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Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Click's Dan Simmons looks at some big differences that Android 2.2 will make to watching videos and browsing Phone giant Vodafone has backed down in a row with customers over software updates for Google Android phones. Last week, many customers who own HTC Desire smartphones were prompted to download a software update which they believed was an upgrade to Android. Instead it installed irremovable Vodafone-branded apps and bookmarks, including links to dating sites. Following a raft of complaints, the firm has backed down and will now offer an update without the applications. The software will upgrade users to the latest version of Android, as many had expected the original upgrade to do. This update has offered no performance enhancements at all Vodafone customer A spokesperson said the software - known as Froyo or version 2.2 - would be ready in the next seven to 10 days. The firm's apps - known as Vodafone 360 - will be offered as an optional download, a spokesperson said. "We will roll out a vanilla version of 2.2," a spokesperson told BBC News. "The only thing we will change are the network settings to optimise them for our network." Unwanted upgrade He said that the Vodafone applications downloaded in the most recent update would be removed when the next upgrade was rolled out. "We will make the 360 service available at a later date for optional download." Many customers were keen to get hold of the latest version of Android as it includes several new features, including HD video recording, the ability to turn the handset into a wireless hotspot and support for Flash software, commonly used to show web video. However, many were quickly disappointed and turned to Vodafone's forums to vent their anger. One wrote: "This update has offered no performance enhancements at all. "What really really annoys me is that Vodafone think of themselves as one of the biggest mobile companies in the world.... however, they in one day have managed to annoy most of their customers by spoiling a brilliant phone." Another said: "Can someone from Vodafone please explain to your paying customers why you are able to get an update out the door full of branding and unwanted Vodafone applications when you know full well all anyone wants is Froyo?" Initially, Vodafone refused to back down, saying that it customised phone software to "optimise customers' experience". However, after several days of complaints it has capitulated to its customers' demands.
'Duck Commander Musical' opens in Las Vegas The Robertson family The Robertson family Photo: Zach Dilgard, A&E Photo: Zach Dilgard, A&E Image 1 of / 35 Caption Close 'Duck Commander Musical' opens in Las Vegas 1 / 35 Back to Gallery The Robertson family, stars of the hit A&E reality show "Duck Dynasty," have a massive empire that's gone beyond the signature duck calls. You name it, the show's has probably been slapped on it, and tonight there's a new product for the Robertsons to be proud of. The "Duck Commander Musical" opens at the Crown Theater at the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas and is based on the book, "The Duck Commander Family." The best-seller was written by CEO Willie and his wife Korie. A seven-piece band provide the soundtrack of country, rock, gospel and pop to the 90-minute musical. Despite its reality TV inspiration, there's a lot of talent behind the family-friendly Vegas show, led by Tony Award-nominated director Jeff Calhoun and Broadway veterans filling out the cast. Take a walk down memory lane by viewing photos of the Robertson family through the years in the gallery above.
Black Frame Custom framed using a 7/8 inch black wood frame with a simple rectangular profile and a smooth, satiny finish providing a casual feel. Graphic is printed on our premium paper. Stretched Canvas Custom printed on textured canvas, stretched over a 1 1/2 inch thick wooden frame and gallery wrapped with black edges. A stylish, gallery look at a reasonable cost. Ready to hang. Charting the flow of political power, this History of the Political Parties print translates the first 100 years of our political history into a single visual picture. Starting from a single source, a large stream representing the political parties forks and rejoins as parties are created and then fade away. The streams twist and turn as power shifts from one party to another. Follow the history of the Loco Focos, Barnburners, Hunkers, Silver Grays, and the Temperance party. See the chaos of the 1850s as the Whig party explodes and the Republican party is born. Purchased with the sequel History of the Political Parties II, these graphics provide a fascinating visual history from presidents George Washington to Donald Trump. This print is a high-quality reproduction of an original antique print created circa 1894 by an unknown designer.
Ready to fight back? Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week. Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. Fight Back! Sign up for Take Action Now and we’ll send you three meaningful actions you can take each week. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Sign up for Take Action Now and we’ll send you three meaningful actions you can take each week. Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue Travel With The Nation Be the first to hear about Nation Travels destinations, and explore the world with kindred spirits. Be the first to hear about Nation Travels destinations, and explore the world with kindred spirits. Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine? Regarding the pending expulsion of Dominicans of Haitian descent, which I’ve written about here and here (based on original reporting by Rachel Nolan, here in Harper’s) and which is scheduled to start later this week: The Dominican Republic is sending mixed messages. Andrés Navarro, the country’s foreign minister, says they will wait until August to start deporting. The deadline for the hundreds of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent to register their status (and thus possibly avoid expulsion) is this Tuesday, and Navarro says the delay is necessary to both compile a complete “data base” with “biometric information” and to ensure that no “errors” are made, which could affect the “credibility of the whole process.” Ad Policy The Dominican Republic is sending mixed messages on deportation. But General Rubén Darío Paulino Sem, the army official in charge of the deportation, says the expulsion will start this Thursday, June 18. Sem has been overseeing the construction of seven concentration camps—which he calls “shelters,” or “centros de acogida”—where Dominicans suspected of being of Haitian descent will be housed until a “final evaluation” can be made. These two positions aren’t necessarily incompatible. Navarro could be talking about the final deportation to Haiti—which leaves room for the round-up to start next week, with the detained placed in Sem’s camps. In the meantime, the “path to citizenship” established by the DR in response to international pressure has been riddled with corruption, bribery, impossible bureaucratic hurdles, long lines, and pepper spray. I’ve received a number of e-mails from relatives of people subject to deportation. They are all heart-wrenching, such as this one, from a man whose partner is Dominican:
Image copyright Science Photo Library A Californian start-up will be allowed to advertise a mail order DNA test that screens for a rare genetic condition, after a U-turn by the US regulator. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), said the 23andMe product would "provide people with information about possible mutations in their genes that could be passed on to their children". It had previously banned similar tests. The 23andMe kit screens for Bloom syndrome, an inherited disease that is most common among Ashkenazi Jews. It can detect whether a healthy person is a carrier of the genetic variant that causes the disorder, and therefore at risk of passing it on to their offspring. 'No test is perfect' In a statement, the FDA also said it would provide the "least burdensome regulatory path" for future projects from 23andMe and similar companies. "In many circumstances it is not necessary for consumers to go through a licensed practitioner to have direct access to their personal genetic information," the regulator added. The decision contrasts with the FDA's stance in 2013, when it ordered 23andMe to "immediately discontinue" selling its saliva collection tests after failing to provide information to back its marketing claims. The $99 test had offered users a readout of their genetic code, including a detailed analysis of their health risks. However, despite giving the Bloom syndrome kit a green light, the FDA cautioned that "no test is perfect" and suggested that the kit should only be used by those likely to carry a relevant gene. Informative labelling and information on how to follow up with a medical professional must be provided by 23andMe, the FDA said. Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Anne Wojcicki, of 23andMe: "We're really partnering with the consumer" 'Major milestone' While welcoming the FDA's decision, 23andMe said it would "not return health results on individually cleared reports" until it had a "comprehensive product offering" in place. The health tech company, which is backed by Google, has been operating since 2006 and was co-founded by Anne Wojcicki, its chief executive, who married Google co-founder Sergey Brin in 2007. "This is a major milestone for our company and for consumers who want direct access to genetic testing," she said in a blog post. "We have more work to do, but we remain committed to pursuing a regulatory path for additional tests and bringing the health reports back to the US market.
Lowest Ratings SORT BY: \| Highest Ratings 33 Reviews. Average Rating: 4.8 of 5 Stars! 5 stars: 91% (30 of 33) 4 stars: 4% (1 of 33) 3 stars: 3% (1 of 33) 2 stars: 0% ( of 33) 1 star: 3% (1 of 33) Display All Reviews Reviewed By: Tom C on 09/22/2017 Rating: 5 of 5 Stars! I've tested compact single-stack 9mm handguns rather extensively, and I just don't think you can do better than a Shield. This gun has all the features you really need, at a price point that would allow you to buy two of them and keep one for back-up, as I did. I found it much softer shooting and easier to control than a Glock 43, with a 2 round magazine capacity advantage when talking about factory components. It has better sights, right out of the box, and is cheaper to boot. Against the Springfield XDS, I found it about the same size, slightly more accurate, and a lot cheaper, as well as being American made. Compared to the Walther PPS LE Model, I'll have to call that one a draw. Both were equally great. You do have three magazine choices on the PPS and only two with the Shield. And compared to the Kahr CW9, the Shield wins on price when you factor in that the Kahr only comes with one magazine. The Smith also seems to be built a bit tougher and doesn't have a break-in period measured in dog years, not to mention that dealing with Kahr Customer Service is like having your teeth drilled, while Smith and Wesson is as easy as it gets. Bottom line is, I'd buy this gun again, and I have. Reviewed By: Don V on 08/14/2017 Rating: 4 of 5 Stars! This is the second Shield that I have own ( I also own a ported 40 S&W from the custom shop)and I must admit I am partial to M&Ps. The workmanship is excellent, take down and cleaning are exceptionally easy, and for short barreled gun, it shoots quite well at the distances one would expect to encounter in a personal defense situation. It\'s size makes it perfect for concealed carry. The trigger is OK, but I have replaced the triggers in both of my Shields with Apex duty-carry trigger kits, but that is my personal preference. Reviewed By: Gavin F on 08/12/2017 Rating: 5 of 5 Stars! Another nice piece for your carry. Quality craftsmanship and priced right with a rebate. Reviewed By: Tim M on 07/07/2017 Rating: 5 of 5 Stars! Great firearm at a great price from Buds. Prompt order updates, prompt shipping. Firearm was in perfect condition Reviewed By: Benjamin S on 07/05/2017 Rating: 5 of 5 Stars! I purchased this M&P Shield for me. Just like a Taurus 605, I gave a Shield to one of my daughter's. Price was right and shipping to my FFL was fast! Love Buds! Reviewed By: Brett S on 05/10/2017 Rating: 5 of 5 Stars! Absolutely love this firearm! Would recommend to all my friends and family. Reviewed By: Kenneth C on 04/07/2017 Rating: 5 of 5 Stars! Great Buy, Don't pass it up. Reviewed By: michael a on 01/26/2017 Rating: 5 of 5 Stars! Bought this for my wife for her cc and she loved it. Trigger is amazing on it and recommended to anyone looking for a great carry gun. Reviewed By: christian w on 01/23/2017 Rating: 5 of 5 Stars! This was another great product at a great price from Buds. The SW shield is one of the best thin single stack 9mm or 40 sw on the market for the money in my opinion. Buds is always were I check first, they usally have everyone else beat in price and customer service....A1 always. Reviewed By: John H on 01/14/2017 Rating: 5 of 5 Stars! Great pistol at a great price Show More Reviews
Nearly 300K New Jobs In February; Unemployment Dips To 5.5 Percent Enlarge this image toggle caption Lynne Sladky/AP Lynne Sladky/AP The U.S. economy added 295,000 jobs last month, according to the Labor Department's monthly survey, and the unemployment rate dropped to 5.5 percent. The latest strong data beat expectations and follow a robust jump the previous month — a sign that the nation's economy is finally picking up steam. Economists had predicted the economy would add 240,000 jobs in February and that the unemployment rate would notch back down to 5.6 percent, where it stood for December. The slight increase in the rate last month was attributed to strong growth in the labor force. The average workweek for nonfarm payrolls was 34.6 hours, a figure that has held steady for five months. The average hourly wage rose 3 cents, to $24.78. As NPR's John Ydstie reported this morning ahead of this morning's release by the department's Bureau of Labor Statistics, the report for January "was stellar on almost every count. It revealed a monthly average for job growth of 336,000 over the previous three months, and it showed strong wage gains after years of disappointing growth." For February, the Labor Department says more jobs were added in food services and drinking places, professional and business services, construction, health care and in transportation and warehousing. The latest report comes as the Federal Reserve has signaled that it is likely to raise interest rates, possibly as soon as June, based on the generally more robust U.S. economy and concerns about inflation pressures. Today's reports shows 51,000 new jobs last month in professional and business services and 29,000 new jobs in construction. Transportation and warehousing added 19,000 jobs, and the retail sector gained 32,000. Over the past year, construction and retail have collectively gained about 320,000 jobs. Reuters reports from London: "The dollar hit an 11-year high against major currencies on Friday as investors bet the monthly U.S. jobs report would increase the chances of rate hikes, even as the European Central Bank embarks on a 1 trillion euro bond-buying campaign."
Github Issue we will ‘hack': “I was curious if there was a better way to bind on multiple events at once…” Wouldn’t it be nice to bind multiple events to the same expression in our Angular2 Templates? It would probably look like this if we did so: <div (click,submit,mouseenter)=’foo($event)’></div> EventManager In my last post, I described how to create custom events by extending EventManagerPlugin. The EventManagerPlugin is an extendable class which allows you to specify behavior for event strings. In fact, it is extended in multiple places in the Angular2 source to implement the normal event bindings you are already using. EventManagerPlugins (AKA the EVENT_MANAGER_PLUGINS provider/OpaqueToken) lives as a private member of EventManager. How it works When you add an event to an angular template, while the DOM tree is being parsed, the DomRenderer’s instance calls listen(). The listen and listenGlobal functions which call their instance of EventManager As you can see, listen() this then calls the EventManager’s instance function addEventListener(). EventManager then searches through its list of registered EventManagerPlugins calling their supports() function and passing the eventName. _findPluginFor(eventName: string) passes the event in question, and then iterates though its plugins looking for a plugin that “supports()” the event name. This function returns either true or false telling the EventManager whether or not this plugin can/is supposed to handle this custom event. When a valid plugin is found, the manager calls that plugin’s version of addEventListener() performing the custom action. Step 1: Creating a new plugin Now that we have an idea how this all works, lets implement a new plugin. Like I mentioned above, we want to have multiple events on our Angular2 templates tie to the same expression like this: <div (click,submit,mouseenter)=’foo($event)’></div> If thats the case the rules for our supports() function should be pretty clear. We need a string which has (1 or more) commas in it, that separate event names. We should also handle when people put something stupid in like “(,click)”. So I wrote my supports() function as follows: Also includes a method I can use to get an array of events. This will allows EventManager to delegate event strings like “click,submit,mousedown” to this plugin. Step 2: implementing the eventListeners Now that we have implemented supports(), EventManager will now call plugin.addEventListener() so the plugin can define its custom behavior. Our custom behavior is simple: “add event listeners for all the events in the eventArray that we parsed”. Fail Number 1 This worked, however custom events wouldn’t trigger for their respective plugins. My first attempt as you can see has me using DOM.onAndCancel(element, singleEventName, outsideHandler); This is the equivalent of conveniently performing the native addEventListener() and removeEventListener(). This however came with some issues. For example when I used “(clickOutside,click,submit)” which includes a custom event (created from another plugin), it did not fire because it was executed in the current plugin’s context. Success!!! Wait, but we do have the EventManager instance available, instead of attaching the events in this plugin, why don’t we pass EventManager the events, and let it do its job and figure out which plugins should use them. So I refactored the code to look like this: Using this.manager.addEventListener() to send events back to be called by the appropriate plugin. Step 3: add it to EVENT_MANAGER_PLUGINS This worked like a charm!!!!! All that was left to do was to implement the plugin and bootstrap it.
One out of every seven people on the planet uses the messaging app WhatsApp every day, according a recent blog post from the company. A billion people a day send messages to their friends and family on a service that's end-to-end encrypted by default, up from a billion per month last year. That surge in growth stands in sharp contrast to Twitter, which added approximately no new monthly uses last quarter, and had in fact lost two million in the US. WhatsApp and Twitter don't just represent contrary growth curves; they're the polar opposites of messaging. Twitter is public. WhatsApp is private. Twitter has a huge problem with safety, while WhatsApp has made privacy and security the center of its mission. And it's now more clear than ever that people have made their choice. WhatsApples to Oranges In fairness, Twitter and WhatsApp differ not just in values but also in their fundamental purpose. Twitter is a broadcast service, enabling anyone to share a message with the whole world. WhatsApp is a messenger service, enabling people to talk to people they know. As Pamela Clark-Dickson, an analyst at London-based Ovum, who has followed chat companies closely, puts it: Twitter is a “one-to-many social media site, whereas WhatsApp is primarily a one-to-one communications app (although WhatsApp also enables group messaging, while Twitter also enables direct messaging).” In some ways, that hamstrings Twitter's potential size. Everyone has people they might want to reach out to directly. Not everyone has something they think they need to share with the world, or understands that they don't need to tweet at all to get a lot of out Twitter. WhatsApp provides a universal service; Twitter's more niche. “That seems like an apples to oranges comparison to me,” says Andrew Crocker, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. A more direct comparison would be between WhatsApp and other direct-messaging services, like Facebook Messenger, Signal, Telegram, or iMessage. Of these, WhatsApp has the highest daily users; the next most popular is Facebook Messenger, which boasts 1.2 billion a month. But instead of raw numbers, look at WhatsApp’s and Twitter’s rates of divergence. Crocker agrees that the explosive popularity of WhatsApp—and other private messaging services—demonstrates just how much people want privacy. That's a stark contrast to just a few years ago, when the death of privacy made for a common refrain in the tech press. Had that come to pass, Twitter could have become a platform for direct messaging. But save for a few cliques who tweet back and forth to make dinner plans (full disclosure, my mother, and brother, and occasionally myself do this, which others find insufferable), the impersonal interactions Twitter offers have failed to attract an audience. WhatsApp's private space, meanwhile, thrives exponentially. Privacy Lives Way back in the pre-Trumpian but post-Snowden era of 2014, headlines like this one were everywhere: Privacy Is Dead. Forbes declared that not only was it dead but it was all of us who use social media that killed it. Mother Jones blamed government surveillance. Even WIRED, coming to privacy’s defense that year, proclaimed that “the rise of publicness has allowed for privateness to become its own trend,” which implied that though privacy was not dead it had become a fetish. Fast forward to 2017. WhatsApp and Snapchat have become the backlash to the public lives everyone was told were inevitable. Parents turn to WhatsApp to securely share photos of our kids and exchange embarrassing parenting tips. Teens who, as WIRED noted in 2014, once posted to Facebook and then deleted everything as a way to force privacy out of an increasingly public medium, turn more and more to Snapchat or Instagram Stories to communicate ephemerally—scared straight, perhaps, by all the experts who admonished them that their Facebook posts would haunt their college applications and future job prospects. Across the globe, WhatsApp opens up a private space people increasingly long for. “The success of WhatsApp shows that there is a great demand for usable, secure private messaging,” Crocker says, adding that it also demonstrates that even public services like Twitter would do well to experiment with offering more granular security and privacy controls. “I would love to see Twitter offer encrypted DMs,” he says. The Network Effect Though Twitter offered no explanation for its drop-off in US users, it’s clear that it’s not merely because people would prefer to talk privately with their friends. It’s also that many people don’t understand how to use Twitter, or why they would want to. And those who do want to use it don’t feel that Twitter does enough to keep them safe from anime-frog-avatared trolls. Both of these ideas–that Twitter is inscrutable, and that it is unsafe–spread through their respective networks, and work against Twitter’s goal of adding and keeping more users. 'The success of WhatsApp shows that there is a great demand for usable, secure private messaging.' – Andrew Crocker, EFF “A lot of people still don’t ‘get’ Twitter—there is still this attitude of ‘what do I say?,’” says Clark-Dickson. “When the point is that, as a user, you don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to.” One of Twitter’s greatest strengths is in passive news discovery, yet the platform hasn’t managed to convey that message to skeptics. Its greatest weakness, on the other hand, is that its most devoted users often fall victim to harassment or abuse. Despite some progress, Twitter hasn’t taken enough meaningful action to make people feel safe. The network effect, on the other hand, helps WhatsApp tremendously. As more people use it, more people follow so that they, too, can be on the group WhatsApp chain are their friends are giggling about. Some may choose it for the end-to-end encryption, others because it’s where the other parents they know share potty-training photos. Whatever the specific reason for a download, WhatsApp’s rise speaks to the global desire to communicate privately in a digital world, while Twitter’s decline shows the increasing disinterest in a soapbox.
(Photo: AP/Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call) People for the American Way hold a protest on November 18 in Upper Senate Park against the nomination of Senator Jeff Sessions as Donald Trump's Attorney General. In the presidential appointments made so far by Donald Trump, the president-elect has signaled his willingness to feed his base of angry white people the race war they crave, if only thus far by means of posturing. But early next year, a race war of words will break out on the Senate floor, and there is little escaping the conclusion that this is what the next occupant of the Oval Office wants. For his chief of staff, Trump selected a talented propagandist whose specialty is fanning the flames of outrage through the use of incendiary themes. As chief executive of Breitbart News, Stephen K. Bannon oversaw a web empire which, he boasted, provided “a platform for the alt-right,” the Trump-loving white supremacist movement that the president-elect was finally shamed into disavowing on Tuesday by the editorial board of The New York Times. Trump’s national security advisor will be General Michael Flynn, who has claimed that Islam is not a true religion, and tweeted, “Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL.” While those comments are best categorized as religious bigotry, it is notable that most Muslims are either brown or black. The appointments of neither Flynn nor Bannon require Senate confirmation. But the nomination of Jeff Sessions, the U.S. senator from Alabama, to the post of attorney general is another matter. In 1986, Sessions won the distinction of being the first nominee in 48 years to be denied Senate confirmation to the federal bench when racially loaded comments he made came to light in his confirmation hearing. A former colleague, who is African American, alleged that Sessions called him and other black attorneys “boy,” which Sessions denied. But the senator did not disavow comments ascribed to him in which he said that he used to think the Ku Klux Klan was OK until he learned that its members smoked pot (Sessions disdains marijuana and its users), or that the NAACP was “un-American” for trying to “force civil rights down the throats of people.” All of this, and likely more revelations along these lines, will be aired once again in 2017, in what promises to be a riveting Senate confirmation hearing. And that’s likely exactly the way the president-elect and his advisers want it. Were Trump not looking to shore up his white-power bona fides with his base, he could have easily avoided the likely spectacle of the Sessions confirmation hearing by simply granting the campaign loyalist a plum job that does not require the advice and consent of the Senate: a job like chief White House counsel, or counselor to the president. In addition to playing the race card with the Sessions nomination, Trump will also again bring his demonstrated need to dominate and abuse women to the fore. After the Access Hollywood video leak revealed Trump’s boast of grabbing women by the genitals, Sessions said that he wouldn’t characterize such behavior as sexual assault. “It think that’s a stretch,” he told the Weekly Standard. The website of the Department of Justice, which Sessions, as attorney general, has been tapped to lead, defines sexual assault this way: “any type of sexual contact or behavior that occurs without the explicit consent of the recipient.” Perhaps a new definition is in the works. ON SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 19, a gathering of white supremacists in the Ronald Reagan building in Washington, D.C., applauded the election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency as a victory for their cause. “Donald Trump’s campaign was the first step towards identity politics in the United States,” said Richard Spencer, president of the National Policy Institute, the white nationalist organization that sponsored the confab. At a press conference convened in conjunction with the NPI gathering, Spencer explained, “Donald Trump is the first [Republican presidential candidate] who doesn’t say ‘I’m going to stick up for capitalism’ or ‘I’m going to stick up for the Constitution.’ He said, ‘I’m going to stick up for you—the people who voted for me.’ This is something new.” The people who voted for Trump, of course, are mostly white. It was Spencer who rebranded a collection of white supremacist, anti-Islam, and misogynist activists as the “alt-right.” By the end of the NPI conference, attendees would be saluting him in the Nazi style as he concluded a full-bore anti-Semitic speech with the words, “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!” On Tuesday, Trump abruptly canceled a scheduled meeting with editors and writers of The New York Times after the paper’s editorial board called on him to personally disavow the support of the NPI conference organizers and attendees. (On Monday, Trump’s transition team spokesperson Hope Hicks had issued a statement disavowing the group’s support.) During the campaign, Trump retweeted posts from the Twitter accounts of white supremacists and other members of the so-called alt-right, amplifying their voices to his millions of followers. Before the day’s end, the president-elect reversed himself, going to the Times’s headquarters for the meeting with the paper’s journalists, and disavowing and condemning the white nationalists who had so saluted him. It really shouldn’t have been so difficult a call. Come January, when the Senate takes up its confirmation schedule, the real race and sex war will unfold in the upper chamber of the United States Congress.
Leith, North Dakota is a small town with only 24 residents. Recently, the town has been targeted for takeover by a group of neo-Nazis, who are trying to make it a haven for white supremacists. According to NPR, white supremacist Craig Cobb has already purchased 12 properties, and has given most of them to other white supremacists. Cobb has said he wants to fly flags of the “formerly white nations of Europe” over the town: “It would be extraordinarily beautiful when people enter the town, particularly at night,” Cobb says. “We will probably have the National Socialist hunting flag with stag horns and a very small swastika in the center — very discreet.” This past weekend, he invited members of the National Socialist Movement, one of the country’s biggest white supremacist groups, to visit the town. The neo-Nazis were met by hundred of Native American and anti-Fascist protestors. You can see lots of images from the protests here and here. While the attempted neo-Nazi takeover is beyond disgusting, it’s inspiring to see people standing up to this hate. My favorite image from the protests is the one above, of a group of Lakota grandmothers who apparently captured one of Cobb’s precious flags. Talk about badass women!
The Ontario government will expand the number of places where transgender people can obtain approvals for publicly insured sex reassignment surgeries, The Globe and Mail has learned. A source close to Health Minister Eric Hoskins said Thursday that the Liberal government is reviewing regulations to determine the best way to increase access beyond Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH,) which is currently the lone site for pre-operative approvals – not just for Ontario but also for Newfoundland and Labrador and, until last year, Saskatchewan. CAMH will no longer be the sole gatekeeper for such procedures, the source confirmed, but it is too early to say where the other approval sites will be. Story continues below advertisement In the meantime, the government also plans to provide "additional support" to CAMH's Adult Gender Identity Clinic, where there are now 970 people in the queue – and where it takes as long as two years to secure a first appointment. The government is not planning a formal announcement, the source said. The news comes on the eve of Friday's Trans Pride March in downtown Toronto, part of the city's Pride festivities. The Globe first drew attention to the bottleneck at CAMH in April when it wrote about the case of Chrystofer Maillet, an Ottawa trans man who paid almost $7,500 out of pocket for a double mastectomy. The Ontario Health Insurance Plan would have covered the procedure if Mr. Maillet, now 36, had first obtained an approval letter from the CAMH clinic. But he could not endure the wait. When he finally landed an appointment at the clinic – nine months after his March, 2013, surgery – the clinic's staff deemed him a good candidate for the procedure and wrote a letter saying so. Mr. Maillet used that letter in an appeal to a quasi-judicial panel that reviews OHIP rejections, but the board ruled against him in January, writing that OHIP's rules clearly state the CAMH approval must precede the surgery. Mr. Maillet has since filed a Charter challenge to the OHIP regulation. Story continues below advertisement Story continues below advertisement "I think that by forcing people to travel halfway across the [province] to do an interview process to allow them access to health care that everyone should have automatically, it's an unfair process," Mr. Maillet said last month. "It just seems like we're making it a whole lot harder for anyone to just be themselves." Other trans patients have since come forward with similar complaints. Bobbie Pearson, a 57-year-old trans woman from London, Ont., appeared Wednesday before the same panel that rejected Mr. Maillet's claim. She is seeking reimubursement for the $20,000 genital surgery she underwent in Pennsylvania last month. A decision in her case is not expected until later this summer at the earliest. The NDP's health critic wrote an open letter to Dr. Hoskins on Wednesday chiding his government for moving too slowly to solve the problem at CAMH. "Far too many trans Ontarians continue to experience elevated risk of depression and suicide in the face of ongoing discrimination, harassment and violence," France Gélinas wrote. "It is heartbreaking and it is wrong that vulnerable individuals should be confronted by barriers to care that make it more difficult to access the health-care services they need." Story continues below advertisement CAMH's president and the psychiatrist who leads the facility's small Adult Gender Identity Clinic have both said the rule limiting approvals to CAMH should be scrapped. The demand for sex reassignment surgery has surged in recent years. Last year, the clinic approved 177 surgeries, up from 59 in 2010. The Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, meanwhile, spent almost $2.2-million on sex reassignment surgeries in 2014-2105, up from about $22,000 in 2008-2009, the year the procedures were relisted by OHIP after a 10-year hiatus. The quality and availability of trans health services varies across Canada. Every jurisdiction except New Brunswick, Nunavut and the Northwest Territories now publicly insures at least some sex reassignment surgeries.
