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From Alan Robinson:
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I’m dumbfounded as to how Translink has gained a bad reputation.
1) They are about the only transit agency I can think of in North America that sees riders as customers.
2) They’ve overseen dramatic growth in ridership and service since the late ’90’s
3) They run a tight ship (obvious if anyone’s actually read how the provincial audits. Their wording were heavily biased against Translink yet found next to nothing in actual waste or efficiencies.)
4) They activily find efficiencies (Canada Line P3 contract, low-cost community shuttle buses, “on the way” routes)
5) They’re incredably transparent (extensive public consultation, long term plans, Buzzer, blog, Twitter, etc…)
For constrast, take Chicago. We have three transit agencies that barely talk to each other, the ‘L’ has maintenance slow zone over about 1/3rd of it’s trackage, Metra can’t run it’s trains reliably during the winter, or at all mid-day. Busses are bunched reliably every day leaving half-hour or worse gaps in service on major routes. Farebox recovery is less than 50% and mode share is far worse than in Vancouver.
Let’s take Toronto. They also can’t manage to keep buses and streetcars running on time, haven’t yet committed to solving extreme congesting on their subway or surface transit, and are wasting a billion dollars on a politically motivated sub-par subway extension to the burbs.
New York can’t even build a subway station for less than $4 billion, let alone be able to run cross-town buses that you could out-walk.
Seattle definition of frequent service is a bus every 20 minutes, although they’re also struggling with the state over the ability to implement a local tax.
Why are people trashing one of the best transportation agencies in North America?
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CBM prg Studio Version 3.0.0 is released. There are a lot of new features in this version. I’d really appreciate it if you report any bugs you find or have any suggestions/comments.
CBM prg Studio allows you to type a BASIC or Machine Code program in using a nice Windows environment and convert it to a ‘.prg’ file which you can run on an emulator, or even a real C64 / VIC20 or PET if you’re feeling brave and have the right kit.
CBM prg Studio is the result of merging C64PrgGen and VIC20PrgGen. Adding new features and fixing bugs in two apps which were 95% similar was a bit of a nightmare so merging them made sense.
It was also a good opportunity for a face lift and to add some new features, such as:
Programs are project based, meaning all related source files, sprite files etc. are kept in one place and multiple source files can be linked more easily.
Tabbed MDI.
Syntax highlighting.
What CBM prg Studio isn’t is a front-end for tok64, cbmcnvrt, bastext or any other tokeniser / detokeniser / assembler. It’s all been written completely from scratch.
New features:
65816 assembler/debugger.
Partial support for the VICE debugger.
Bitmap import/export for character editor.
Binary file import to Assembly source.
Line and rectangle drawing tools for the screen designer.
TASM support added to Source Converter tool.
Bug Fixed:
Assembler: Using arithmetic with cheap labels would fail. Slow incbin performance for large binary files. Wrong SYScall generation for C128 projects. incbin with screen data imported all screens. Assembling past the end of memory not detected properly. Invalid branch not detected properly. Arithmetic on WORDs not carried out. Multiple characters in single quotes in BYTE sequences not assembled properly. GenerateTo only created .prg files. Save File As… would only save .bas files. Comment tool would not comment out already commented code. Incbin reporting ‘file too large’ error by mistake.
Screen Designer: Binary file export Colour selection for C16 projects didn’t work. Wrong screen size saving C128 screens. Character set selection corrected.
General: Some code reformatting issues.
Download: CBM prg Studio v3.0.0 (578)
source: ajordison.co.uk
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United States Supreme Court case
Clinton v. Jones, 520 U.S. 681 (1997), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case establishing that a sitting President of the United States has no immunity from civil law litigation, in federal court, against him or her, for acts done before taking office and unrelated to the office.[1] In particular, there is no temporary immunity, so it is not required to delay all federal cases until the President leaves office.[1]
Background of the case [ edit ]
On May 6, 1994, former Arkansas state employee Paula Jones filed a sexual harassment suit against U.S. President Bill Clinton and former Arkansas State Police Officer Danny Ferguson. She claimed that on May 8, 1991, Clinton, then Governor of Arkansas, propositioned her. David Brock had written, in the January 1994 issue of The American Spectator, that an Arkansas state employee named "Paula" had offered to be Clinton's mistress. According to the story, Ferguson had escorted Jones to Clinton's hotel room, stood guard, and overheard Jones say that she would not mind being Clinton's mistress.
The suit, Jones v. Clinton, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas. Jones, represented by Attorneys Joseph Cammarata and Gilbert K. Davis, sought civil damages from the President, whose request to file a motion to dismiss the case on the grounds of Presidential Immunity was approved on July 21, 1994.[2] On December 28, 1994, Judge Susan Webber Wright ruled that a sitting President could not be sued and deferred the case until the conclusion of his term, essentially granting him temporary immunity (although she allowed the pre-trial discovery phase of the case to proceed without delay in order to start the trial as soon as Clinton left office).[3]
Both parties appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, which ruled in favor of Jones, finding that "the President, like all other government officials, is subject to the same laws that apply to all other members of our society."[4]
Clinton then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, filing a petition for writ of certiorari.
The Supreme Court's decision [ edit ]
In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court affirmed the decision of the Court of Appeals.[1]
In the majority opinion by Justice John Paul Stevens, the Court ruled that separation of powers does not mandate that federal courts delay all private civil lawsuits against the President until the end of his term of office.[1]
The court ruled that they did not need to decide "whether a claim comparable to petitioner's assertion of immunity might succeed in a state tribunal" (a state court), but noted that "If this case were being heard in a state forum, instead of advancing a separation-of-powers argument, petitioner would presumably rely on federalism and comity concerns".[1]
The court also found that "our decision rejecting the immunity claim and allowing the case to proceed does not require us to confront the question whether a court may compel the attendance of the President at any specific time or place."[1]
In his concurring opinion, Breyer argued that presidential immunity would apply only if the President could show that a private civil lawsuit would somehow interfere with the President's constitutionally assigned duties.
Aftermath [ edit ]
On April 1, 1998, U.S. District Court Judge Susan Webber Wright granted summary judgment to Clinton in Jones v. Clinton.[5] A witness in Jones v. Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, denied having engaged in a sexual relationship with Clinton. A Lewinsky friend, Linda Tripp, had recorded conversations where Lewinsky discussed her affair with Clinton. Tripp then turned the tapes over to Kenneth Starr, an independent counsel investigating Clinton's misconduct in office. The revelations from these tapes became known as the Lewinsky scandal.
