Desktop replacement laptops' operation time on batteries is typically shorter than other laptops; in rare cases they have no battery at all. In the past, some laptops in this class used a limited range of desktop components to provide better performance for the same price at the expense of battery life, although this practice has largely died out.[30] The names Media Center Laptops and Gaming Laptops are used to describe specialized notebook computers, often overlapping with the desktop replacement form factor.[23]
Rugged laptop [ edit ]
A rugged laptop is designed to reliably operate in harsh usage conditions such as strong vibrations, extreme temperatures, and wet or dusty environments. Rugged laptops are usually designed from scratch, rather than adapted from regular consumer laptop models. Rugged laptops are bulkier, heavier, and much more expensive than regular laptops,[31] and thus are seldom seen in regular consumer use.
The design features found in rugged laptops include a rubber sheeting under the keyboard keys, sealed port and connector covers, passive cooling, very bright displays easily readable in daylight, cases and frames made of magnesium alloys that are much stronger than plastics found in commercial laptops, and solid-state storage devices or hard disc drives that are shock mounted to withstand constant vibrations. Rugged laptops are commonly used by public safety services (police, fire, and medical emergency), military, utilities, field service technicians, construction, mining, and oil drilling personnel. Rugged laptops are usually sold to organizations rather than individuals, and are rarely marketed via retail channels.
Business laptop [ edit ]
A business laptop is a laptop designed for those in a workplace. Typically, it is ruggedised, with consumer facing features, like high resolution sound, removed to allow the device to be used for pure productivity.
Hardware [ edit ]
Miniaturization: a comparison of a desktop computer motherboard ( ATX form factor) to a motherboard from a 13" laptop (2008 unibody Macbook
The basic components of laptops function identically to their desktop counterparts. Traditionally they were miniaturized and adapted to mobile use, although desktop systems increasingly use the same smaller, lower-power parts which were originally developed for mobile use. The design restrictions on power, size, and cooling of laptops limit the maximum performance of laptop parts compared to that of desktop components, although that difference has increasingly narrowed.[32]
In general, laptop components are not intended to be replaceable or upgradable, with the exception of components which can be detached, such as a battery or CD/CDR/DVD drive. This restriction is one of the major differences between laptops and desktop computers, because the large "tower" cases used in desktop computers are designed so that new motherboards, hard disks, sound cards, RAM, and other components can be added. In a very compact laptop, such as laplets, there may be no upgradeable components at all.[33]
Intel, Asus, Compal, Quanta, and some other laptop manufacturers have created the Common Building Block standard for laptop parts to address some of the inefficiencies caused by the lack of standards and inability to upgrade components.[34]
The following sections summarizes the differences and distinguishing features of laptop components in comparison to desktop personal computer parts.[35]
Display [ edit ]
Most modern laptops feature a 13 inches (33 cm) or larger color active matrix display based on LED lighting with resolutions of 1280×800 (16:10) or 1366×768 (16:9) pixels and above. Models with LED-based lighting offer lesser power consumption and often increased brightness. Netbooks with a 10 inches (25 cm) or smaller screen typically use a resolution of 1024×600, while netbooks and subnotebooks with an 11.6 inches (29 cm) or 12 inches (30 cm) screen use standard notebook resolutions. Having a higher resolution display allows more items to fit onscreen at a time, improving the user's ability to multitask, although at the higher resolutions on smaller screens, the resolution may only serve to display sharper graphics and text rather than increasing the usable area. Since the introduction of the MacBook Pro with Retina display in 2012, there has been an increase in the availability of very-high-resolution (1920×1080 and higher) displays, even in relatively small systems, and in typical 15-inch screens resolutions as high as 3200×1800 are available. External displays can be connected to most laptops, and models with a Mini DisplayPort can handle up to three.[36]
Central processing unit [ edit ]
A laptop's central processing unit (CPU) has advanced power-saving features and produces less heat than one intended purely for desktop use. Typically, laptop CPUs have two processor cores, although 4-core models are also available. For low price and mainstream performance, there is no longer a significant performance difference between laptop and desktop CPUs, but at the high end, the fastest 4-to-8-core desktop CPUs still substantially outperform the fastest 4-core laptop processors, at the expense of massively higher power consumption and heat generation; the fastest laptop processors top out at 56 watts of heat, while the fastest desktop processors top out at 150 watts.
There have been a wide range of CPUs designed for laptops available from both Intel, AMD, and other manufacturers. On non-x86 architectures, Motorola and IBM produced the chips for the former PowerPC-based Apple laptops (iBook and PowerBook). Many laptops have removable CPUs, although this has become less common in the past few years as the trend has been towards thinner and lighter models. In other laptops the CPU is soldered on the motherboard and is non-replaceable; this is nearly universal in ultrabooks.
In the past, some laptops have used a desktop processor instead of the laptop version and have had high performance gains at the cost of greater weight, heat, and limited battery life, but the practice was largely extinct as of 2013. Unlike their desktop counterparts, laptop CPUs are nearly impossible to overclock. A thermal operating mode of laptops is very close to its limits and there is almost no headroom for an overclocking–related operating temperature increase. The possibility of improving a cooling system of a laptop to allow overclocking is extremely difficult to implement.