Geneva's Grand Mosque (Keystone) The Zurich prosecutor’s office has opened a criminal investigation into suspected violation of anti-racism laws after a member of the rightwing Swiss People’s Party tweeted: “Maybe we need a new Kristallnacht … this time against the mosques”. Also referred to as the Night of Broken Glass, Kristallnacht is the name given to a pogrom against Jews in Germany in November 1938, during which nearly 100 people were killed and businesses and synagogues attacked while authorities looked on. In a statement on Tuesday, the prosecutor’s office said it had interviewed the author of the tweet, searched his home and seized the equipment used to post the comments on social networking site Twitter. According to the prosecutor’s office, the author admitted to having written the tweet, but said it had been taken out of context by the media. The tweet was apparently made in response to the acquittal in May of a Muslim man who had said it was “OK” for a man to beat his wife if she refused to have sex with him. Tweeted on Saturday, the author had removed the comments from his Twitter account and denied he written it. But the newspaper 20 Minuten on Tuesday revealed it had retrieved the tweet, along with another which said: “I would like to stand certain people up against the wall and shoot them. Less dirt on the earth would be good”. The author sits on the local school board and is a member of the executive committee of a local branch of the People’s Party in Zurich (districts 7/8). In a statement, president of the city of Zurich People’s Party, Roger Liebi, said the comments were “unacceptable” and called for the man to be expelled from the party. On Tuesday evening the local politician at the centre of the controversy anounced his immediate resignation from the party. The move was welcomed by the party branch, whose president Urs Fehr said he deplored any form of incitement to violence against individuals or minorities. The Young Greens called for the man to resign from his position on the school board and, along with the Islamic Central Council, is considering pressing charges. The Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities said the tweet was offensive to Jews and Muslims and called on the Swiss People’s Party to condemn the comments as unacceptable. swissinfo.ch and agencies Neuer Inhalt Horizontal Line SWI swissinfo.ch on Instagram SWI swissinfo.ch on Instagram
Photo — Prosecutors charged Jared L. Loughner, a troubled 22-year-old college dropout, with five federal counts on Sunday, including the attempted assassination of a member of Congress, in connection with a shooting rampage on Saturday morning that left six people dead and 14 wounded. Evidence seized from Mr. Loughner’s home, about five miles from the shooting, indicated that he had planned to kill Representative Gabrielle Giffords , Democrat of Arizona , according to documents filed in Federal District Court in Phoenix . Special Agent Tony M. Taylor Jr. of the F.B.I. said in an affidavit that an envelope found in a safe in the home bore these handwritten words: “I planned ahead,” “My assassination” and “Giffords.” Mr. Loughner, who is believed to have acted alone, is in federal custody and is scheduled to make his first court appearance before a magistrate judge in Phoenix on Monday. Ms. Giffords was in critical condition after surviving, against the odds, a single gunshot wound to the head at point-blank range. Her doctors were cautiously optimistic that she would survive, and said on Sunday that they had removed nearly half of her skull to prevent damage from the swelling of her brain . An outpouring of grief was on display all over Tucson , where friends of the many victims joined complete strangers in lighting candles and offering tear-filled prayers. From the back of the temple Ms. Giffords attends, Naomi Present, the distraught daughter of a rabbi, cried out on Sunday morning, “Why, why, why, why?” Many across America were asking the same thing, and the state found itself on the defensive, with its top lawmakers asserting that Arizona was not a hothouse of ugly rhetoric. President Obama called on Americans to observe a moment of silence at 11 a.m. Monday in honor of the wounded and dead. Robert S. Mueller III , the director of the F.B.I., traveled to Tucson to oversee the shooting investigation at Mr. Obama’s request. He said an intensive investigation was seeking to determine “why someone would commit such a heinous act and whether anyone else was involved.” Mr. Mueller added that discussions were under way to increase security for all members of Congress. Capitol security agencies are planning to join the F.B.I. on Wednesday in a security briefing for members of Congress. Already, the United States Marshals Service has increased protection for federal judges in Arizona. Investigators here focused their attention on Mr. Loughner, whom they accused of methodically planning the shootings, which occurred outside a supermarket. The court documents said Mr. Loughner bought the semiautomatic Glock pistol used in the shooting at Sportsman’s Warehouse, which sells hunting and fishing gear, on Nov. 30 in Tucson. The gun was legally purchased, officials said, prompting criticism of the state’s gun laws, which allow the carrying of concealed weapons. Sheriff Clarence W. Dupnik of Pima County, a critic of what he calls loose gun restrictions, bluntly labeled Arizona “Tombstone.” The documents also indicated that the suspect had previous contact with the congresswoman. Also found in the safe at Mr. Loughner’s home was a letter from Ms. Giffords thanking him for attending a 2007 “Congress on Your Corner” event, like the one she was holding Saturday morning when she was shot. Along with being accused of trying to kill Ms. Giffords, Mr. Loughner was charged with the killing and attempted killing of four government employees: John M. Roll , the chief federal judge in Arizona, who was killed; Gabriel Zimmerman, a Congressional aide, who was also killed; and Pamela Simon and Ron Barber, aides who were wounded. Mr. Loughner could face the death penalty if convicted. The indictment against Mr. Loughner indicated that the authorities had surveillance video, which was not released, that captured events outside the supermarket. Outside lawyers said the footage would probably be saved for court. The authorities did release 911 tapes of the minutes after the shooting, at 10:11 a.m. Saturday, in which caller after caller, many out of breath, dialed in to report shots fired, many shots, and people falling, too many to count. Mr. Mueller said additional state charges might be filed, and he did not rule out the filing of terrorism charges. Mr. Loughner has refused to cooperate with investigators and has invoked his Fifth Amendment rights, the Pima County sheriff’s office said. Photo Judy Clarke, a federal public defender who has handled major cases, has been appointed to represent Mr. Loughner, CNN reported. Ms. Clarke has defended Theodore J. Kaczynski , who was convicted in the Unabomber attacks, and Zacarias Moussaoui , the Qaeda operative. Early Sunday, the authorities released a photograph taken from the surveillance video of a possible accomplice in the shooting. But the man later contacted sheriff’s deputies, who determined that he was a taxi driver who had taken the suspect to the mall where the shooting took place and then entered the supermarket with him when he did not have change for the $14 fare. Seasoned trauma surgeons, used to seeing patients in distress, were shaken by the scale of the shootings. Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters. “I never thought I would experience something like this in my own backyard,” said Dr. Peter M. Rhee, chief of trauma surgery at the University Medical Center, who has experience on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq and who likened what happened in Tucson to the mass shootings in those places. Doctors treating Ms. Giffords said she had been able to respond to simple commands, an encouraging sign. At a news conference at the hospital, surgeons said she was the only one of the victims to remain in critical care at the hospital. They said she was lucky to be alive but would not speculate about the degree of her recovery, which they said could take months or longer. “Over all, this is about as good as it’s going to get,” Dr. Rhee said. “When you get shot in the head and a bullet goes through your brain, the chances of you living are very small, and the chances of you waking up and actually following commands is even much smaller than that.” Dr. G. Michael Lemole Jr., the chief of neurosurgery , who operated on Ms. Giffords, said the bullet traveled through the left side of her brain “from back to front.” It did not cross from one side of the brain to the other, he said, nor did it pass through some critical areas that would further diminish her chances of recovery. Officials said the attack could have been even more devastating had several victims not overwhelmed the suspect as he tried to reload his gun. A bystander, Patricia Maisch, who was waiting to meet Ms. Giffords, grabbed the gun’s magazine as the gunman dropped it while trying to reload after firing 31 rounds, officials said. Two men, Roger Salzgeber and Bill D. Badger, then overwhelmed the gunman, and another man, Joseph Zamudio, restrained his flailing legs. In addition to Judge Roll, 63, and Mr. Zimmerman, 30, who was the director of community outreach for Ms. Giffords, the others who died were identified as Christina Green, 9; Dorothy Morris, 76; Dorwin Stoddard, 76; and Phyllis Schneck, 79. The new House speaker, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio , denounced the attack in an early Sunday appearance in West Chester, his hometown, and said it was a reminder that public service “comes with a risk.” Mr. Boehner urged people to pray for Ms. Giffords and the other victims and told his House colleagues to persevere in fulfilling their oath of office. “This inhuman act should not and will not deter us,” he said. “No act, no matter how heinous, must be allowed to stop us.” He also said the normal business of the House for the coming week had been postponed “so that we can take necessary action regarding yesterday’s events.” That business had included a vote to repeal the health care overhaul. Mr. Loughner had exhibited increasingly strange behavior in recent months, including ominous Internet postings — at least one showing a gun — and a series of videos in which he made disjointed statements on topics like the gold standard and mind control. Pima Community College, which he had attended, said he had been suspended for conduct violations and withdrew in October after five instances of classroom or library disruptions that involved the campus police. As the investigation intensified on Sunday, the police were still at the scene of the shooting, a suburban shopping center known as La Toscana Village. Investigators have described the evidence collection as a monumental task given the large number of bullets fired and victims hit. All of the cars in the parking lot were scrutinized in search of a vehicle the gunman might have driven to the scene. Then the taxi driver stepped forward to help explain how the suspect had arrived.
A Donald Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE surrogate on Capitol Hill called on Ted Cruz Rafael (Ted) Edward CruzTrump unleashing digital juggernaut ahead of 2020 Inviting Kim Jong Un to Washington Trump endorses Cornyn for reelection as O'Rourke mulls challenge MORE to quit the presidential race, saying it’s time for GOP elites to accept the billionaire businessman as the party’s likely nominee. “The only strategy for these other guys is [a contested convention in] Cleveland and that is a really poor strategy," Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), one of nine lawmakers to have endorsed Trump, told The Hill on Wednesday. "When I say it’s time to start referring to Trump as the presumptive nominee and start talking about him as the likely nominee, that goes for Ted Cruz and John Kasich as well. ADVERTISEMENT “If Ted Cruz cares more for the party and the country than his own political ambitions, he too will refer to Trump as the presumptive nominee, step down and give us a one-month, six-week head start to unity," Cramer continued. The comments from Cramer, the at-large congressman from North Dakota, came on the same day former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who ran for president in 2012, said Trump’s primary victory in his home state of New York on Tuesday made him the presumptive nominee. Neither Cruz, the Tea Party senator from Texas, nor Kasich, the more moderate Ohio governor, have given any indication they’re prepared to throw in the towel. Their surrogates on Capitol Hill said both candidates will take the fight all the way to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland this July, anticipating that Trump will fall short of the 1,237 delegates he needs to secure the nomination on the first ballot. “I think it’s premature on either side, either Republican or Democrat,” to call anyone the presumptive nominee “until they get the requisite delegates. And we’re not there yet,” Rep. Justin Amash Justin AmashHouse to push back at Trump on border Ex-GOP lawmakers urge Republicans to block Trump's emergency declaration This week: Congress, Trump set for showdown on emergency declaration MORE (R-Mich.), a Cruz backer, said in an interview. A member of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, Amash said Kasich should have dropped out a long time ago. The Ohio governor has only won 148 delegates to Trump’s 845 and Cruz’s 559. But one of Kasich’s top surrogates on Capitol Hill, Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.), shot back that Cruz was essentially in the same boat as Kasich. Trump’s near sweep of delegates in New York mathematically eliminated the possibility of Cruz winning the nomination on the first ballot. “That was Kasich’s advice to Cruz: to drop out because he wasn’t mathematically viable,” Dent told The Hill. “I’m sure Ted Cruz won’t be following his own advice. “They are in a similar spot. Neither can win on the first ballot,” Dent went on. “If people want an alternative to Donald Trump, they have two choices right now, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, and the question is, which candidate shares your values and is electable? Without question, in my view, that is John Kasich.” The back and forth Wednesday represented a new level of squabbling among House surrogates that largely mirrored the infighting among Trump, Cruz and Kasich on the campaign trail. In light of Gingrich’s remarks, Cramer said it was time for other GOP luminaries to rally behind Trump as the nominee, to allow the party to pivot to fighting Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE and the general election. “I would certainly hope that our leadership, not just in the House and Senate but folks like Mitt Romney and like Karl Rove should start talking about him like he is going to be the nominee,” Cramer said in an interview just off the House floor. “Whether they refer to him as the presumptive nominee or not, we should be talking about him as if he is our nominee because he is going to be our nominee. And we want to transition to the positive side sooner rather than later.” But even neutral observers in the party said they weren’t prepared just to accept Trump as the standard-bearer. “I’m not willing to say anybody is our guy right now. I will say if Donald Trump is the guy, I will be his biggest supporter. But I really don’t see any way that Trump gets 1,237 on the first ballot,” said retiring Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.). Trump easily won the Peach State, but most of its delegates will back Cruz if voting goes to multiple ballots. Westmoreland said if Trump gets within striking distance of the 1,237 mark, he could feasibly try to negotiate with the party's unbound delegates to push him over the top. “He says he’s a great negotiator. Well, we’ll find out.”
Maryland wide receiver Juwann Winfree has withdrawn from school and is no longer part of the Terps football program, according to reports from the Baltimore Sun and Washington Post. Winfree's decision to leave comes just over a week after he was suspended indefinitely by Randy Edsall for violation of the student-athlete code of conduct. A native of New Jersey, the 6-foot-2 rising sophomore came to College Park last year as a highly-touted four-star recruit. He caught 11 passes for 158 yards and two touchdowns his freshman year and was expected to compete for a starting job before the suspension earlier this month. Even without Winfree, Edsall expects a healthy competition this fall at wide receiver. “I’m excited about the guys we have at wide receiver,” Edsall told InsideMDSports last week. “I think those guys will do a great job. The returning guys -- in terms of Amba [Etta-Tawo], Will Ulmer, Taivon [Jacobs], Levern [Jacobs], DeAndre Lane -- I think all those guys will do well. And I’m looking forward to seeing [incoming freshmen] D.J. [Moore] and Jarvis [Davenport]. So again, I think we’ve got a lot of talent there and those guys know there’s tremendous opportunities ahead of them.” Winfree is the second Maryland wide receiver to leave the program in the last month. Marcus Leak announced his plans to transfer in May.
Rick Sanchez, the anchorman fired from CNN after calling Jon Stewart a "bigot" and implying that Jews control the media, is entering comeback mode. First step: Meet with a high-profile rabbi. Sanchez will "hold a public dialogue" with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach at a synagogue in New York City on January 13. "My career path was changed because of a misconstrued comment, which very few actually even bothered to listen to," Sanchez said in a statement. "I have spent the last few months concentrating on my family, but instantly jumped at the opportunity for a public dialogue with my friend, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. I look forward to addressing any and all questions and concerns of the Jewish community." Rabbi Boteach, who bills himself as "America's Rabbi", is kind of the Father Cutié of Judaism. He's discussed gay marriage with Rosie O'Donnell and the afterlife with Christopher Hitchens. Now he's going to discuss Rick Sanchez with Rick Sanchez.
Miro Cerar, leader of the Miro Cerar Party (SMC) speaks in parliament after his confirmation as new Prime Minister in Ljubljana August 25, 2014. REUTERS/Srdjan Zivulovic LJUBLJANA (Reuters) - Slovenia’s parliament will vote on approving Prime Minister elect Miro Cerar’s new center-left coalition government on Sept 18, the assembly’s spokeswoman said on Wednesday. Cerar, whose Party of Miro Cerar (SMC) won a snap election in July, has formed a coalition with pensioners’ party Desus and the center-left Social Democrats. Together they hold 52 out of parliament’s 90 seats, making the approval of the new government a near certainty. He has promised to bring economy professor Dusan Mramor back as finance minister in the country which narrowly avoided an international bailout for its banks in December. One of Mramor’s main jobs will be cutting the budget deficit to 3 percent of GDP in 2015, as demanded by the European Commission. He held the post from 2002 to 2004. Cerar has said he will also continue with privatization, seen as a key step towards consolidating Slovenia’s public finances, though he sell-offs would be “strategically considered”.
NEW BRAUNFELS, Texas - Thanks to the hard work and dedication of a New Braunfels Boy Scout, the K-9s that have dedicated their lives to police work are now being recognized. A hand-carved police dog statue was unveiled Tuesday. The monument was dedicated to the four-legged law enforcement members of the New Braunfels Police Department. “When we first pictured the memorial, we weren’t thinking of something this large scale, but then we started to dig deeper into it and we started to get the passion for it,” said Tommy Durant, who spearheaded the project. “This project here just blew us away. It was crazy, well beyond our expectations. Then he made it a reality,” said K-9 Officer Derrick Bobo, with the New Braunfels Police Department. Durant needed a project to become an Eagle Scout and wanted to do something for law enforcement. “They don’t get paid a salary. They just come out here and do this just to get some love and a chew toy, so just wanted to honor them and all they do for us,” Durant said. Durant started the work about six months ago, securing donations of funds and stones. “For a guy his age to dedicate his entire summer to do something for someone else is pretty awesome,” Bobo said. “I have always had a heart for these police,” Durant said. “I have always wanted to do something myself as a career that a lot of people wouldn’t want to do.” Copyright 2016 by KSAT - All rights reserved.
The big post-debate story is about the media. CNBC is being pilloried by Republicans for the way it conducted last night’s event, in Boulder, Colorado. “CNBC should be ashamed of themselves,” Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, wrote in an e-mail to supporters. “Let's put the mainstream media on notice. I want to send a message to moderators of upcoming debates that any bias won’t be tolerated.” Rand Paul, who was once the darling of the mainstream media and celebrated as a top-tier Republican candidate, but who has been a non-entity in the Presidential campaign, used the anti-CNBC backlash to raise money. He changed his Twitter avatar to a picture of the senator with a black rectangle over his mouth and the word CENSORED across it. “Fight back against the media bias” was superimposed on the new photo. Whining about tough questions and media bias is an old campaign tactic. On both the right and the left, there are now well-funded institutions that do nothing but scour the Internet, TV, and radio for perceived slights from the press. The CNBC journalists are public figures who surely know that getting beaten up by partisans comes with the job of covering American politics. And, of course, just because accusations of bias or unfairness come from the R.N.C. and the G.O.P. Presidential candidates, who all have strategic reasons for attacking the press, doesn’t mean that they are untrue. But, as last night’s debate went on and the candidates realized that the crowd had turned against the moderators, and that they could score easy points by lambasting them, legitimate grumbling about some tough questions turned into something else: using the charge of media bias to avoid answering legitimate questions. The candidate who pulled this off better than anyone was Marco Rubio, who was generally seen as the winner of the debate. Becky Quick, a CNBC correspondent, asked Rubio the following question: Senator Rubio, you yourself have said that you’ve had issues. You have a lack of bookkeeping skills. You accidentally intermingled campaign money with your personal money. You faced foreclosure on a second home that you bought. And just last year you liquidated a sixty-eight-thousand-dollar retirement fund. That’s something that cost you thousands of dollars in taxes and penalties. In terms of all of that, it raises the question whether you have the maturity and wisdom to lead this seventeen-trillion-dollar economy. What do you say? This was as predictable a question as Rubio could expect. His personal finances have been raised as an issue for years. In his own memoir, Rubio wrote about the troubles he had mixing personal and business purchases on a Republican Party credit card, and lamented his “lack of bookkeeping skills.” But Rubio decided that the question was hostile and that he could therefore evade it. “You just listed a litany of discredited attacks from Democrats and my political opponents,” he said, as if that proved the accusations were false, “and I’m not gonna waste sixty seconds detailing them all.” Quick’s questions were cited by several conservative commentators after the debate as being unfair. Several argued that Democrats were not asked similarly tough questions in the recent CNN debate. That’s silly. The first question of the Democratic debate, for Hillary Clinton, was “Will you say anything to get elected?” Rubio, clearly feeling how the room had turned against the moderators, came back a little later in the debate and delivered one of the big applause lines of the night: “I know the Democrats have the ultimate super PAC. It's called the mainstream media.” Not a bad line. But Rubio must know that the issue of his finances isn’t going away. The Miami Herald has reported that Rubio “amended his financial disclosure forms … after The Miami Herald asked why they lacked a $135,000 home equity loan he obtained from a bank controlled by his political supporters.” The Tampa Bay Times has reported that Rubio “double-billed the Republican Party of Florida and state taxpayers for eight flights while he was House Speaker.” (He said that was a mistake, and that he would repay the party.) The Times also reported that “Rubio billed the party for more than $100,000 during the two years he served as the state's House speaker,” and that “charges included repairs to the family minivan, grocery bills, plane tickets for his wife, and purchases from retailers ranging from a wine store near his home to Apple's online store.” (Rubio said that the expenses were all related to party business.) Rubio is about to go through a period of much more intensive media scrutiny. Complaining about media bias won’t be enough to get him through it.
The Washington Post has the latest blockbuster report derived from the documents that former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked to media outlets. In a series of articles posted on Thursday, Wapo breaks down the various components of the U.S. “black budget”—that is, the money given to the 16 U.S. spy agencies that make up the intelligence community (IC). One of the parts of the report that is not classified information is the actual size of the black budget itself. Although the U.S. does not release information on how much funding each agency receives, much less what it goes to, it does publish the aggregate of the 16 spy agencies’ budgets, albeit only after the fiscal year has ended. For FY 2013 the Obama administration requested US$52.6 billion dollars for the intelligence community. Although Congress might not have approved that much money (we find out September 30), this was actually a decrease from the $53.9 billion the U.S. spent during FY 2012, and the $54.6 billion spent during FY 2011. It’s interesting to compare this figure to other nation’s defense spending. Based on the Stockholm Independent Peace Research Institute’s (SIPRI) data on global defense expenditures, as presented by Wikipedia, if the U.S. intelligence community was instead a separate national military, it’d have the 8th largest budget of any military in the world. The IC’s budget is in other words about $6 billion more than India spent on defense last year. If the “separate $23 billion devoted to intelligence programs that more directly support the U.S. military” (Military Intelligence Program) is included, the U.S. IC would be the 4th largest military by expenditures in the world, right after the U.S., China, and Russia. Indeed, its budget is over $10 billion more than the UK spent on defense in 2012, according to SIPRI (of course the UK has a separate intelligence apparatus as well). With the separate $23 billion calculated in, last year the U.S. IC spent well over double the $32.07 billion the ten nations that comprise the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) spend on defense, according to the latest SIPRI figures and, in the case of Myanmar (which SIPRI doesn’t list), newspaper articles. The IC’s budget was about 7 times as much as Iran spent on defense in 2012. The Central Intelligence Agency’s budget ($14.7 billion) alone would make it the 17th largest military spender in the world, just a few tens of millions of dollars more than Israel spent on defense last year. The money that the U.S. requested for the IC’s counterterrorism operations this year, $17.2 billion, was over $2 billion more than Israel spent on defense in 2012. It was just short of double the $9 billion Iran spent on defense in 2012. Not surprisingly, despite this enormous investment in intelligence, the U.S. still has some critical gaps according to Wapo. These are especially in the Indo-Pacific region. For example, Wapo reports that “The governments of Iran, China and Russia are difficult to penetrate, but North Korea’s may be the most opaque. There are five ‘critical’ gaps in U.S. intelligence about Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs, and analysts know virtually nothing about the intentions of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.” Other blank spots include, according to Wapo, “questions about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear components when they are being transported” and “the capabilities of China’s next-generation fighter aircraft.”
The Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle called economics “the dismal science.” He was only half right. Dismal, yes, but a science, no. Economics is more like a religion, in which reality is shaped by belief or blind faith. And, in the case of free-market zealots, it can turn into a cult. Thus, we see them pointing these days to the dazzling light of the soaring stock market, proclaiming fervently that Wall Street’s spectacular rise from the ashes of the Great Recession is proof from the God of Mammon that these are boom times. Lo, is the magic of the marketplace upon us? No, it’s just the wizardry of the Fed. For five years, America’s central bank has funneled two massive subsidies into Wall Street banks and giant corporations in an ungodly effort to keep them flush, while praying that they might use these government windfalls to create a job or two. The first subsidy essentially amounts to giving $85 billion every month to big banks. Yes, 85 billion! The idea behind the government’s so-called “asset-purchase program” is that this capital will be channeled into investments that nourish the roots of our economy. In practice, however, bankers are funneling this cash into gimmicky high-risk investment schemes that create nothing and buyouts to expand their already too-big-to-fail empires — plus ever-heftier paychecks for themselves. The second subsidy is the Fed’s relentless policy of artificially holding interest rates close to zero. This has severely punished middle-class retirees who counted on getting interest income from their savings, but it’s been a blessing from on high for huge corporations wanting to buy out their competitors or — in a totally unproductive bit of marketplace voodoo — to buy out themselves. Meanwhile, the Fed’s trickle-down monetary policy has produced a truly dismal level of job creation while widening our hellish chasm of inequality.
I feel like EU immigration has been used as vehicle in the UK to rally against all immigration. It honestly makes no sense whatsoever. Generally EU immigration to the UK benefits the UK economy, unlike most immigrants from outside the EU, and the people that come over here integrate well, also unlike most immigrants from outside the EU. There are no polish ghettos, Eastern Europeans are not associated with crime or poverty, therefore why is the UK so anti? Well sadly I think it's got something to do with racism. What people really want to attack is the immigration of muslims to the UK. However if they do that they can be labelled racist, it's much easier to attack the EU freedom of movement policy, EU immigrants lacking a singular voice to fight back, and also not coming from extremely impoverished backgrounds means their cause isn't so readily championed by the left wingers who see themselves as fighting on behalf of the downtrodden. EU immigration is the easy scapegoat that can be attacked. It also can draw on the sense of xenophobic feeling many right wing Brits feel towards mainland Europe. In a sense, the refugee and muslim populations are too protected by being ethnic and religious minorities fleeing the third world. The EU migrants are the easy target that bigots can bitch about without seeming racist. edit: I'll also add that it's an expression of general anti-EU sentiment too. Many people are anti-EU on the basis that they think Brussels is taking away their national sovereignty. People who are anti-EU for these reasons are inclined to dislike EU immigration simply because it's an effect of Britain being part of the EU, not a reason that has anything to do with the EU migrants themselves whatsoever.