In the Court's opinion in Clinton v. Jones, Stevens had written, "...it appears to us highly unlikely to occupy any substantial amount of petitioner's time." The Supreme Court's ruling in Clinton v. Jones led to the District Court's hearing of Jones v. Clinton, which led to the Lewinsky scandal, when Clinton was asked under oath about other workplace relationships, which led to charges of perjury and obstruction of justice and the impeachment of Bill Clinton.
On April 12, 1999, Wright found Clinton in contempt of court for "intentionally false" testimony in Jones v. Clinton, fined him $90,000, and referred the case to the Arkansas Supreme Court's Committee on Professional Conduct, as Clinton still possessed a law license in Arkansas.[6]
The Arkansas Supreme Court suspended Clinton's Arkansas law license in April 2000. On January 19, 2001, Clinton agreed to a five-year suspension and a $25,000 fine in order to avoid disbarment and to end the investigation of Independent Counsel Robert Ray (Starr's successor). On October 1, 2001, Clinton's U.S. Supreme Court law license was suspended, with 40 days to contest his disbarment. On November 9, 2001, the last day for Clinton to contest the disbarment, he opted to resign from the Supreme Court Bar, surrendering his license, rather than facing penalties related to disbarment.
In the end, Independent Counsel Ray said:
The Independent Counsel’s judgment that sufficient evidence existed to prosecute President Clinton was confirmed by President Clinton’s admissions and by evidence showing that he engaged in conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice.
More specifically, the Independent Counsel concluded that President Clinton testified falsely on three counts under oath in Clinton v. Jones. However, Ray chose to decline criminal prosecution in favor of what the Principles of Federal Prosecution call "alternative sanctions". This included being impeached:
As a consequence of his conduct in the Jones v. Clinton civil suit and before the federal grand jury, President Clinton incurred significant administrative sanctions. The Independent Counsel considered seven non-criminal alternative sanctions that were imposed in making his decision to decline prosecution: (1) President Clinton’s admission of providing false testimony that was knowingly misleading, evasive, and prejudicial to the administration of justice before the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas; (2) his acknowledgement that his conduct violated the Rules of Professional Conduct of the Arkansas Supreme Court; (3) the five-year suspension of his license to practice law and $25,000 fine imposed on him by the Circuit Court of Pulaski County, Arkansas; (4) the civil contempt penalty of more than $90,000 imposed on President Clinton by the federal court for violating its orders; (5) the payment of more than $850,000 in settlement to Paula Jones; (6) the express finding by the federal court that President Clinton had engaged in contemptuous conduct; and (7) the substantial public condemnation of President Clinton arising from his impeachment.
These seven sanctions, Ray reasoned, were "sufficient", and therefore he did not pursue further sanctions in a criminal proceeding.[7]
See also [ edit ]
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Is there anything better than a good whisky? Well, yes actually. A good whisky that comes out of a fantastical steampunk machine.
Matt Advertising commissioned us to design and produce a sensational whisky pouring machine for Black Bottle Whisky. So that’s what we did. In 6 weeks.
Top view into the machine.
The machine in-situ at the Steamworks bar in Johannesburg.
How does it work, you ask? You insert a coin, crank a handle, pull a lever, and watch the intricate magic unfold in typical steampunk style. The end result: a glass of whisky, poured in the most creative of ways.
During the design process we referenced old machine elements and functionality to give the machine a steampunk aesthetic. But, surprise! Although the machine may look vintage and antiquated, it is in fact fully electronic. It may seem like the crank wheel is moving the platform, but actually it’s an infrared sensor and stepper motors controlled with electronics, that are doing all the work.
Early concept drawings for the machine.
Some of the detailing on the machine including old Russian nixie tubes and treated metal.
The machine was made from a combination of sourced vintage pieces and manufactured components. All electronics were custom-made by our team of mad scientist (AKA our engineers and software developers).
Included in this project were special features, such as: Custom-made Black Bottle coins
60-year old Russian Nixie tubes for the count-down numbers
Metal work produced by a real blacksmith (Michael Hayward)
Brass plating, using old-school electro-plating
We’ll drink to that.
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Weight-based ideals are ever-evolving and rarely connected to actual health, so it can be difficult to separate unrealistic beauty standards from what’s actually good for you. But anyone who’s ever had to take a gym class knows that at least there’s a doctor-approved, universal formula that can tell you if you’re actually overweight, right? Well, no.
Doctors, government health organizations and insurance companies have encouraged the use of body mass index, or BMI, to measure overweight and obesity for decades. The formula (your weight in kilograms divided by your height, squared) gives you a number that purportedly tells you how much fat you have. If you score above 25 (overweight) or 30 (obese), it might scare you into losing weight. But it hasn’t actually seemed to have that effect. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the average American woman over the age of 20 in 2010 was 5’3″ and weighed 166.2 lbs. That makes her BMI 29.4. The average man was just shy of 5’8 and 195.5 lbs, which puts him at about 29.7. So the average American is not only overweight, but almost obese.
That kind of macro analysis is why the BMI was created—the mathematician who invented the formula used it to to compare large populations (pdf), and noted that it shouldn’t be used for individuals. However, as Mother Jones notes, BMI entered the mainstream after World War II, thanks to insurance companies who wanted a way to quantify fat. Their theory was policyholders who weighed the most seemed to die younger. Their promotion of the tool made converts out of researchers, and eventually even clinicians.
Americans labeled obese paid 22% more in health insurance premiums in 2013 than people in the normal range, even though research has suggested that people in the overweight range might live longer than their “normal” counterparts, and that it’s actually most dangerous to be underweight.
The trouble is, BMI is clearly not a perfect indicator of health; it’s just the easiest one. It doesn’t differentiate between muscle and fat content, so an athlete like professional US women’s basketball player Ebony Hoffman could be classified as overweight. Hoffman is 6’2″ and weighs 215 lbs., which puts her at a 27.6 BMI.
AP Photo/Jessica Hill That’s Ebony Hoffman on the right.
Athlete or average citizen, the BMI isn’t the universal tool it’s been promoted to be. It doesn’t take into account age, gender and race, which has led to potentially misidentifying populations of African American people as overweight.