Graphical processing unit [ edit ]
On most laptops a graphical processing unit (GPU) is integrated into the CPU to conserve power and space. This was introduced by Intel with the Core i-series of mobile processors in 2010, and similar accelerated processing unit (APU) processors by AMD later that year. Prior to that, lower-end machines tended to use graphics processors integrated into the system chipset, while higher end machines had a separate graphics processor. In the past, laptops lacking a separate graphics processor were limited in their utility for gaming and professional applications involving 3D graphics, but the capabilities of CPU-integrated graphics have converged with the low-end of dedicated graphics processors in the past few years. Higher-end laptops intended for gaming or professional 3D work still come with dedicated, and in some cases even dual, graphics processors on the motherboard or as an internal expansion card. Since 2011, these almost always involve switchable graphics so that when there is no demand for the higher performance dedicated graphics processor, the more power-efficient integrated graphics processor will be used. Nvidia Optimus is an example of this sort of system of switchable graphics.
Memory [ edit ]
Most laptops use SO-DIMM (small outline dual in-line memory module) memory modules, as they are about half the size of desktop DIMMs.[35] They are sometimes accessible from the bottom of the laptop for ease of upgrading, or placed in locations not intended for user replacement. Most laptops have two memory slots, although some of the lowest-end models will have only one, and some high end models (usually mobile engineering workstations and a few high-end models intended for gaming) have four slots. Most mid-range laptops are factory equipped with 4–6 GB of RAM. Netbooks are commonly equipped with only 1–2 GB of RAM and are generally only expandable to 2 GB, if at all. Laptops may have memory soldered to the motherboard to conserve space, which allows the laptop to have a thinner chassis design. Soldered memory cannot be easily upgraded.
Internal storage [ edit ]
Traditionally, laptops had a hard disk drive (HDD) as a main non-volatile storage, but these proved inefficient for use in mobile devices due to high power consumption, heat production, and a presence of moving parts, which can cause damage to both the drive itself and the data stored when a laptop is unstable physically, e.g. during its use while transporting it or after its accidental drop. With the advent of flash memory technology, most mid- to high-end laptops opted for more compact, power efficient, and fast solid-state drives (SSD), which eliminated the hazard of drive and data corruption caused by a laptop's physical impacts.[37] Most laptops use 2.5-inch drives, which are a smaller version of a 3.5-inch desktop drive form factor. 2.5-inch HDDs are more compact, power efficient, and produce less heat, while at the same time have a smaller capacity and a slower data transfer rate. Some very compact laptops support even smaller 1.8-inch HDDs. For SSDs, however, these miniaturization-related trade-offs are nonexistent, because SSDs were designed to have a very small footprint. SSDs feature a traditional 2.5- or 1.8-inch or a laptop-specific mSATA or M.2 card's form factor. SSDs have a higher data transfer rate, lower power consumption, lower failure rate, and a larger capacity[38][39][40][41] compared to HDDs. However, HDDs have a significantly lower cost.
Most laptops can contain a single 2.5-inch drive, but a small number of laptops with a screen wider than 15 inches can house two drives. Some laptops support a hybrid mode, combining a 2.5-inch drive, typically a spacious HDD for data, with an mSATA or M.2 SDD drive, typically having less capacity, but a significantly faster read/write speed. The operating system partition would be located on the SSD to increase laptop I/O performance. Another way to increase performance is to use a smaller SSD of 16-32 GB as a cache drive with a compatible OS. Some laptops may have very limited drive upgradeability when the SSD used has a non-standard shape or requires a proprietary daughter card.[42] Some laptops have very limited space on the installed SSD, instead relying on availability of cloud storage services for storing of user data; Chromebooks are a prominent example of this approach. A variety of external HDDs or NAS data storage servers with support of RAID technology can be attached to virtually any laptop over such interfaces as USB, FireWire, eSATA, or Thunderbolt, or over a wired or wireless network to further increase space for the storage of data. Many laptops also incorporate a card reader which allows for use of memory cards, such as those used for digital cameras, which are typically SD or microSD cards. This enables users to download digital pictures from an SD card onto a laptop, thus enabling them to delete the SD card's contents to free up space for taking new pictures.
Removable media drive [ edit ]
Optical disc drives capable of playing CD-ROMs, compact discs (CD), DVDs, and in some cases, Blu-ray Discs (BD), were nearly universal on full-sized models by the early 2010s. A disc drive remains fairly common in laptops with a screen wider than 15 inches (38 cm), although the trend towards thinner and lighter machines is gradually eliminating these drives and players; these drives are uncommon in compact laptops, such as subnotebooks and netbooks. Laptop optical drives tend to follow a standard form factor, and usually have a standard mSATA connector. It is often possible to replace an optical drive with a newer model. In certain laptop models there is a possibility to replace an optical drive with a second hard drive, using a caddy that fills the extra space the optical drive would have occupied.
Inputs [ edit ]
Closeup of a touchpad on an Acer laptop
Closeup of a TrackPoint cursor and UltraNav buttons on a ThinkPad laptop
An alphanumeric keyboard is used to enter text and data and make other commands (e.g., function keys). A touchpad (also called a trackpad), a pointing stick, or both, are used to control the position of the cursor on the screen, and an integrated keyboard[43] is used for typing. An external keyboard and mouse may be connected using a USB port or wirelessly, via Bluetooth or similar technology. With the advent of ultrabooks and support of touch input on screens by 2010-era operating systems, such as Windows 8.1, multitouch touchscreen displays are used in many models. Some models have webcams and microphones, which can be used to communicate with other people with both moving images and sound, via Skype, Google Chat and similar software. Laptops typically have USB ports and a microphone jack, for use with an external mic. Some laptops have a card reader for reading digital camera SD cards.