Few people have had as much influence on modern psychology as Carl Jung; we have Jung to thank for concepts like extroversion and introversion, archetypes, modern dream analysis, and the collective unconscious. Psychological terms coined by Jung include the archetype, the complex, synchronicity, and it is from his work that the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) was developed, a popular staple of personality tests today. Among Jung’s most important work was his in-depth analysis of the psyche, which he explained as follows: “By psyche I understand the totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious,” separating the concept from conventional concept of the mind, which is generally limited to the processes of the conscious brain alone. Jung believed that the psyche is a self-regulating system, rather like the body, one that seeks to maintain a balance between opposing qualities while constantly striving for growth, a process Jung called “individuation”. Jung saw the psyche as something that could be divided into component parts with complexes and archetypal contents personified, in a metaphorical sense, and functioning rather like secondary selves that contribute to the whole. His concept of the psyche is broken down as follows: The ego To Jung, the ego was the center of the field of consciousness, the part of the psyche where our conscious awareness resides, our sense of identity and existence. This part can be seen as a kind of “command HQ”, organizing our thoughts, feelings, senses, and intuition, and regulating access to memory. It is the part that links the inner and outer worlds together, forming how we relate to that which is external to us. How a person relates to the external world is, according to Jung, determined by their levels of extroversion or introversion and how they make use of the functions of thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition. Some people have developed more of one or two of these facets than the others, which shapes how they perceive the world around them. The origin of the ego lies in the self archetype, where it forms over the course of early development as the brain attempts to add meaning and value to its various experiences. The ego is just one small portion of the self, however; Jung believed that consciousness is selective, and the ego is the part of the self that selects the most relevant information from the environment and chooses a direction to take based on it, while the rest of the information sinks into the unconscious. It may, therefore, show up later in the form of dreams or visions, thus entering into the conscious mind. The personal unconscious The personal unconscious arises from the interaction between the collective unconscious and one’s personal growth, and was defined by Jung as follows: “Everything of which I know, but of which I am not at the moment thinking; everything of which I was once conscious but have now forgotten; everything perceived by my senses, but not noted by my conscious mind; everything which, involuntarily and without paying attention to it, I feel, think, remember, want, and do; all the future things which are taking shape in me and will sometime come to consciousness; all this is the content of the unconscious… Besides these we must include all more or less intentional repressions of painful thought and feelings. I call the sum of these contents the ‘personal unconscious’.” Unlike Freud, Jung saw repression as just one element of the unconscious, rather than the whole of it. Jung also saw the unconscious as the house of potential future development, the place where as yet undeveloped elements coalesced into conscious form. Complexes Complexes, in the Jungian sense, are themed organizations in the unconscious mind centering around patterns of memories, emotions, perceptions, and wishes, patterns that are formed by experience and by an individual’s reactions to that experience. Unlike Freud, Jung believed complexes could be very diverse, rather than individuals simply having a core sexual complex. Complexes often behave in a rather automatic manner, which can lead to a person feeling like the behaviour that arises from them is out of his or her control. People who are mentally ill or mislabeled as “possessed” often have complexes that take over regularly and markedly. Complexes are strongly influenced by the collective unconscious, and as such, tend to have archetypal elements. In a healthy individual, complexes are seldom a problem, and indeed are likely key to balancing the rather one-sided views of the ego so that development can occur. If the person is mentally unwell, however, and unable to regulate his or herself (as seen in those experiencing dissociation between these states), complexes may become overt and more of an issue. In these cases, the ego is damaged, and is therefore not strong enough to make use of the complexes via sound reflection, granting them a full and unruly life of their own. To treat such people, Jung looked more toward future development than simply dealing with their pasts; he tried to find what the symptoms meant and hoped to achieve, and work with them from that angle. The collective unconscious The theory of the collective unconscious is one of Jung’s more unique theories; Jung believed, unlike many of his contemporaries, that all the elements of an individual’s nature are present from birth, and that the environment of the person brings them out (rather than the environment creating them). Jung felt that people are born with a “blueprint” already in them that will determine the course of their lives, something which, while controversial at the time, is fairly widely supported to today owing to the amount of evidence there is in the animal kingdom for various species being born with a repertoire of behaviours uniquely adapted to their environments. It has been observed that these behaviours in animals are activated by environmental stimuli in the same manner that Jung felt human behaviours are brought to the fore. According to Jung, “the term archetype is not meant to denote an inherited idea, but rather an inherited mode of functioning, corresponding to the inborn way in which the chick emerges from the egg, the bird builds its nest, a certain kind of wasp stings the motor ganglion of the caterpillar, and eels find their way to the Bermudas. In other words, it is a ‘pattern of behaviour’. This aspect of the archetype, the purely biological one, is the proper concern of scientific psychology.” Jung believed that these blueprints are influenced strongly by various archetypes in our lives, such as our parents and other relatives, major events (births, deaths, etc.), and archetypes originating in nature and in our cultures (common symbols and elements like the moon, the sun, water, fire, etc.). All of these things come together to find expression in the psyche, and are frequently reflected in our stories and myths. Jung did not rule out the spiritual, despite the biological basis he described the personality as having; he also felt there was an opposing spiritual polarity which greatly impacts the psyche. The Self The Self, according to Jung, was the sum total of the psyche, with all its potential included. This is the part of the psyche that looks forward, that contains the drive toward fulfillment and wholeness. In this, the Self was said to drive the process of individuation, the quest of the individual to reach his or her fullest potential. In this area Jung once again is seen to differ from Freud; in Freudian theory, the ego is responsible for the above process and forms the axis on which a person’s individual psychology spins, whereas in Jungian theory, the ego is just one part which rises out of the (infinitely more complex) self. Persona Jung said that the Persona is an element of the personality which arises “for reasons of adaptation or personal convenience.” If you have certain “masks” you put on in various situations (such as the side of yourself you present at work, or to family), that is a persona. The Persona can be seen as the “public relations” part of the ego, the part that allows us to interact socially in a variety of situations with relative ease. Those who identify too strongly with their personas, however, can run into problems—think of the celebrity who becomes too involved with his or herself as the “star”, the person who cannot leave work at work, or the academic who seems condescending to everyone. Doing the aforementioned can stunt someone’s personal growth a great deal, as other aspects of the self then cannot properly develop, crippling overall growth. The persona usually grows from the parts of people that wished once to please teachers, parents, and other authority figures, and as such it leans heavily toward embodying only one’s best qualities, leaving those negative traits which contradict the Persona to form the “Shadow”. The Shadow Those traits that we dislike, or would rather ignore, come together to form what Jung called the Shadow. This part of the psyche, which is also influenced heavily by the collective unconscious, is a form of complex, and is generally the complex most accessible by the conscious mind. Jung did not believe the Shadow to be without purpose or merit; he felt that “where there is light, there must also be shadow”—which is to say that the Shadow has an important role to play in balancing the overall psyche. Without a well-developed shadow side, a person can easily become shallow and extremely preoccupied with the opinions of others, a walking Persona. Just as conflict is necessary to advancing the plot of any good novel, light and dark are necessary to our personal growth. Jung believed that, not wanting to look at their Shadows directly, many people project them onto others, meaning that the qualities we often cannot stand in others, we have in ourselves and wish to not see. To truly grow as a person, one must cease such willful blindness to one’s Shadow and attempt to balance it with the Persona. Anima and animus According to Jung, the anima and animus are the contra-sexual archetypes of the psyche, with the anima being in a man and animus in a woman. These are built from feminine and masculine archetypes the individual experiences, as well as experience with members of the opposite sex (beginning with a parent), and seek to balance out one’s otherwise possible one-sided experience of gender. Like the Shadow, these archetypes tend to wind up being projected, only in a more idealized form; one looks for the reflection of one’s anima or animus in a potential mate, accounting for the phenomenon of love at first sight. Jung did see either masculinity or femininity as the “superior” side of the gender coin (unlike many of his peers, who favoured masculinity), but merely as two halves of a whole, such as light and shadow, halves which ought to serve to balance one another out. Individuation Individuation, to Jung, was the quest for wholeness that the human psyche invariably undertakes, the journey to become conscious of his or herself as a unique human being, but unique only in the same sense that we all are, not more or less so than others. Jung did not try to run from the importance of conflict to human psychology; he saw it as inherent and necessary for growth. In dealing with the challenges of the outside world and one’s own many internal opposites, one slowly becomes more conscious, enlightened, and creative. The product of overcoming these clashes was a “symbol” which Jung felt would contribute to a new direction where justice was done to all sides of a conflict. This symbol was seen as a product of the unconscious rather than of rational thought, and carried with it aspects of both the conscious and unconscious worlds in its work as a transformative agent. The development that springs from this transmutation, which is so essential to Jungian psychology, is the process of individuation. Image Credits: flickr.com/photos/spiritual_marketplace
The heat check is one of the most mystifying occurrences in professional sports. A zero sum game that is either infuriating or infatuating. Success can mean the orchestration of a beautiful crescendo. The electricity of the crowd building, desperate to discharge. But failure is, is heard only through palm muffled faces, grumbling strings of incensed vulgarity. In an era more and more driven by advanced statistical analysis, the generation of the “right” shot is quickly becoming the centerpiece of the modern NBA offense. By all means of logic and sense, of course doing whatever the team has done all season to most effectively put points on the board is the solution. But what if it wasn’t? What if logic and sense went right out the window? What if a player just couldn’t be stopped? What if it was in the biggest stage of his life? What if he was Lebron James? Twenty-two is an unusual age for almost anyone. You’ve pretty much run out of milestones until you can rent a car at twenty-five. Everyone gets it, you can drink. Legally. And now that you’re graduating college, you find yourself looking around at the corporate world and realizing that even though no one else seems to have any idea what the hell they’re doing either, you’re probably going to have to figure it out. Lebron James wasn’t spending time worrying that his Global Studies degree would land him writing “Sarah with no H” on the side of grande-iced-chai-lattes in black sharpie for the next forty years. Lebron James was twenty-two and worried about getting the Cleveland Cavaliers back to the playoffs. The year before, 2005-2006 season, James lead his hometown Cavs to the postseason for the first time since Will Smith’s Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It debuted. If you ever need any motivation, remember that everything you do, is one step further away from people saying “Jiggy wit it”. The youngest MVP in league history had just inked a 60 million dollar contract extension, so in fairness, he could pay for enough therapy to never think about any song he wanted for the rest of his days. But Lebron’s focus this year was far more laser-like than mine clearly has ever been. The 22 year old team captain dragged a Cavaliers team that featured point guard, Eric Snow, who dished out four assists per game, and Drew Gooden snagging, a team high 8.5 boards on average. Other notables included Big ‘ol Zydrunas Ilgauskas and the man earning 13.3 million dollars than any of us in 2007, none other than Larry Hughes. Twenty-two year old’s should have problems like “Am I allowed to think a senior in high school is attractive?” Not, “What do I do if the man my GM paid 13 million dollars to help me win averages 7 points per game during an important playoff series?” But here we stand. 8:00pm, May 31st, 2007. Auburn Hills, Michigan. These were the Pistons. The one seed. The team. Veterans. Old Heads. Hell, Dale Davis was born before the MOON LANDING. They were gritty, tenacious. This was their fourth straight trip to the Eastern Conference Finals. Four years ago Lebron wasn’t sure if he could vote. Chauncy, Tayshaun, Rip, Sheed, C.Webb. They were the walking embodiment of Detroit, each one a legend as an individual, but they achieved such great heights as a team. Lebron sometimes looked like he was the team down in Cleveland. In game one of the series, James would score only ten points. Needless to say, Cleveland would lose. Only when Lebron became the aggressor, scoring 32 points in game 3 would the Cavaliers show life and find the victors circle. Now the series was tied 2-2, and by the time he would take a seat behind the podium late that night in Auburn Hills, the impact of this Lebron James would send shockwaves through NBA history. The Cavaliers would win the tip, but the first play of the game would undoubtedly stick in the back of the young King James’ mind, handing the ball to Ilgauskas only to see the offense stall and sputter. This was not going to win the game, and falling to the Pistons in a repeat performance of last year was not an option. Motor City’s well oiled cogs turned without issue early. Through two possessions, two offensive rebounds and a Chauncy Billups wide open three set The Palace on fire. The City of Detroit was pushing Lebron James’ heels to the brink. The most anyone will root against a normal human at 22 is an ex from across a urine soaked dive bar. James and the Cavs would find themselves down by one point in a competitive but sloppy first half that saw 23 in wine and white put 16 tallies on the board. Lebron James, even at such a young tender age was an unselfish superstar. He lead Cleveland in assists by a full 2 helpers on the season, and during the playoffs of 2007, James assisted 37.4% of his teammates field goals when on the floor. This game however, Lebron watched teammates lay brick after brick, no doubt the criticisms of game one ringing in his ears. Six minutes and five seconds until the final buzzer sounds. 79-78, Cavaliers lead. Remember our talk about heat checks? Well at that particular moment in time, Lebron James had himself one of those. But not a regular heat check. Not your typical, Jason Terry launching a three from the stratosphere in the middle of the third quarter heat check. Lebron James took a heat check for the game, for the momentum of the series, and for the fledgling steps of a legacy that would dominate headlines for years to come. He grabbed a rebound, briskly strode three quarters of the court, and launched a wide open deep two that today would send Daryl Morey into cardiac arrest. Following the shot, the camera locked onto James, brow furrowed, and millions of viewers across the country simultaneously whispered, “Oh shit.” There was a look in the face of this 22 year old that told a story all of its own. This wasn’t something you saw from a kid, someone who should be complaining about how his parents moved all the stuff out of his old room. Lebron James was a man. The Pistons, the team of veteran stars united by their defensive prowess, would soon do as everyone else who had stepped foot in Cleveland, Ohio had done since the iconic image was put on display in November, 2005. They would witness. With a fraction over five minutes remaining, a graphic appeared on screen. Lebron James- 1/1, 2 pts in the 4th quarter. “The chosen one” had felt the weight enormous pressure his entire life, there was no doubt the stage was lit, but would he prove himself wired to rise to the occasion like the NBA immortals to which he was so often compared? The Piston’s lead ballooned to seven with 3:15 remaining. The light needed to go off, even the Pistons’ faithful, packed like sardines into a Palace that grew louder and louder each tick of the clock. Then… almost underneath of the excited chatter from the stands, Lebron James exploded like a wild mouse roller coaster to the basket for an and-1. The basketball gods smiled at the at their marionettes as James would miss the free throw, only to have it recovered by Cleveland’s Sasha Pavlovic. They damn near pissed their pants when Drew Gooden, 1/5 from the free throw line, was fouled. He would make one of the two, and it would be the last time a Cavalier with a name other than James on the back of his jersey would score. First, a three pointer, the desperation becoming more and more obvious as precious seconds poured from the scoreboard above. The lead was 1. Then, a steal, a flash, and a foul. Lebron James had stolen the ball with 1:55 to play, and was fouled under the basket before the clock struck 1:52. The Cavs had shown their cards. The ball was going to be in the hands of number 23. Now stop him. The Pistons were given that opportunity up by 2 with 12 seconds left. The King would assure Tayshawn Prince it would not be easy. Overtime was just the beginning. All eyes were on James, but the Pistons couldn’t manage to put a body on him. Foul after foul, James would do his damage at the free throw line until it was clear that one of the most willing passers in the league that the Kid From Akron had the floor, and he was not going to give it up. With just over 30 seconds remaining in OT, James would hit a deep two that had to have been the inspiration for Rick Ross’ signature grunt. It was gospel, this was not just a heat check, this was history. Tie game. Buzzer. The second overtime arrived. Now all the Pistons had to do was stop the greatest athlete in the world, on the shooting streak of his life, with the legacy he had carried on his back since early high school on the line. Simple. 18. Straight. 20. Straight. 23. Straight. Each basket pulling more and more life from the Pistons and their crowd. The artistry of the heat check had not evaded the spectators. Heart and determination were the attributes the Pistons pinned to their lapel each and every game since their Championship in 2004, but what they had just witnessed went beyond that. It was almost an act of God. And with 11.2 seconds remaining in the second overtime, The Chosen One finished what he had begun almost an hour ago. He received the inbound pass with little resistance. Point guard Chauncey Billups tasked with keeping the game alive. The team defense for which Detroit basketball had been heralded collapsed on Lebron James like water returning to shape. Its calm having been interrupted by a force of nature. 25. Straight. 29 of the Final 30 points. Lebron James has always had a team. Good or bad, he has remained consistently one of the men most unselfish and ready to make the “right play” in the NBA. But for 2 overtimes and 5 minutes of the fourth quarter, Lebron James combined the mystery and spectacle of an all time great heat check, and elevated it to levels previously unseen through sheer determination. You read earlier that all logic and sense dictates basketball. But Lebron didn’t defy those requirements. On May 31st, 2007, Lebron James dared logic and sense to defy his will. And then scored 25. Straight. Related Comments comments
Release 2 for Shroud of the Avatar is upon us and the dev team at Portalarium invited me up to Austin recently to take a look. Those with early access to Ultima Onlines spiritual successor will immediately note a lot of additions since the last release, not the least of which is the new ability to jump thanks to the tenacious efforts of certain members of the team. Chests scattered around town will now include a slew of new items such as rugs, cloaks, and an assortment of other freshly added items to equip on your avatar and for decorating houses. Other improvements to the environment have been added such as reorienting the lunar debris field and adding wind-power generation systems to houses in Owls Head for powering the tesla coils that protect the city. Richard Garriott proudly talked about something else you may notice. Backers with early access during the last release spent a lot of time chatting with NPCs and all those conversations were stored, parsed, and databased to improve on the AIs communication abilities. Just as youd expect of Garriott, this new song of the Avatar is taking on a sense of life due to his grasp of those subtle notes beyond most developers comprehension. NPC dialogue amounts to basic databases and scripts, yet in fifteen years of MMORPGs weve hardly made it much farther than a robotic hail. Static NPCs and light-switches you cant interact with have been breaking immersion for years and Lord British says hell no longer stand for it. One of the biggest additions is the opportunity to travel to a new village of Kingsport via portal, but all the new cool features and content aside, the true soul of the new update can be summed up into a single word. Crafting. Im a firm believer that crafting makes or breaks big games, so I was particularly excited to talk to the guys about what theyre doing with Shroud of the Avatar. We talked about what to expect in Release 2, but more importantly we talked about some of the early design concepts for the eventual game. Crafty Content All the new stuff aside, I expect reason youre most likely chomping at the bit to play the new release is the chance to check out the crafting. I can tell you that youll be getting a strong dose of it in this early pass of the game. Crafting stations and chests with everything you need to get started can be found near the heart of Owls Head. You can also get functional crafting stations from chests and drop them in a house if you prefer more privacy. Id had a chance to see a little of the crafting in an earlier visit and the team has released a few videos showing off crafting as well, but I wasnt as prepared as I thought I was. The recipes have all been changed, so you probably dont know what you think you do. In order to make it a little easier however, those folks with early access will be getting an email with a few initial recipes to get them started. Theres still a lot to discover, though. There are at least one hundred recipes to be found through experimentation in this release, and the email will only start you off with a hand-full of them. Youll need to play around with stations, tools, and ingredients to find others. The number of possible combinations is more than a little daunting, so there have also been some changes that make that easier as well. In the earlier versions of the crafting system, there was no visual indication that you had met the requirements for making anything, even after dragging ingredients into the crafting area. Starr Long tells me the team talked about it quite a bit and in the end decided that was a little too time-consuming and for no good in-game lore, immersion, or other reason to keep it that hard. With the new system, when you have the correct items in the crafting area to make something on the combine, the craft button on the bottom of the GUI will light up and become clickable to let you know. Im more inclined to something more hardcore, so at first I kind of felt like that might be too easy. I have to admit to changing my mind after a closer look, however. Besides ingredients, there are also tools required for some combinations. For instance, a log on a table saw requires a cubit stick for measuring the length of cuts to turn it into refined materials. With all the various tools and crafting stations, I think theres a better balance to the system now than there might have been otherwise. Beyond Content Seeing the new stuff for Release 2 was cool, but the more enjoyable part of the afternoon came when I was able to sit down with Richard and Starr to converse about how the crafting will work in more detail now that theyve started putting it into the game. Theres a lot more to crafting than the mere surface visible in this release, and Ive always maintained that crafting was one of those critical pillars to a good MMO and the one that gets hosed up most often. When the game is eventually released, one of the aspects of crafting will be that players never experience a total failure. When you combine the ingredients, there are percentage chances of success and failure, as well as critical success and failure. As you might expect, a success means you make what you planned to, and critical success means you make it better in some fashion. You might expect failure to mean you dont succeed and loose some or all of your materials based on how bad you failed, but Richard says thats not what will happen. He used a baking analogy to explain it by pointing out that a baker combines salt, water, flour, and some sort of fat to make a dough. After kneading the dough it might be a bit soupy or too dry. The baker has failed a little and can choose to add more water or flour to compensate if he wants. At each step, hell either make it worse, fix the problem, or possibly nail it, making something better than hed intended and possibly come out with bread thats particularly good. In the bread analogy, you never really lose any of the ingredients. You may make terrible bread, but youll still have bread, or something that at least resembles it. Crafting in Shroud of the Avatar will work in the same way, with a slight tweak. At least for things like weapons and armor, players will have the chance to improve crafted items based on their skill. So if you really skunk it up when making a sword, you can take the crude blade that resulted in the previous attempt and try to improve it up to the best you can make at your skill level. Im a little on the fence about this, personally. Im a firm believer in the idea that great success loses meaning if theres no chance of great failure. Also, Im concerned that this system could prevent a decent market for player-made goods from forming due to an over-saturation of product. I expressed those concerns then, and Starr Long pointed out the flip side of my point, which is how much it hurts to lose a rare item on a critical fail. Thats not fun and something they want to try to avoid if they can. According to Starr, because items have what amounts to quality and condition values in this system, it allows the player to experience a failure while avoiding being left with nothing. In the sword example, if a rare gem had been required to make it and you failed, you havent lost that gem. The sword you ended up with may just not be as good as youd intended, but then you have the option of trying to improve it from there. The risk comes in because theres a chance you could make it worse. Starr and Richard managed to lessen my concerns considerably, but balancing risk with reward in crafting when youre not willing to destroy critical ingredients is going to be tough. That said, the ability to improve and upgrade items creates some pretty cool opportunities, and goes a long way towards balancing any drawbacks. Finding a weapon or armor that you like as a new character and being able to improve them as you grow will really help with adding color to the world. We wont see everyone wearing all the same stuff because its the best because anything can be upgraded to be great. Looting Content While I may question occasional specific mechanics, one thing Ill never question is Portalariums desire to create and incredibly deep and intelligent game. Crafting is intended to be so deeply ingrained into the eventual game that itll make up a significant portion, if not all, of the eventual loot from creatures and quests. Another point that both Richard and Starr reiterated during this last visit was their commitment to making player-crafted items the best in the game. Other developers have paid lip-service to the same ideal, but theres no doubting the sincerity in these guys when they talk about it. Proof is the in the player-crafted custard (and fish sticks), to paraphrase an old expression. The folks at Portalarium dont just talk in nice printable statements like you might hear elsewhere, they talk in specifics. When player-crafted items are sold to vendors, some will remain in inventory to be sold by that vendor. That means players shopping in a particular town could begin looking for items created by a particular craftsman if they wanted. Product not held by the NPC vendor for selling locally will be shipped off, perhaps to be found in other towns. Far more interesting is the alternative, which is that those shipments might be robbed. That creates a cache of player-made items floating around among the lawless elements of the land, just waiting to be recovered by an adventurous player. So you might kill an outlaw to find a cool-looking sword made by the smith in another village, and if its damaged or the stats arent quite as good as youd like, no problem. You take it to your own local smith to have it repaired and possibly improved a bit. In my case, Im more of a staff sort of guy, so maybe the sword gets sold to the nearest vendor and the cycle starts over. Either way, its a simple idea that creates a much richer world, and thats what keeps me excited about what Portalarium does next. Complete Content Ultima Online has defined sandbox crafting for the last decade and a half, and this release might be the most important of those published in the schedule for telling us whether SotA will become the new standard or not. Despite my concerns about the eventual player economy, I think its obvious these guys have put a lot of thought into what they want to do with this aspect of the game. This release will give us a taste of what theyre planning, but conversations along with developer blogs and posts demonstrate its just the smallest nibble of the whole feast. Additionally, I think Release 2 for Shroud of the Avatar says a great deal about this development team. Its very early in development still, but what we already have in front of us still suggests that there are great things to come. Theres a lot of attention being paid to small details that might never even show up on another teams radar. There have also been dramatic changes based on backer-feedback, which goes to show that these developers really do listen and react to what players have to say. All those items together suggest that this is a team working on something that they truly care about and enjoy being involved with. Its a team with big ideas and high standards, led by a core cadre with the experience to pull ambitious projects off. More importantly, this is a team thats willing to build on past successes while still excitedly blazing their own trails when they think they have an idea thats better. In short, its a crafty recipe for an epic game. Lets hope they get a critical success on the roll.
No arm of the government has taken more grief from Atlantic writers, more often, over a longer period of time, than the Transportation Security Administration. Naturally I think that the criticism -- from Jeffrey Goldberg, from me, from Bruce Schneier and others in guest essays -- has been perfectly reasonable and fair. But it's conceivable that TSA officials would disagree. Recently John Pistole, the new (since July) Administrator of the TSA agreed to an interview. Two days ago, Jeff Goldberg and I went to his office and spent a little under in an hour in an on-the-record interview. The transcript of the discussion is here, and Jeff Goldberg's initial account of the session is here. The transcript is long, and later today I'll say more about some of the points Pistole made (and finessed) about what the TSA is trying to do. For the moment, a bit of atmosphere. Jeff Goldberg and I allowed 20 minutes for the taxi ride from the Atlantic's office to the TSA office near National Airport; arrived in eight; and loitered for a while as government contractors, with badges, waited to get cleared into the building. When our turn came, naturally we had to go through a security screening -- standard in government buildings these recent years. There were familiar rubberish trays, just like at an airport, with a conveyor belt to send them through an x-ray machine. (Disappointingly, the screening was by a contract security service, not by TSA's own blue-shirts.) "What do I have to put in the tray?" I asked. "Pretty much like at the airport," the young woman doing the screening said.
Filters and Drums Logic Noise is an exploration of building raw synthesizers with CMOS logic chips. This session, we continue to abuse the 4069UB as an amplifier. We’ll turn the simple unity-gain buffer of last session into a single-pole active lowpass filter with a single part. (Spoiler: it’s a capacitor.) While totally useful, this simple filter is a bit boring and difficult to make dynamic. So we’ll look into an entirely different filter, the Twin-T notch filter, that turns out to be sharp enough to build a sine-wave oscillator on, and tweakable enough that we’ll make a damped-oscillator drum sound out of it. Here’s a quick demo of where we’re heading. Read on to see how we get there. Filters Last session, we built an amplifier and played around with the gain: the ratio of how much voltage swing is output relative to how much is input. An active filter is an amplifier where this gain depends on the frequency of the incoming signal. This lets us carve out different frequency ranges that we’d either like more or less of. (In general, though, you don’t need an amplifier to filter. See passive filters versus active filters.) When you pluck a string on a guitar, for instance, all sorts of frequencies are produced. But over time the string vibrations are damped out by the wood that the guitar is made of, and within a half-second or so, most of the vibrations left are related to the string’s fundamental vibrational frequency (determined by where your finger is on the frets). The higher frequency vibrations are the first to go. This suggests a sound synthesis strategy to make “natural” sounding instruments: generate all sorts of frequencies and then filter out the higher ones. Single-pole Lowpass Filter Given that we’ve already made a few simple amplifier circuits last time, it’s a quick step to understand the simplest of all filters: the single-pole filter. Here’s the circuit diagram: Yeah, that’s an added capacitor. That’s all there is to it. But have a listen to the difference: Remember the intuition about the negative-feedback amplifier from last time. We had two resistors, one between the input and the 4069, and the other in feedback between the (inverted) output and the input. When the input voltage wiggled around the 4069’s neutral voltage, the output wiggled in the opposite direction. And the ratio of the voltage swings, the gain, depends on how hard the feedback path has to work to cancel out the incoming signal current. The same intuition works for the filter, as long as you understand one thing about capacitors. Capacitors pass current through them only reluctantly. The amount of current a capacitor passes before it’s “charged up” to a voltage that resists any further incoming current is referred to as its capacitance. Or, in electro-math: C = Q/V or V = Q/C, where Q is the charge on the capacitor, which is also the current (charge per second) summed up over time. In short, the more charge you put into a capacitor, the higher voltage it develops to resist putting more charge into it. And how quickly this voltage ramps up is proportional to one over the capacitance and directly proportional to the current passing through. For us, this means that it’s easy to pass a given current through a capacitor for a short while, harder to pass the same current through for a longer time, and impossible to get current through forever without increasing the input voltage to overcome the capacitor’s “charged-up” voltage. Or put another way: capacitors let high frequency current vibrations through easily, resist middle frequencies, and deny constant-voltage direct current. So what happens when we put a capacitor in the feedback path of our unity-gain feedback amplifier? Since the capacitor nearly blocks very low frequencies, all of them have to pass through the resistor, and we get unity gain. As we increase the frequency, some of the current starts to pass through the capacitor and the total feedback resistance is lowered. This means that the output has an easier job cancelling out the input, and thus less gain at middle frequencies. At very high frequencies, the capacitor will pass currents so easily that almost none will even need to go through the resistor, and the gain drops even lower. Put more succinctly, the capacitor resists lower frequencies more than higher ones. In a negative feedback amplifier, output gain increases when it’s harder to push current through the feedback path. So by putting a capacitor in the feedback path, we make an amplifier with more gain in the low frequencies and less gain for higher frequencies. Voila, a lowpass filter! Variable Cutoff Lowpass Filter What if we want to vary the cutoff frequency? In math, the cutoff frequency for a single pole lowpass filter like this is 1/(2 * pi * R * C). Practically, we can vary the cutoff frequency by changing the capacitor or by changing the input current through the resistor. So we’ll set the basic range by picking a capacitor value and vary the filter’s frequency response by turning a potentiometer. For the circuit here, the cutoff frequency ranges from 160 Hz at 100k ohms to 1600 Hz at 10k ohms. But there’s one catch with varying the input resistor; we also change the overall gain which depends on the ratio of feedback resistor to input resistor. So if you’re going to be changing the frequency response by changing the input resistor a lot, you might also want to change the feedback resistor at the same time to track it, holding the overall (passband) gain roughly constant. For that, you’ll need a stereo / dual potentiometer, which is simply two potentiometers linked to the same shaft. With one knob, you control two identical resistors. Before we leave the single pole filter, you can convert the lowpass filter here into a highpass filter simply by moving the capacitor out from the feedback loop and sticking it in front of the input resistor. Give it a shot! Twin-T Filter Our story gets significantly more interesting if we toss a more complicated filtering element in the feedback path, and one of our favorite filters is the Twin T. Instead of being a lowpass filter like the one above, the Twin T is a notch filter. Notch filters pass both high and low frequencies, but are tuned to knock out a particular frequency in the middle. In its raw form, the Twin T filter is fairly useful for killing a specific nuisance frequency in a signal. Maybe you want to knock out power line noise (60Hz in the USA, 50Hz in Europe). Toss a Twin T filter that’s tuned to 60Hz into the chain, and you’ll get rid of most of the noise without damping down the rest of your signal very much. To see why it’s called a Twin T, have a look at the circuit diagram: The Twin T works by combining two signal paths, each one T-shaped. The T with two resistors and a capacitor to ground is a simple lowpass filter, essentially a passive version of the one we made above. The other T with the series capacitors and resistor to ground is a highpass filter. Highpass and lowpass sounds like everything should get through, right? Yes, but. At the frequency that the filter is tuned for (the “cutoff” frequency) the two outputs are exactly 90 degrees out of phase from the input, but in opposite directions. In theory, if both Ts are tuned to the same frequency the two paths exactly cancel each other out at the cutoff frequency and none that cutoff frequency makes it through at all. In reality, you can actually get the two branches fairly close to each other and get very good, but not perfect, cancellation of the tuned frequency. What happens when we put a Twin T filter into the feedback path of an amplifier? Remember that the negative feedback logic requires the output to create more voltage the harder it is to push current back through the feedback path. So instead of knocking out the frequency that the filter is tuned to, we get that one particular frequency amplified. If there’s a little bit of noise entering the input at our tuned frequency, it’ll get amplified a lot and all of the other frequencies will get attenuated. And suddenly you’ve got a sine-wave oscillator. Drums Which brings us to today’s killer circuit, and a little bit of a refinement on the above explanation. The short version is that we detune the Twin T filter a little bit so that it only rings when it’s given an impulse and then dies out. First let’s play a little bit and build up the Twin-T and 4069UB amplifier part of the circuit. It’s just the Twin-T filter from above set up in the feedback path of a 4069UB inverter stage, and then sent out directly through another 4069UB inverter as a buffer. It’s overdriven and you’ll hear the clicks of the trigger bleeding through, but it’s a start. Refinements With the basic circuit working, let’s expand on it in two different ways. First, we’ll drive the drum with another oscillator circuit. Then, we’ll pass the audio out through a lowpass filter to knock off some of the trigger pulse bleedthrough. Here’s the final circuit: Starting on the left, we have a very low frequency oscillator set up on the 40106 and buffered using another 40106 stage. This simply puts out a nice reliable square wave. The signal then passes through a capacitor, which again has the effect of letting only the higher frequencies pass through. What makes it through looks basically like a quick pulse (in green). The trigger signal pulse is inserted into the feedback loop of the Twin T. It’s actually not crucial where you attach the trigger, but it’ll couple less with the Twin T section if you connect it here. And finally, we’ll pass the signal through a lowpass filter to remove the clicky noise that comes from the raw trigger signal feeding through to the output. Range What values should we use for capacitors and resistors? Try to pick the component values so that the single capacitor in the lowpass T is twice as large as the two capacitors (2 C) and the single resistor is half as large as the paired resistors (1/2 R). This makes both Ts tune to the same frequency, given again by 1/(2piR*C) where R and C are the values of the paired resistors and capacitors respectively. In practice, try to get factor-of-two capacitors and leave the resistors adjustable wherever possible. Since we’ll be de-tuning the circuit on purpose to make the oscillations die out slowly, there’s not a reliable formula for the resistances. You’ll just have to pick capacitors and tweak the knobs until it works. That said, if you find you want frequencies outside of the range that you’re currently getting, don’t hesitate to swap out the capacitors. Tweaking and Tuning Detuning the Twin-T section is the secret to making this circuit work as a drum rather than as a sine-wave oscillator, and the approach you’ll have to take is a bit experimental, so let’s talk about tuning this circuit. If you align the two halves of the Twin T perfectly, as we mentioned before, only the one single frequency will be blocked, and thus only that one frequency will be amplified by the negative feedback circuit. You’ll get a very nice sine wave oscillator, but not drums. If you detune the two halves of the Twin T from each other, especially if you do so by raising the cutoff frequency of the highpass filter so that it’s higher than the lowpass filter, a wider and wider band of frequencies are blocked by the Twin T, and thus receive the extra gain from the amplifier. But as you spread the gain over a wider and wider band of frequencies, you get less gain at any given frequency. As you continue to detune the Ts from each other, you’ll reach a point where the circuit no longer amplifies any single frequency enough to oscillate indefinitely by itself. However, and this is the key here, the filter will oscillate for a while if you provide it with a strong enough impulse signal. And that’s exactly what we’re doing with the square wave coupled through the capacitor coming from the tempo oscillator. It’s nice to watch the damped waveforms on a scope if you’ve got one. So here’s a procedure for getting close to your desired sound. To enable oscillation over a wide range of frequencies, set the decay potentiometer as low as it will go. This sets the highpass leg of the T to a very high cutoff frequency, which means that it’s passing nearly nothing. This frees up the lowpass T section to determine the pitch, and for most of the tuning potentiometer’s range you’ll get oscillations. Pick the rough pitch you want by listening to the oscillator. Now you can tune up the decay pot until the oscillations are just damped out and you’ll be set. But notice that the two potentiometers influence each other a little bit. That’s because the two legs of the T are simply electrically connected. So as you increase the decay to go from oscillator to drum, be ready to also tweak the frequency potentiometer to keep the drum tone at your desired pitch and decay rate. Extensions If you’re interested in exploring more active filter designs than just the single pole lowpass shown here, have a look at Rod Elliott’s great writeup on active filters. You can either break down and use op-amps and dual power supplies, or you can keep hacking and replace any of the op-amps in his circuits with a 4069UB stage as long as they only use negative feedback and have the op-amp’s positive terminal connected to ground. In particular, have a look at the multiple feedback topology and the biquad. If you don’t need synth drums, you can simply tune the Twin T up and use the circuit as a sine wave oscillator. For a single set of capacitors it’s not very widely adjustable, but if all you need is a single frequency you can pick the right capacitors and you’re set. It’s not the best sine wave oscillator out there, but it’s hard to beat a one-chip build with a few passive components thrown in. But don’t take our word for it: here’s a scope shot. The yellow line is the produced sine wave, and the purple is a FFT of the signal. Vertical bars are 20dBV, or a factor of ten. The first peak, at 150Hz is our sine wave, and the second peak is down in voltage by about a factor of 100. It’s not lab equipment, but it’s pretty solid for the abuse of a CMOS logic chip. And there’s nothing stopping you from feeding the circuit with audio-frequency trigger pulses if you want to freak out. The result is very similar to the sync oscillator we built before but it’s a lot mellower because the waveforms involved are fundamentally sine waves here. Have fun!