And focusing on your BMI score may be detrimental to your health. In a study from the US Agricultural Service, people who received group education about body acceptance and intuitive eating had better cholesterol and blood pressure after two years than they did at the beginning of the trial. The other group’s health didn’t change even though they kept a food diary, learned how to limit calories and fat intake and monitored their weight. Neither group weighed less after two years, but the overall wellness group was more active and practiced better eating control.
If you want to know more definitively if you’re overweight and at a higher health risk because of that, measure your waist size—high abdominal fat is a more specific predictor of health problems. Either way, if you really want to get healthy fast it’s probably best to disregard the BMI and go to the gym instead. For common diseases like diabetes, exercise—not body mass—is the best predictor of how long, and how, you’ll live.
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The Obama administration has ordered immigration agents to ask immigrants they encounter living in the country illegally whether they might qualify under President Barack Obama’s plans to avoid deporting them, according to internal training materials obtained by The Associated Press.
Agents also have been told to review government files to identify any jailed immigrants they might be able to release under the program.
The directives from the Homeland Security Department mark an unusual change for U.S. immigration enforcement, placing the obligation on the government for identifying immigrants who might qualify for lenient treatment. Previously, it was the responsibility of immigrants or their lawyers to assert that they might qualify under rules that could keep them out of jail and inside the United States.
It’s akin to the Internal Revenue Service calling taxpayers to recommend they should have used certain exemptions or deductions.
The training materials apply to agents for Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They instruct agents “to immediately begin identifying persons in their custody, as well as newly encountered persons” who may be eligible for protection from deportation.
{snip}
Under Obama’s plans, the government is focused on deporting immigrants with serious criminal records or who otherwise pose a threat to national security or public safety. For the most part, under the new policy, immigrants whose only offense is being in the country without permission aren’t supposed to be a priority for immigration officers.
While the administration has estimated that as many as 4 million people will be eligible for protection from deportation, the Congressional Budget Office estimated about 2 million to 2.5 million immigrants are expected to be approved for the program by 2017. As many as 1.7 million young immigrants were estimated to be eligible for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, but since its 2012 creation only about 610,000 people have successfully signed up.
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ROCK HILL, S.C. -- Vice President Joe Biden hit the campaign trail for Hillary Clinton Tuesday with stops in Rock Hill and Charlotte. The AME Zion Church's Life Center in Rock Hill hosted Biden and several prominent South Carolina Democrats as they tried to get supporters excited about the election.
The church's first woman bishop said she couldn't endorse a candidate, but encouraged the packed sanctuary to pray and then vote.
Normally a Republican stronghold, South Carolina is now considered a toss-up state in the presidential election with a recent poll from Survey Monkey showing Clinton and Trump in a statistical tie. Biden looked to energize voters to head to the polls and turn SC blue.
"They've thrown everything but the kitchen sink at Hillary Clinton," he said.
Biden said Clinton has been beaten and battered in this campaign. He said she doesn't have the charisma on the trail that her husband Bill or Obama has, but he said she's is the one for the job.
"From the time she's gotten out of college, she's been working for children and families," he said.
The Vice President spoke before a predominantly black crowd in Rock Hill. He got choked up telling a story about his grandchildren having a sleepover with the Obama girls soon after getting the nomination.
"That's how it is supposed to be," he said when recalling seeing white and black children sharing a sleeping bag.
He took a swipe at Donald Trump and his talk of the good old days in reference to his "Make America Great Again," slogan.
"Those good 'ol days weren't all that good for a whole lot of folks," he declared. "The guy who is the head of the ticket started his career as a real estate developer getting sued by not renting to black people."
Biden also made a case for other Democrats running for state and local offices, particularly his former aide and 5th district congressional candidate Fran Person, who introduced the Vice President.
"7 days left," he shouted. "Let's get up in the next 7 days let's bring this home and make this the America we know we can make," he declared to a cheering crowd.
From Rock Hill, Biden headed to Charlotte to speak at the Arbor Glen Outreach Center in a "Get Out the Early Vote" Rally. Early voting in NC ends Saturday, November 5 and so far has favored Democrats. An Elon poll released Tuesday puts Clinton ahead of Trump by 1%, which is within the margin of error. North Carolina has been an important battleground state in the race with frequent visits from both candidates and their backers.
President Obama will campaign in Chapel Hill Wednesday and Charlotte Friday for Clinton.
Donald Trump will be in Concord on Thursday.
Copyright 2016 WCNC
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Grant Boys Plans to Quit Selling Semiautomatic Assault Weapons
Garell, in a move that he expects will be criticized by other weapons dealers and owners, said he will cease selling all semiautomatic assault weapons at his Newport Boulevard store after his current inventory is exhausted. He added that he plans to contact local law enforcement agencies about purchasing the assault firearms he now has in stock.
"The handwriting is on the wall that these types of weapons with massive firepower have little true purpose," said Garell, who also sells camping and outdoor gear. "I believe they are going to be banned eventually."
Randy Garell, president of the Grant Boys store in Costa Mesa, said the retail gun dealers must "wake up and face facts."
The head of one of the largest gun stores in Orange County said Friday he will stop selling such military assault weapons as the AK-47 rifle, the type used to kill five grade-school pupils in Stockton.
Garell said he was "greatly disturbed" by the killings Tuesday in Stockton by an unemployed drifter armed with a Soviet-designed AK-47 rifle and a handgun. He said his decision to discontinue sales was prompted by statements from Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates and others calling for a statewide ban on several assault weapons.
Those assault weapons include the Israeli Uzi and the U.S.-made AR-15, a semiautomatic version of the M-16 military weapon.
"Listening to Gates--a pretty conservative, pro-gun guy--you realize that these weapons don't belong in certain hands," said Garell, whose company has been in business 40 years. "And to say that (some) guns sold at legitimate stores don't find their way into the wrong hands is wishful thinking."
But Bob Kahn, owner of B & B Sales, one of Southern California's biggest gun retailers, said a ban on sales of semiautomatic rifles would do nothing "but improve the odds for criminals." Kahn, who last year sold more than 40,000 weapons through his North Hollywood and Westminster stores, said the problem is the court system, which allows "convicted criminals back on the street" too quickly.
Kahn said the bulk of individuals buying assault weapons are military veterans who like to have the weapons for reasons of nostalgia, or recreational gun owners who like going to the desert to "shoot at cans."