Input/output (I/O) ports [ edit ]
On a typical laptop there are several USB ports, an external monitor port (VGA, DVI, HDMI or Mini DisplayPort), an audio in/out port (often in form of a single socket) is common. It is possible to connect up to three external displays to a 2014-era laptop via a single Mini DisplayPort, utilizing multi-stream transport technology.[36] Apple, in a 2015 version of its MacBook, transitioned from a number of different I/O ports to a single USB-C port.[44] This port can be used both for charging and connecting a variety of devices through the use of aftermarket adapters. Google, with its updated version of Chromebook Pixel, shows a similar transition trend towards USB-C, although keeping older USB Type-A ports for a better compatibility with older devices.[45] Although being common until the end of the 2000s decade, Ethernet network port are rarely found on modern laptops, due to widespread use of wireless networking, such as Wi-Fi. Legacy ports such as a PS/2 keyboard/mouse port, serial port, parallel port, or Firewire are provided on some models, but they are increasingly rare. On Apple's systems, and on a handful of other laptops, there are also Thunderbolt ports, but Thunderbolt 3 uses USB-C. Laptops typically have a headphone jack, so that the user can connect external headphones or amplified speaker systems for listening to music or other audio.
Expansion cards [ edit ]
In the past, a PC Card (formerly PCMCIA) or ExpressCard slot for expansion was often present on laptops to allow adding and removing functionality, even when the laptop is powered on; these are becoming increasingly rare since the introduction of USB 3.0. Some internal subsystems such as: Ethernet, Wi-Fi, or a wireless cellular modem can be implemented as replaceable internal expansion cards, usually accessible under an access cover on the bottom of the laptop. The standard for such cards is PCI Express, which comes in both mini and even smaller M.2 sizes. In newer laptops, it is not uncommon to also see Micro SATA (mSATA) functionality on PCI Express Mini or M.2 card slots allowing the use of those slots for SATA-based solid state drives.[46]
Battery and power supply [ edit ]
2016-era laptops use lithium ion batteries, with some thinner models using the flatter lithium polymer technology. These two technologies have largely replaced the older nickel metal-hydride batteries. Battery life is highly variable by model and workload and can range from one hour to nearly a day. A battery's performance gradually decreases over time; substantial reduction in capacity is typically evident after one to three years of regular use, depending on the charging and discharging pattern and the design of the battery. Innovations in laptops and batteries have seen situations in which the battery can provide up to 24 hours of continued operation, assuming average power consumption levels. An example is the HP EliteBook 6930p when used with its ultra-capacity battery.[47]
A laptop's battery is charged using an external power supply which is plugged into a wall outlet. The power supply outputs a DC voltage typically in the range of 7.2—24 volts. The power supply is usually external and connected to the laptop through a DC connector cable. In most cases, it can charge the battery and power the laptop simultaneously. When the battery is fully charged, the laptop continues to run on power supplied by the external power supply, avoiding battery use. The battery charges in a shorter period of time if laptop is turned off or sleeping. The charger typically adds about 400 grams (0.88 lb) to the overall transporting weight of a laptop, although some models are substantially heavier or lighter. Most 2016-era laptops use a smart battery, a rechargeable battery pack with a built-in battery management system (BMS). The smart battery can internally measure voltage and current, and deduce charge level and SoH (State of Health) parameters, indicating the state of the cells.[citation needed]
Cooling [ edit ]
Waste heat from operation is difficult to remove in the compact internal space of a laptop. Early laptops used heat sinks placed directly on the components to be cooled, but when these hot components are deep inside the device, a large space-wasting air duct is needed to exhaust the heat. Modern laptops instead rely on heat pipes to rapidly move waste heat towards the edges of the device, to allow for a much smaller and compact fan and heat sink cooling system. Waste heat is usually exhausted away from the device operator towards the rear or sides of the device. Multiple air intake paths are used since some intakes can be blocked, such as when the device is placed on a soft conforming surface like a chair cushion. It is believed that some designs with metal cases, like Apple's aluminum MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, also employ the case of the machine as a heat sink, allowing it to supplement cooling by dissipating heat out of the device core. Secondary device temperature monitoring may reduce performance or trigger an emergency shutdown if it is unable to dissipate heat, such as if the laptop were to be left running and placed inside a carrying case. Aftermarket cooling pads with external fans can be used with laptops to reduce operating temperatures.
Docking station [ edit ]
Docking station and laptop
A docking station (sometimes referred to simply as a dock) is a laptop accessory that contains multiple ports, and in some cases expansion slots or bays for fixed or removable drives. A laptop connects and disconnects to a docking station, typically through a single large proprietary connector. A docking station is an especially popular laptop accessory in a corporate computing environment, due to a possibility of a docking station to transform a laptop into a full-featured desktop replacement, yet allowing for its easy release. This ability can be advantageous to "road warrior" employees who have to travel frequently for work, and yet who also come into the office. If more ports are needed, or their position on a laptop is inconvenient, one can use a cheaper passive device known as a port replicator. These devices mate to the connectors on the laptop, such as through USB or FireWire.