Rachael Block wants to change your opinion about bats. She knows that if you're like most people, bats probably fall somewhere between weird and downright frightening on your radar. But this 14-year-old from Fairfax, Virginia, knows there's so much more to bats than their Halloween persona. That's why she's been working tirelessly for years to teach people about bats. And it's why she has joined forces with other bat-loving teens around the country to take part in a free online webcast series to celebrate bats for Bat Week. Block is one of eight teens from across the United States who make up the Bat Squad, which is hosting a free online webcast this week for Bat Week, Oct. 24-31. "There’s a Shark Week. Bats deserve a week, too, that’s just all about them," said Block. In the series, Block and her Bat Squad counterparts are diving into the benefits of bats, their habitats and the threats they face. They're also talking about work each of the teens is doing to get more people involved in conservation. For Block, that involves writing a weekly blog about bats called the "Baturday News" for a local bat conservation organization called the Save Lucy Campaign. Are you ready to have your mind changed about bats? Block was kind enough to answer a few questions about the group's mission and to offer a sneak peek into the wonderful world of bats: Love them or not, bats play a vital role in our ecosystem. (Photo: Visanuwit thongon/Shutterstock) MNN: What sparked your interest in bats? Rachael Block: I got excited about bats because they were living outside my front door. We would have to walk by them to get into the house. It was a lot of fun to watch them in the evening because they would wake up and squeak at me. They were fun to watch because they all had different personalities. Some liked to be looked at and some hid. It was a lot of fun to watch them climb up the brick wall because I could see their wings. Their wings are fascinating! What's the most important thing you think people should know about bats? I think everyone should know how important bats are. The bats that we have around here are all insectivores. Each of them can eat over 1,000 insects in an hour. That is a lot of bugs! And they eat bugs that humans don't really want around. Other bats eat fruit and pollinate plants that people eat. Bats play a very important role in our ecosystem. I think if people knew how important they are, they would do more to help them. And maybe, they wouldn't be so scared of them. How did you get involved in writing a weekly blog about bat conservation? When I was in the sixth grade, I read an article about a local bat rehabilitator in the newspaper and thought it would be fun to volunteer for her. I really wanted to help her take care of the sick and injured bats, but there are laws about how old you have to be and other qualifications that a sixth grader doesn't have. The rehabilitator, Mrs. Leslie Sturges [also president of the Save Lucy Campaign board] was very nice and found a job that I was qualified for. She needed someone to write a weekly blog that would teach kids about how amazing bats are and about white-nose syndrome, the disease that is killing bats. I started volunteering for the Save Lucy Campaign and had so much fun learning about the bats that I kept doing it. I've learned a lot! And I've gotten to participate in a lot of fun experiences because of my blog. Do you have a favorite bat fact or trivia tidbit that you'd like to share? Bats may have been around since the time of the dinosaurs. DNA evidence shows that they have been around for at least 33 million years. And they haven't really changed all that much in all those millions of years. Tune in to the Bat Week webcast to learn more about these fascinating fliers. The webcasts will air on BatWeek.org at 1 p.m. EST from Oct. 25 through Oct. 28. Each webcast consists of 15 minutes of bat-tastic footage streamed live, along with matching classroom activities geared towards Next Generation Science Standards. This teen is on a mission to make you care about bats It's Bat Week, and Rachael Block and the Bat Squad are showing some love for these fascinating flyers.
column: letters from Ray date: May 2018 topic: Adopting a universal basic income for all people can help society think creatively with new ideas, develop new industries — and free-up people to work on important future projects. This practical social support program can grow as science & technology rapidly evolve, becoming part of world abundance. story: by Ray Kurzweil Dear readers, As you might have seen in the news, entrepreneur and renowned Facebook founder & CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave a commencement speech at Harvard University. He said in his talk: “To keep our society moving forward, we have a generational challenge — to create new jobs, a renewed sense of purpose, and to take on big meaningful projects. Our generation will have to deal with tens of millions of jobs replaced by automation like self-driving cars & trucks. But we have the potential to do so much more together. More than 300,000 people worked to put a man on the moon — including that janitor. Millions of volunteers immunized children around the world against polio. Millions of people built the Hoover dam and other great projects. We should have a society that measures progress not just by economic metrics, but by how many of us have a role we find meaningful. We should explore ideas like universal basic income — to give everyone a cushion to try new things. We’re going to change jobs many times, so we need affordable child care — to get to work and health care that aren’t tied to one company. We’re all going to make mistakes, so we need a society that focuses less on locking us up or stigmatizing us. And as tech keeps changing, we need to focus more on continuous education throughout our lives. Giving everyone the freedom to pursue purpose isn’t free. People like me should pay for it. Many of you will do well and you should too. That’s why my wife Priscilla Chan and I started the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and committed our wealth to promoting equal opportunity. These are the values of our generation.” — Mark Zuckerberg \| full speech A universal basic income is a form of security for a society’s citizens in which all residents of a country regularly unconditionally receive a sum of money, either from a government or public institution, in addition to any income received from elsewhere. I support something along these lines. We want to do it in a way that doesn’t destroy incentives to contribute to society. So the question is how we get there. We already have a muddle approximating UBI * in the form of food stamps, social security, Medicaid, Medicare, emergency rooms and other programs. You can get most of your needs for basic sustenance from these programs today — with the important exception of housing. There are shelters but these are grim and dangerous. We are clearly headed toward a situation where everyone can live very well, with the support that society will provide. The fantastic price-performance gains we’ve seen in information technology is coming to physical products, food, energy, and other material items as they all become information technologies — like 3D printing, vertical agriculture, and solar energy. I plan to talk about these issues, and how they will affect — and ultimately improve our civilization — in my next book. I remain positive that people like Mark Zuckerberg are thinking creatively about the future. We will be able to enter an age of abundance, as technology & science progress makes a better world for all of us. — Ray Kurzweil * UBI is universal basic income notes \| 11 reasons to support basic income Materials for conversation. source: Basic Income 1. Basic Income will help us rethink how & why we work. A basic income can help you do other work and reconsider old choices. It will enable you to re-train, safe in the knowledge that you’ll have enough money to maintain a decent standard of living while you do. So it will help each of us decide what it is we truly want to do. 2. Basic Income will contribute to better working conditions. With the insurance of having unconditional basic income as a safety net, workers can challenge their employers if they find their conditions of work unfair or degrading. 3. Basic Income will down-size bureaucracy. Because a basic income scheme is one of the most simple tax / benefits models, it will reduce all the bureaucracy surrounding the welfare state thus making it less complex and costly, while being fairer and more emancipatory. 4. Basic income will make benefit fraud obsolete. Benefit fraud will vanish as a possibility because no one needs to commit fraud to get a basic income: it is granted automatically. Moreover, an unconditional basic income will fix threshold and poverty trap effects. 5. Basic income will help reducing inequalities. A basic income is a means for sharing the wealth produced by a society to all people, reducing growing inequalities across the world. 6. It will provide a more secure and substantial safety net for all people. Most existing tested anti-poverty programs exclude people because of their complexity, or because people don’t know how to apply or if they qualify. With a basic income, people currently excluded will automatically have their rights guaranteed. 7. Basic Income will contribute to less working hours, better distribution of jobs. With a basic income, people will have the option to reduce their working hours without sacrificing their income. So they’ll be able to spend more time doing other things they find meaningful. At the macro-economic level, this will induce a better distribution of jobs — because people reducing their hours will increase job opportunities for those currently excluded from the labor market. 8. Basic Income will reward unpaid contributions. A huge number of unpaid activities are currently not recognized as economic contributions. Yet our economy increasingly relies on these free contributions — think about Wikipedia, or the work parents do. A basic income would recognize and reward theses activities. 9. Basic Income will strengthen our democracy. With a minimum level of security guaranteed to all citizens — and less time in work or worrying about work — innovation in political, social, economic & technological terms would become a lively part of everyday life and its concerns. 10. Basic Income is a fair redistribution of technological advancement. Thanks to massive advancements in our technological and productive capacities, the world of work is changing. But most of our wealth and technology comes from standing on the shoulders of giants. We’re wealthier because of our ancestors. Basic income is a way to civilize and re-distribute the advantages of that ongoing advancement. 11. Basic Income will end extreme financial poverty. Because we live in a world where we have the means and the will to end the kinds of suffering we see as a supposedly constant feature of our surroundings. Basic income is a way to join together the means and the will. on the web \| background Harvard Univ. \| YouTube channel Harvard Univ. \| Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg commencement address 2017 • video Chan + Zuckerberg Initiative \| main on the web \| essentials Wikipedia \| universal basic income Wikipedia \| Mark Zuckerberg Wikipedia \| Chan + Zuckerberg Initiative Futurism \| universal basic income: the answer to automation? • infographic Vice \| What would happen if we gave everyone free money: new experiments in universal basic income Basic Income \| main Basic Income \| What is basic income? Basic Income \| 10 reasons to support basic income book \| on topic book title: Basic Income: a radical proposal for a free society + a sane economy author: by Philippe Van Parijs + Yannick Vanderborght this book on Good Reads: visit IMAGE
With every bad result the clamour grows for Arsenal to dispense with their most successful manager. But who could possibly follow Arsène Wenger? The answer may be found in France. Rémi Garde never made much impact as a player at Arsenal; signed on the same day as Patrick Vieira, he was always in the shadows and retired after three injury-hit seasons. But despite being a manager for just 18 months he is now second favourite with the bookmakers to replace Wenger, behind only Pep Guardiola. Garde is largely unknown on these shores outside the Arsenal cognoscenti, but when Wenger was appointed in 1996 it was, for most, a case of “Arsène who?” And that turned out rather well. Join Independent Minds For exclusive articles, events and an advertising-free read for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent With an Independent Minds subscription for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent Without the ads – for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Wenger, though, had a lot more experience than Garde, who took over at Lyons in June 2011. It is what he has done since, as well as his links with Wenger and Arsenal, that have catapulted him into contention. Garde took control of a Lyons team which had lost its way in recent years after winning seven successive titles from 2001-2008. Claude Puel, the former Lyons manager, spent £125m over three years without success. Garde, who was on the coaching staff for several title-winning years but more recently was running the academy, stepped up with a brief to slash the budget, mainly by shifting non-performing “stars” and promoting youth. He has not only done that, he has also steered the team past big-spending Paris Saint-Germain and done it while cruising into the knockout stages of the Europa League. Lyons are in that competition because Garde just failed to secure a Champions League place last season, but his team did win the French Cup. Garde could have been Lyons manager earlier; he was offered the chance to replace the departing Gérard Houllier in 2007 but turned it down preferring to work with the youngsters. That indicated a man who knows his own mind – as does a public contradiction of autocratic president Jean-Michel Aulas over transfer policy – and who is planning for the long-term. It is also similar to Guardiola, who eschewed the chance to become Barcelona’s technical director in favour of learning the management ropes with the (largely) young men of Barcelona B. That turned out rather well, too. Keep up to date with all the latest news with expert comment and analysis from our award-winning writers
[TRANS] Yixing for Bazaar Men’s Magazine Jan 2016 Idol stars’ brightly shining outer appearance causes one to be incredibly envious, but the hardships behind that appearance cause one to can’t help but sigh. Behind the cameras, the young Zhang Yixing is a handsome boy with a clear gaze, once he laughs, it’s as though the air within a few hundred metre radius of him is infected by his warm aura. The day of shooting, he had already reached extreme exhaustion due to the prior few days of continuous wire work and filming, he was not feeling well. But he didn’t have any complaints and co-operated with the shooting, modestly communicating with the photographers, to reach the optimal photographic effect. When staff couldn’t help but feel for him, asking him to rest out of concern, the lively him still smiled warmly, using a serious and professional attitude to respond to everyone who was concerned for him. Zhang Yixing is kind and pure, unafraid of hard work, constantly forging ahead, believing that success will gift good luck to those who work hard, we look forward to seeing his future shine brighter and brighter. Q: As a celebrity in trend, what is your favourite kind of fashion style? A: I still prefer simple styles, usually I mainly wear types like T-shirts and jeans. I think that comfortable things are still more suitable for me. Q: How does such a glamorous and vibrant fashion icon as yourself maintain your physical strength and follow the trends closely? A: If I have time, I will look at some fashion shows, and also pay attention to some fashion brands. When attending some fashion activities, I will also take note of trends-related content. As for maintaining my physical strength, I do exercises like work out or swim in my free time. Q: On programs and during work you have always displayed courtesy and politeness, have there been times when you have been in a bad mood? How do you release your stress? A: If I’m not in a very good mood, I will choose exercise or music to relax myself. Working out or creating music as long as I have free time, both of these methods can soothe my mood, everyone can also try this. Q: If possible, what short-term goals do you have? A: If possible, my short-term goal is to have a short holiday (here he reveals an innocent and adorable smile, explaining that it is a joke). My short-term goal is hopefully to complete the work on my hands well, and if I have spare time, of course it is to create better music. Q: What are the greatest sense of achievements and difficulties you meet during your work? Have you ever thought about giving up show biz? A: Currently, there are no greatest sense of achievements or difficulties. Being able to be rewarded for every piece of my own hard work is something which I feel is already very good. I have never thought about giving up anything, since I have already done it, then I will definitely try my hardest to do it well. Q: Everyone has an idol they worship during their student days, youthful and beautiful and emanating a kind of attraction. As a public figure as well as a “male god” idol with many young followers, can you recall whether you had an idol who similarly gave you strength in your student days? A: Actually I have quite a lot of idols, a lot of people gave me strength as my role models, allowing me to continuously grow and improve, and are also the goals I keep working hard towards, impelling me forward. Q: If you could try, as someone who is polite and respectful, would you try a role that is completely different from your own personality? A: I want to try a lot of different roles, but I want to try acting as a killer most, and it’s the kind of cold-blooded killer that completely turns things around/subverts expectations, haha……as an actor, I hope I can challenge more different roles, make a breakthrough, only this way can i improve… Q: Are you willing to try various styles? What is the style you want to try the most? A: If it’s for portraying a role, to adapt to a role itself, for the role I am willing to try (all styles). But if it’s daily life, then I think the clean and comfortable style is the best. Q: Having visited so many countries and cities, which one do you like most? Which city do you hope to settle down in? A: Indeed I’ve been to many places because of work, they’re very beautiful and comfortable, but if I were to settle down, I would definitely hope to return to Changsha, I am a Changsha person to the core, my family and friends are all there, so I definitely hope to live in Changsha. Q: Which celebrity or famous person do you admire most? Whose accomplishments do you hope to achieve one day? A: There are many seniors I admire and idolize, and they also encourage and impel me forward. Don’t dare to speak of any too great accomplishments, just work hard and do well myself, of course I also hope that my hard work will be rewarded, the best accomplishment would be to become outstanding myself. Q: Is your favourite field singing, hosting, or acting? Which field do you want to try the most? A: Actually my dream since young is music, when I became a celebrity, I feel that I have more of a responsibility, to guide more people. Doing the things I want to do, guiding towards the direction of positivity. Although I personally prefer music, but currently I am also an actor at the same time. With regards to performing, I feel that it is very fresh, very fun, and at the same time something that involves a lot of knowledge and should be paid attention to, so I will also put effort into performing. Q: Which of your works are you most satisfied with? A: I’m most satisfied with my next piece of work, haha, because I am always working hard on the road towards the most satisfactory works. Q: Many people in the industry say Zhang Yixing is very obedient, very talented and also very humble and polite, as an idol, is there anything you want to say to your fans? Encouraging words, thankful words, or words you want to guide them with? A: What I want to say to my fans is of course thank you, really thank you guys for your support all the way, I will also work even harder, to let you guys see a better me. I think that I have really received too much in 2015, there are also many people I want to thank, and I hope everyone around me can be healthy and happy… Q: If it’s possible to not work, what do you want to do most right now? A: Write songs, accompany my family. Q: Please give the readers of <Bazaar Men> and your fans some fashion style advice? A: I think that fashion is about choosing what is most suitable for yourself, and pursuing authenticity.
Four Famous Laws & How You Can Visualize Them Famous laws, theorems, and observations are often named after the person who proposed the idea. These “eponymous laws” can be graphed. We do so in this post, using our free, web-based product. Contact us about getting a trial of Plotly Enterprise on your servers. Moore’s Law Transistors are used in building electronics. The number of transistors in a circuit has been doubling approximately every two years, an observation made by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore. This creates exponential improvements in the performance of electronics every two years. Moore’s Law is graphed below. Zipf’s Law Zipf’s law states that in a corpus (a group of words, as in a book or set of articles) the frequency of a word is inversely proportional to its rank. The graph below shows a Zipfian distribution from a group of 29 works of British literature. The word “the” occurred most frequently: 225,300 times. “Is” was second most popular. Zipfian distributions create a line when we plot frequency (y-axis) and word usage rank (x-axis) on a double log-axis plot. On the right we show the same data on a linear scale. The inset histogram shows how often each word was used. Zoom in to see another 998 words. Benford’s Law Many real-life sources of data follow Benford’s Law: 1 occurs as the leading digit in numbers about 30% of the time. Others are less common, with 9 as the first digit less than 5% of the time. A pair of mathematicians who studied the law concluded that “Benford’s law continues to defy attempts at an easy derivation.” Shown below are a few examples, with the equation describing the law as the title. The random number generator used here produced uniform random numbers. We could design a random number generator that would follow Benford’s Law. Hubble’s Law We can show the data in one graph, then filter in the legend. If you’re an R user, you can make a Benford’s Law graph with ggplot2 and Plotly. A note: we’re hiring R developers. Email jobs [at] plot [dot] ly. When a train or fire truck approaches you, the pitch sounds lower; the pitch shifts upward if the source is going away from you. That is a simple example of the Doppler effect, first demonstrated in 1845. A train pulled an open car full of trumpet players playing the same note. Observers heard the drop in tone when the car passed. An observable Doppler shift also occurs when a light source is moving away from you. The light pattern shifts towards the red end of the spectrum. If the source is moving towards you pattern shifts towards the blue end of the spectrum. Hubble’s law applies this knowledge, using velocity to estimate the distance of galaxies from Earth. The plot below is based on data gathered by James Imamura and shows the estimated distance of over 1,000 galaxies. Mpc stands for megaparsec, a unit astronomers use to indicate distances between galaxies. What Is Plotly? Plotly supports collaborative graphing for anyone using the web or Excel, Google Docs, Python, matplotlib, R, ggplot2, & MATLAB. Collaborate online with anyone on any browser or device without any downloads or installations. We support 2D, 3D, and streaming graphs and have over 100K users from science, engineering, industry, journalism, academia, and education (K-12 & up). Plotly is free for unlimited sharing, or you can run Plotly on-premise on a private server; contact us today to start a trial.
'This Song Is Uncomfortable': Macklemore On The Contradictions Of 'White Privilege' i Ben Haggerty, a.k.a. Macklemore, and Jamila Woods collaborated on the song 'White Privilege II.' Ariel Zambelich/NPR hide caption toggle caption Ariel Zambelich/NPR Ben Haggerty, a.k.a. Macklemore, and Jamila Woods collaborated on the song 'White Privilege II.' Ariel Zambelich/NPR knows what you think of him. The Seattle rapper born Ben Haggerty told me that he spent the first few days following the release of his new song, "White Privilege II," reading the thinkpieces that greeted — or bemoaned — its arrival. And then he had to take a break, take Twitter off his phone. Macklemore knows what you think of him. The Seattle rapper born Ben Haggerty told me that he spent the first few days following the release of his new song, "White Privilege II," reading the thinkpieces that greeted — or bemoaned — its arrival. And then he had to take a break, take Twitter off his phone. Not a surprise given the subject matter — or the fact that the song landed on the Internet exactly as a snowstorm bore down on the East Coast, giving "White Privilege II" the feel of a storm of its own, to be handled with equal parts hype and snark. Before Macklemore arrived at NPR's Washington, D.C., headquarters, we chose a smaller studio then we normally would for this conversation, because it felt like one we didn't want to conduct across a large table. He introduced himself as Ben. He and Jamila Woods, a poet and singer from Chicago who sings the song's final lines, each took their place at a microphone. We spent the next hour getting into how the song came to be, what it was like writing it, what they think of the response, how Macklemore has internalized some of the criticism he has earned in the years since his breakthrough album, The Heist, made him a pop star and how that affects his work. What aired on All Things Considered was a sliver of that discussion — so much so that we are posting this transcript of the longer conversation. It's been edited for clarity and gets more deeply into many of the questions that have been raised by and about the song since its release — but also the concept of white privilege as it's understood by Macklemore, who has been thinking, and rapping, about it for a decade. Audie Cornish: Ben, this is your second song on this subject. The first time you did a song called "White Privilege," in 2005 , it was really from the position from within hip-hop as a fan, right? Talk a little bit about that. Ben Haggerty/Macklemore : Yeah. It was, at the time, an observation: I was observing the cultural shift of hip-hop music in terms of who was going to the shows, who was making the music, who was kind of at the forefront in terms of sales and in terms of touring. And I was observing it from a place of, "This is very different from when I first started to attend hip-hop shows. This is very different than the music that I grew up listening to. It has changed drastically." And I wrote the song from that perspective. And since then, we have seen the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the incidents that sparked it. "White Privilege II" actually starts with someone joining a procession of marches, at what I assume is a Black Lives Matter protest. I don't know if this is something you actually experienced? Haggerty: Yeah, it was. It was the night of the Darren Wilson non-indictment. We were in the office huddled around the computer screen, and I remember feeling extremely frustrated and angered, that feeling of "How is this happening again?" and not really knowing what to do. I ended up driving to a meeting, [but] I sat down in the meeting and immediately felt this restless, "I need to do something. I should go back." I left the studio and drove by the police precinct, and there were people assembled outside. Get the latest Flash Player Learn more about upgrading to an HTML5 browser Adobe Flash Player or an HTML5 supported browser is required for video playback. YouTube And where were you? Haggerty: I was in Seattle. And it starts there. It starts with that moment of observing police brutality happening, again, with no accountability — and me stepping into a protest with a lot of baggage, feeling out of protest shape, when there's this moment of injustice and I am feeling so compelled that I need to do something, yet also stepping into that space in my own head of, "Should be here? Is there something that I'm going to get called out for, being here? Am I going to distract more than actually do any good by being present here?" And all of these questions that I had. Jamila, you were nodding there. I don't know if you've been a part of these protests, where you are in Chicago. But is this an idea that you've ever considered — like, for a white person coming to this protest, how do they participate? What would be constructive? Jamila Woods: Yeah, I think hearing that verse was one of the most intriguing parts of the song to me. The protests I've attended, I've seen and experienced some tension between white activists, or even [just] white people attending protests, who don't necessarily have a moment of introspection — who maybe are just taking up airtime, you know, destroying things or just doing things that are distracting from what the protest is actually for. To me, I feel like it's an important thing not to just consider yourself an ally by showing up, but to really investigate what your role can be in a productive way. And that comes from authentically engaging with the people — the black people — who are leading the protest. Now, you guys didn't really know each other before this, and having any kind of cross-racial discussion is hard for most people in their regular life. Jamila, when you were first invited to collaborate, what were your initial concerns? Woods: One of my initial concerns was understanding that the song was intended to reach the Macklemore and Ryan Lewis fan base — majority white audience. I don't typically think about addressing a white audience with my work, and so, trying to think about an authentic way to engage in that and not have it come off as always people of color having the burden to explain issues of race to white people — I really kind of struggled with that at first. Ben, for you, what were some of your trepidations in jumping into a song like this and bringing in another voice? Haggerty: I don't think I had any trepidations about bringing in another voice. I think it was imperative to have a sense of community, in terms of creating this song. But just to — I want to pull it away from this language, because I feel like we're very academic right now. Jamila said something interesting here: She's thinking of your fan base, which she's describing as white. For you, was there a concern of, "How do I talk about this? How do I bring in a person of color without turning them into a mascot? What am I doing here?" Haggerty: Absolutely. Well, I think it was ... To start the song, I'm just going to start talking. It started with being silent, for a long time, around these issues — in a social setting, not wanting to mess up. And realizing that I can do a tweet, I can do an interview, but the greatest tool that I have as an artist is to make a song. That is where my platform extends the longest. So, in making a song about race, or about police brutality, or about white privilege or white supremacy or cultural appropriation, where do you start? And I wanted to start with me showing up at a protest in a place of fear, thinking about myself too much, not knowing if it was okay to say "Black Lives Matter" at that exact moment. That's where this record came from: "How can I engage in this discussion knowing that I will benefit, knowing that this is co-opting, but [that] I still want to say something"? Inherently, the system in which the song operates is flawed. Inherently, my place in talking about this is going to have contradictions. How do I do this from an authentic place, knowing that it should be called out, knowing that it is never going to be perfect, but knowing that, at the end of the day, it's more important for me to say something than to remain silent? Cornish: Okay, so you sit down to start to write. And from the opening of the song, people know they're getting something different: slow saxophone, moaning in the background — you kind of took it there right away. There are critics of the song who are like, "This song is not fun." Was there ever a moment when you thought, "I need a little sugar to make this medicine go down. I need to make this a ' Thrift Shop ' in order to sell this particular message"? Or was it more a sense of, "You know what? Here we are." Haggerty: No, no — purposefully, this song is uncomfortable. The music is uncomfortable. We approached this record like a play. I don't think it was our intention to make it uncomfortable — I just don't think that there was a space to start from where we were like, "Yo, we're trying to make this appeal to the masses. Let's make this a three-minute-and-30-second song and try to get it on the radio." That was never the point. We wanted to make a play. We wanted to show different perspectives through the music, and have almost different acts. Cornish: But if you're trying to reach the widest audience, could that have been the call? There's a part in the song where you describe a mother approaching you and saying, "You're the only hip-hop that I let my kids listen to. Did you feel like you needed to reach that crowd? Haggerty: I don't think that this subject matter is built for easy listening. Or accessibility, in terms of playback value. I think that that would be disingenuous to the content of the record; if we tried to make some sparkly pop record out of a song about police brutality, that would have been off-base. Cornish: Halfway through the song, Ben, you note the often-used argument that white pop stars borrow heavily from black artists — and you mention Elvis , Miley Cyrus and Iggy Azalea by name. I know that there has been a lot of back and forth about that online; do you regret using names? Has that distracted from the message? Haggerty: I think it has distracted from the message. We live in a world where things move very quickly on the Internet, and I watched the conversation shift from white privilege to, "Did he diss Iggy Azalea?" I think it's a lot easier and a lot more comfortable for mass media to grab onto something like a potential diss or someone calling somebody out, versus the issues that I was trying to get at in this record. And it's a deflection. It's a distraction. Cornish: We should say, Iggy Azalea tweeted over the weekend that rap is global, that she makes pop-rap. And she was kind of dismissive of this argument that she had to essentially be an activist to work in the genre. What's your response to that? I think there are probably rappers, black and white, who feel that way, to some extent — that they make pop. Woods: Yeah, I don't think it's necessary to call yourself an activist or to go to protests in order to be considered a part of hip-hop. But participating in hip-hop culture, you have to understand the history of hip-hop and how it was created as a way for people of color who were living in a disenfranchised community to have a voice and to really empower themselves. And so there's a way in which, as a white artist in hip-hop, in the system that's created to have white people feel comfortable or relatable, there's erasure of the history of what comes with hip-hop. So it's not necessarily that you have to be an activist, but just to be mindful of the broader culture that hip-hop is and how to remain authentically engaged in that. Hip-hop is also about talking about where you come from, and kind of being authentically you, and so I think that's the most important thing. Cornish: Ben, what's your response to that idea? Haggerty: I think that Iggy Azalea, like myself, has used hip-hop to her benefit. And that is her right, and that is my right, to be able to make art that speaks to us. But it is important, as Jamila said, to understand the history, and to come from a point of view that is true to who you are. You don't need to be an activist, but I do think that it is important to realize how whiteness operates in terms of pop culture: the immediate platform that we are given as white artists, whether it be on the radio, or with program directors, or people that are buying our music, or people that are coming to our shows. It is important to realize that we immediately have privilege in those spaces that people of color don't have access to immediately, and to educate oneself about the systemic, the systemic reasons behind that. And that's not to say that Iggy Azaela shouldn't rap, or that I shouldn't rap, but there's a certain amount of accountability that I think is important if you are going to participate in the culture. Cornish: You guys are very calm in this room, but the creative process is a journey. What were the moments of the song that you clashed, that you had to push back and say, well, look, I really want to get this particular phrase or message out? Woods: [The song is] kind of set up as a journey: It starts out with a lot of introspection and a lot about Ben, and kind of moves towards community and asking bigger questions about white supremacy and white privilege. In terms of the question of where would I sing, where would I write something and also what parts of the song were necessary, I had to kind of push back at points, wondering, "Is it necessary to go through all of the internal thinking?" And I think what I came to understand through talking with Ben and Ryan was that there was a goal of not alienating listeners — so, trying to kind of be vulnerable and trying speak to feelings of discomfort or being unsure what white people might feel, and kind of using that as a way to get people. So you don't just start out by saying "white supremacy," laying it all out, and then maybe losing people. Cornish: But I think it's funny, the question you're asking is almost like a literal moment of a very meta-question, which is: "Is this about you, Ben Haggerty? Like, where do I, the black voice, fall in this song about white privilege?" Were there moments where you really weren't on the same page? Haggerty: I mean, it's the creative process. I don't think that there was one definitive [conflict], like, "Oh we really beefed over this bar," or something like that. I think that what we strived to do with this song is workshop it — have conversations around each bar, and everyone had a pen. I'd write stuff that would get scratched out. We would keep working until we felt good about where the piece was at. Cornish: What's the intention of the song, at the end of the day? Haggerty: The intention of the song, at the end of the day, is to start a conversation. And to utilize the platform that we have as artists, the reach that we have, to engage our audience in a conversation about race. One that can be uncomfortable, that comes with a lot of fear of not wanting to mess up, of not wanting to say the wrong thing, but just stepping into the space and learning. Woods: I think, for me, the intention was for listeners of the song to feel something, to feel moved by the end. That's something I feel like you can't really get all the time from reading an article or watching a video. At least for myself, looking at what's happening, it's a constant state of emotional distress and trauma and almost like a saturation, to the point where, in order to act, you have to kind of stop engaging. So, just trying to use that as an entry point to motivate people to action through an emotional sphere, versus a cerebral one. Haggerty: Can I say something? I'm just kind of having this thought and I don't know if it's fully formed; it's probably not. Cornish: That's the best kind. You know, in terms of the white rapper conversation — I think that there is this want or desire, as a white rapper, to just be classified as a rapper. Like, "I don't want to be a 'white rapper' — I'm a good rapper, period." And this perspective from certain people of, like, "Race shouldn't matter; I should just be judged on my raps and that should be the end of it." And I think that that's not the world that we live in. The fanbase that I have access to, the resources, having equipment to record with in the first place — all of these things go back to the inherent privilege that I had because of the color of my skin. It's really easy for white people in society to be like, "We're post-racial, we're past that, we have a black president," or, "I have black friends," or, you know, "I'm a good rapper" — whatever it is, to discard the fact that race is a factor in my career, or in somebody else's career. That's a conversation that I see often, that race shouldn't matter in this, but it completely does. And I think that it's negligent for a white artist participating in this culture to say that their race doesn't give them a certain set of advantages. I guess the question would be, then, is the best way to use your platform to do a song like this — which at the end of the day, people could interpret as more being about you — then to do something with your platform? Which would be to, say, have a label and bring on more artists of color, who you think should be given a chance? Have you created another scenario where people can basically say, "It's all about you"? Right. Maybe. Maybe. I think that what is going to determine if this was all about me, or if this is bigger, is the conversations that come next, and highlighting other artists and using our resources and our fanbase to shed light on not only people in the movement that are active and engaging in this anti-racist work, but also artists that might not have the same opportunities that I had. This song is a very preliminary step in what I am hoping will be lifelong work. And that's personal accountability, and accountability to the community. That, to me, is what is going to determine whether or not this song is inevitably about me or something bigger. But, that's one that I have to keep coming back to. And we were talking last night about not wanting to make this, like, a press run. Like the minute that this becomes, "Oh, now I am the expert, and now I'm talking about Black Lives Matter, or "Now I'm the expert on white privilege" ... I am the complete opposite. I'm stepping into the conversation, I'm learning, I'm trying to read, I'm trying to engage. I'm going to make mistakes along the way, and I don't want to be like, "Let me hog up as much space as possible now that I've made this song." That would be counterproductive. I think it's speaking about the song, getting some of the intentions out, and then going back and creating a curriculum, figuring out how to get into a room with young people to have a discourse. The action is the next piece of this song.