Some even buy them for personal protection, said Kahn, though he conceded a handgun is a better form of defense at close range because it is easier for the average person to aim and fire.
Surge in Sales Expected
Until Tuesday's shootings, Kahn said, the AK-47 was "losing its appeal . . . but now there will probably be a surge in sales again." He explained that some people who had not been aware that assault weapons were readily available and relatively inexpensive likely will be in the market for them now.
Under California law, most assault rifles, unlike handguns, can be purchased over the counter with no waiting period. A handgun purchase involves a state-mandated background check that usually takes 2 weeks.
If a background check was required for assault weapons, Garell said, the Stockton gunman might not have been able to buy the AK-47 he used. Patrick Edward Purdy, a high school dropout, had a long history of arrests on a variety of misdemeanor charges.
State Sen. Marian Bergeson (R-Newport Beach), who favors a complete ban on the sale of assault weapons, said the Legislature "at the very least" should require a background check before one of the high-powered rifles can be sold.
"I can't see any constructive reason why anyone should own one of those," Bergeson said. "They are simply used to carry out warfare on private citizens."
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By now it’s obvious that lecturing Donald Trump supporters about why they shouldn’t vote for him only confirms their convictions.
If you’re part of the “establishment,” which approximately means anyone who has served in government or, grab your garlic garland, a member of the media, your opinion matters less than whatever you scrape off your shoe.
It also matters not that Trump loves the media when it suits him (see “Morning Joe”). Or, that Trump wouldn’t be where he is without the media’s compliance in covering every word he utters. Both he and early endorser Sarah Palin have been masters of media manipulation — knowing how to attract attention that necessitates coverage, while also mocking journalists when they show up.
The challenge for people who fear a Trump presidency even more than others covet it comes down to: How do you convince the inconvincible? How do you persuade the proudly unpersuadable?
First, you probably should buy them a drink, and then you should try not to insult them. (I’m talking to myself here.) Too often we in the media say or write things that feel more like a put-down than an observation. To say, for example, that someone is “undereducated” (a pollster term), which is true of a large portion of Trump’s base, isn’t the same as calling someone stupid. But it might feel that way if you’re on the receiving end.
Donald Trump disavowed former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke on Feb. 26, but then declined to do so on Feb. 28. The Fix's Chris Cillizza looks at Trump's strategy. (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)
Most people know that college doesn’t endow intelligence. It’s all in how you say things, which one wishes Trump appreciated more. He isn’t just coarse and rude, but is also often vile.
Second, the motivating anger of his constituents needs to be respected and its origins fully understood. It’s too easy to capture a disordered individual acting out as representative of the crazies-for-Trump. Unfortunately, when your jobs are in China, the southern border has been overrun with people entering illegally, your fellow citizens are attacked by radical Islamists and the president whose policies you abhor happens to be African American, it’s easy for others to interpret anger about policies into anger toward groups of people.
Trump, alas, has made it exceedingly easy.
Some of his fans may well be guilty of a variety of phobias and -isms, but the sum of Trump’s popularity is more aptly found in his offering what these voters feel they haven’t had — a voice and a place at America’s table. Trump has given them a megaphone and a chair. Most important, he has given them a purpose.
“Make America Great Again” is a grand cause that can mean whatever you need it to mean. Trump himself is a conduit to the “ belongingness ” imperative, the human need to be a part of something larger than oneself. Whether Trump realizes this consciously, he has the primitive instinct of a tribal leader. He senses how to marshal his warriors, who, emotionally committed, are loath to desert.
This was apparent in Nevada when Trump won rural voters who should have belonged to Ted Cruz, based on the all-important public-lands issue. The federal government owns a whopping 84.9 percent of Nevada’s land. Cruz promised he would return the land to the state; Trump said he wouldn’t.
One insider told me that when Cruz researchers showed rural voters news video of the comments, most rejected the video as doctored. They were inoculated to any truth that ran contrary to their beliefs. Data be damned.
The irony is that this deep distrust of the establishment and the media is the Republican Party’s own handiwork. Its leaders and operatives have been preaching for decades that the government and journalists can’t be trusted.
The tragedy is that, of all those mentioned here, the most untrustworthy and dishonest is Trump. He undeniably lied a few days ago when he said he didn’t know anything about David Duke in what otherwise would have been the easiest disavowal in political history. In fact, Trump specifically mentioned Duke in a 2000 interview that many have heard by now.
His dishonesty consists of promises he knows he can’t possibly keep, whether forcing Mexico to pay for a border wall or deporting 11 million illegal immigrants, though my favorite is promising Wofford College students that they’ll all have jobs upon graduation. In Palm Beach, Fla., recently, I heard from more than a few of Trump’s neighbors, “He doesn’t believe anything he’s saying.” I suppose there’s some comfort in that thought, but then what does he believe?
By unanimous assent, he believes in The Donald.
Read more from Kathleen Parker’s archive, follow her on Twitter or find her on Facebook.
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California on Friday formally proposed a 40 percent slash in the state’s greenhouse gas emissions, minutes after President Trump was inaugurated.
The state’s Air Resources Board said that 40 percent cut by 2030, compared with 1990 levels, would be the most ambitious climate goal in North America.
“Climate change is impacting California now, and we need to continue to take bold and effective action to address it head on to protect and improve the quality of life in California,” Mary Nichols, the board’s chairwoman, said in a statement.
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“The plan will help us meet both our climate and our clean air goals in the coming decades and provide billions of dollars in investments to cut greenhouse gases, smog and toxic pollution in disadvantaged communities throughout the state,” she said.
“It is also designed to continue to drive creative innovation, generating good new jobs in the growing clean technology sector.”
The plan sets up a contrast with Trump, who was inaugurated about 30 minutes before California released its plan.
Trump is promising to dismantle all of former President Barack Obama Barack Hussein ObamaWith low birth rate, America needs future migrants 4 ways Hillary looms over the 2020 race Obama goes viral after sporting black bomber jacket with '44' on sleeve at basketball game MORE’s climate change agenda, including limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and from oil and natural gas drilling.
Trump has said climate change is a hoax, and Scott Pruitt, his nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, has sued the agency to stop Obama regulations repeatedly.
Pruitt said at a confirmation hearing this week that he would consider ending California’s decades-old authority to enforce its own limits on emissions from cars and trucks, alarming the state’s liberal leadership.