Charging trolleys [ edit ]
Laptop charging trolleys, also known as laptop trolleys or laptop carts, are mobile storage containers to charge multiple laptops, netbooks, and tablet computers at the same time. The trolleys are used in schools that have replaced their traditional static computer labs[48] suites of desktop equipped with "tower" computers, but do not have enough plug sockets in an individual classroom to charge all of the devices. The trolleys can be wheeled between rooms and classrooms so that all students and teachers in a particular building can access fully charged IT equipment.[49]
Laptop charging trolleys are also used to deter and protect against opportunistic and organized theft. Schools, especially those with open plan designs, are often prime targets for thieves who steal high-value items. Laptops, netbooks, and tablets are among the highest–value portable items in a school. Moreover, laptops can easily be concealed under clothing and stolen from buildings. Many types of laptop–charging trolleys are designed and constructed to protect against theft. They are generally made out of steel, and the laptops remain locked up while not in use. Although the trolleys can be moved between areas from one classroom to another, they can often be mounted or locked to the floor or walls to prevent thieves from stealing the laptops, especially overnight.[48]
Solar panels [ edit ]
In some laptops, solar panels are able to generate enough solar power for the laptop to operate.[50] The One Laptop Per Child Initiative released the OLPC XO-1 laptop which was tested and successfully operated by use of solar panels.[51] Presently, they are designing a OLPC XO-3 laptop with these features. The OLPC XO-3 can operate with 2 watts of electricity because its renewable energy resources generate a total of 4 watts.[52][53] Samsung has also designed the NC215S solar–powered notebook that will be sold commercially in the U.S. market.[54]
Accessories [ edit ]
A common accessory for laptops is a laptop sleeve, laptop skin, or laptop case, which provides a degree of protection from scratches. Sleeves, which are distinguished by being relatively thin and flexible, are most commonly made of neoprene, with sturdier ones made of low-resilience polyurethane. Some laptop sleeves are wrapped in ballistic nylon to provide some measure of waterproofing. Bulkier and sturdier cases can be made of metal with polyurethane padding inside and may have locks for added security. Metal, padded cases also offer protection against impacts and drops. Another common accessory is a laptop cooler, a device which helps lower the internal temperature of the laptop either actively or passively. A common active method involves using electric fans to draw heat away from the laptop, while a passive method might involve propping the laptop up on some type of pad so it can receive more air flow. Some stores sell laptop pads which enable a reclining person on a bed to use a laptop.
Obsolete features [ edit ]
modem PCMCIA card on an old ThinkPad
Features that certain early models of laptops used to have that are not available in most current laptops include:
Comparison with desktops [ edit ]
Advantages [ edit ]
A teacher using laptop as part of a workshop for school children
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales using a laptop on a park bench
Portability is usually the first feature mentioned in any comparison of laptops versus desktop PCs.[55] Physical portability allows a laptop to be used in many places—not only at home and at the office, but also during commuting and flights, in coffee shops, in lecture halls and libraries, at clients' locations or at a meeting room, etc. Within a home, portability enables laptop users to move their device from the living room to the dining room to the family room. Portability offers several distinct advantages:
Productivity : Using a laptop in places where a desktop PC cannot be used can help employees and students to increase their productivity on work or school tasks. For example, an office worker reading their work e-mails during an hour-long commute by train, or a student doing their homework at the university coffee shop during a break between lectures.
: Using a laptop in places where a desktop PC cannot be used can help employees and students to increase their productivity on work or school tasks. For example, an office worker reading their work e-mails during an hour-long commute by train, or a student doing their homework at the university coffee shop during a break between lectures. Immediacy : Carrying a laptop means having instant access to information, including personal and work files. This allows better collaboration between coworkers or students, as a laptop can be flipped open to look at a report, document, spreadsheet, or presentation anytime and anywhere.
: Carrying a laptop means having instant access to information, including personal and work files. This allows better collaboration between coworkers or students, as a laptop can be flipped open to look at a report, document, spreadsheet, or presentation anytime and anywhere. Up-to-date information : If a person has more than one desktop PC, a problem of synchronization arises: changes made on one computer are not automatically propagated to the others. There are ways to resolve this problem, including physical transfer of updated files (using a USB flash memory stick or CD-ROMs) or using synchronization software over the Internet, such as cloud computing. However, transporting a single laptop to both locations avoids the problem entirely, as the files exist in a single location and are always up-to-date.
: If a person has more than one desktop PC, a problem of synchronization arises: changes made on one computer are not automatically propagated to the others. There are ways to resolve this problem, including physical transfer of updated files (using a USB flash memory stick or CD-ROMs) or using synchronization software over the Internet, such as cloud computing. However, transporting a single laptop to both locations avoids the problem entirely, as the files exist in a single location and are always up-to-date. Connectivity: In the 2010s, a proliferation of Wi-Fi wireless networks and cellular broadband data services (HSDPA, EVDO and others) in many urban centers, combined with near-ubiquitous Wi-Fi support by modern laptops[note 2] meant that a laptop could now have easy Internet and local network connectivity while remaining mobile. Wi-Fi networks and laptop programs are especially widespread at university campuses.[56]
Other advantages of laptops:
Size : Laptops are smaller than desktop PCs. This is beneficial when space is at a premium, for example in small apartments and student dorms. When not in use, a laptop can be closed and put away in a desk drawer.
: Laptops are smaller than desktop PCs. This is beneficial when space is at a premium, for example in small apartments and student dorms. When not in use, a laptop can be closed and put away in a desk drawer. Low power consumption : Laptops are several times more power-efficient than desktops. A typical laptop uses 20–120 W, compared to 100–800 W for desktops. This could be particularly beneficial for large businesses, which run hundreds of personal computers thus multiplying the potential savings, and homes where there is a computer running 24/7 (such as a home media server, print server, etc.).