It looks like Isaiah Thomas isn't the only NBA All-Star learning the tricks of the trade from the Black Mamba. Former Los Angeles Lakers guard Kobe Bryant says he's willing to bestow his wisdom on any player who seeks it out, with that list already including names like Kyrie Irving, James Harden, Russell Westbrook, and Gordon Hayward. "I'm around for all the guys," Bryant told ESPN's Jackie MacMullan. "Anybody can reach out. It's an open book." His mentor-pupil relationship with Thomas has received the most attention. The Boston Celtics point guard contacted the five-time champion for basketball advice after Bryant first offered his condolences following the passing of Thomas' sister, Chyna. "I was happy to help him. He had the courage to ask. I did the same thing with Michael Jordan when I was a young player," Bryant added. It was during Bryant's rookie campaign in 1996-97 when late pop icon Michael Jackson told him to seek out legends of the game and learn as much as possible. He cited everyone from Jordan to Magic Johnson to Larry Bird to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as those who provided guidance along the way. Now that he's retired, he wants to return the favor by helping the next generation of stars who will carry the torch for the league.
The population of critically endangered yellow-crested cockatoos (Cacatua sulphurea) in the Indonesian province of West Nusa Tenggara has reached an all-time low of 107 individual birds, according to a recent report from The Jakarta Post. The cockatoos are protected by international and Indonesian law, but they are also highly valued in the illegal pet trade, where they can fetch more than $500 each. The average annual income in Indonesia is just over $1,400, making the birds worth as much as most workers can earn in four months. The West Nusa Tenggara chapter of the Natural Resources Conservation Agency (Balai Konservasi Sumber Daya Alam or BKSDA) conducted surveys of yellow-crested cockatoo populations in several conservation areas and counted just 87 birds. Another survey by mining company PT Newmont Nusa Tenggara—which operates the Batu Hijau copper and gold mine near a key cockatoo habitat—found just 20 more. Yellow-crested cockatoos also live on several other Indonesian islands but are in decline throughout their range, mostly because of unsustainable trapping for the pet trade and deforestation, according to BirdLife International, which estimated the total wild population for the species at fewer than 7,000 individuals in 2007. The BKSDA says that cockatoos are hunted in West Nusa Tenggara to order, meaning they are only taken from the wild when a buyer has already been lined up. The birds are very slow breeders, laying just two or three eggs at a time once a year. That leaves them poorly equipped to adapt to the threats they currently face. The birds can probably recover if given the chance, though. A 2006 study published in Oryx found that one population of a related subspecies, the citron-crested cockatoo (C. s. citrinocristata), more than doubled in the decade after legal trade was outlawed in 1993. Unfortunately, illegal trade appears to have picked up again over the past 10 years, leaving the future of the species in question. Photo by Charles Lam via Flickr. Used under Creative Commons license Previously in Extinction Countdown:
BSDCan 2013 DevSummit Special Status Report This special status report contains a summary of the discussions from the various working groups at the BSDCan 2013 DevSummit. The FreeBSD Project organizes DevSummits at various events, typically at the major BSD conferences, so that developers can meet and discuss matters in person. Contact: Brooks Davis <brooks@FreeBSD.org> Buildworld is the target for building the base system in the venerable FreeBSD build system. This session aimed to investigate the current limitations, discuss recent improvements, and propose future directions for this process. Over recent years, FreeBSD has been used increasingly in embedded systems and so cross development has become a lot more important. One of the changes recently committed by Brooks Davis now permits building the entire base system and creating a disk image without root privileges. This makes embedded development easier, as a number of users can now share an expensive development box, capable of performing builds quickly, without having to give all of them root. This session also discussed the bmake import, which brings in NetBSD's make along with some improvements from Juniper, which should allow much more accurate dependency tracking and faster parallel and incremental builds. This should have some additional benefits to the rest of the project, for example by making our tinderbox infrastructure, which notifies developers if the have broken the build, able to report failures much more quickly. One frequently requested capability, which is now being investigated by Marcel Moolenar, is the ability to build FreeBSD from other platforms. Currently, developing a FreeBSD-based embedded system requires a FreeBSD host system for building, which is a barrier to entry that we would like to avoid. There are a number of changes to our toolchain planned for the 10.x and 11.x timescales, including replacing GNU binutils with LLVM-based tools and importing MCLinker. These are unlikely to be the default in 10.0, but we hope to be able to provide a GPL-free base system as a functional option this year. Contact: Dru Lavigne <dru@FreeBSD.org> Contact: Benedict Reuschling <bcr@FreeBSD.org> The documentation working group met during the main sessions and also had several productive evenings improving the state of FreeBSD documentation. The FreeBSD Handbook has undergone some significant updates recently and there is work underway to create a snapshot that will be available as a professionally published print edition. There are still some sections in need of updates before this can happen and the documentation team is working on engaging the relevant developers to review this content. The FreeBSD web site redesign was discussed. Currently, many of the most commonly accessed pages are difficult to navigate to. Its visual design is also somewhat dated. The documentation team is working to design an improved structure and has several offers of assistance with the appearance. The FreeBSD Project is international and many of the contributors do not have English as their first language. To encourage more participation from the rest of the world, it is important to have high-quality translations of the documentation. PC-BSD uses pootle (available from the FreeBSD ports tree) to assist with keeping translations consistent and up to date and we are evaluating doing the same for FreeBSD. The documentation team plans to have a Docs Hackathon colocated with the Cambridge DevSummit in August. Contact: George Neville-Neil <gnn@FreeBSD.org> FreeBSD has traditionally been a platform with support for very high performance networking. This is one of the main reasons why it was selected for the Netflix streaming appliance, which is currently responsible for over 20% of the Internet traffic in the USA. The goal of this session was to discuss current bottlenecks at the receiving end of connections. Modern network cards support multiple receive queues and can deliver packets into them depending on various criteria. The design of a good API for accessing this functionality is very important, as it shortens the path between a packet arriving in the card and it being delivered into a userspace process. In an extreme case, for example with cluster applications or virtual machines, the receive queue may be accessed directly from a process bypassing the kernel. In a more conventional setting, the packets should be delivered to a kernel thread on the same CPU as the receiving process, so that the copy to userspace is cheap. The group examined a number of different proposals, including some patches, and discussed the requirements for a general API. This work is ongoing. Contact: Erwin Lansing <erwin@FreeBSD.org> The working group on ports and packages discussed the fallout from the security incident and the lessons learned. Old-style binary package building is now online and the infrastructure for building them is in a much more maintainable state. Building pkg(8) (new-style) packages should be possible soon. Bryan Drewery presented a short talk on the status of Poudriere, the new package builder. This is usable for building package sets for local deployment and for the official FreeBSD packages. When the original package building infrastructure was designed, it took most of a day to build a large port like Mozilla on a high-end machine. Now, we have single machines in the FreeBSD cluster that can build the entire ports tree in a day. Poudriere is designed for this model and does not rely on ports supporting parallel builds internally. Instead, it builds each port in a separate jail, with ports that do not depend on each other being built in parallel when there are spare CPUs. Moving forward, the project plans to decouple package releases from base system releases. Each base system release is intended to be backwards compatible within that release series and so any packages for N.x should work on N.x+1. The project will build weekly package sets for each branch that will be retained for two weeks, with no QA, and monthly sets that will undergo QA and will be available for 12 months. Stacy Son and Brooks Davis talked about packages for less common architectures. Stacy has worked to bring QEMU usermode support to FreeBSD. This means that MIPS or ARM FreeBSD binaries can run on an x86 FreeBSD system. The kernel will detect the foreign binary and launch it in the emulator. Stacy has been using this to create jails containing a cross compiler and shell for the host architecture, but native libraries for the target. This allows ports that are not cross-build aware to run configure scripts that do things like compile executables and run them, but still has the most processor-intensive part of the build (compiling and linking) running outside of emulation. With this approach, we are easily able to build weekly package sets for MIPS and ARM on a single x86 box. For installing onto embedded systems, there are still some open problems. The pkg(8) infrastructure can install many packages onto a disk image, but will not be able to run complex post-install scripts without the target system booting. Contact: Benno Rice <benno@FreeBSD.org> UEFI is the new boot firmware standard pushed by Intel. It comes with a number of challenges, including the SecureBoot restriction, that prevents the firmware from booting unsigned kernels and bootloaders. This is not currently a problem, as most systems either do not enable this restriction by default, or make it easy to disable, but it will be more important in the future. The goal for UEFI support in FreeBSD is to merge the bootloader that is currently in the projects branch, which will perform signature verification and then hand off to the more conventional FreeBSD bootloader. This loader will be very simple and so will need changing (and re-signing) fairly infrequently. The FreeBSD Foundation will be responsible for ensuring that the bootloader is signed and so will work with SecureBoot. There are a number of restructuring and refactoring tasks that will need to be done over the next few months to ensure that the FreeBSD boot process works cleanly with UEFI. These include removing some code duplication between various platforms that use UEFI, removing some legacy support from the i386 kernel, and restructuring how some of the bootloader code is built. Interaction with UEFI will be simplified once clang supports the MS Windows calling convention (used by UEFI) when generating UNIX binaries. Benno Rice has been working on this, with some assistence from David Chisnall, and this support should appear soon. Contact: Peter Grehan <grehan@FreeBSD.org> Virtualization is an increasingly important topic, with large providers like Amazon deploying huge numbers of VMs and many users deploying VMs on desktop systems for testing and backwards compatibility. Today, FreeBSD supports a wide variety of virtualization options. This working group discussed the current status and future directions of several of them. Xen is the de-facto standard for large-scale virtualization and FreeBSD has supported running as a guest for some time. SpectraLogic has funded recent work on improving this, with two overlapping goals. The first is to allow FreeBSD to run as the Domain 0 operating system. This is the operating system that runs with elevated privilege and is allowed to talk directly to the hardware and which must provide the virtualized devices to the guests. This requires full paravirtualization support. Related to this is the ability to use more paravirtualized hardware when booting as a hardware virtualized guest. This includes support for the new PVH mode, which uses hardware support for memory operations but paravirtualized drivers for everything else, giving the best performance possible with Xen. The FreeBSD VirtualBox port is progressing well, with preliminary support for 3D accleration in guests. The patches for Microsoft's HyperV, provided by Microsoft, are currently being tested with a view to incorporating them into FreeBSD 10. FreeBSD also includes its own virtualization infrastructure, bhyve (pronounced beehive), which is designed to support hardware-assisted virtualization. This has made significant progress over the past year, including now supporting AMD's virtualization extensions as well as those from Intel. With so many options, FreeBSD is now very well placed in terms of virtualization, both as a host and a guest.
Ladies and gentlemen, it gives us great pleasure to let you know that a certain developer tools company has just released a magnificent tool for development teams into the market. Yes, we’re talking about JetBrains Upsource, the new on-premises repository browser and code review tool that’s been available for early access for a few months. Today Upsource 1.0 hits RTM and becomes available for purchase. You are invited to download Upsource 1.0 and start using it with your team’s projects. A free 10-user plan is activated by default, and larger plans are available starting at $1,300. As a quick reminder, here’s what you and your team can do with Upsource 1.0: Access code in Git, Mercurial, Subversion and Perforce repositories : Explore and monitor all your VCS repositories from a central location, using a common friendly UI. Both internal company’s repositories and externally hosted repositories such as those at GitHub can be handled by Upsource. : Explore and monitor all your VCS repositories from a central location, using a common friendly UI. Both internal company’s repositories and externally hosted repositories such as those at GitHub can be handled by Upsource. Keep track of code changes : Navigate to specific revisions, inspect diffs inline or side-by-side. Track recent commits, branches and merges, or search the project history to learn who did what and when. : Navigate to specific revisions, inspect diffs inline or side-by-side. Track recent commits, branches and merges, or search the project history to learn who did what and when. Explore any revision of your code base : Enjoy quick read access to the current or any prior state of your project’s code, without having to check out locally. Browse project structure, view syntax-highlighted files, search for code, files and text. : Enjoy quick read access to the current or any prior state of your project’s code, without having to check out locally. Browse project structure, view syntax-highlighted files, search for code, files and text. Discuss and review code : Discuss code and changes with teammates, create code reviews on individual revisions or entire branches, or keep the team up to date with important changes in the code base. : Discuss code and changes with teammates, create code reviews on individual revisions or entire branches, or keep the team up to date with important changes in the code base. Use code insight in Java projects : Take advantage of code inspections when reading or reviewing code in Java projects, search for usages, or navigate to symbol declarations, as if you were using IntelliJ IDEA. : Take advantage of code inspections when reading or reviewing code in Java projects, search for usages, or navigate to symbol declarations, as if you were using IntelliJ IDEA. Share links to code: Use URLs to link to everything in code, including revisions, branches, code reviews, diffs, discussions, reports, search filters, files, or even selections in code. Here’s a set of fresh Upsource videos by Hadi Hariri to save you a bit of reading: In addition to the free 10-user pack, we offer several commercial user packs ranging from 25 to 1000 users. As usual for JetBrains tools, every license is perpetual and includes 1 year of free upgrades. By the way, if you’re a non-commercial OS developer or a faculty member in an educational institution, take note that we provide Open Source and Classroom licenses from the get-go. Whoever you are, today is just the perfect day to download Upsource, give it a try and hopefully make your team enjoy the product.
It’s time to add a little bit more purpose into post-temple heroic existence. There’ve already been some things to do, but now there is another big mindless goal – after the great construction for their god is complete, it’s time for heroes to think about themselves and save for a prosperous future! Heroes will now start saving some of their drinking money for retirement and, since heroes whose gods have temples are not the poorest and have high standards, they will need a lot – about 30 million gold coins. Does this number seem unreachable? Well, at one time 1000 bricks seemed unreachable too. In the meantime, you can check out the new pantheon to track your progress. Another change that we’re making today is about the Ideabox. Here is what’s new: From now on all ideas will be voted on for 24 hours from their initial appearance instead of the old 100 votes limit. More votes per idea should better reflect community opinion, so make sure to cast your vote! ER acceptance of ideas is determined by the relative number of up votes. The threshold for diary and earthly news submissions stays the same – 50%, but for other types it’s been decreased to 40%, which should increase the chance of these ideas making it into the game. More details about the approval process can be found in this forum topic. We hope these changes will make idea processing simpler and increase the number of approved ideas. Thanks to all ER participants for the great job they did over the last few months! PS: We’ve also created new mobile pages for pantheons. Hopefully those on mobile phones will like them.
There is a sort of unofficial tradition in this country that ex-Presidents of the United States generally remain silent on major legal and policy matters pushed by their successors. For example, George W. Bush has been widely praised for essentially saying next to nothing about his successor after leaving office in 2009. However, a new report published Sunday morning suggests the soon to be former-President Obama may not give his successor the same courtesy. It is well known that the Obamas plan to remain in Washington, D.C. post presidency so their youngest daughter can finish out high school without having to change schools. Despite becoming the first past-president to remain in D.C. in nearly a century, Obama had suggested in previous interviews that he would mostly remain out of the political fray post-presidency. That is not to say he has plans to leave the public spotlight entirely, but it was suggested by top Obama aides that he did not plan to fully embrace the Bill Clinton post presidency model. In fact, Obama said this summer his post-presidency plan was simply to “go back to doing the kinds of work that I was doing before, just trying to find ways to help people.” All of that, of course, was said before Donald Trump scored an Election Day victory that many in Obama’s inner-circle almost certainly never saw coming. Perhaps that is why on Sunday The New York Times is reporting that Obama is now “rethinking his plans to withdraw from the political arena” when his term ends in January 2017. In fact, buried deep in the article, you’ll find it literally says as much: For Mr. Obama, a return to the partisan fray was never the intention. . . . But that vision assumed that his presidential legacy would be protected and nurtured by Mrs. Clinton in the Oval Office. According to the Times report, Obama began “hinting” to friends and allies almost immediately in the aftermath of Trump’s win that he would soon join in efforts to oppose Trump’s presidency. The largest hint to date came in a recent speech to Democratic activists where Obama told them, “You’re going to see me early next year, and we’re going to be in a position where we can start cooking up all kinds of great stuff to do.” The reason he is waiting until after the transition is reportedly because Obama still “holds out hope that he might influence Mr. Trump” during the transition process. But if his efforts at influencing the president-elect fail, the newspaper notes Obama has “made it clear that once out of office he will not remain silent if Mr. Trump goes too far in undoing his legacy.” It remains to be seen what influence Obama will have post presidency, but we will likely find out quickly if Republicans make good on their promise to repeal Obamacare. Or even sooner, perhaps, if Trump acts with the promised urgency to rescind Obama’s immigration executive actions. [image via Evan El-Amin/shutterstock]
Pastor Gregg Olcott and his wife, Sarah (8/26/2015) The pastoral search team at Cornerstone Community Church has been known to hunt nationwide for just the right pastor to lead the church in Goodview, so who would have thought the team’s most recent search would end in their own back yard? Due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control, former pastor David Vanzant and his family found the need to move to Memphis, Tenn., after a short two-month stay at Cornerstone. Pastor Gregg “Gooch” Olcott (nickname given him as a youth by his baseball team members), a Winona resident and part-time pastor at Brookside Church, had been invited to deliver several messages at Cornerstone during the Sundays that followed. On August 1, as if by God’s provision, Pastor Gregg began his pastoral duties, partnered by his wife, Sarah, in the newly-built church located at the intersection of Highway 61 and 44th Avenue in Goodview. While Pastor Gregg and his wife live and work in Winona, it is obvious God has led them and their family on quite a journey during their early years. Gregg’s grandfather was a Baptist pastor in Rose Hill, N.Y., near Geneseo, N.Y., a college community (pop. 10,000) where Gregg grew up. Sarah was raised in Lockport, N.Y., and they both attended undergraduate school in Geneseo. Gregg studied ecology and environmental science in hopes of becoming a forest ranger. Sarah studied English and eventually completed a Master’s program in higher education. The two met during Sarah’s senior year. The Olcotts then moved to New Orleans, La., where Gregg changed his college focus, majoring in secondary education-- social studies. It was there that the couple grew and matured in their faith, were baptized as believers and served as part of the worship team at a non-denominational church called River of Life. They finally settled in Winona, where Gregg finished his teaching degree at WSU. Still motivated by an urge to someday pastor a church — perhaps his grandfather’s in New York — Gregg completed seminary studies in Lynchburg, Va., at Liberty University, an accredited Christian college founded in 1971 by late Baptist leader and evangelical pastor Jerry Falwell. Besides Pastor Gregg’s current church responsibilities, he provides home-schooling for four of their five children and serves as assistant scout master for Boy Scout Troup 6 in Winona. He also directs “Lifeline,” a local Christian ministry network that connects the needs of area residents to those that can fulfill those needs. Many in the local area know Pastor Gregg as the founder and director of “Classical Conversations,” a home-school organization that teaches parents how to teach their children using the classical model — grammar, dialectic and rhetoric. Pastor Gregg explained, “In this organization, we teach parents how to teach the basics using songs and whatever else is available, similar to the early one-room school house. At the same time, we encourage children to be warriors for Christ.” His wife also participates in this organization as a tutor while she juggles her multiple roles as wife, mother and WSU assistant director of housing and director of the residential college. In their “free” time, Gregg, Sarah and their children —Ian (12), Makarah (10), Uvonne (8), Jocelyn (6), and Malcolm (3), love to camp and spend time outdoors. Pastor Gregg’s vision for Cornerstone is to encourage lasting God-centered relationships, and to share the love of Christ in the community. He foresees an influx of young families in the future, providing a nice age mix with many opportunities for fellowship as a whole and in small groups, supporting one another in life’s challenges. “When God opens a door, it’s surreal!” Pastor Gregg exclaimed with passion. Then he added, “The new Cornerstone facility is a testimony to the fact that God opened doors and faithful people moved through them quickly, only to be blessed in the process.” Visitors to Cornerstone are always welcome. For information about the church and to listen to several of Pastor Gregg’s sermons visit www.cccofwinona.org.
Dear Reader, As you can imagine, more people are reading The Jerusalem Post than ever before. Nevertheless, traditional business models are no longer sustainable and high-quality publications, like ours, are being forced to look for new ways to keep going. Unlike many other news organizations, we have not put up a paywall. We want to keep our journalism open and accessible and be able to keep providing you with news and analysis from the frontlines of Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World. Attempts by far-right activist detainees and their attorneys to smear the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) over its investigation into the Duma deadly arson attack are continuing, the agency said Thursday. t added that such tactics are aimed at distracting attention from the crimes of a fanatical Jewish terrorist organization, seeking the overthrow of the Israeli state to establish a fundamentalist monarchy that would expel non-Jews from the land. The Shin Bet is investigating a Jewish terrorist organization, whose members “are being interrogated currently, which is behind severe attacks motivated by an extreme anti-Zionist ideology. This organization continued to carry out attacks after the arson attack in Duma [which murdered Palestinian parents and their infant son], and they saw that attack as something to be emulated,” the security agency said this week. The terrorist organization seeks to overthrow the State of Israel through violent acts, including murdering innocent Palestinians, igniting a rebellion to institute a king, undermining relations between Israel and other states, as well as expelling non-Jews from the land and harming minorities.Terror attack in DumaThe goal of the investigation is to “uncover the organization and thwart future attacks,” the Shin Bet said. The organization is being investigated “in accordance with the professional and legal standards that are acceptable for thwarting organizations that plot severe future attacks,” said the security agency.Claims by the lawyers of the suspects in custody that the Shin Bet “sexually harassed” suspects, struck their genitals, kicked, spat or electrocuted them, or that one of the suspects attempted suicide, are all categorically false, the Shin Bet affirmed.“All of these claims are false and have no connection to reality,” it added.The goal of such lies is to try and prevent the Shin Bet from carrying out its job by disrupting the investigation and harming the agency’s image, it said. “Extreme-right-wing activists and their lawyers are trying to distract the public and legal attention from severe acts of terrorism committed by the said organization, and shift it to the legitimacy of an investigation to uncover their acts,” the Shin Bet said.The agency added that the investigation is under the full legal supervision of the attorney general, the state prosecution, other lawyers accompanying the case and the courts, which have hosted over 100 meetings regarding the suspects in custody.A second breakthrough was made earlier this week in the investigation into the deadly July arson attack, the agency said.“The Shin Bet confirms that in recent days, there has been progress in the investigation into the Duma terrorist attack. All other details pertaining to the investigation are under a gag order,” the Shin Bet stated.On December 3, the agency said that a number of Israeli youths arrested recently by security forces are being investigated “in the context of concrete suspicions” related to the attack.Earlier this month, the Shin Bet issued its first detailed denial in response to claims of torture made by lawyers representing the Jewish suspects.“Terrorist attacks carried out by the organization led to, among others, the murder of three innocent Palestinians, and as a result, contributed to instability in the region, and worsened the security situation,” the Shin Bet said. Join Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>>
Meridian resident Nykolas Alford waves a rainbow-colored flag designed with the U.S. flag during a Human Rights Campaign protest of House Bill 1523 on the Mississippi State Capitol steps in Jackson, Miss., Tuesday, March 29, 2016. (Justin Sellers/The Clarion-Ledger via AP) Mississippi’s House Bill 1523 says, among other things, that public employees, businesses, and social workers cannot be punished for denying services based on the belief that marriage is strictly between a man and a woman. Same goes for people who act on the belief that “sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage” and that gender is determined at birth. It says the government can’t prevent businesses from firing a transgender employee, clerks from refusing to license a same-sex marriage, or adoption agencies from refusing to place a child with a couple who they believe may be having premarital sex. As of Wednesday, HB 1523 has passed Mississippi’s House and Senate. The “Religious Liberty Accommodations Act” must return to the House for to resolve differences, according to the Mississippi Business Journal. But it is expected to be approved there (it passed 80 votes to 39 in February). Then it will go to the desk of Republican Gov. Phil Bryant, who has championed religious liberty bills in the past. Ben Needham, director of Human Rights Campaign’s Project One America, told Buzzfeed Wednesday that the measure “is probably the worst religious freedom bill to date.” But advocates of the bill, which is one of about 10 drafted by states across the country in response to the Supreme Court decision guaranteeing a right to same-sex marriage last summer, says that the legislation will protect the rights of those who disagree with the court’s decision. “This is presenting a solution to the crossroads we find ourselves in today as a result of Obergefell v. Hodges,” Republican State Sen. Jenifer Branning said as she presented the bill to the Senate, according to the Jackson Clarion-Ledger. “Ministers, florists, photographers, people along those lines — this bill would allow them to refuse to provide marriage-related business services without fear of government discrimination.” Later in her speech, she assured her colleagues, “It takes no rights away from anyone. It gives protection to those in the state who cannot in a good conscience provide services for a same-sex marriage,” according to New York Magazine. Religious freedom proposals are being weighed in nearly a dozen states after the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage. (Claritza Jimenez/The Washington Post) The passage of the bill comes days after Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal vetoed a similar measure that had provoked outrage from Hollywood, the National Football League and a number of big businesses. North Carolina, meanwhile, is dealing with backlash to a recently-passed law that bars local governments from extending civil rights protections to gay and transgender people and prohibits transgender people from using public bathrooms according to their gender identity. The Mississippi legislation is more sweeping than both those measures. It prevents the government from “discriminating” (through taxes, fines, withholding benefits, or other forms of retaliation) against a “person” (broadly defined as an individual, religious organization, association, corporation and other kinds of businesses) for acting on their religious convictions regarding sexuality and marriage. That includes employers, landlords and rental companies, adoption and foster care agencies, people and companies that provide marriage-related services (rental halls, photographers, florists, etc.). The bill protects doctors who refuse to provide counseling, sex-reassignment surgery, fertility treatments and other services based on their religious convictions, and allows companies and schools to establish sex-specific policies regarding dress and bathroom use. It allows state employees to recuse themselves from licensing or overseeing a same-sex marriage, so long as they take “all necessary steps” to ensure that the marriage isn’t impeded or delayed as a result. And it gives foster and adoptive families license to “guide, raise or instruct” children as they see fit, a rule that Human Rights Campaign argues would make LGBT children vulnerable to being forced into “conversion therapy.” The version of the bill passed by the House also would have allowed people who felt their right to religious exercise had been infringed by the government to sue the state; the Senate version gives the state sovereign immunity from such suits. Gov. Bryant has not explicitly said whether he would sign the bill if it reaches his desk. But in an interview with WLOX this week, he said he didn’t think the legislation was discriminatory. “I think it gives some people, as I appreciate it, the right to be able to say ‘That’s against my religious beliefs and I don’t need to carry out that particular task,'” he told the TV station. Critics disagree. “It is very broad and very dangerous,” Erik Fleming, a former Mississippi legislator who is now director of advocacy and policy for the state’s branch of the ACLU, told BuzzFeed. “It basically sanctions religious discrimination.” “It is reminiscent of what happened 50 or 60 years ago in this same state,” Fleming told BuzzFeed. “People say that it is just religious, but there were people who had a religious belief that black and white people should be segregated, and you’re opening that Pandora’s box again.” That same argument was made by the bill’s critics during the Senate debate on Wednesday, according to WLBT and the Associated Press. Sen. John Hohrn (D-Jackson) told his colleagues that measures like HB 1523 were the reason people “think badly” of the state. “Why do we keep doing this to ourselves?” he asked. “We don’t need to put another stain on Mississippi.”