The California plan proposed Friday would extend its cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gases through 2030, cut the carbon intensity of fuels used for transportation and put more than 4 million zero-emission vehicles on the roads.
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Life is Strange Episode 3, 4 and 5 Release Dates.
Square Enix and Dontnod Entertainment confirmed that the episodic, narrative driven adventure game Life is Strange releases digitally worldwide every six weeks, with Episode 1 & 2 available now on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Xbox One and Xbox 360. The Life is Strange – Episode 3, 4 & 5 release date follows around every month and a half! :)
Life is Strange is expected to release its digital episodes on the following dates:
• Episode 1: Chrysalis – January 30th, 2015 worldwide on Steam, Xbox Live, and PlayStation Network.
• Episode 2: Out of Time – March 24th, 2015 worldwide on Steam, Xbox Live, and PlayStation Network in America/Canada; Then March 25th, 2015 on PlayStation Network in Europe/Australia.
• Episode 3: Chaos Theory – May 19th, 2015 worldwide on Steam, Xbox Live, and PlayStation Network in America/Canada; Then May 6th, 2015 on PlayStation Network in Europe/Australia.
• Episode 4: Dark Room – 21-28th, 2015 worldwide (don’t worry it’s still coming in July) on Steam, Xbox Live, and PlayStation Network in America/Canada; Then July 22-29th, 2015 on PlayStation Network in Europe/Australia.
• Episode 5: Polarized – October 20th, 2015 worldwide on Steam, Xbox Live, and PlayStation Network in America/Canada; Then August 26th-September 2nd, 2015 on PlayStation Network in Europe/Australia.
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Sean Patrick Maloney has become the second openly gay non-incumbent to win election to Congress tonight. He beat Rep. Nan Hayworth, a Republican who is serving in her first term in the House.
Maloney, a former staffer in Bill Clinton’s White House, has a partner of 20 years and three children.
“We can’t wait for Sean to show his colleagues in the House his pride in his family, and his commitment to the people of New York’s 18th Congressional District,” said Chuck Wolfe, president and CEO of the Victory Fund. Maloney joins Wis. State Rep Mark Pocan, who won his race tonight to replace Rep. Tammy Baldwin in the House. ”Sean has been a leader in New York, serving two governors and working hard to secure a more promising future for his children. He will also be a strong voice in Congress for fairness and equality.”
He is the first openly LGBT member of Congress from New York.
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Where in the world is Richard Simmons? The enthusiastic workout guru has been actively out of the public eye for nearly two years now, and his close friends are concerned that he’s being held hostage at his Hollywood Hills home, according to the Daily News.
“We were very close,” a friend told the News. “It’s not something that I want to seek publicity about, but we are very concerned. Teresa [Reveles, Simmons’ longtime housekeeper] did turn me away several times. He has missed funerals of close friends. He was the most reliable and caring person on the planet, and then to suddenly vanish? I have come to believe that something else is happening. I don’t think Richard is in there of his own volition.”
PHOTOS: Diet Secrets of the Stars
According to the report, the last time Simmons spoke with his close friend and former assistant, Mauro Oliveira, was in April 2014; the odd meeting ended with Simmons, 67, insisting that the pair could no longer be in touch.
“i just want to be by myself, and I want to be in the house, and we’re never going to see each other again,” Simmons reportedly said to Oliveira.
The Brazilian-born Oliveira then asked Simmons point-blank whether Reveles was controlling his life, to which the fitness guru said, “Yes.”
PHOTOS: Stars Share Secrets: Read Celebs’ Shocking Confessions
“I feel that Richard is now being controlled by the very people that he controlled his whole life,” he says. “Controlled in the sense that they are taking advantage of his weak mental state. Controlled in the sense that they are controlling his mail, controlling his everything. His brother, the manager and Teresa. Those three people.”
The last time Simmons sat down for an interview was for a 2013 New Year’s Eve interview with CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin, who asked him what his morning affirmations are.
PHOTOS: ‘80s Hunks: Then & Now
“I say, ‘Try to help more people,’” Simmons said in the televised interview before breaking down in tears.
Simmons rode on a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade that following November, and attended a Los Angeles fundraiser for Covered California in January 2014.
The final straw for Oliveira, he told the Daily News, was when he visited Simmons at his mansion in March 2014, and saw the public figure sleeping at 2 p.m. on a Sunday.
PHOTOS: Celebrity Workout Buddies
“I said, ‘Richard, you need to get up. You need to do something,’” Oliveira recalled. “He said, ‘No, I’m tired. let me sleep.’ And nobody cares. I walked downstairs and said, ‘Teresa, Richard needs treatment.’ She said, ‘I don’t care.’”
In January 2015, TMZ reported that the LAPD paid a visit to Simmons after they were tipped off that things might be awry at the Hollywood Hills mansion, but found Simmons alert and responsive.
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Democratic candidate LuAnn Bennett, left, and Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-Va.) greet one another after their first debate in the race for Virginia’s 10th Congressional District in Lansdowne, Va., on Oct. 6. Democrats must unseat Comstock to have any hope of reclaiming the House majority. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
Hillary Clinton’s persistent advantage over Donald Trump in recent presidential polls has Democrats eyeing big gains in Congress. And while the Senate majority is clearly in sight, the House majority is a much more elusive goal.
Reaching it will require Democratic candidates to triumph in a variety of districts, taking advantage not only of Trump’s weaknesses but also, in many cases, more localized political climates. Even then, Democrats face a tall order in reclaiming a majority, with their best prospects lying largely in suburban areas that are the most expensive places to wage effective campaigns.
[Buoyed by rising polls, Clinton shifts to a new target: the House and Senate]
Republicans currently hold a 246-to-186 majority; three seats — one reliably Republican, two reliably Democratic — are vacant. That means Democrats need to flip 30 seats, and party strategists have been careful in discussing that prospect. House leaders, including Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) have suggested a 20-seat gain would be a good outcome.
Flipping the House would require the confluence of factors — robust Democratic turnout, on a par with the levels seen in 2008 and 2012 for President Obama; a significant depression in Republican turnout to near-midterm levels as voters unenthused by Trump simply decide not to cast ballots; and, to a lesser extent, Trump voters withholding their support from the handful of GOP candidates who have broken with the nominee.