: Laptops are several times more power-efficient than desktops. A typical laptop uses 20–120 W, compared to 100–800 W for desktops. This could be particularly beneficial for large businesses, which run hundreds of personal computers thus multiplying the potential savings, and homes where there is a computer running 24/7 (such as a home media server, print server, etc.). Quiet : Laptops are typically much quieter than desktops, due both to the components (quieter, slower 2.5-inch hard drives) and to less heat production leading to use of fewer and slower cooling fans.
: Laptops are typically much quieter than desktops, due both to the components (quieter, slower 2.5-inch hard drives) and to less heat production leading to use of fewer and slower cooling fans. Battery : a charged laptop can continue to be used in case of a power outage and is not affected by short power interruptions and blackouts. A desktop PC needs an Uninterruptible power supply (UPS) to handle short interruptions, blackouts, and spikes; achieving on-battery time of more than 20–30 minutes for a desktop PC requires a large and expensive UPS. [57]
: a charged laptop can continue to be used in case of a power outage and is not affected by short power interruptions and blackouts. A desktop PC needs an Uninterruptible power supply (UPS) to handle short interruptions, blackouts, and spikes; achieving on-battery time of more than 20–30 minutes for a desktop PC requires a large and expensive UPS. All-in-One: designed to be portable, most 2010-era laptops have all components integrated into the chassis (however, some small laptops may not have an internal CD/CDR/DVD drive, so an external drive needs to be used). For desktops (excluding all-in-ones) this is divided into the desktop "tower" (the unit with the CPU, hard drive, power supply, etc.), keyboard, mouse, display screen, and optional peripherals such as speakers.
Disadvantages [ edit ]
Compared to desktop PCs, laptops have disadvantages in the following areas:
Performance [ edit ]
While the performance of mainstream desktops and laptop is comparable, and the cost of laptops has fallen less rapidly than desktops, laptops remain more expensive than desktop PCs at the same performance level.[58] The upper limits of performance of laptops remain much lower than the highest-end desktops (especially "workstation class" machines with two processor sockets), and "bleeding-edge" features usually appear first in desktops and only then, as the underlying technology matures, are adapted to laptops.
For Internet browsing and typical office applications, where the computer spends the majority of its time waiting for the next user input, even relatively low-end laptops (such as Netbooks) can be fast enough for some users.[59] Most higher-end laptops are sufficiently powerful for high-resolution movie playback, some 3D gaming and video editing and encoding. However, laptop processors can be disadvantaged when dealing with a higher-end database, maths, engineering, financial software, virtualization, etc. This is because laptops use the mobile versions of processors to conserve power, and these lag behind desktop chips when it comes to performance. Some manufacturers work around this performance problem by using desktop CPUs for laptops.[60]
Upgradeability [ edit ]
Upgradeability of laptops is very limited compared to desktops, which are thoroughly standardized. In general, hard drives and memory can be upgraded easily. Optical drives and internal expansion cards may be upgraded if they follow an industry standard, but all other internal components, including the motherboard, CPU and graphics, are not always intended to be upgradeable. Intel, Asus, Compal, Quanta and some other laptop manufacturers have created the Common Building Block standard for laptop parts to address some of the inefficiencies caused by the lack of standards. The reasons for limited upgradeability are both technical and economic. There is no industry-wide standard form factor for laptops; each major laptop manufacturer pursues its own proprietary design and construction, with the result that laptops are difficult to upgrade and have high repair costs. Devices such as sound cards, network adapters, hard and optical drives, and numerous other peripherals are available, but these upgrades usually impair the laptop's portability, because they add cables and boxes to the setup and often have to be disconnected and reconnected when the laptop is on the move.
Ergonomics and health effects [ edit ]
Wrists [ edit ]
Laptop cooler (silver) under laptop (white), preventing heating of lap and improving laptop airflow
Prolonged use of laptops can cause repetitive strain injury because of their small, flat keyboard and trackpad pointing devices,.[61] Usage of separate, external ergonomic keyboards and pointing devices is recommended to prevent injury when working for long periods of time; they can be connected to a laptop easily by USB or via a docking station. Some health standards require ergonomic keyboards at workplaces.
Neck and spine [ edit ]
A laptop's integrated screen often requires users to lean over for a better view, which can cause neck or spinal injuries. A larger and higher-quality external screen can be connected to almost any laptop to alleviate this and to provide additional screen space for more productive work. Another solution is to use a computer stand.
Possible effect on fertility [ edit ]
A study by State University of New York researchers found that heat generated from laptops can increase the temperature of the lap of male users when balancing the computer on their lap, potentially putting sperm count at risk. The study, which included roughly two dozen men between the ages of 21 and 35, found that the sitting position required to balance a laptop can increase scrotum temperature by as much as 2.1 °C (4 °F). However, further research is needed to determine whether this directly affects male sterility.[62] A later 2010 study of 29 males published in Fertility and Sterility found that men who kept their laptops on their laps experienced scrotal hyperthermia (overheating) in which their scrotal temperatures increased by up to 2.0 °C (4 °F). The resulting heat increase, which could not be offset by a laptop cushion, may increase male infertility.[63][64][65][66][67]
A common practical solution to this problem is to place the laptop on a table or desk, or to use a book or pillow between the body and the laptop.[citation needed] Another solution is to obtain a cooling unit for the laptop. These are usually USB powered and consist of a hard thin plastic case housing one, two, or three cooling fans – with the entire assembly designed to sit under the laptop in question – which results in the laptop remaining cool to the touch, and greatly reduces laptop heat buildup.