This article originally appeared on thump Playa del Carmen is a Mexican beach city 45 minutes outside of Cancún. Over the last decade, thanks largely to the swarms of tourists flocking to its annual BPM Festival, it's become an international party hub for dance music diehards – and an under-the-radar getaway for people who don't want to be found. My brush with the darker side of Playa began in October of 2013, when I was working as a salesperson and concierge for a company that rents luxury villas to vacationers sometimes willing to pay upwards of $3,000 (£2,275) per night. My duties included booking deals, answering questions and ensuring our guests had everything they needed during their stay. I landed the gig when my own family rented a villa there; after a few shots of tequila and the bitter realisation that I had no desire to return to school anytime soon, I asked the owner of the company if he needed any help. Turns out he did, and a month-and-a-half later I was on a one-way flight from my hometown of Los Angeles to Mexico. Playa del Carmen is a small town, and during my three months there I rubbed shoulders with all kinds of characters from every corner of the world: expats; nomads; international club kids; even self-admitted criminals hiding from the Feds. Still, it was Micha's* story that I'll never forget, because it was my first (and probably last) glimpse into the elusive and glamorous world of those in the upper echelons of the drug trade. In retrospect, I actually got to see more than a glimpse – for a few surreal weeks, I was a character in Micha's world, fully immersed in the lifestyle of an international drug kingpin. I met Micha in January of 2014, when he rented a five-bedroom villa on the beach from us. He was 6'2" and clean-cut, harbouring a taste for fitted clothing, designer shoes and watches that cost close to a teacher's starting salary. Perhaps part of his charm to me was that he seemed like the embodiment of traditional masculinity, with the chiselled physique of a UFC fighter, the commanding presence of a Godfather-style mafioso, and a strong jaw that would clench whenever he was mad or lost in thought. After some initial small talk, I learned he was from Manitoba, Canada, in his early-thirties, and of Eastern European descent. Micha arrived with his friend Tim, whose trip to Mexico was the first time he'd left Canada after spending his entire young adulthood in prison for attempted murder. Tim was 29, but had the energy of a teenager. It's was as if his development ceased when he entered prison. The relationship between Micha and me was unconventional from the start. Before I had the chance to give him and Tim a tour of their villa and my usual concierge spiel, Micha took a Ziploc bag out of his pants loaded with what he told me were 75 pressed ecstasy pills and a sheet of acid. After I got over my initial shock, the adrenaline junkie in me kicked in. Micha's brazenness was a welcome change from all the bougie rich people and mums gone wild I'd been dealing with all season. "Do you want any?" "Sure." He gave me five ecstasy pills. WATCH: Big Night Out – Ibiza Wondering why the hell anyone would casually carry around so many drugs, I asked the guys what they did for work. Micha mindlessly pulled out three cell phones and told me he was "in construction". I continued to press him, asking, "You know this villa is for up to ten people. Is it just the two of you?" Micha said he was flying in a friend and some girls from Colombia. Sure enough, the next day two of the most gorgeous women I'd seen in my life strolled in through the door and introduced themselves as Lorena and Mari. The girls looked like vixens straight out a music video, with Sofía Vergara faces and Nicki Minaj bodies. They were dressed in tiny T-shirts and bikinis, with skin-tight jeans, long acrylic nails and plenty of jewellery. Somewhat mysteriously, I was told they were "being paid to party for the week". The girls were kind to me. The three of us bonded over our mutual love for electronic music and travel, and Lorena even showed me videos of her DJing at parties in her hometown of Cali, Colombia. Our interaction beyond this, however, was limited, as the girls spent a majority of their time taking selfies and snorting a strange powder straight from the bag. "Ningunas personas en Colombia les gustan cocaine" – "No one in Colombia likes cocaine" – Mari told me in Spanish. They told me it was 2C-B, a designer drug similar to MDMA. A day after the women arrived, Micah's buddy Ivan showed up – also from Cali, Colombia. While emptying his luggage in the common area, Ivan pulled out more designer drugs and a couple grand in $100 bills, casually informing me that the money was grade-A counterfeits. He then told us that he was held up at the airport in Cancún because of his record showing a traffic warrant in Miami. According to Micha, he met Ivan several years ago in Guadalajara during one of his frequent trips to Mexico, and they've been friends ever since. Now, Ivan was essentially Micha's right-hand-man whenever they were in Mexico; his primary duties included being a translator between Micha and his harem of Latinas, driving everyone around and carefully coordinating nights out on the town. Micha took a liking to me – perhaps because I was the only female he could communicate with in English. Over the course of a few nights he took us all out partying at clubs like Mamita's, Kool Beach Club, Canibal Royale and La Santanera. It was just around the time before BPM Festival, so the DJs played mostly underground house and techno. Micha preferred a more Vegas vibe, but stuck around as long as there were pretty girls and plenty of champagne. Bottles of Dom Pérignon – never Moët Our routine usually went something like this: we'd show up at the club, pay for a table and immediately be treated like royalty. The servers would bring Moët, but Micha wouldn't be satisfied, so they'd come back with Dom Pérignon. The tab would run to at least $10,000. Always paid in cash. Every night also involved copious amounts of drug use, astronomically expensive meals out and plenty of Colombian-Canadian sex. It was the type of grade-A reckless hedonism that movies like Spring Breakers are made of, and truthfully, I enjoyed every second of it. A few days before his check-out date, Micha decided he wanted to make an impromptu trip to Guadalajara to visit friends. Meanwhile, the women and Ivan flew back to Colombia, leaving me alone with Micha and Tim. We immediately ran into a problem: the guys couldn't pay for flight tickets with their credit cards because they wanted to avoid leaving an electronic paper trail. After all the time we'd spent together – with Micha essentially letting me tag along on his all-expenses-paid vacation – I felt inclined to help. At this point, I knew that Micha was probably not the owner of a run-of-the-mill construction company, but at this point I enjoyed their company so much that I chose to ignore my growing suspicions. I offered to put the tickets on my card and have the guys pay me back in cash. They politely declined. Instead, Micha gave me 1,000 pesos (approximately $100) to drive to Cancún International Airport and buy two tickets to Guadalajara for him and Tim, in cash. After Mexico, Micha flew back to Canada and I went home to LA. For the next six months, we kept in touch via WhatsApp. It felt exciting to be friends with an elusive bad boy who orbited on a level far above the small-time dealers I'd fucked with in Playa and LA. I still wasn't even sure what he did exactly, but would soon find out. Micha roaming the ruins of Playa In August of 2014, Micha announced that he was coming to LA for a month-long vacation, and was thinking about investing in the El Pollo Loco restaurant chain after hearing from friends how good their Mexican-style grilled chicken is. He told me that he might want to open one back in Manitoba. He offered me $150 a day, plus free shopping trips and meals, if I agreed to be his driver during his visit. I didn't have a job at the time, so this sounded like a sweet deal. Plus, working for Micha meant we'd get to hang out all the time, and that's really all I wanted. I'd always had a thing for bad boys, Micha was handsome and treated me well. Based on our time together in Mexico, I knew hanging out with him in LA was guaranteed fun. Sure, he was probably involved in some shady industry, but my infatuation with him completely clouded my better judgement. I told myself: no one's perfect, right? The first couple of days we spent together in LA were great. I took him to El Pollo Loco a few times and he loved it. We went to the beach and hung out in Hollywood and Santa Monica. We stopped by Fred Segal's and he bought me jewellery, pulling out a thick wad of cash to pay for it. Like our time in Mexico, everything was always paid for in cash to avoid a paper trail. Then, one afternoon, he suddenly disappeared. We'd made plans to go to the beach in Malibu, but I didn't hear from him all day. He'd mentioned the night before that he was planning to meet friends at some hotspots, so I assumed he'd had a wild night partying at Playhouse or Greystone Manor in Hollywood, both clubs he expressed interest in visiting. I didn't think much of it. Later that night, I received a barrage of panicked texts and phone calls from him, asking me to meet him down the street from his apartment, in the parking lot of a strip mall. On the phone he still sounded like the calm, collected Micha I knew, yet I could sense in his voice that something was very wrong. When I arrived, he hopped into the passenger seat. "Just drive," he said. No explanation. He leaned the seat all the way back, making sure his head wasn't visible from outside the car's window. He periodically looked over his shoulder. I was confused, but secretly liked the thrill. It felt like we were living in a Hollywood blockbuster. Finally, when we were at least ten miles away from his place, Micha sat up. I demanded to know what was going on, and he told me that, the previous night, a swarm of local police, FBI and DEA raided his apartment and seized $300,000 (3227,445) in cash. They'd been watching him the entire time he was in LA and saw him interact with a group of "shady men in vaquero hats". This was the only reasoning he gave me for the raid, but it was all I needed to know to tell what was really going on. Micha enjoying El Pollo Loco Micha told me he was thrown in jail for the night, but paid someone to pay his bond so he could be released in the morning, just hours before I picked him up. This explained why he'd gone incommunicado with me for a while. Next, he asked me to drive him to his lawyer's office so he could figure out how to get back to Canada immediately. But, at this point, I was starting to freak out as the gravity of the situation sunk in. "If you want me to drive you anywhere, you have to tell me what the fuck you really do," I demanded, pleading that my safety was at stake. "Give me your phone," he said, staring at me intensely with his piercing blue eyes. I handed it over. He turned it off and kept it in his pocket. "I move Molly and H," he said nonchalantly. "Oh, OK," I stuttered, shocked that he'd finally admitted to it. "I'll fucking kill you if you tell anyone," he laughed. I knew in my heart that there was some truth to this. Strangely, after his "confession", I felt at ease knowing I wasn't crazy, and that Micha wasn't some wild construction tycoon with bad financials. He assured me that I would be safe, and strangely, I still trusted him. I drove him to his lawyer's, rationalising to myself that I wasn't doing anything illegal, and I could always plead ignorance. The attorney's office was in a seedy part of Van Nuys; I assumed he also represented some of the big-time drug gangs, like the Van Nuys Boys or the Pacoima Piru Bloods, known in those parts of LA. We sat in the waiting room and out came a thin man with a flashy watch and a pinstripe suit. Micha went into a room with him, and when he came out, he had good news: his attorney knew how to get him home to Canada. Micha would just have to pay him $35,000 (£26,535) – presumably for more flashy watches and pinstripe suits. After we left the lawyer's office, Micha made a couple of phone calls on one of his burner phones, arranging for two girls from Manitoba to meet him in LA the next day with more burner phones and cash. In a moment of clarity, even my naïve, thrill-seeking 22-year-old self anticipated the murky waters ahead should I continue to associate myself with Micha. So after I dropped him off, I called my dad from my car and asked for advice. Even though he's always practiced a sort of laissez-faire version of parenting, my dad was genuinely concerned for my safety when I told him what was happening. He instructed me to immediately delete Micha's number unless I wanted a file on me and law enforcement trailing my whereabouts – or worse. The following day, I texted Micha, letting him know that I was headed out of town for a while. I lied and told him I was thinking about moving back to Mexico and might be difficult to contact. He replied telling me to have fun, keep in touch and that maybe we'll see each other in Mexico again. Then, I reluctantly deleted his numbers from my phone and eventually changed my own. That friendly goodbye was the last thing I ever heard from Micha. To this day, I still think about him from time to time. Sometimes, I even look him up on American and Canadian prison inmate locators, hoping to dig up a trace of him somewhere. But I've got nothing. In fact, I still don't even know that Micha was his real name. *All names have been changed
Ahead of the release of the live-action Ghost in the Shell adaptation, the original 1995 classic will hit theaters and Blu-ray. The film will have a one-night-only screening on January 25th in the UK, and Funimation will screen both the subtitled and dubbed versions on the film and February 7th and 8th. On March 7th, Lionsgate will rerelease the movie on Blu-ray in a Deluxe Collector’s Edition set, complete with Mondo artwork and Steelbook packaging. Limited screening events have become popular Limited screening events have become more popular in the last few years, thanks to theater chains like Alamo Drafthouse Cinema. Films like Star Wars, Blazing Saddles, Back to the Future, and the Harry Potter films have all returned to theaters to celebrate their respective franchises or honor lost stars. Given the importance of Ghost in the Shell in genre fiction, capitalizing on its popularity may help get people to theaters when the live-action version lands. Of course, the new Ghost in the Shell has garnered its share of controversy. Scarlett Johansson’s starring role as the Major has been criticized as whitewashing. Fans will soon decide how good the effort was when the film hits theaters on March 31st.
Local foodies flocked to Tribeca on Tuesday night to get a taste of orange-coated delicacies — such as “Flamin’ Hot Limón Chicken Tacos” and “Purrfectly Fried Green Tomatoes” — as the Cheetos pop-up restaurant kicked off its three-day stay in the Big Apple. “I’m going to go die in a food coma on my couch right now,” said male model River Viiperi, just moments after devouring a Cheetos Sweetos Crusted Cheesecake, some Cheetos Sweetos Sweet and Salty Cookies — and a stack of White Cheddar Cheetos and Cheetos Sweetos Apple Crepes. see also Cheetos go haute cuisine with new restaurant Here’s a dangerously cheesy new restaurant concept. Cheetos is opening... “Definitely not in my diet, but I had to try it,” he told The Post. The Cheetos pop-up, dubbed “The Spotted Cheetah,” is located on West Broadway at Franklin St. inside the Distilled gastropub. The menu — which includes Cheetos meatballs, Cheetos crusted fried pickles, and Flamin’ Hot and White Cheddar Mac n’ Cheetos — was created by celebrity chef Anne Burrell. Each of the eleven items range in price, from $8 to $22. Most of those who dined at the restaurant on Tuesday night were surprised by how well-made the dishes were, as well as the eatery’s cheesetastically chic look. “We thought it would be more cheesy inside — but it was a serious dining experience with good service and, like, mood lighting,” explained Sarah Roe, a 23-year-old Manhattanite who came with her friend, Caroline Meyerson, also 23. “It was classy,” Meyerson gushed. “We had the macaroni topped with hot Cheetos. It was intense, but delicious…A lot of flavor…I couldn’t have a whole bowl, but it was delicious.” Mary McGrath, 50, of Manhattan, gave her meal a 9 out of 10 — saying it was something she had always dreamed of. “I love Cheetos,” she said. “If I’m going to the electric chair, I’m eating Cheetos.” In addition to everyday food lovers, the pop-up also got a visit from singer Mariah Carey — who graced its Orange Carpet with twins, Moroccan and Monroe. While most people enjoyed their experience, there were a small few who weren’t fans of the dangerously cheesy food mashups. “It gets overwhelming after the third Cheeto dish,” admitted Nikki Banner, 24. “I think for Cheetos fans it could be heaven. But for a regular person, too salty,” said 27-year-old Misty Lou, who scarfed down three appetizers and an entree. “I give it a seven.” The Spotted Cheetah will be open until Thursday. Hours are from 6 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. — and diners are required to reserve their seats in advance. While the pop-up reportedly sold out of spots ahead of Tuesday’s grand opening, it’s unclear if the same happened for the remaining two nights. Those interested in going can make their reservation on the restaurant’s website.
With Spanish police under orders to prevent the vote, it's anyone's guess how many people will cast their ballots in Sunday's referendum (AFP Photo/LLUIS GENE ) Barcelona (AFP) - Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont said Saturday he and his supporters would not "give up" their rights, speaking on the eve of an independence vote that Madrid has banned and is trying hard to block. By Saturday, the interior ministry said it had sealed most of the 2,315 polling stations in the wealthy northeastern Spanish region in an effort to prevent Sunday's referendum. However, teachers, parents, students and activists have leapt into action, defying warnings of repercussions by occupying at least 160 schools designated as polling stations. In an interview with AFP, Puigdemont insisted that his government had "everything in place so that everything takes place normally", vowing that supporters of the referendum would not "go home" or give up on their rights. But he also called on mediation over the crisis that pits his separatist executive against Madrid in what has become one of the biggest crises to hit Spain in decades. "If the yes wins, if the no wins -- in any scenario there must be mediation, because things aren't working" he told AFP. Puigdemont did not call on any specific person, organisation or country to mediate Catalonia's dispute over its place within Spain, but he hinted the EU may be well placed to do so. "I think that from now it would be logical for the EU to actively monitor (the situation) and actively take an interest," he said. The crisis has sown divisions among Catalans, with the region deeply split on independence, even if a large majority want to be allowed to settle the matter in a legal vote. Further afield, Spaniards the country over are worried. In Spain's major cities, Madrid, Sevilla, Santander, Alicante, Valencia and Malaga, thousands protested for Spanish unity, and thousands also rallied in Barcelona, the Catalan capital. "We shouldn't have got to this point. We've arrived at a point of no return," said Fernando Cepeda, a 58-year-old engineer, a Spanish flag tied around his waist in front of Madrid's city hall. - Pyjama parties, Zumba dance - Authorities have been racing against the clock to prevent the vote ruled unconstitutional by Spain's courts. For days, they have been seizing electoral items such as ballot papers while prosecutors have ordered the closure of websites linked to the vote and the detention of key members of the team organising the referendum. But those for the vote have mobilised. Farmers and firefighters have vowed to protect polling stations. And on Friday, as children finished their school day, parents, kids, teachers and activists rushed to occupy building designated as polling stations to stop police from closing them. Many used the Telegram messaging app to get organised, said an AFP correspondent who saw some of the messages. Some schools imagined innovative ways to circumvent an order that public spaces cannot be used for the referendum by organising leisure activities all over the weekend, from kids' pyjama parties to volleyball games. Barcelona's Joan Brossa high school, for instance, advertised a series of activities including film screenings, football matches and Zumba dance fitness classes. Enric Millo, the central government representative in Catalonia, said earlier Saturday that 163 of the polling stations were already occupied when they were sealed off. As a result, those inside were allowed to leave but no one could enter. AFP reporters, however, visited several occupied schools where people were free to go in and out freely, indicating there may be more occupied buildings that have yet to be sealed off. A regional government source said there were "around 200 occupied centres" in the municipality of Barcelona alone. Millo said police had also gone to the Catalan government's communications hub in Barcelona on Saturday, cutting its connections with polling stations as well as a software that could have allowed "an online vote." - Fear of unrest - Catalan separatist leaders and organisers of "committees to protect the referendum" have stressed that everyone must remain peaceful. In one incident, though, someone fired a pellet gun on Friday night at a group of people standing in front of an occupied high school in the Catalan town of Manlleu, lightly injuring three people, police said. The Mossos d'Esquadra Catalan police have warned about the risk of "disruption of public order" if efforts are made to prevent people from casting ballots. Madrid has sent thousands of extra police officers from other forces to Catalonia -- which accounts for one fifth of Spain's economy -- to stop the referendum from happening.
When the 2014 midterm elections came to a close and the race for the White House officially started, there seemed to be no doubt that Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic presidential nominee. No doubt until now. In a new poll, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has (just barely) taken the lead in Iowa over Clinton: The Vermont senator is favorite among 41% of Iowa likely Democratic participants, compared with 40% supporting the former Secretary of State, according to a Quinnipiac poll released Thursday. That marks a major reversal from early July, when Clinton was ahead of Sanders, 52% to 33%. This news broke just three days after NBC News reported that Sanders held a 10-point in New Hampshire, and that Clinton’s Iowa popularity was steadily declining. Even though she “apologized” Tuesday for her private email server, she’s now polling behind a candidate few took seriously even six months ago. Is this finally the end of the road for Clinton? She may have been the first lady, a U.S. senator, and secretary of state, but if this bad polling continues, she might never call the Oval Office her own. The Republican candidates have spent months attacking Clinton. Now they might need to start brushing up on Bernie Sanders’ brand of socialism.
President Obama's birth certificate, which was released in 2011. This post, from 2013 when questions about Cruz's presidential eligibility were first questioned, has been updated. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) released his birth certificate two years ago, seeking to put to rest questions about whether the Canadian-born senator is qualified to run for president in 2016. Immediately, parallels were drawn to President Obama's 2011 release of his own birth certificate, which also was meant to end lingering questions about his eligibility to be president. And now that Cruz is a GOP presidential front-runner, his eligibility is being called into question, too -- most notably by Donald Trump on Tuesday and early Wednesday. And for the few in the birther and media watchdog communities, they see hypocrisy. Why is the media not utterly denouncing those who question Cruz's eligibility in the same way they have denounced the "birthers" who questioned -- and continue to question -- Obama's? Because the only thing these two situations seem to have in common is that they involve a birth certificate and a presidential candidate. Questions about Cruz's eligibility have everything to do with interpretation of the law; the questions about Obama's eligibility had everything to do with a dispute over the underlying facts -- more specifically, conspiracy theories about whether the president was born in the United States, as he claimed, and whether he somehow forged a birth certificate that said he was born in Hawaii. In Cruz's case, nobody is disputing the underlying facts of the case -- that Cruz was born in Canada to a Cuban father and a mother who was a U.S. citizen. As we wrote in March 2013, that makes him a U.S. citizen himself, but it's not 100 percent clear that that is the same thing as a "natural-born citizen" -- the requirement for becoming president. Most scholars think it's the same thing, and the Congressional Research Service said in 2011 that someone like Cruz "most likely" qualifies to run for president. But to this point, there is no final word from the courts, because while foreign-born candidates have run -- including George Romney and John McCain -- none of them has actually won and had his eligibility challenged. Obama was also born to a mother who was a U.S. citizen, meaning that if he had been born outside the United States -- the centerpiece of the birther argument -- the situations might be parallel. But birthers weren't and aren't making a legal argument about Obama; they were disputing the facts about where he was born and accusing him of perpetrating a massive fraud. One is a legal question that, as we have noted, most experts believe is basically moot; the other is a conspiracy theory. Some will accuse the media of instituting a double standard when it comes to these two cases because Cruz is a Republican and Obama is a Democrat. But nobody is accusing Cruz of lying about his past as part of a vast conspiracy to become president. It's just not an apples-to-apples comparison.
“Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children.” That’s the advice The Guardian gave readers in an article that was tweeted out enthusiastically by abortion advocates such as Cosmopolitan magazine’s senior political writer Jill Filipovic. She means to say fewer, but the anti-human attitude comes through loud and clear. Conservatives are accused of wrongly saying that some liberals think as Filipovic does, but her tweet and the larger movement she participates in show that the characterization is fair. A couple of years ago I noted the problem of what I termed “fecundophobia” — an open dislike of children and women’s fertility in general. Filipovic’s tweet went over like a lead balloon, with people sending her photos of their adorable children and asking which one should be sacrificed on the altar of Gaia. Others rightly wondered whether she also advocated suicide or otherwise offing people in order to “conserve resources.” Others pointed to the fatal flaws of Malthusian thinking: Malthusianism is the discredited belief that populations grow exponentially while the food supply grows arithmetically, leading to food shortages and poverty. It crops up every once in a while despite it being false, and the more fringe environmentalists, pro-abortionists, and eugenicists carry the flag of Malthusianism to this day, as we see here. The authors of the paper being written up in The Guardian express distress that the United States isn’t telling citizens to have fewer children. Chris Goodall, an author on low-carbon living, is quoted in the article: “The paper usefully reminds us what matters in the fight against global warming. But in some ways it will just reinforce the suspicion of the political right that the threat of climate change is simply a cover for reducing people’s freedom to live as they want.” Why, yes, one does imagine that telling people to kill children or otherwise prevent their natural arrival might give people the idea that certain elements on the Left hate babies so much they want to sacrifice them on the altar of climate change. Sadly, some women appear to adopt this idea that healthy wombs are to be fought using hormones or surgeries. The article quotes one woman taking this liberal command quite seriously: “In life, there are many values on which people make decisions and carbon is only one of them,” she added. “I don’t have children, but it is a choice I am considering and discussing with my fiance. Because we care so much about climate change that will certainly be one factor we consider in the decision, but it won’t be the only one.” A CNN journalist confirmed that this anti-child approach is being taken seriously among some groups: Combined with the fact that the U.S. fertility rate just hit a “dangerous” new low even as it’s doing better in that regard than other developed countries, the climate Malthusianism all seems like a real-life version of that opening scene in “Idiocracy”: In any case, Filipovic gave up the game today. The goal of abortion fanatics is not female autonomy or equality or self-determination. It’s fewer babies on earth. Let’s join together to love babies, instead of hate them, and love the women who gestate them, instead of making them feel guilty for the healthy operation of their wombs and life-giving systems.
People who may have vandalized rocks in Grand Canyon National Park/NPS Investigative Services Branch National Park Service authorities are looking for a couple in connection with vandalism in Grand Canyon National Park. Investigative Services Branch agents and Grand Canyon rangers are seeking information about two people who may have vandalized rocks near the Yavapai Geology Museum. On May 22, 2016, a visitor at the South Rim of the park observed a couple spray painting graffiti, and was able to capture images of the people and the vandalism, according to a park release. After painting "Evans 16" on a rock feature, the couple left before park rangers could contact them. If you were in the park that day and may have seen these people, or if you recognize them from the image, you should contact the Investigative Services Branch. You can do so anonymously. You can: * Call the Tip Line at 888-653-0009 * Send them an online tip * Email the branch * Send agents a message on Facebook
A fourth-grade worksheet in Vermilion Parish that utilizes urban slang is under fire after an Eaton Park Elementary parent came forward with concerns. The worksheet in question provides various contextual evidence of the word "twist" — including as reference to tornadoes and the 50s dance move — but it also references rapper Twista and his work with a single titled "Po Pimp" and a group called the Speedknot Mobstaz. "My son doesn't know what pimps and mobstaz are!" wrote concerned mother Brittney Badeaux in an email to Hot 107.9's DJ Digital . "I don't condone ebonics at his young age." "I try to teach my son respect and morals," Badeaux said. "My goal everyday (sic) is for him to become better for tomorrow and ultimately grow into a great man!" Vermilion Parish School Superintendent Jerome Puyau said the worksheet is in accordance with Common Core standards adopted by Louisiana . "Part of the Common Core is what they call 'real-world text,'" Puyau explained. "What are our students reading?" "Are these students going to see this on the shelves in our department stores?" he continued. "And the answer is yes. If you search it, the first thing that comes up is the actual song ("Po Pimp"). This is real-world." Puyau said the worksheet was pulled from an education website that aligns itself with Common Core standards . "The Twist" was controversial in the 50s, Puyau noted, and even the Harry Potter books once raised controversy in his district when a librarian wouldn't stock the series because of its focus on witchcraft. The album "Kamikaze," also mentioned under the rapper's description, refers to suicide pilots, Puyau said, but this word is taught in history classes. Badeaux also raised concerns about a similar text exercise that included a detailed description of how a machine gun works. But Puyau stressed that Vermilion Parish teachers review the content distributed to students, and it's consistently in alignment with Common Core standards. "We want to make sure that our students have an understanding and teaching of real-world life experiences through words, but there are teachable moments for parents, and there are teachable moments for us as educators."
"This is MMA. Anything can happen". That's a line you regularly hear from fight fans and analysts in the sport of Mixed Martial Arts, but sometimes it gets taken to a whole new level. Remember when Kazushi Sakuraba lost after that nasty ear injury he sustained against Marius Zaromskis? You know, that time when the Lithuanian fighter literally almost punched Saku's ear off? Well a similar situation happened in an MMA bout in Russia, when Ali Bagautinov took on Vadim Zhlobich this past weekend in an event dubbed as 'Fight Nights: Battle of Desnia'. After a back and forth first round, Sambo-based bantamweight prospect, Bagautinov picked up his opponent and went for a huge takedown. The slam somehow caused his cauliflower ear to rupture as it ripped in half and started bleeding profusely. As he was getting up, Ali noticed his nasty injury but somehow, he still managed to win by guillotine choke. It's not exactly a nice scene to watch, but you can view footage from the fight after the jump. Gif courtesy of Zombie Prophet.
Major Battles of World War I Battle of Passchendaele - 1917 Battle of Passchendaele - 1917 Battle of Tannenberg – 1914 Battles of Gaza - 1917 Battle of Heligoland Bight - 1914 Second Battle of Aisne - 1917 First Battle of Marne – 1914 Second Battle of Arras - 1917 First Battle of the Masurian Lakes – 1914 Battle of Messines – 1917 First Battle of Aisne – 1914 Battle of Passchendaele - 1917 First Battle of Albert - 1914 Battle of Caporetto - 1917 First Battle of Arras – 1914 Battle of Cambrai - 1917 First Battle of Ypres – 1914 German Spring Offensive - 1918 Gallipoli Campaign – 1915 Hundred Days Offensive - 1918 Second Battle of the Masurian Lakes – 1915 Battle of Passchendaele - 1917 Battles of Isonzo – 1915 Second Battle of Somme - 1918 Loos-Artois Offensive - 1915 Second Battle of Marne - 1918 Battle of Verdun - 1916 Battle of St Mihiel - 1918 Battle of Passchendaele - 1917 Battle of Cambrai - 1917 First Battle of Somme - 1916 Battle of Vittori Veneto - 1918 World War I was the first global conflict of its scale. Many major and significant battles were fought between 1914 and 1918,and most of the major countries of the world were drawn into it. World War I saw the emergence of trends that would rewrite history.Prior to World War, I the use of poison gas was insignificant. Driven by a desperate need to end the frustrating stalemate of trench warfare on the Western Front, France, Germany, and other countries resorted to the use of poison gas was as a weapon. Poison gas was used as a lethal tool in the, the, and theWith both the Allied and Central troops digging into trenches, mobility was curtailed on the Western front. An immediate consequence of this was the development of tanks. At first the tanks did seem bulky and serious doubts were raised with regard to their efficacy. The Germans then started to develop anti-tank weapons. Toward the end of World War I, it became clear that tanks would be part of the weaponry of all nations in the years to come. The World War I battles where tanks featured wereandNaval Warfare ranked high on the minds of the countries involved in World War I. The Battle of Jutland was the biggest naval battle of the war. Theand theset the stage for full-fledged naval warfare, as witnessed in World War II.Trench warfare became a characteristic feature of the battles of the Western Front from late 1914 on. Theare some of the important battles fought from the trenches of the Western Front.The major battles of World War I were accompanied with the loss of lives and property.
Image caption Everett Dutschke has links to Paul Curtis, against whom charges were dropped this week A man has been arrested in Mississippi and charged in connection with the sending of letters containing ricin to President Obama, a senator and a judge. Everett Dutschke was detained at home in Tupelo on Saturday and handed over to US Marshals, police said. Mr Dutschke has been charged with possessing a biological agent with intent to use as a weapon. He has links to a man against whom charges were filed and later dropped, as well as the senator and judge. Ricin is a naturally occurring protein, found in the castor oil plant, which is highly toxic. It is 6,000 times more poisonous than cyanide. List of names Tupelo Police Chief Tony Carleton said Mr Dutschke was taken into custody without incident at 01:00 (06:00 GMT) on Saturday. His home had been under surveillance since Friday afternoon. A law enforcement official told WTVA that the 41-year-old was being held at the Lafayette County Detention Center. Ricin Can be fatal when inhaled, ingested or - most dangerously - injected One to three castor beans chewed by a child, or just eight seeds chewed by an adult, can be fatal The toxin is part of the waste produced when castor oil is made Q&A: What is ricin? The US Attorney's Office in the Northern District of Mississippi said in a press release that Mr Dutschke had been charged with developing, producing and possessing "a biological agent, toxin and delivery system for use as a weapon, to wit: ricin". If convicted of the federal charge, he faces a maximum life term in jail and a $250,000 fine. The office said Mr Dutschke was expected to appear in a district court in Mississippi on Monday. Agents from the FBI and the US Capitol Police, as well as members of an anti-terrorist response team from the Mississippi National Guard, had searched Mr Dutschke's home on Tuesday and Wednesday, as well as the premises of a former martial arts studio he ran in Tupelo. Attention turned to Mr Dutschke after charges were dropped on Tuesday against Paul Kevin Curtis, a local Elvis impersonator. A search of Mr Curtis' home in nearby Corinth revealed no evidence to suggest he had sent the ricin-laced letters to President Obama, Senator Roger Wicker and Mississippi Judge Sadie Holland, officials said. Image caption Agents searched the premises of a former martial arts studio Mr Dutschke ran in Tupelo Hal Neilson, a lawyer for Mr Curtis, said Mr Dutschke's name had been submitted on a list of people who might have had a reason to hurt his client. Mr Curtis said he had worked with Mr Dutschke several years ago, and that they had discussed publishing a book called Missing Pieces, about an alleged conspiracy to sell body parts on the black market. Mr Dutschke decided not to publish the material, Mr Curtis added. But Mr Dutschke told the Associated Press that he did not know Mr Curtis well, and that the last time they had contact was in 2010. Judge Holland's family is reported to have confronted Mr Dutschke at a political rally in the town of Verona in 2007, when he ran as a Republican against her son, Steve Holland, a Democratic state representative. Mr Holland said Mr Dutschke had made a derogatory speech about the Holland family, and that his mother had forced him to apologise. Mr Dutschke said Steve Holland had exaggerated the incident, telling AP: "Everybody loves Sadie, including me." He is also reported to know Senator Wicker.