Mark S. Mellman, a Democratic pollster who is consulting on about a dozen House races, said a 10-point Clinton win could put the majority into play. “It’s not a certainty, but it’s certainly a possibility at that stage,” he said.
[House Democrats believe Trump troubles give them real shot at retaking majority]
Republicans, meanwhile, have counseled incumbents to tout their constituent work while campaigning against the persistent unpopularity of both top presidential candidates. “If we had to readjust every time something happened at the top of the ticket, we would be in disarray, so we have been focused on keeping it local,” said Katie Martin, a spokeswoman for the National Republican Congressional Committee.
But GOP members are increasingly playing defense in their advertising, and top leaders sounded alarms last week after the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announced a $21 million September fundraising haul. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) pleaded with his GOP colleagues on a conference call last week for more campaign cash from safer incumbents, saying that Trump’s sagging unpopularity was beginning to hurt vulnerable members.
Still, it’s not as simple as waiting for a Clinton blowout for Democrats. They still must have competent candidates on the ballot, campaigns hand-tailored to individual districts and enough funding to get their message out widely. Here are three key races that represent the different environments Democrats must navigate.
Nevada’s 4th District: The gimme
In 2014, GOP Rep. Cresent Hardy won this district, anchored in Las Vegas’s northern suburbs, when Democrats stayed home. This time, Democrats are confident that their candidate, state lawmaker Ruben Kihuen, will resonate in a district that is at least 55 percent Asian, black and Hispanic. Kihuen was born in Mexico and immigrated with his parents to the United States in the 1980s — a life story that Democrats think will resonate with voters.
“This is a working-class district. This is a majority-minority district. If you look at the people in this district, they’re unemployed, they need jobs, they need their wages increased,” Kihuen said in a recent interview.
The National Republican Congressional Committee has spent at least $4.2 million in support of Hardy, with another $1.4 million reserved in the Las Vegas media market for the final two weeks. A new NRCC spot slams Kihuen for his past association with a controversial lobbying firm.
Kihuen has made Trump a key part of his campaign, and national Democratic groups are spending at least $1.6 million in the final weeks to drive that message — even after Hardy withdrew his support for the presidential candidate after the release of the “Access Hollywood” video. A new ad from the House Majority PAC notes how Hardy stood by Trump through all of his previous controversies.
The only recent public polling in the race comes from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which said last week that Kihuen held a two-point lead in a district where Clinton is leading Trump by seven points. Kihuen should also benefit from a strong turnout effort, making this among the lowest-hanging fruit for House Democrats. If they can’t win here, they will have a hard time picking up even 15 seats.
Virginia’s 10th District: The suburban “pivot”
Democrats’ long-term plan for reclaiming the House majority has anticipated a “demographic pivot” where well-educated, wealthy suburban dwellers who tended to vote Republican become increasingly Democratic over time. Trump, party strategists argue, has accelerated that pivot to the point that districts thought to be out of reach until 2018 or beyond are now in play.
There’s no better proving ground for that theory than the outer suburbs of Washington, where Republicans are in peril of losing a district they have held since 1980. Incumbent Rep. Barbara Comstock is facing a challenge from LuAnn Bennett, a real estate developer and first-time candidate, and they are on track to spend a combined $14 million in the pricey D.C. media market.
National Republican groups, including the NRCC and the Congressional Leadership Fund super PAC, have already spent $4.1 million painting Bennett as a tax-hiking liberal with a sketchy business record, with another $3.3 million in TV ads reserved for the final weeks.
Democratic groups, meanwhile, have countered with roughly $3 million in TV and radio ads — including spots highlighting Comstock’s positions against abortion rights and same-sex marriage, a message aimed at the suburban voters now seen as a keystone of the Democratic coalition. Another $2.1 million is coming before Election Day.
Bennett’s latest ad declares that “Comstock and Donald Trump are the same.”
Polling in the race has been sparse, but it has been among the most expensive races for both parties. But the ads don’t tell the whole story: The two have sparred about local issues, as well — including who would be better suited to handle transportation issues. At a Northern Virginia Chamber of Commerce debate last week, Comstock — now the only Republican representing the D.C. suburbs — emphasized the importance of having a member of the House majority in the regional delegation.
“That’s kind of a big assumption at this point,” Bennett countered.
Kansas’s 3rd District: The curveball
In a few districts, it’s not just about Trump, it turns out. In a late push to oust incumbent GOP Rep. Kevin Yoder, Democrats are seizing on the unpopularity of Kansas’s Republican governor, Sam Brownback.
Yoder’s opponent, financial consultant and political neophyte Jay Sidie, is arguing to his suburban Kansas City district that Yoder’s trickle-down tax policies are the same as those advocated by Brownback, which have resulted in major cutbacks to state programs.
Sidie is now benefiting from a $1 million DCCC ad campaign that includes a spot tying Yoder to school funding cuts he advocated as a state legislator. Sidie recently issued a poll showing him four points behind in a district where Clinton is well ahead of Trump.
Yoder and Republican allies are set to spend a combined $1.8 million before Election Day. His campaign manager, Cate Duerst, said Sidie is “a disaster of a candidate” with a questionable business record and that Democrats are spinning “relentless lies” about Yoder. “It’s a political ploy that shows just how much contempt and little respect Washington Democrats have for voters in Kansas, and it won’t succeed,” she said. But Yoder has been forced to distance himself from Brownback — he left the Kansas legislature before Brownback became governor — and by attacking Sidie for missing votes on local education funding.
Sidie said in a recent interview that Yoder’s attacks have only served to make him better known to voters yearning for an alternative to Republican mismanagement, and he stands by his attempts to link Yoder to Brownback and Trump.
“Whenever Brownback gives a speech, Yoder is right behind him clapping, and the same thing with Trump,” he said. “I think the people here just aren’t going to put up with that.”
In a sign of unease, the Congressional Leadership Fund last week said it would pump $700,000 into Yoder’s race. It could be money well spent to save the GOP House majority: A Democratic majority would almost certainly need to include Sidie.
This item has been updated.
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Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Anna Holligan reports: "Geert Wilders is refusing to attend the trial"
Dutch anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders has failed to turn up for a trial where he is charged with racial discrimination and inciting hatred.
The charges were brought after he led a chant for fewer Moroccans in the Netherlands at a rally 18 months ago.
Mr Wilders, leader of the Dutch Freedom Party (PVV), said the trial at Schiphol, was political and "a travesty".