Thighs [ edit ]
Heat generated from using a laptop on the lap can also cause skin discoloration on the thighs known as "toasted skin syndrome".[68][69][70][71]
Durability [ edit ]
A clogged heat sink on a laptop after 2.5 years of use
Laptops are generally not durable, however there are certain exceptions.
Laptop keyboard with its keys (except the space bar) removed, revealing crumbs, pet hair and other detritus to be cleaned away.
Equipment wear [ edit ]
Because of their portability, laptops are subject to more wear and physical damage than desktops. Components such as screen hinges, latches, power jacks, and power cords deteriorate gradually from ordinary use, and may have to be replaced. A liquid spill onto the keyboard, a rather minor mishap with a desktop system (given that a basic keyboard costs about US$20), can damage the internals of a laptop and destroy the computer, result in a costly repair or entire replacement of laptops. One study found that a laptop is three times more likely to break during the first year of use than a desktop.[72] To maintain a laptop, it is recommended to clean it every three months for dirt, debris, dust, and food particles. Most cleaning kits consist of a lint-free or microfiber cloth for the LCD screen and keyboard, compressed air for getting dust out of the cooling fan, and cleaning solution. Harsh chemicals such as bleach should not be used to clean a laptop, as they can damage it.[73]
Parts replacement [ edit ]
Original external components are expensive and usually proprietary and non-interchangeable; other parts are inexpensive—a power jack can cost a few dollars—but their replacement may require extensive disassembly and reassembly of the laptop by a technician. Other inexpensive but fragile parts often cannot be purchased separately from larger more expensive components. For example, the video display cable and the backlight power cable that pass through the lid hinges to connect the motherboard to the screen may eventually break from repeated opening and closing of the lid. These tiny cables usually cannot be purchased from the original manufacturer separate from the entire LCD panel, with the price of hundreds of dollars, although for popular models an aftermarket in pulled parts generally exists. The repair costs of a failed motherboard or LCD panel often exceeds the value of a used laptop. Parts can also be ordered from third party vendors.
Heating and cooling [ edit ]
Laptops rely on extremely compact cooling systems involving a fan and heat sink that can fail from blockage caused by accumulated airborne dust and debris. Most laptops do not have any type of removable dust collection filter over the air intake for these cooling systems, resulting in a system that gradually conducts more heat and noise as the years pass. In some cases the laptop starts to overheat even at idle load levels. This dust is usually stuck inside where the fan and heat sink meet, where it can not be removed by a casual cleaning and vacuuming. Most of the time, compressed air can dislodge the dust and debris but may not entirely remove it. After the device is turned on, the loose debris is reaccumulated into the cooling system by the fans. A complete disassembly is usually required to clean the laptop entirely. However, preventative maintenance such as regular cleaning of the heat sink via compressed air can prevent dust build up on the heat sink. Many laptops are difficult to disassemble by the average user and contain components that are sensitive to electrostatic discharge (ESD).
Battery life [ edit ]
Battery life is limited because the capacity drops with time, eventually requiring replacement after as little as a year. A new battery typically stores enough energy to run the laptop for three to five hours, depending on usage, configuration, and power management settings. Yet, as it ages, the battery's energy storage will dissipate progressively until it lasts only a few minutes. The battery is often easily replaceable and a higher capacity model may be obtained for longer charging and discharging time. Some laptops (specifically ultrabooks) do not have the usual removable battery and have to be brought to the service center of its manufacturer or a third-party laptop service center to have its battery replaced. Replacement batteries can also be expensive.
Security and privacy [ edit ]
Because they are valuable, commonly used, portable, and easy to hide in a backpack or other type of travel bag, laptops are often stolen. Every day, over 1,600 laptops go missing from U.S. airports.[74] The cost of stolen business or personal data, and of the resulting problems (identity theft, credit card fraud, breach of privacy), can be many times the value of the stolen laptop itself. Consequently, physical protection of laptops and the safeguarding of data contained on them are both of great importance. Most laptops have a Kensington security slot, which can be used to tether them to a desk or other immovable object with a security cable and lock. In addition, modern operating systems and third-party software offer disk encryption functionality, which renders the data on the laptop's hard drive unreadable without a key or a passphrase. As of 2015, some laptops also have additional security elements added, including eye recognition software and fingerprint scanning components.[75]
Software such as LoJack for Laptops, Laptop Cop, and GadgetTrack have been engineered to help people locate and recover their stolen laptop in the event of theft. Setting one's laptop with a password on its firmware (protection against going to firmware setup or booting), internal HDD/SSD (protection against accessing it and loading an operating system on it afterwards), and every user account of the operating system are additional security measures that a user should do.[76][77] Fewer than 5% of lost or stolen laptops are recovered by the companies that own them,[78] however, that number may decrease due to a variety of companies and software solutions specializing in laptop recovery. In the 2010s, the common availability of webcams on laptops raised privacy concerns. In Robbins v. Lower Merion School District (Eastern District of Pennsylvania 2010), school-issued laptops loaded with special software enabled staff from two high schools to take secret webcam shots of students at home, via their students' laptops.[79][80][81]
Sales [ edit ]
Manufacturers [ edit ]
There are many laptop brands and manufacturers. Several major brands that offer notebooks in various classes are listed in the adjacent box. The major brands usually offer good service and support, including well-executed documentation and driver downloads that remain available for many years after a particular laptop model is no longer produced. Capitalizing on service, support, and brand image, laptops from major brands are more expensive than laptops by smaller brands and ODMs. Some brands specialize in a particular class of laptops, such as gaming laptops (Alienware), high-performance laptops (HP Envy), netbooks (EeePC) and laptops for children (OLPC).