Upending the portrayal of Lt. Charles Joseph Gliniewicz as a hero tragically cut down in the line of duty as he neared retirement, authorities on Wednesday said the Fox Lake officer died in a suicide he staged to look like a murder as it became clear he could face consequences for years of alleged theft. Gliniewicz, 52, shot himself in a "carefully staged suicide" as it became clear that his "extensive criminal acts" could come to light during a review of village finances and practices, said George Filenko, commander of the Lake County Major Crime Task Force. Prosecutors, meanwhile, are continuing to investigate possible crimes by others that were revealed during the probe into the officer's death. Gliniewicz ran the village's Explorer youth police training program and he had been stealing money from it for some seven years, Filenko said. Gliniewicz stole an amount in the five figures and used the money for personal expenses, including mortgage payments, travel and adult websites, Filenko said. The announcement marked a sharp turn for an investigation that began Sept. 1 with hundreds of officers, as well as dogs and helicopters, searching for suspects who apparently never existed. In the weeks that followed, Lake County authorities downplayed the possibility that Gliniewicz took his own life. A 30-year veteran and fixture of the lakeside village, Gliniewicz was laid to rest after a funeral attended by thousands, at which he was portrayed as a selfless public servant who gave his life for his community. The lieutenant, a heavily tattooed Army veteran known to many as "G.I. Joe," mentored many youths through the Explorers, and some observers portrayed his death as evidence of an escalating war on police. To the contrary, authorities said Wednesday, Gliniewicz staged his suicide as it became clear that he could face repercussions for using the youth program to facilitate his thefts. Text messages Gliniewicz had sent, which authorities revealed Wednesday, appeared to suggest threats against Village Administrator Anne Marrin. Investigators have also seen evidence that Gliniewicz had made contact with a woman linked to the Outlaws motorcycle gang to discuss the possibility of a gang member doing harm to Marrin, said multiple sources with knowledge of the investigation. The interest in harming the official is one of several areas of possible wrongdoing still under investigation, the sources said. Police also said Gliniewicz had forged documents to get equipment from a military surplus program. The day before he died, police said, Gliniewicz sent a text message voicing concern that he'd been asked for a financial report and inventory for the Explorer program. "Gliniewicz committed the ultimate betrayal to the citizens he served and the entire law enforcement community," Filenko said. "The facts of his actions prove he behaved for years in a manner completely contrary to the image he portrayed." Gliniewicz's family members, who have insisted he did not kill himself, declined to comment on the allegations in a statement released through attorneys. "Today has been another day of deep sorrow for the Gliniewicz family," the statement reads. "The Gliniewicz family requests that their privacy be respected as they continue to cope with the loss of the beloved husband and father." The ruling of suicide could have serious financial consequences for Gliniewicz's survivors, as the families of officers killed in the line of duty are eligible for benefits worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, experts have said. Lt. Charles Joseph Gliniewicz, a 30-year veteran of the Fox Lake Police Department, conducted a "staged suicide" on Sept. 1, 2015, according to the Lake County Major Crime Task Force. His death will likely continue to reverberate. Lake County State's Attorney Mike Nerheim said the results of the investigation have been turned over to his office, as well as to the FBI, for investigation of alleged crimes that are not related to Gliniewicz's shooting but were uncovered during the inquiry into it. The FBI declined to comment. Leroy Marre, 79, of Antioch, a neighbor of the Gliniewiczes, said the news of the late officer's suicide left him in shock. "What a surprise, from hero to criminal," he said. The question of how Gliniewicz died has driven controversy since shortly after officers found him mortally wounded in a remote marshy area. Wednesday's revelations left Filenko and others to answer pointed questions as to why authorities spent weeks discouraging the idea that Gliniewicz took his own life. "Our intention was never to mislead the public. We completely believed that this was a homicide," Filenko said, adding that investigators came to believe in recent weeks that it was a suicide. About 8 a.m. Sept. 1, Gliniewicz radioed in that he was pursuing two white males and a black male. After dispatchers lost contact with Gliniewicz, responding officers found him shot, with his .40-caliber handgun resting nearby. That touched off a massive but fruitless manhunt followed by an investigation initially geared toward finding the trio Gliniewicz had described. Officers tracked down three men captured on video in the area, but then announced they'd been ruled out as suspects. Police never mentioned any other suspects as the investigation ground on for weeks and — with a dearth of information coming from authorities — rumors and vague information proliferated. On Wednesday, authorities laid out what they believed happened. Gliniewicz staged his death by leaving a trail of his equipment — including his pepper spray, baton and glasses — around the scene to try to mislead investigators, Filenko said. Gliniewicz fired one shot that hit his protective vest and cellphone and aimed a second, fatal bullet beneath his vest in his upper torso, authorities said. With the help of FBI behavioral experts, authorities concluded he'd shot himself, in part because he was not dragged after being shot and there were no physical signs he'd fought for his life. Marrin said questions about Gliniewicz's management of the Explorer program began with a routine review of village departments that started after she was hired in 2014 as the town's first professional administrator. When Marrin asked questions about finances, sought an inventory of the Explorer post equipment and inquired about parental consent forms, "no one seemed to have the answers," she said. "There were various red flags," she said.
Cyber Monday sales broke a record in 2013, with shopping on mobile devices leading the charge. Cyber Monday sales jumped 20.6% year-to-year, making it the biggest online shopping day in history, according to an analysis released by IBM (IBM) Tuesday. Purchases made on mobile devices surged 55.4% year-over-year, and made up 17% of Monday's total online sales, according to IBM's e-commerce report. Smartphones were more popular for making purchases than Tablets, said IBM. Related: Mobile shopping for bargains This is in stark contrast to Black Friday sales, which fell 13.2% from the prior year, according to ShopperTrak, a retail industry firm. But that's partly because many retailers, including Toys 'R' Us, WalMart (WMT), Target (TGT) and Best Buy (BBY), opened their doors on Thanksgiving Thursday, cutting into the traditional Black Friday sales. ShopperTrak said sales for Black Weekend, which spans Thanksgiving Day through Sunday, crept up 1% compared to last year. "Black Friday shopping is no longer a one-day event," the firm said in a press release.
Whenever parents and pundits get caught up in one of the many asinine decisions coming out of Canada’s public school boards or unions, we invariably forget to consider how someone will actually break the news to the students. “Sorry, boys and girls: we’re not going to see dinosaur bones tomorrow because the province walked away from the bargaining table.” Or: “I’m sympathetic to the fact that you fell and hurt yourself, Jonny, but I can’t physically touch you for fear that it might be misinterpreted by observers.” Or: “I know you were excited about that field trip to Phoenix, but … well, a couple of crazed terrorists shot a bunch of people in San Bernardino, Califor — Jonny, is that gum? Spit it out — in California. So we’re not going on our trip. Sorry.” The latter discussion could very well be happening in classrooms across Alberta right now in light of the Calgary and Edmonton Catholic school boards’ decisions to cancel all international travel plans for the remainder of the school year. Edmonton Catholic Schools spokeswoman Lori Nagy explained the move by citing a statistic saying that there have been 355 mass shootings in 336 days in the United States, “which confirms that acts of violence can occur anywhere at any time.” “We no longer live in a certain world climate,” she added. (Parents who learned how to duck under their desks in elementary school would surely quibble with her reference to the recent forfeiture of inherent and consistent global security.) The Calgary Catholic School District did not reference the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino specifically, as Edmonton’s board did, but instead referred to “fluctuating travel advisories and unknowns” as potentially posing a risk to the “health and well-being” of students and staff. “While we believe in the educational value of international travel,” it said in a release, “we have an obligation to ensure a safe and caring environment.” Alberta students are thus getting a very different type of education: one about bureaucratic insularity, about the proliferation of anxiety, about the power (and also the impotence) of statistics and, perhaps most significantly, about the supremacy of inflated insurance premiums. I can only speculate what the average sixth grader, say, in an Edmonton or Calgary Catholic school would be thinking now, having learned that those responsible for his safety have deemed it too risky to travel to Washington, or London, or New Orleans. Surely his perception of the global threat of terror is now distended far beyond the point of reconcilability with reality: the product a cocktail of juvenile imagination, an underdeveloped capacity for nuance and reason, and affirmation of his anxieties from those he sees in positions of power. If we want to create a generation of kids afraid of every loud bang, or every siren, or every brown person, this is a pretty good way to do it. The psychology of this phenomenon isn’t really hard to understand: kids feel better when we look in their closets and tell them there’s no monster, not when we hunker down in the basement with a baseball bat and a jumbo pack of beef jerky. That’s not to say that we should ignore the monsters that do exist, but only that adults shouldn’t overstate its importance. After all, the risk of dying in some sort of mass shooting or terrorist attack abroad — despite recent events — remains overwhelming low, and kids are still at far greater risk of injury at home if they have a pool in their backyard or an erratic driver for a parent. Indeed, if “safety” really did compel these school boards to cancel their planned international trips, the concern should have been over risk posed by the car ride to the airport, not because of what could happen at the destination. [np_storybar title=”Read & Debate” link=””] Find Full Comment on Facebook [/np_storybar] In any case, these school boards are playing a no-win game. By the same logic espoused the administration, students should also be prohibited from visiting Ottawa, considering that the city saw 100 per cent more terrorist attacks last year than did Regina or Montreal. Moncton, N.B. should also be scratched off the list, since it was the site of one of the most horrific mass shootings Canada has seen in several years. The board should be wary of Elliot Lake, Ont., which saw the roof of one of its malls collapse in 2012, and of Lac-Mégantic, Que., where a gruesome train derailment killed 47 the following year. Danger literally everywhere, and while some of that danger should compel us to modify our behaviour, such as looking both ways before we cross the street, much of that danger, such as the prospect of a fluke accident or random attack, should not. Reasonable people should be able to recognize the difference, and endeavour to confer that skill onto our kids. It’s the difference between living in fear, and living. National Post Robyn Urback • rurback@nationalpost.com \| robynurback
Story by Elliot Struck Today, Koa Smith and brother Alex dropped a Namibia edit via their production haus, LastNameFirst.tv, and the first wave in that edit is the best sand barrel ever ridden. And, the best GoPro wave ever captured, this one on the mouth mount. And one of the top three barrels ever surfed. Before you pick either of those three bones, watch the wave above. It’s an unfathomably long turbine of oil and glass, which Koa aptly describes as Mesmerising. It’s well beyond our microscope, but we felt we had to drop it regardless… Stab: Is this the best wave you’ve ever ridden? Koa: F’sure. I got one that was maybe almost as good but not as beautiful. That one was just… mesmerising. It looks fake. There’s no ripples or water drops… that was my first run that day. It was foggy when I paddled out and I couldn’t see the waves, I could just hear them. I knew it was gonna be good, I just didn’t know how big it'd be, ‘cause the night before it was eight-to-10 feet Hawaiian. So I was kinda sketchy. I paddled out in the fog and got two waves, super glassy but fell on both of them, and then the sun broke through the fog and that wave came in. I actually dropped in on Dylan Goodale, but he was too deep. I couldn’t even believe when I came out of that thing. How many waves had you ridden at Namibia prior? That was my first trip down there, the second day I was there. What about big names freaking they missed the swell? The best surfers in the world get anxiety when they miss crazy waves. Ha! I sent Kelly a clip straight away. He was super pissed that he didn’t make it there. What about John, he loves the Afrikaans! I was in Tahiti with John before I went and he so badly wanted to come along with me. But, he had to go to Fiji and it was flat for the first week he was there and I was sending grabs from where we were and he was soooo pissed off! Have you ever seen a better barrel than that in a clip? A little arrogance here, please. I haven’t seen a GoPro clip like that before. The conditions and everything were so perfect. I got this clip two months ago, so it was kinda gnarly hiding it. Then Benji Brandt released his clip and I was like, “fuck, do we release it? Nah, let’s just wait.” So I’m just psyched that it’s finally out there. How big was that wave? Like, a four footer. Enough to stand, with pumping room. I was pumping that entire wave. How long in real time? I really need to time it again, but I think it was 25 or 27 seconds. What percentage of the way through it did it become the best wave of your life? I mean, probably three quarters of the way through it was already the best wave of my life, maybe earlier. It was such a safe wave, y’know, nothing too treacherous like surfing Chopes where you could fall and die. It’s just this sand bottom, long barrel, nothing to worry about. You had to claim it. It looked impulsive. I told myself, I’m not gonna claim any waves today – I always tell myself that, I never claim waves. But I came out of that one, looked in and there was no one on the beach. I was like, did anyone see that? I scanned all the way in to the right and there was this one guy, and he just threw his hands in the air. I was like, “YEAH!” and… I claimed it. That was the best moment I’ve ever had in surfing. Ever? Yeah, number one. You come out of that and… I was like, that actually happened. It wasn’t one of those moments where you do all that and then only almost make it. It actually happened. I was baffled. What’d you do afterwards? Well you’ve gotta do runs because of the current and the wave's so long. I came in and went straight to my car, plugged in my GoPro and dropped the clip straight onto the desktop as a backup. I did that every run. Guys were losing their GoPros on, like, every run. A lot of people had it tied to their wetsuit so that they wouldn’t lose it. But I like to be able to move it around and get whatever angle I want. It was super sketchy. How many did you take with you? I only had one, then my two brothers each had one. Alex ended up losing his. He lost it and Dale Staples found it way down the beach two hours later. At the end of the last day, we were driving back and there was this sunset with a bunch of flamingos. Alex was like, Koa, you’ve gotta bust out your drone and get one last clip. I wasn’t sure cause it was pretty windy. But I put his GoPro on my drone and flew it over the flamingos. It was probably a super sick clip. But as I tried to fly it back, it just got blown out to sea. And that was all his GoPro footage from a whole day, gone. How many GoPros are sitting at the bottom of Namibia? A lot! Everyone lost one that I was with. Imagine if you’d lost yours on the wave before that perfect one. What else could I have done but laugh…
Bellator scored a mild win in the weekend's ratings battle, as its tentpole event from St. Louis on Friday drew slightly more viewers than UFC's event the next night from Sao Paulo, Brazil. Bellator averaged 814,000 viewers for a show that featured two championship fights and a number of surprise announcements. UFC, going against tougher sports competition, but on a more familiar Saturday night, did 757,000 viewers for its main card headlined by the third meeting between Vitor Belfort and Dan Henderson. Even though Belfort and Henderson are well known names with nearly two decades of star power in the sport, for whatever reason, the match-up has not drawn well. The previous fight between the two, on November 9, 2013, also from Brazil, did 722,000 viewers. There are several points regarding direct comparisons between Bellator and UFC that should be noted. The biggest is that Spike, which airs Bellator, is in about eight million more homes than FOX Sports 1, which airs UFC. If you factor that in, the numbers of the two shows would be close to identical, with UFC actually having a slight edge. UFC was also on Saturday, a more familiar night for sports, but also one with far more competition. UFC went against a plethora of college football games, including the Louisiana State vs. Alabama game on CBS that did 10,680,000 viewers, as well as games on ABC, FOX, ESPN and ESPN 2, plus the Brandon Rios vs. Thomas Bradley boxing match on HBO, which peaked for the main event with 910,000 viewers. Bellator went against NBA games on ESPN and College Football on ESPN 2, and with the lesser competition, was the third most-watched sports event of the night. Bellator also had a theoretical edge in the sense its two main events both went five rounds, giving them more time to build an audience. UFC's main event was over in two minutes. However, the Bellator peak rating, with 1,048,000 viewers, came early, in the Bobby Lashley vs. James Thompson fight that lasted less than one minute. With the exception of people like Ken Shamrock, Tito Ortiz and Kimbo Slice, Lashley, with his pro wrestling fan base, has been consistently Bellator's biggest ratings draw. Lashley's fight this past weekend outdrew Ortiz's championship challenge to Liam McGeary last month. The UFC prelims, headline by Gleison Tibau's win over Abel Trujillo, and also featuring a quick loss by Clay Guida, did 609,000 viewers. The pre-game show on FS 1 did 217,000 viewers and the post-fight coverage did 215,000 viewers. Throwing out the Conor McGregor show in January, UFC has averaged 871,000 viewers for prime time Fight Night shows in 2015. Saturday's show was the third lowest number so far this year.
IT GOT 37% OF THE VOTES CAST IN OUR SURVEY The fans choose the goal by Torres against Villarreal as the best of the 2014-15 season The goal that Fernando Torres scored at El Madrigal, which served to win three crucial points for the Champions League direct qualification, won over the Chilean goal by Saul against Real Madrid in the votes. We now know the best goal of the 2014-15 season for the red and white fans. It is the one scored by Fernando Torres at El Madrigal in the 34th round of the League, which served to win three crucial points in the struggle for the direct access to the next edition of the Champions League group stage. The goal scored by the forward from Fuenlabrada got 37% of the votes cast by fans in the survey we proposed to choose the best goal of the campaign. The striker from Madrid fought for a ball in the midfield with Bailly, snatched it and sprinted up to the rival’s box, where he cut Sergio Asenjo, dribbled two defenders and scored in an empty goal. The goal meant the triumph in a stadium as complicated as Villarreal’s and an important step towards the main goal of the season. In second place, with 22% of the votes, is Saúl Ñíguez for the Chilean goal he scored against Real Madrid in the 22nd round of the League at the Vicente Calderón Stadium. The home-grown player resolved dramatically a pass from Siqueira from the left that meant the 2-0 after hitting the woodwork. And interestingly, another goal by Fernando Torres closes the podium of honour in this campaign. It is the first one he scored in the second leg match of the King’s Cup round of 16 against Real Madrid at the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium. The striker from Fuenlabrada received a pass from Griezmann and placed the ball in the rival’s top corner to make our team advance in the first minute of play. 20% of the participating fans in this survey supported this goal as the best of the campaign.
New molecules produced at Georgia Tech could enable engineers to build all-optical data routers, ultimately leading to transmission speeds as high as two terabits–or 2,000 gigabits–per second. Today’s fastest commercial routers switch data at 40 gigabits per second. Modern fiber-optic networks are limited in speed because the light that carries data has to be converted into electrical signals when it reaches an Internet router. This step lets the router determine the signal’s destination and forward the data accordingly. Keeping data all-optical would significantly speed up transmission of large amounts of data, such as detailed medical images, telepresence applications, high-speed image recognition, and high-definition video. To address this problem, engineers have built devices that can switch optical signals by manipulating mirrors or bubbles to redirect the light beams. The Georgia Tech team, in contrast, designed molecules that could theoretically switch optical signals in just a few femtoseconds, versus the microseconds needed by systems that use physical mechanisms to redirect the light. The project was a collaboration among the labs of Georgia Tech chemistry professors Seth Marder, who led the synthesis phase of the project; Jean-Luc Brédas, a theoretical chemist; and Joseph Perry, the physical chemist who characterized the molecules. The team started its design process by looking at a class of organic molecules called polymethine dyes. These brightly colored molecules have unusual properties that allow researchers to change the refractive index of the material by shining a laser on it–and hence shift the phase of any light waves traveling through it. This gives them a way to control the modulation of light using only optical systems–no electricity needed. Researchers had looked into using organic molecules for optical switching about 15 or 20 years ago because of their very fast response to electric and optical fields, says Larry Dalton, a chemist and electrical engineer who develops optical materials at the University of Washington. In fact, the intrinsic response time of organic molecules is between 10 and 100 terahertz, meaning that if the right material is found, data might be processed at those astonishing speed. However, no one was able to create organic materials that could shift the phase far enough without absorbing too much of the light wavelengths used in telecommunications systems. The dye created by the Georgia Tech team “is the first that allows you to change the index of refraction without light being lost,” Dalton says. “You have the potential to move forward with practical applications now”–including improved methods of optically encoding data and all-optical computing, as well as ultrafast optical switching. “People had largely given up on doing this with organic materials,” Marder says. Through a combination of theoretical design and trial and error, the Georgia Tech scientists were able to create a molecule that had the properties they needed. So far, the researchers have only measured the molecule’s optical properties in a liquid solution. “The hard work comes now in taking these molecules and putting them into a material and making the switch,” Marder says. The Georgia Tech chemists are already working on that task. While the dye itself is “not the easiest thing to make” and the material will ultimately be expensive, Marder says, any device will probably use only very small quantities. Perry says that while engineers might be able to push existing electro-optical technology to provide transmission speeds of up to 100 gigabits per second, all-optical processing could theoretically allow for speeds as high as two terabits per second, allowing download of high-definition movies in minutes rather than hours. While they may not be able to hit those speeds, he says that if everything goes well, the group may have a device that can switch data at hundreds of gigabits per second in about five years. A photonics company contacted the Georgia Tech team only a day or two after the research was first published, and the academics plan to begin discussions with company representatives this week. Even if they can develop working optical routers as quickly as they hope, Perry notes, it will take much longer for the technology to have any appreciable influence on the speed of consumers’ Internet links, largely because telecom companies tend to upgrade their systems incrementally. He expects that the first customers for any all-optical switch will be companies like Google that run large server farms.
Finally! Our epic journey to the dog cafe Bau House! We’ve wanted to go here for so long! In fact, if you remember our Giocat Cat Cafe video from a long time ago, then you might have wondered if there was an equivalent for dogs. This is it! Now, we were worried about bringing Spudgy here, because Spudgy doesn’t really like other dogs. It’s not that he’s aggressive, but we think of him as a bit of a snob. He thinks he’s human and he’s ashamed of his dog-self a lot of the time. He’ll hang out with us and sit with us, but if another dog tries to play with him Spudgy will ignore that dog. “Hey Spudgy, can I smell your junk?” Nope, cause he will always walk away. If a dog insists on playing with him and (heaven forbid) tries to put a paw on Spudgy, Spudgy will just yell at the dog in a quick single bark or two (which we think is probably a doggy swear word) and then just go back to minding his own business while the other dog sulks away. So, you can see that we were worried about bringing him to a dog cafe in which he’d have to interact with a bunch of other dogs, many of which who might not share a resentment for their dogginess, but – come on – we couldn’t go without the Spudgy! When we first walked in, an army of dogs defending their fort greeted us. Spudgy went into immediate snob mode. We had to put our name on a waiting list (even though it was like, 3pm on a Friday) since there were no free tables. We got to wait inside the cafe though, just at a little middle island waiting area. Of course, the dogs flocked to Spudgy, violating him and smelling his bum from every possible angle (sorry little guy, there was nothing we could do to stop them) and then they just abandoned him. Spudgy grabbed a seat beside us on the safety of the plastic island couches and looked around in awe. Or shock. Or disgust. We can’t tell. All we know is he straight up refused the drinking bowl shared by all the dogs and would only drink from a fresh glass. Geez. We have created a monster. After about 30 minutes, a table freed up. Bau House works the same as the Gio Cat Cafe, in which there is no entrance fee, but you must order a beverage. After we ordered, Spudgy was officially allowed to walk around on the floor and mingle…or not. We gotta say, the staff is really dedicated to cleaning up after the dogs. They essentially walk around in plastic aprons armed with spray bottles, paper towels, and mops. As soon as a dog piddles, they run to clean it. They do a great job because you’d think a cafe filled with dogs would smell like, well, dog, but it mostly smells like antibacterial cleaner. Simon didn’t see this, but I (Martina) think my highlight at the dog cafe was when a huge dog jumped up on the ledge by the window and curled out a huge stinky chocolate swirly ice cream poo right beside the table of a well-groomed Korean couple. Awesome. Dogs are so great. Don’t worry, it was cleaned up right away and we didn’t see anymore poo ice cream being served, but I loled prettttty hard at their disgust/shock/awkward faces. The other surprise highlight of our trip to Bau House was when we reviewed our video footage. Spudgy innocently approached a couple at the cafe, they patted him on the head, and then he proceeded to do a drive-by-pee-attack on their plastic wrapped umbrellas which were on the floor under their bench. Oh Spudgy. I was wondering why all those dogs swarmed the area after you left. Anyhow, if you’re interested in going and getting your umbrellas peed on, you can follow our map here and find it down a side street just off of Parking Lot Street in Hongdae. On the corner is “Whang’s Sandwich and Coffee” which was formally “Joe’s Sandwich and Coffee”, and the other side is CHIR CHIR Chicken. Bau house is on the third floor, right above SALLY’S GUITAR. If you’re interested in calling them for more info, you can reach them at 02) 334-5152, or you can check out their Korean site and get more (Korean only) info there. You can also click on the map here for full directions, or you can check the video out here to get a sense of what the landmarks are like. We didn’t do a full video of us getting to the place, because we took a taxi there from Bucheon (couldn’t carry Spudgy and our camera gear and umbrellas on the Subway). If you’ve been there, let us know what you thought. Our experience there was pretty freaking awesome!
Image copyright PA Great British Bake Off winner Nadiya Hussain is to host her own cookery show Hussain, who won Bake Off in 2015, will feature in the eight-part series for BBC Two, which will seek out great examples of British food. Her show - Nadiya's British Food Adventure - will see her undertake a road trip around Britain, visiting a different region in each episode. Hussain explored her culinary roots in Bangladesh in a two-part television series last year. She is due to travel across the country, from the Scottish Highlands to Devon and Dorset, to highlight some of Britain's most innovative cooking. Hussain said: "Our country's regional cuisine is much more than tried and tested traditional dishes - there are quirky and clever food producers out there who are reinventing British food in unique and exciting ways. "I can't wait to meet these local food heroes, to find inspiration in the most unusual food stories and unlikely ingredients and then come up with some brand new recipes in the kitchen, adding my own special twist."
By Dee Gill After years of acting like tech’s biggest fuddy-duddy, Intel has given investors something to get excited about again. And with a modest valuation and a 3.5% dividend yield, Intel shares make an attractive option for long-term value seekers. Intel’s CEO Brian Krzanich unveiled several imaginative new gadgets Monday at the Consumer Electronics Show Las Vegas tech conference, including a baby monitor with heart rate information and an earpiece with answers a la Apple ’s Siri. The forward thinking apparent in these devices was a refreshing change from Intel, which has spent much of the past five years offering technical advances to smartphone parts in an attempt to recapture missed opportunities in that market. The smart bowl Krzanich demonstrated Monday—it charges all those phones, iPods and other electronic gadgets one typically deposits at the front door—was a helluva lot more exciting than last year’s announcement of a new processor for cheap smartphones. INTC data by YCharts This renewed focus on the future comes as Intel’s fundamentals and share price earn the shares an attractive rating from YCharts Pro, a grading system for equities based on dozens of viewable data points. YCharts Pro currently has as Intel Rating with a rare set of double tens, indicating strong fundamentals and undervalued shares. Krzanich’s presentation backs up speculation that the world’s largest semiconductor chip maker is willing to concede some defeat in the smartphone market so it can get a head start on the next big thing. Intel was slow to recognize the importance of smartphones, allowing competitors like Qualcomm and Broadcom to gain seemingly intractable market positions. While Intel sold PC parts, those two competitors saw much faster growth in mobile technology. BRCM Revenue (TTM) data by YCharts Concentrating on cutting edge stuff like wearable devices and functional stoneware could help Intel avoid making that mistake again. In reality, the prototypes Krzanich showed off aren’t nearly as important as the research and tech they demonstrate. Those toys simply showed the world that Intel can run whatever new device others imagine in those fields. When an Apple or Google devises new a new gadget, they’ll know where to go for the chips. Special Offer: Where should you invest in 2014? Download the new free report 12 Stocks To Buy For 2014 for ideas from top Forbes advisors. Meanwhile, Intel shares carry cred as a value investment. Its 3.5% dividend yield has been well-backed by earnings and cash flow. Intel does not offer regular dividend hikes—a particular downside in today’s rising interest rate environment—but it’s due for an increase, perhaps with the next earnings release Jan. 16. Intel’s free cash flow yield rivals Apple’s and exceeds that of IBM (IBM), Microsoft (MSFT) and Google. You can unleash financial advisor tools on Intel shares to apply cash flow and many other metrics. GOOG Free Cash Flow Yield (TTM) data by YCharts On a forward P/E ratio basis, Intel shares are trading at only a slight premium to most of those big tech companies. GOOG PE Ratio (Forward) data by YCharts The danger to investors in Intel comes from the uncertain future of personal computers, which consumers have dropped in favor of smaller devices, and Intel’s inability to make big inroads into the currently hot smartphone market. Intel has no intention of abandoning its dominant position in PCs, or its pursuit of smartphones. Its problems on these fronts helped make our upbeat view of Intel in August 2012 look premature. But Krzanich, who was promoted to CEO in May, is emphasizing Intel’s role in products that look little like smartphones or tablets. It’s a rather major difference from two years ago, when Intel thought it could salvage the personal computer market by tweaking the products. Its thinner, lighter notebooks are nice, but hardly make up for the action Intel missed in the smartphone market. High tech baby monitors and smart bowls will do little or nothing for Intel’s bottom line any time soon. Sales of parts for more mundane products like servers (booming) and tablets (behind but hopeful) will play far bigger roles in Intel shareholder’s immediate returns. But when the next big thing rolls out? Don’t be surprised to find Intel inside. --- Dee Gill, a senior contributing editor at YCharts, is a former foreign correspondent for AP-Dow Jones News in London, where she covered the U.K. equities market and economic indicators. She can be reached at editor@ycharts.com. Read the RIABiz profile of YCharts. You can also request a demonstration of YCharts Platinum.