If convicted, he faces a fine and a year in prison.
Mr Wilders has repeatedly criticised Islam, calling for the Koran to be banned and for the closure of all mosques in the Netherlands.
'Political trial'
The trial, in a high-security courtroom, heard that 6,474 complaints had been made in response to Mr Wilders' remarks at a rally in 2014. A sample of 35 complaints was read out.
Prosecutors argued that Geert Wilders crossed a line when he asked supporters if they wanted "fewer or more Moroccans" in the Netherlands.
After supporters chanted back "fewer", he replied: "We'll organise that."
Mr Wilders denounced the trial as an attempt to suppress freedom of speech.
"This is a political process, and I refuse to co-operate with it. We have to talk about politics in parliament, not in the courtroom," he said in a statement read by his lawyer.
Image copyright AFP Image caption Mr Wilders did not appear in court on Monday and was represented by his two lawyers
But the prosecutor insisted Mr Wilders was wrong to assume that as a politician his remarks were exempt from laws on hate speech.
In 2011, Mr Wilders was acquitted of incitement after being accused of encouraging hatred towards Muslims.
The latest trial comes as opinion polls suggest the PVV is consistently faring well in polls, ahead of parliamentary elections in March.
The party is currently second, behind Prime Minister Mark Rutte's liberal VVD, and is predicted to win 23 seats in the 150-seat parliament.
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Spellslinger Skills a guest Nov 19th, 2013 1,319 Never a guest1,319Never
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rawdownloadcloneembedreportprint text 14.08 KB Innate Skill Spell Surge Instant 2 min cooldown Requires 50 Spell Power to activate. While Spell Surge is active, your spells will receive their Surge bonus when cast. ###################################################################################### ###################################################################################### # Assault, all done at level 1. So if you see 0 damage it just means # I don't have the scaling # # # ###################################################################################### Mobile Fire Start off with it Freeform Mobile 1 sec channel no cooldown Range 25m Deal 1 physical damage 3 times over 1.0s to foes. Surge Bonus: Damage increased to 1 per shot. Tier +0 damage per shot Tier 4 +25% Movement Speed while casting when used in combat Tier 8 Generate 2 Spell Power ###################################################################################### Charged Shot Unlocked through AMPs Freeform Stationary 2.4 sec charge 7 sec cooldown Range 35m Deal Magic damage to foes. C1: 2 dmg, 2.0s cd C2: 2 dmg, 3.0s cd C3: 5 dmg, 5.0s cd C4: 10 dmg, 7.0s cd Surge Bonus: Reach full charge in 1.2s Tier +1 damage Tier 4 Expands telegraph width by 1 meter Tier 8 +20% Spell Surge damage ###################################################################################### Ignite Unlocked at level 4 Freeform Mobile 1 sec cast no cooldown Range 35m Deal 2 Magic damage on impact and 4 magic damage over 8.0 seconds to foes. Periodic damage increases over time and applies more frequently. Surge Bonus: Deals 2 on impact and 6 over 8.0s seconds. ###################################################################################### Wild Barrage Unlocked at level 6 Freeform Mobile 2.5 sec channel 12 sec cooldown Range 25m Deal 1 physical damage 12 times over 2.5s to foes. Surge Bonus: Deals damage 16 times. Tier +0 damage per shot Tier 4 Now affects 10 foes Tier 8 Snares foes by 35% while channeling ###################################################################################### Frozen Bolt Unlocked at level 9 Freeform mobile 1.3 sec cast 6 sec cooldown Range 35m Deal 2 magic damage to foes. Snares by 35% for 6.25s Surge Bonus: Deals 2 magic damage Snares by 50% for 6.26s Tier +0 damage, +0.25s Snare Tier 4 Decreases cooldown by 1.0s Tier 8 Increases Snare effectiveness by 15% ###################################################################################### Rapid Fire Unlocked at level 11 Freeform Stationary 1.0 sec channel No cooldown Range 25m Deal 1 physical damage 3 times over 1.0s to foes. Surge Bonus: Damage increased to 1 per shot. Tier +0 damage per shot Tier 4 Restores 25% of a Dash Counter Tier 8 Genereates 2 Spell Power ###################################################################################### Flame Burst Unlocked at level 15 Freeform Instant 9 sec cooldown Range 35m This ability can only be used after a Critical Hit. Deal 4 magic damage to foes. Surge Bonus: Damage increased to 6 Tier +0 damage Tier 4 Expands telegraph width by 1 meter Tier 8 Each magic damage based ability cast reduces the cooldown by 1.0s. ###################################################################################### Assassinate Unlocked through AMPs Freeform Instant 8 sec recharge Deal 3 physical damage to a single foe. If the foe's health is critical (red), damage is increased to 5. Abililty Charges: 3 Surge Bonus: Damage is increased to 4 normally and 7 if the enemy's health is critical. Tier +0 damage, +0 critical damage Tier 4 +1 Max Charges Tier 8 Killing blows restore all ability charges ###################################################################################### True Shot Unlocked at level 21 Freeform Stationary 2 sec then multi-tap 20 sec cooldown Range 40m Deal 5 physical damage to foes. Pierces 35% armor. Fires 3 shots before going on cooldown and each shot fires 50% faster than the last. Surge Bonus: Initial cast time reduced to 1.2 seconds. Tier +0 damage Tier 4 +10 range Tier 8 +15% Armor Pierce ###################################################################################### Magic Missiles Unlocked at level 31 Freeform stationary 1.8 sec channel 8 sec cooldown Range 25m Deal 2 magic damage every 0.6s for 1.80s divided up amongst up to foes. Debuffs Magic Resist by 6% for 12.0s If a single target is impacted, applies debuff twice. Surge Bonus: Deals 3 damage Tier +0 damage Tier 4 Can now be cast while moving Tier 8 Apply full damage to all foes while Spell Surged ###################################################################################### ###################################################################################### ###################################################################################### # Support, all done at level 1. So if you see 0 damage it just means # I don't have the scaling # # # ###################################################################################### Runic Healing Unlocked at level 6 Targeted Mobile 2 sec channel 3 Focus/tick no cooldown Range 35m Heal an ally 1 health every 0.5s for 2.0s If cast while moving, the healing effect is reduced to 1. Surge Bonus: Healing increased