Many brands, including the major ones, do not design and do not manufacture their laptops. Instead, a small number of Original Design Manufacturers (ODMs) design new models of laptops, and the brands choose the models to be included in their lineup. In 2006, 7 major ODMs manufactured 7 of every 10 laptops in the world, with the largest one (Quanta Computer) having 30% of world market share.[82] Therefore, identical models are available both from a major label and from a low-profile ODM in-house brand.
Market Share [ edit ]
Battery-powered portable computers had just 2% worldwide market share in 1986.[83] However, laptops have become increasingly popular, both for business and personal use.[84] Around 109 million notebook PCs shipped worldwide in 2007, a growth of 33% compared to 2006.[85] In 2008 it was estimated that 145.9 million notebooks were sold, and that the number would grow in 2009 to 177.7 million.[86] The third quarter of 2008 was the first time when worldwide notebook PC shipments exceeded desktops, with 38.6 million units versus 38.5 million units.[84][87][88][89]
May 2005 was the first time notebooks outsold desktops in the US over the course of a full month; at the time notebooks sold for an average of $1,131 while desktops sold for an average of $696.[90] When looking at operating systems, for Microsoft Windows laptops the average selling price (ASP) showed a decline in 2008/2009, possibly due to low-cost netbooks, drawing an average US$689 at U.S. retail stores in August 2008. In 2009, ASP had further fallen to $602 by January and to $560 in February. While Windows machines ASP fell $129 in these seven months, Apple macOS laptop ASP declined just $12 from $1,524 to $1,512.[91]
Laptop Disposal [ edit ]
The list of materials that go into a laptop computer is long, and many of the substances used, such as beryllium, lead, chromium, and mercury compounds, are toxic or carcinogenic to humans. Although these toxins are relatively harmless when the laptop is in use, concerns that discarded laptops, cause a serious health risk and toxic environment damage, were so strong, that the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive (WEEE Directive) in Europe specified that all laptop computers must be recycled by law. Similarly, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has outlawed landfill dumping or the incinerating of discarded laptop computers.
Most laptop computers begin the recycling process with a method known as Demanufacturing (Demanufacture), this involves the physical separation of the components of the laptop.[92] These components are then either grouped into materials (e.g. plastic, metal and glass) for recycling or more complex items that require more advanced materials separation (e.g.) circuit boards, hard drives and batteries.
Corporate laptop recycling can require an additional process known as data destruction. The data destruction process ensures that all information or data that has been stored on a laptops hard drive can never be retrieved again. Below is an overview of some of the data protection and environmental laws and regulations applicable for laptop recycling data destruction:
• Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA)
• EU Privacy Directive (Due 2016)
• Financial Conduct Authority
• Sarbanes-Oxley Act
• PCI-DSS Data Security Standard
• Waste, Electronic & Electrical Equipment Directive (WEEE)
• Basel Convention
• Bank Secrecy Act (BSA)
• FACTA Sarbanes-Oxley Act
• FDA Security Regulations (21 C.F.R. part 11)
• Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA)
• HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act)
• NIST SP 800-53
• Add NIST SP 800-171
• Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act
• Patriot Act of 2002
• PCI Data Security Standard
• US Safe Harbor Provisions
• Various state laws
• JFAN 6/3
• Gramm-leach-Bliley Act
• DCID
Extreme use [ edit ]
The ruggedized Grid Compass computer was used since the early days of the Space Shuttle program. The first commercial laptop used in space was a Macintosh portable in 1991 aboard Space Shuttle mission STS-43.[93][94][95] Apple and other laptop computers continue to be flown aboard manned spaceflights, though the only long duration flight certified computer for the International Space Station is the ThinkPad.[96] As of 2011, over 100 ThinkPads were aboard the ISS. Laptops used aboard the International Space Station and other spaceflights are generally the same ones that can be purchased by the general public but needed modifications are made to allow them to be used safely and effectively in a weightless environment such as updating the cooling systems to function without relying on hot air rising and accommodation for the lower cabin air pressure.[97] Laptops operating in harsh usage environments and conditions, such as strong vibrations, extreme temperatures, and wet or dusty conditions differ from those used in space in that they are custom designed for the task and do not use commercial off-the-shelf hardware.
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
^ Unconfirmed if this exists in most recent models of laptops. ^ Almost all laptops contain a Wi-Fi interface; broadband cellular devices are available widely as extension cards and USB devices, and also as internal cards in select models.
References [ edit ]
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Wow! What do you know, I’m opening up commissions!!
So I need to take some unpaid leave for the next to weeks to fly out of state to support my mom while my grandfather goes into hospice care. He is rather old and this is probably be the last time I see him.
It’s a long time to go unpaid so I’m hoping to take some commissions to make supplement my income while I’m gone.
Deets:
E-mail me at onefellart@gmail.com with details about what you would like! Please provide image references, feel free to supplement your reference images with any additional details you feel I may need.
Please provide image references, feel free to supplement your reference images with any additional details you feel I may need. Payment is upfront! Payment should be sent via paypal after we agree on the details and amount. I will only begin drawing your commission after I receive payment.
Payment should be sent via paypal after we agree on the details and amount. I will only begin drawing your commission I receive payment. All files will be about 1500x2100 (an ipad screen size).