Self-incompatibility (SI) is a general name for several genetic mechanisms in angiosperms, which prevent self-fertilization and thus encourage outcross and allogamy. It should not be confused with genetically controlled physical or temporal mechanisms that prevent self-pollination, such as heterostyly and sequential hermaphroditism (dichogamy). In plants with SI, when a pollen grain produced in a plant reaches a stigma of the same plant or another plant with a similar genotype, the process of pollen germination, pollen-tube growth, ovule fertilization and embryo development is halted at one of its stages and consequently no seeds are produced. SI is one of the most important means of preventing inbreeding and promoting the generation of new genotypes in plants, and it is considered as one of the causes for the spread and success of angiosperms on the earth. Mechanisms of single-locus self-incompatibility [ edit ] The best studied mechanisms of SI act by inhibiting the germination of pollen on stigmas, or the elongation of the pollen tube in the styles. These mechanisms are based on protein-protein interactions, and the best-understood mechanisms are controlled by a single locus termed S, which has many different alleles in the species population. Despite their similar morphological and genetic manifestations, these mechanisms have evolved independently, and are based on different cellular components;[1] therefore, each mechanism has its own, unique S-genes. The S-locus contains two basic protein coding regions - one expressed in the pistil, and the other in the anther and/or pollen (referred to as the female and male determinants, respectively). Because of their physical proximity, these are genetically linked, and are inherited as a unit. The units are called S-haplotypes. The translation products of the two regions of the S-locus are two proteins which, by interacting with one another, lead to the arrest of pollen germination and/or pollen tube elongation, and thereby generate an SI response, preventing fertilization. However, when a female determinant interacts with a male determinant of a different haplotype, no SI is created, and fertilization ensues. This is a simplistic description of the general mechanism of SI, which is more complicated, and in some species the S-haplotype contains more than two protein coding regions. Following is a detailed description of the different known mechanisms of SI in plants. Gametophytic self-incompatibility (GSI) [ edit ] In gametophytic self-incompatibility (GSI), the SI phenotype of the pollen is determined by its own gametophytic haploid genotype. This is the more common type of SI.[2] Two different mechanisms of GSI have been described in detail at the molecular level, and their description follows. The RNAase mechanism [ edit ] The female component of GSI in the Solanaceae was found in 1989.[3] Proteins in the same family were subsequently discovered in the Rosaceae and Plantaginaceae. Despite some early doubts about the common ancestry of GSI in these distantly related families, phylogenetic studies[4] and the finding of shared male determinants (F-box proteins)[5][6][7][8] clearly established homology. Consequently, this mechanism arose approximately 90 million years ago, and is the inferred ancestral state for approximately 50% of all plants.[4][9] In this mechanism, pollen tube elongation is halted when it has proceeded approximately one third of the way through the style.[10] The female component ribonuclease, termed S-RNase[3] probably causes degradation of the ribosomal RNA (rRNA) inside the pollen tube, in the case of identical male and female S alleles, and consequently pollen tube elongation is arrested, and the pollen grain dies.[10] The male component was only recently putatively identified as a member of the "F-box" protein family.[8] Despite some fairly convincing evidence that it may be the male component, several features also make it an unlikely candidate.[citation needed] The S-glycoprotein mechanism [ edit ] The following mechanism was described in detail in Papaver rhoeas. In this mechanism, pollen growth is inhibited within minutes of its placement on the stigma.[10] The female determinant is a small, extracellular molecule, expressed in the stigma; the identity of the male determinant remains elusive, but it is probably some cell membrane receptor.[10] The interaction between male and female determinants transmits a cellular signal into the pollen tube, resulting in strong influx of calcium cations; this interferes with the intracellular concentration gradient of calcium ions which exists inside the pollen tube, essential for its elongation.[11][12][13] The influx of calcium ions arrests tube elongation within 1–2 minutes. At this stage, pollen inhibition is still reversible, and elongation can be resumed by applying certain manipulations, resulting in ovule fertilization.[10] Subsequently, the cytosolic protein p26, a pyrophosphatase, is inhibited by phosphorylation,[14] possibly resulting in arrest of synthesis of molecular building blocks, required for tube elongation. There is depolymerization and reorganization of actin filaments, within the pollen cytoskeleton.[15][16] Within 10 minutes from the placement on the stigma, the pollen is committed to a process which ends in its death. At 3–4 hours past pollination, fragmentation of pollen DNA begins,[17] and finally (at 10–14 hours), the cell dies apoptotically.[10][18] Sporophytic self-incompatibility (SSI) [ edit ] In sporophytic self-incompatibility (SSI), the SI phenotype of the pollen is determined by the diploid genotype of the anther (the sporophyte) in which it was created. This form of SI was identified in the families: Brassicaceae, Asteraceae, Convolvulaceae, Betulaceae, Caryophyllaceae, Sterculiaceae and Polemoniaceae.[19] Up to this day, only one mechanism of SSI has been described in detail at the molecular level, in Brassica (Brassicaceae). Since SSI is determined by a diploid genotype, the pollen and pistil each express the translation products of two different alleles, i.e. two male and two female determinants. Dominance relationships often exist between pairs of alleles, resulting in complicated patterns of compatibility/self-incompatibility. These dominance relationships also allow the generation of individuals homozygous for a recessive S allele.[20] Compared to a population in which all S alleles are co-dominant, the presence of dominance relationships in the population, raises the chances of compatible mating between individuals.[20] The frequency ratio between recessive and dominant S alleles, reflects a dynamic balance between reproduction assurance (favoured by recessive alleles) and avoidance of selfing (favoured by dominant alleles).[21] The SI mechanism in Brassica [ edit ] As previously mentioned, the SI phenotype of the pollen is determined by the diploid genotype of the anther. In Brassica, the pollen coat, derived from the anther's tapetum tissue, carries the translation products of the two S alleles. These are small, cysteine-rich proteins. The male determinant is termed SCR or SP11, and is expressed in the anther tapetum as well as in the microspore and pollen (i.e. sporophytically).[22][23] There are possibly up to 100 polymorphs of the S-haplotype in Brassica, and within these there is a dominance hierarchy. The female determinant of the SI response in Brassica, is a transmembrane protein termed SRK, which has an intracellular kinase domain, and a variable extracellular domain.[24][25] SRK is expressed in the stigma, and probably functions as a receptor for the SCR/SP11 protein in the pollen coat. Another stigmatic protein, termed SLG, is highly similar in sequence to the SRK protein, and seems to function as a co-receptor for the male determinant, amplifying the SI response.[26] The interaction between the SRK and SCR/SP11 proteins results in autophosphorylation of the intracellular kinase domain of SRK,[27][28] and a signal is transmitted into the papilla cell of the stigma. Another protein essential for the SI response is MLPK, a serine-threonine kinase, which is anchored to the plasma membrane from its intracellular side.[29] The downstream cellular and molecular events, leading eventually to pollen inhibition, are poorly described. Other mechanisms of self-incompatibility [ edit ] These mechanisms have received only limited attention in scientific research. Therefore, they are still poorly understood. 2-locus gametophytic self-incompatibility [ edit ] The grass subfamily Pooideae, and perhaps all of the family Poaceae, have a gametophytic self-incompatibility system that involves two unlinked loci referred to as S and Z.[30] If the alleles expressed at these two loci in the pollen grain both match the corresponding alleles in the pistil, the pollen grain will be recognized as incompatible.[30] Heteromorphic self-incompatibility [ edit ] A distinct SI mechanism exists in heterostylous flowers, termed heteromorphic self-incompatibility. This mechanism is probably not evolutionarily related to the more familiar mechanisms, which are differentially defined as homomorphic self-incompatibility.[31] Almost all heterostylous taxa feature SI to some extent. The loci responsible for SI in heterostylous flowers, are strongly linked to the loci responsible for flower polymorphism, and these traits are inherited together. Distyly is determined by a single locus, which has two alleles; tristyly is determined by two loci, each with two alleles. Heteromorphic SI is sporophytic, i.e. both alleles in the male plant, determine the SI response in the pollen. SI loci always contain only two alleles in the population, one of which is dominant over the other, in both pollen and pistil. Variance in SI alleles parallels the variance in flower morphs, thus pollen from one morph can fertilize only pistils from the other morph. In tristylous flowers, each flower contains two types of stamens; each stamen produces pollen capable of fertilizing only one flower morph, out of the three existing morphs.[31] A population of a distylous plant contains only two SI genotypes: ss and Ss. Fertilization is possible only between genotypes; each genotype cannot fertilize itself.[31] This restriction maintains a 1:1 ratio between the two genotypes in the population; genotypes are usually randomly scattered in space.[32][33] Tristylous plants contain, in addition to the S locus, the M locus, also with two alleles.[31] The number of possible genotypes is greater here, but a 1:1 ratio exists between individuals of each SI type.[34] Cryptic self-incompatibility (CSI) [ edit ] Cryptic self-incompatibility (CSI) exists in a limited number of taxa (for example, there is evidence for CSI in Silene vulgaris, Caryophyllaceae[35]). In this mechanism, the simultaneous presence of cross and self pollen on the same stigma, results in higher seed set from cross pollen, relative to self pollen.[36] However, as opposed to 'complete' or 'absolute' SI, in CSI, self-pollination without the presence of competing cross pollen, results in successive fertilization and seed set;[36] in this way, reproduction is assured, even in the absence of cross-pollination. CSI acts, at least in some species, at the stage of pollen tube elongation, and leads to faster elongation of cross pollen tubes, relative to self pollen tubes. The cellular and molecular mechanisms of CSI have not been described. The strength of a CSI response can be defined, as the ratio of crossed to selfed ovules, formed when equal amounts of cross and self pollen, are placed upon the stigma; in the taxa described up to this day, this ratio ranges between 3.2 and 11.5.[37] Late-acting self-incompatibility (LSI) is also termed ovarian self-incompatibility (OSI). In this mechanism, self pollen germinates and reaches the ovules, but no fruit is set.[38][39] LSI can be pre-zygotic (e.g. deterioration of the embryo sac prior to pollen tube entry, as in Narcissus triandrus[40]) or post-zygotic (malformation of the zygote or embryo, as in certain species of Asclepias and in Spathodea campanulata[41][42][43][44]). The existence of the LSI mechanism among different taxa and in general, is subject for scientific debate. Criticizers claim, that absence of fruit set is due to genetic defects (homozygosity for lethal recessive alleles), which are the direct result of self-fertilization (inbreeding depression).[45][46][47] Supporters, on the other hand, argue for the existence of several basic criteria, which differentiate certain cases of LSI from the inbreeding depression phenomenon.[38][43] Approximately one half of angiosperm species are SI,[48] the remainder being self-compatible (SC). Mutations that break down SI (resulting in SC) may become common or entirely dominate in natural populations. Pollinator decline, variability in pollinator service, the so-called "automatic advantage" of self-fertilisation, among other factors, may favor the loss of SI. Similarly, human-mediated artificial selection through selective breeding may be responsible for the commonly observed SC in cultivated plants. SC enables more efficient breeding techniques to be employed for crop improvement. See also [ edit ] References [ edit ] Further reading [ edit ]
An Islamic terrorist (or would-be terrorist; I’m not sure if he’ll be allowed his 72 virgins for this botched job) blew himself up in a Brussels train station when soldiers began shooting at him. He had first detonated his luggage, apparently in an attempt to cause mass panic, and was then planning to cause casualties with his bomb belt. The actions of the alert soldiers prevented anyone besides the mujahid from being harmed. Authorities still haven’t established a motive for the attack. According to the eyewitness report below, however, the terrorist shouted “Allahu Akhbar!” just before he detonated. Many thanks to Ava Lon for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling: Media reports on the failed attack in Brussels: Video transcript: 00:00 I was going down the staircase to return to the platform 00:04 where I wanted to go, and there I heard 00:08 someone screaming , someone who was screaming; and then at some point he 00:12 yelled “Allahu Akhbar!” and he made his luggage explode. 00:16 From there I continued descending, all while alerting people to evacuate as many 00:20 people as possible, and there he was just behind me, six feet behind me on the staircase 00:24 going down, and he still had an explosive vest on. Hat tips for articles: Reader from Chicago.
The Dyldam Parramatta Eels have today announced the signing of outside back Clinton Gutherson to the club for the next two seasons. Gutherson, 21, will join the Blue and Gold for pre-season this week from the Manly Warringah Sea Eagles, where he made his NRL debut in 2013. “Clint is a talented young player who will add a great deal of skill to our back line this season,” Head Coach Brad Arthur said. “He’s unfortunately had the last few years interrupted by injuries, but he’s ready to return and make an impact.” The Eels have also signed 20 year-old forward Matthew Woods from the Wests Tigers for the 2016 season. In 2015, Woods was named in the NSW Under 20s State of Origin squad and played in the Wests Tigers Holden Cup side.
The government on Tuesday launched an auction for four private nationwide TV licenses, a highly polarized procedure that leftist officials have portrayed as a bid to streamline the country’s dysfunctional media landscape and which critics see as a thinly disguised attempt to control it. Eight such networks are operating at the moment, which means that four will have to suspend operations within 90 days, or take part in a follow-up auction for theme-based licenses about which the details are still obscure. The starting price for bids Tuesday was set at 3 million euros. Bids were to increase by amounts of 500,000 euros. Media executives and representatives, some wheeling suitcases, entered the heavily guarded premises of the General Secretariat of Information and Communications (GGEE) in Athens where the tender is taking place. Representatives of the bidders are not allowed to communicate with each other or with the outside world during the process, which is expected to go on for two days. The use of cell phones is prohibited. “In order to safeguard the interest of the state, the flow of information between the bidders must be cut,” State Minister Nikos Pappas, who is overseeing the tender, told state TV on Tuesday. TV channels have appealed to a top court. Their case is strengthened by legal experts who warn that the decision to restrict the number of licenses to four goes against the Greek Constitution as well as European Union rules on free market access. The European Commission has expressed reservations over the process, which also saw the sidelining of the National Council for Radio and Television (ESR), an independent watchdog. Developments have drawn the ire of Greece’s opposition parties. A spokesman for main opposition New Democracy, which has said that it will not recognize the results of the procedure, on Tuesday said the ruling SYRIZA party was seeking to build “a gray regime.” “It is only illiberal establishments that manipulate and control information which seek to determine and rule on the exact number of television stations,” Giorgos Koumoutsakos said. Other political parties issued similar statements. Responding to opposition criticism, government spokeswoman Olga Gerovasili repeated what has become a SYRIZA mantra, saying that the auction is designed to bring order to the market and purge it of corruption, while urging the conservatives to recognize the process. “New Democracy must recognize that the status quo of the past 27 years was unacceptable,” she said, suggesting that private channels had for years been broadcasting illegally because their permits were not acquired through a tender. But TV channel executives appeared unconvinced. “We must pay ransom so that the channels can continue to operate along the lines of a modern democracy,” Skai TV CEO Kostas Kibouropoulos said as he went through the gates of the GGEE building.
Graphene, everybody’s favorite wonder material, has yet another trick up its sleeve. The ultra-strong, highly conductive carbon lattice is extraordinarily good at detecting faint and high frequency sound waves. That’s according to new research from the University of Belgrade in Serbia, where materials scientists have just built the world’s first graphene-based condenser microphone. It’s roughly 32 times more sensitive than garden-variety nickel mics over a range of audible frequencies. And in the future, graphene microphones may be able to pick up sound well beyond the range of human hearing. Advertisement The researchers used a chemical vapor deposition process to “grow” sheets of graphene on a nickel foil substrate. They then etched the nickel away and placed the remaining graphene sheet (about 60 layers thick) in a commercial microphone casing. There, it acts as a vibrating membrane, converting sound to electric current. It’s only a prototype, but so far, the team’s graphene mic boasts 15 decibels higher sensitivity than commercial microphones, at frequencies of up to 11 kHz. But model simulations indicate that a far more sensitive graphene microphone is theoretically possible. At 300 layers thick, a graphene vibrating membrane may be able to detects frequencies of up to 1MHz—approximately fifty times higher than the upper limit of human hearing. “At this stage there are several obstacles to making cheap graphene, so our microphone should be considered more a proof of concept” said Marko Spasenovic, a co-author on the paper published this week in 2D materials “The industry is working hard to improve graphene production - eventually this should mean we have better microphones at lower cost.” Advertisement So, if you’ve got an audiophile in the family, keep an eye out for graphene mics over the next few years. They’ll probably be wildly expensive if and when they first hit stores. But if somebody really wants to record an ambient album featuring grass blades rustling in the breeze, this seems like the way to go. [Read the full scientific paper at 2D materials] Follow the author @themadstone Top image: Atomic crystalline structure of graphene, via AlexanderAlUS / Wikimedia
This is my personal blog. The views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not those of my employer. A Hardware Security Module (HSM) is any hardware that you can use for crypto operations without revealing the crypto keys. Specifically I’m referring to the Yubikey NEO and TPM chips, but it should apply to other kinds of special hardware that does crypto operations. I’ll refer to this hardware as the “device” as the general term, below. Some background When describing the Yubikey NEO I’m specifically referring to its public key crypto features that I’ve previously blogged about, that enable using Yubikey NEO for GPG and SSH, not its OTP generating features. To generate keys for these devices you have two options. Either you tell the device to generate a key using a built in random number generator, or generate the key yourself and “import” it to the device. In either case you end up with some handle to the key, so that you command the device to do a crypto operation using the key with a given handle. This “handle” is often the key itself, but encrypted with a key that has never existed outside the device, and never will. For TPMs they are encrypted (wrapped) with the SRK key. The SRK is always generated inside the TPM chip. TPM chips and Yubikey NEO both allow for importing and internal generation of keys. As does YubiHSM, which is a device that provides some other crypto primitives more geared at the server side. Internal key generation for normal Yubikey OTP mode doesn’t any sense, since the security model with these OTPs are a shared secret between the Yubikey and the authentication server. They key can’t be extracted after being imported, but it has to exist outside the Yubikey too. So it by definition has to exist in at least two places, and at least temporarily has to exist in RAM. So, which is it? Generate on device or import a key? If the answer hadn’t been “it depends”, then this blog post would have been much shorter. They both have pros and cons. Arguments for generating on the device The key has never been in RAM. Even if your computer was already hacked when you programmed the device, the keys are safe and don’t have to be recalled. The key has never been on disk. There is no chance that part of the key generator was swapped out to disk while it had sensitive data in RAM. I list this point separately to stress that as soon as the key has ever existed on disk, it should be treated as being copied. While Gutmann hasn’t been relevant for many years for modern hard drives, and a single overwrite on a spinning disk is probably safe against even the best adversaries, it’s getting harder and harder to actually overwrite anything. With newer filesystems with journals and copy-on-write you can’t overwrite data through the file system anymore. And even if you succeed on the file system layer sectors may be remapped on spinning platter disks, and wear leveling makes it pretty much impossible to overwrite all data on SSDs. It’s easier, safer, and possibly cheaper (due to write cycle limits), to just destroy the drive and buy a new one. Cold boot attacks are prevented. If you generate on the CPU and in RAM someone with physical access could powercycle the machine and read out the contents of the memory. This is an unlikely attack, I’ll admit. Arguments for generating on CPU and importing into device Keys can be backed up before importing. You’ll note that this is pretty much an attack against yourself. You can GPG the key to an encrypted file that can only be decrypted by the private key you store in your physically guarded safe. This point doesn’t matter if your use case makes it cheap and easy to just regenerate the keys. The big benefit is that the random number generator is under your control. The entropy for generating the key can be taken from the device, RDRAND in your CPU, timings between keyboard pressings, network packets arriving, etc.. Since you can use (and /dev/random uses) many different sources, any one of them being bad is not a catastrophy. A hardware device can only use itself, and a deliberate or accidental flaw is much more serious. Key handles Like I mentioned earlier no matter how you generate your individual keys with a TPM chip, they are encrypted with the SRK key, and the “handles” are opaque blobs encrypted with this key. If the random number generator in the device is flawed, backdoored, or otherwise compromised, then an attacker can exploit this to decrypt your blobs, and thus get to your keys. If the TPM chip random number generator is bad then your key blobs can be broken. But it’s not a complete break. As long as the keys themselves are of good quality then the attack only works if you have access to the blobs. You are still in a better situation than if you just had standard ~/.ssh/id_rsa files. My recommendation Short answer: generate the key on the device. Motivation: I respect differing opinions (and have laid out arguments against my recommendation above), and may change my mind in the future. The reason I recommend generating the key on the device is that this is the only way in which you can say “this key has never existed, and will never exist, outside the device” (barring you doing something stupid like generate the key as a migratable key, something that’s possible with TPM chips at least, and is even default and the only possible with opencryptoki). Bear in mind: Do not generate migratable keys. Jeez! Feed some random data to the hardware before generating the key. E.g. Tspi_TPM_StirRandom() My alternative recommendation Neither way is bad, really. So if you prefer to generate the key outside the device, I recommend: If possible, do not generate migratable keys. (not possible with TPM 1.2, but will be with TPM 2.0) Using /dev/random directly, not /dev/urandom or any homegrown thing. directly, not or any homegrown thing. Generate the key only after the machine has been up for a while, and has had a chance to gather entropy. Never store the key on disk, even temporarily. Use /dev/shm if your key generator has to use files. if your key generator has to use files. Generate the key and import into the device from the same program, don’t pass it along to an importer. Overwrite the key in memory when you’re done importing it into the device. Keep in RAM for as short a time as possible the key in memory when you’re done importing it into the device. Keep in RAM for as short a time as possible Don’t generate keys in a long-running daemon. Let the OS clean up after key generator. Comments, suggestions, corrections and opinions welcome.
Organ Trail – Director’s Cut – What We Think In Organ Trail: Director’s Cut, the classic pioneer trek across the United States, Oregon Trail, gets the undead treatment and the results are spectacular. Be warned: this game may well eat your brains. Back From the Undead The Men Who Wear Many Hats first released Organ Trail as a free Flash game for Halloween in 2011. The response from fans was highly enthusiastic. The Director’s Cut is the end result of a successful Kickstarter campaign that netted the team the resources required to expand the game even further and create mobile device versions. In this latest release, they have improved on the main campaign, and added a slew of bonus modes and content. This review, as stated in the title, is based on the Windows PC version. The End is Nigh Here The apocalypse is afoot! Zombies are scouring the United States and feasting on the living. At the behest of the government, nuclear explosions are decimating the urban centers considered too infested to save. Death (or, more likely, undeath) is all but certain. But wait! There’s hope! Rumor has it that a final human settlement known as Safe Haven can be found on the west coast of the United States. Grab an abandoned station wagon, load up with four friends and some supplies, and roll on towards salvation! A radio broadcast warns that the next nuke will take out your current shelter in Washington DC, so heading west sounds a darn sight better than digging in. The 16 Colors of Terror If the visuals were any leaner, they’d be ASCII. Organ Trail forgoes updated graphics, keeping the homage to the original Trail true to its Apple II roots. Blocky zombies may not seem like much on their own, but once a dozen or so are on screen, all zooming in on your location, you’ll be too concerned with survival to nitpick about the scenery. The chiptune soundtrack by Ben Crossbones keeps in line with the retro feel, but adds ambient, gloomy modern overtones, and surges with electric bass riffs during action sequences. This Land Was Your Land, This Land Was My Land… The game is broken into travel sequences, town sequences and action mini-games. While traveling, the station wagon chugs slowly across the map between checkpoints, and helpful or harmful (and often hilariously phrased) things can happen to the party on the way. You could find food, lose precious med kits, end up fending off a gang of bikers, or contract dysentery. The party can stop between turns to attempt to trade with passersby, and to scavenge for additional goods. Though initial road sequences will breeze by, they take on an edge-of-your-seat feel when the station wagon is on its last spare tire, and supplies are growing scarce. It’s a Hell of a Town Interactions in town will provide better opportunities to trade and to acquire goods as payment for work. The party can also rest, seek combat training upgrades, and perform repairs on the station wagon using scrap metal. Keeping the party healthy and the wagon in working condition is crucial if you want to maintain a steady pace. Leaving some cities will require you to ford your…well, Ford, I suppose…through a giant swarm of zombies. You can sneak through, drive through quickly with guns-a-blazing, or hire mercenaries to fire at the throng while you coast through. The wrong selection can result in one of your party members being dragged from the vehicle, killing him or her instantly. This is My Rifle The action minigames will have the player fending off zombies, collecting supplies (while fending off zombies) and even fighting other bands of human beings. All of these are accomplished using the same shooting mechanic. To fire a rifle effectively, move the cursor over the target, hold the button, drag the cursor to the player, and release. The projectile will travel along a straight line. It’s a simple system, and can be employed on the fly. This way, you can “kite” a horde of undead behind you, firing on only on the ones in your immediate path, thus conserving ammunition. Seeing Home Through The Eyes of a Pioneer The rest of the game becomes a loop of these sequences, and the zombie apocalypse theme fits it all perfectly. The harrowing events that can unfold on the road make each new stop a welcome sight, though some will have very few supplies to offer. Scavenging will often net a good deal of trade-worthy goods, but there may be no one willing to trade. Meanwhile, the party has run out of medicine, is down to the last scraps of food, and ruined the wagon’s last replacement muffler while “dicking” with it. It all added to a sinking, yet compelling feeling that I might not actually survive to the end. Several times, with food on the decline, and a woeful collection of fuel and goods, I would begrudgingly roll out for the next landmark, hoping for the best. This is where the game is most successful: the more dire the circumstances, the more likely I was to find myself saying “just one more turn”. On my first play through, I made it to Safe Haven, but not without heavy losses. If you want to really have the game creep you out, name your party members after real-life loved ones and then dance while the game yanks you around by the heartstrings. The Undead Rise Again, Again! Organ Trail: Director’s Cut also presents the new Endless Mode. As implied, there is no Safe Haven as a final destination, but you must trek onwards with your party until you can carry on no longer. By eradicating swarms of zombies, combat upgrades are unlocked. Feel like taking the edge off all the end-of-days nightmare inducing subject matter? Engage Halloween mode! All the zombies are just enthusiastic costume-party types, and all the scavenged food is now candy. If strategy-based survival isn’t your cup of tea, try Clement’s Quest. You’ll still take the station wagon west, but in an over-the-top physics based driving adventure. The campaign mode alone is worth a play, and there is a plethora of achievements to unlock, some of which will call for several playthroughs. With all of these new features under the hood, Organ Trail: Director’s Cut is still easy to pick up, but you’ll likely find it hard to shamble away. Rating:
Back in about 2008, I set up a group blog called “Cultured Perl”. The idea was to have a blog that concentrated on the Perl community rather than the technical aspects that most Perl bloggers write about most of the time. It didn’t last very long though and after a few posts it quietly died. But the name “Cultured Perl” still appeals to my love of bad puns and I knew I would reuse it at some point. At YAPC Europe 2010 in Pisa, I gave a lightning talk called Perl Vogue. It talked about the way the Perl modules come into fashion and often go out of fashion again very quickly. I suggested an online Perl magazine which would tell people which modules were fashionable each month. It was a joke, of course (not least because Vogue are famously defensive of their brand. Over the last many years people have suggested that the Perl community needs to get “out of the echo chamber” and talk to people who aren’t part of the community. For example, instead of posting and answering Perl questions on a Perl-specific web site like Perl Monks, it’s better to do it on a general programming site like Stack Overflow. Hold those three thoughts. “Cultured Perl”, online Perl magazine, getting out of the echo chamber. Medium is a very popular blogging site. Many people have moved their blogging there and it’s a great community for writing, sharing and recommending long-form writing. I get a “recommended reading” email from Medium every day and it always contains links to several interesting articles. Medium has two other features that interest me. Firstly, you can tag posts. So if you write a post about web development using Perl and tag it with “web dev” then it will be seen by anyone who is following the web dev tag. That’s breaking out of the echo chamber. Secondly, Medium has “publications”. That is, you can bring a set of articles together under your own banner. Publication owners can style their front page in various ways to differentiate it from Medium’s default styling. Readers can subscribe to publications and they will then be notified of every article published in that publication. That’s an online magazine. So I’ve set up a publication on Medium (called “Cultured Perl” – to complete the set of three ideas). My plan is to publish (or republish) top quality Perl articles so we slowly build a brand outside of the echo chamber where people know they can find all that is best in Perl writing. If you write about Perl, please consider signing up to Medium, becoming a contributor to Cultured Perl and submitting your articles for publication. I’ll publish the best ones (and, hopefully, work with authors to improve the others so they are good enough to publish). I’m happy to republish stuff from your other blogs. I’m not suggesting that we suddenly move all Perl blogging to Medium. For example, whenever I publish something on Perl Hacks, the post gets mirrored to a Perl Hacks publication that I set up on Medium earlier this year. There’s a WordPress to Medium plugin that does that automatically for me. There may well be similar tools for other blogging platforms (if you can’t find one for your blog – then Medium has an API so you could write one). If you are a reader, then please consider subscribing to Cultured Perl. And please recommend (by clicking on the heart symbol) any articles that you enjoy. The more recommendations that an article gets, the more likely it becomes that Medium will recommend it to other readers. I have no idea how this will go, but over the next few months I hope to start by publishing four or five articles every week. Perhaps you could start by submitting articles about what a great time you had at YAPC Europe. Oh, and here are the slides from the lightning talk I used to announce this project at YAPC Europe in Cluj-Napoca, Romania yesterday. Also published on Medium.
Story highlights Refugee families say they fear being tracked by Sri Lanka authorities They hosted Edward Snowden in the aftermath of his massive intelligence leak Hong Kong (CNN) Three asylum seeker families who sheltered US whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013 say they are living in fear because of reports that Sri Lankan police officials have been in Hong Kong trying to search for them. "I (am) very scared, maybe they can arrest me," said Supun Kellapatha, a Sri Lankan asylum seeker who gave up his family's bed for Snowden. "I don't have (a) normal life now." For weeks in 2013, the families took turns hiding Snowden in their cramped Hong Kong apartments, when he was trying to evade the authorities after carrying out one of the biggest intelligence thefts in US history. They kept their story secret until going public last year. Edward Snowden's Hong Kong lawyer, Robert Tibbo, who also represents the asylum seekers, told a news conference on Thursday that he has received information from "multiple sources" that members of the Sri Lankan Criminal Investigation Department (CID) were in Hong Kong on at least two occasions, in November and December. Sri Lankan refugee Supun Thilina Kellapatha (L), 32, Sri Lankan refugee Ajith Puspa (2nd L), 45, and Filipino refugee Vanessa Rodel (R), 40, look on as their lawyer Robert Tibbo (2nd R) speakes at a press conference at the Legislative Council of Hong Kong on February 23, 2017. On the second visit, Tibbo said at least two suspected Sri Lankan CID members took "active steps" to find the families, who don't want to return home because they fear being persecuted. Read More
Attorney Roberta Kaplan, who represented Edie Windsor in the landmark case, United States v. Windsor, which struck down the Defense of Marriage Act in 2013, filed suit this week in federal court in Jackson to overturn Mississippi’s ban on same-sex marriage on behalf of two lesbian couples: Rebecca "Becky" Bickett and Andrea Sanders of Harrison County; and Jocelyn "Joce" Pritchett and Carla Webb of Jackson, who married in Maine in 2013. Kaplan noted that Mississippi has the highest percentage of gay couples with children, and that was one of the reasons why she thought it was an important case to take. ”They said, 'We need rights. We need to have our families protected the way other families are,'” she told me in an interview on SiriusXM Progress. “I agreed with them. I agreed it was the right time and we put a case together pretty quickly.” The case has been fast-tracked by U.S. District Court Judge Carlton W. Reeves, an appointee of President Obama, who scheduled a hearing for November 12. The LGBT rights group Campaign for Southern Equality is also a plaintiff, and the plaintiffs are also represented by Mississippi attorney Robert McDuff of McDuff & Byrd, based in Jackson. “We asked the court to kind of, on a very expedited schedule, decide that our clients were right and give them the right to marry at the very beginning of the case,” Kaplan explained. “And I have to say, writing the brief — I’m a bit of legal geek, so writing briefs for me is fun, which, already, I admit, is somewhat strange — but writing this brief was one of the best experiences of my life. [That’s] because the entire case just quotes case after post-Windsor case, just making the argument over and over and over again for why we’re right. Normally in a brief you have to analogize to other situations as to why you’re right. Here, we didn’t have to analogize. We have 40-plus decisions already deciding exactly the same thing.” Kaplan also weighed in on the U.S. Supreme Court’s momentous decision nearly three weeks ago -- what she called its "non-decision decision" -- to let several circuit court decisions stand, bringing marriage equality to many more states but obviously not stepping in to rule on marriage equality for all 50 states, as some had hoped and expected. She referred to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s statements of a few weeks before, in which Ginsburg said the court would likely wait until a circuit court ruled against gay marriage before it stepped in. Ginsburg's remarks seemed to reflect the take-it-slow approach she has telegraphed on the issue in the past.
Shutterstock As you probably remember, Buzz, the Cheerio mascot, kind of went missing last week. His disappearance is part of General Mills’ campaign to raise awareness about the dwindling population of bees. In addition to extracting Buzz from boxes, General Mills also has plans for a 3,300 acre bee habitat. The company claims that 30 percent of their ingredients are pollinated by bees and they’re hoping consumers will join them in attempting to combat the disappearing bee population. Unfortunately, they’ve made a pretty big mistake. As part of the #bringbackthebees campaign, Cheerios pledged to give away 200 million wildflower seeds to anyone who signed up on their website. A mere seven days after the campaign was announced, the General Mills blog shared that 1.5 BILLION wildflower seeds were due to be distributed in the U.S. and Canada. They could hardly bee-lieve it!

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