Please allow up to 2 days to receive a reply, and be patient with the turnaround for the finished art. I will be away from home for the next two weeks and I will work on them when I am not visiting with family. I’ll make sure to keep you updated though <3
Backgrounds will all be solid/gradient colors. It wont cost extra to request a BG.
All of these are either waist up, or busts, as shown in the example. Sorry no fullbody atm.
Again, any questions/inquires should be sent to onefellart@gmail.com! Tumblr hates sending me notifications.
Great okay! Thanks so much for reading, please boost if you would like.
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WASHINGTON (AP/The Huffington Post) -- Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown blamed his staff Thursday for passages about his upbringing on his official Senate website that were lifted word for word from a 2002 speech by former senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Dole.
“It was a summer intern that put together the site, we corrected it once we found out," he told the Boston Globe.
His office had “very little time and resources to put things up" at the time of the site's launch, he said.
"They did it, we were notified of it, we fixed it -- end of story,” Brown told the Globe.
The Democratic group American Bridge, which discovered the matching words, accused the Massachusetts Republican of plagiarism.
"This is just further proof that Scott Brown is not who the people of Massachusetts think he is," Rodell Mollineau, president of American Bridge, said in a written statement. "The fact that he has plagiarized a personal values statement in a message to students really raises questions about just how genuine Scott Brown is."
Brown's spokesman, John Donnelly, said excerpts of the speech were on Dole's website, which aides used as a template for his, and that the passages were transferred inadvertently without being rewritten.
Donnelly denied any plagiarism, saying it was an innocent mistake by staffers.
"Senator Dole's website served as one of the models for Senator Brown's website when he first took office ... It was a staff level oversight which we regret and has been corrected," Donnelly said in a statement.
The passages were about the values that parents instill in their children.
"I was raised to believe that there are no limits to individual achievement and no excuses to justify indifference," was the message on Brown's website that has since been removed. "From an early age, I was taught that success is measured not in material accumulations, but in service to others. I was encouraged to join causes larger than myself, to pursue positive change through a sense of mission, and to stand up for what I believe."
Passages from Dole's speech were included in a message to students on her website.
"I am Mary and John Hanford's daughter, raised to believe that there are no limits to individual achievement and no excuses to justify indifference," was the message on Dole's website. "From an early age, I was taught that success is measured, not in material accumulations, but in service to others. I was encouraged to join causes larger than myself, to pursue positive change through a sense of mission, and to stand up for what I believe."
In his biography, "Against All Odds: A Life From Hardship to Hope," Brown described a difficult childhood, including moving 17 times by the time he turned age 18, an absent father and sexual abuse by a camp counselor and a beating by a stepfather.
"I look back on my life now, though, and I can honestly say that there isn't one thing I would change: not the arrest, not the violence, not the hunger, not the beatings and brute struggles," Brown wrote, adding that such experiences made him what he is today.
Brian Nick, a spokesman for the former North Carolina senator, said Dole viewed the episode as "an innocent mistake" by staff. Nick said that a lot of Senate offices use generic language from time to time.
Brown, a Republican, is running for re-election in 2012 for the seat long held by the late Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy.
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The Move catalog may be [at this point] not growing anymore...and overall [sadly] a bit on the sparse side -- there is still a lot of fun to be had with the Move controller.
Firstly, let me just say that the Move itself works fine. In shooting games (my main attraction to them) it does seem to lose calibration and 'drift' over time...but it's an overall minor annoyance; it does break the illusion, but doesn't kill the fun. I am using mine with a projector screen...so I am not sure if that environment / setup would affect it at all.
The catalog of game to really checkout, at least in my opinion / findings...is as follows:
Firstly...before even the "numbers" -- if you want to play shooting games...get the Sharp Shooter gun attachment. I'm not sure how many games "fully" utilize it, but it does work great for a number of games I'll name below. Also, the Navigation Controller did enhance the experience significantly in certain games as well.
1) Heavy Rain. I'm actually really sad that Beyond: Two Souls didn't support the Move...as Heavy Rain was a wonderfully natural fit for what it asked you to do. Likely the best Move integration in a game I've had. I actually didn't even try "Beyond: Two Souls" since I felt it was such an oversight to not have it.
2) Dead Space: Extraction. This was a great unexpected surprise for me. It's still an "on the rails" shooter...but it actually has a decent story -- and playing with a friend is an absolute blast. My friend and I were completely surprised, and I am excited to play through it again soon.
3) House of the Dead OVERKILL. It's cheesy, campy...and plenty crude. But it's also a whole lot of fun. Grab a friend, and you'll be laughing away. This is likely the one that friends and I first reach for, as it's just straight-through fun...even if it isn't the most engaging of story lines -- you play it for the shooting. ;)
4) Child of Eden. I can't say that I've finished this game, or jumped into it every spare chance I get...but it's quite an audio-visual experience. If you have a nice sound system and a decent TV, turn out the lights and you'll be treated with quite a different experience.
5) The Shoot. Another really fun co-op game. Sadly, you have to finish a stage before it is unlocked as "co-op"...don't know why they did that...but once you have them cleared (hopefully ahead of time), it is really fun to play with friends.
I have others that I have bought, but haven't played yet: Killzone 3 (one of the few games that fully utilizes the Sharp Shooter), etc ... but I can say that the investment in the Move is well worth the fun-factor.
Especially if you've ever enjoyed arcade shooters...this accessory will be great fun for you.
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