to 1 while stationary and 1 while moving. Tier +0 health per tick Tier 4 Penalty for moving while channeling decreased to 20% Tier 8 Now heals a second ally within 5 meters of your target ###################################################################################### Distortion Unlocked at level 6 Freeform Instant 20 Focus 18 sec cooldown Range 35m Apply an absorption shield with 7 health to yourself and allies for 10.0s Surge Bonus: Shield health increased to 10 Tier +0 shield Tier 4 Duration increased to 20.0s Tier 8 Applies 1 Interrupt Armor as long as the shield persists ###################################################################################### Vitality burst Unlocked at level 9 Freeform Stationary 2.6 sec charge 9 Focus/charge 8 sec cooldown Heal yourself and the closest allies. C1: 2 health, 4.0s cd C2: 3 health, 6.0s cd C3: 8 health, 8.0s cd Surge Bonus: Reach full charge in 1.3s Tier +0 health Tier 4 +5 Range Tier 8 While Spell Surged restore 3 health over 4.0s to allies if fully charged. ###################################################################################### Astral Infusion Unlocked at level 11 Targeted Instant 48 Focus 1.0 min cooldown Range 35m Heal an ally for 10 health instantly and 1 health every 2.0s for 6.0s. Once buffed, the ally cannot be affected by Astral Infusion or Phantasmal Armor again for 15.0s Surge Bonus: Heals for 13 health instantly and 1 health every 2.0s. Tier +1 health, +0 health per tick Tier 4 Cooldown reduced by 10.0s Tier 8 Reduces damage taken 35% for 6.0s. ###################################################################################### Healing Salve Unlocked at level 13 Freeform Stationary 1 sec cast 28 Focus No cooldown Range 20m Apply a buff to yourself and the closest allies for 20.0s that heals for 1 health when damage is taken. This effect cannot occur more than once every 3.0s Surge Bonus: Healing increased to 1 Tier +0 health per proc Tier 4 Increases buff duration from 20.0s to 30.0s Tier 8 Increases max Health by 5 ###################################################################################### Dual Fire Unlocked at level 15 Freeform Mobile 1.6 sec cast 9 Focus 5 sec cooldown Range 25m Restore to 1 health to allies and deal 1 magic damage to foes. Increase ally Strikethrough chance by 3% and decreases for Strikethrough Chance by 3% for 13.5s Surge Bonus: Healing increased to 2 Damage increased to 2 Tier +0 health, +0 damage Tier 4 No cooldown Tier 8 Strikethrough buff and debuff increased to 5% ###################################################################################### Healing Torrent Unlocked through AMPs Freeform Mobile 1.3 sec cast 21 Focus Range 35m No cooldown Restore 5 health to yourself and the closest allies. The focus cost of this ability increases by 9 each time it is used within 8.0s of its previous use, stacks twice. Surge Bonus: Healing increased to 7 Tier +0 health Tier 4 Can now be cast while moving Tier 8 Debuff stack cap reduced to 1 ###################################################################################### Call of the Void Unlocked at level 21 Freeform Instant 18 Focus 18 sec cooldown Range 15m Create a 10 meter zone that heals allies within the zone for 0 health every 1.0s for 12.0s Surge Bonus: Heal increased to 1 per second Tier +0 health per tick Tier 4 +2 field radius Tier 8 Reduces all damage taken by 10% ###################################################################################### Regenerative Pulse Unlocked at level 24 Freeform Instant 24 Focus 15 sec cooldown Range 35m Restore 6 health divided up amongst up to allies. Surge Bonus: Restores 9 health Tier +0 health Tier 4 Cooldown is decreased by 5.0s if a single ally is impacted Tier 8 Protects from death for 2.0s divided up amongst 3 allies. ###################################################################################### Sustain Unlocked at level 27 Stationary 1.8 sec charge 12 focus/charge 6 sec cooldown Range 20m Heal yourself and the closet allies. C1: 3 health, 3.0s cd C2: 6 health, 6.0s cd Surge Bonus: Reach full charge in 0.9s Tier +0 health Tier 4 Now targets the lowest health allies Tier 8 +5 Range ###################################################################################### ###################################################################################### ###################################################################################### # Utility, all done at level 1. So if you see 0 damage it just means # I don't have the scaling # # # ###################################################################################### Gate Unlocked through AMPs Self Instant 25 Focus 30 Sec cooldown Blink forward 20 meters. Stun foes in your path for 3.0s Tier +0.1% Stun Tier 4 +1 Interrupt Armor Tier 8 If a foe is interrupted cooldown is reduced by 5.0s ###################################################################################### Cone of Frost Unlocked at 9 Freeform Instant 18 Focus 30 sec cooldown Range 25m Deal 3 magic damage to foes. Roots for 3.35s Tier +0 damage, +0.2s Root Tier 4 Cooldown reduced by 5.0s Tier 8 When the Root effect ends foes are Snared by 35% for 3.0s ###################################################################################### Void Slip Unlocked at 13 Self Instant multi-tap 1.0 min cooldown Transition into for the Void for 3.5s Removes all disables and drops the caster from any threat lists. Using the ability a second time will cause the caster to exit the Void early. Tier +0.3s duration Tier 4 Now removes all dispellable debuffs Tier 8 Restores 2% max Health every 1.0s ###################################################################################### Arcane Shock Unlocked at 15 Freeform Instant 12 Focus 20 sec cooldown Apply a sigil to foes which will automatically interrupt them if they start casting a spell in the 2.4s If a spell is interrupted, all foes will suffer 3 magic damage Tier +0.18s Interrupt, +0 damage Tier 4 Cooldown reduced by 5.0s Tier 8 Purges 1 buff ###################################################################################### Purify Unlocked at 18 Targeted Instant 15 Focus 6 sec cooldown Rage 35m Remove 1 debuff effect from an ally and other allies within 5 meters. Heal for 2 health. Tier +0 health Tier 4 No longer has a cooldown Tier 8 Now dispels all debuffs ###################################################################################### Gather Focus Unlocked at 18 Stationary 2 sec cast 30 sec cooldown Restore 102 Focus. Reduces the effect of all outgoing healing by 35% for 6.0s Tier +6 focus Tier 4 Restores 15% additional Focus when below 200 focus Tier 8 No longer debuffs outgoing healing ###################################################################################### Void Pact Unlocked through AMPs Mobile Instant 42 Focus 1.5 min cooldown Range 8m Create an 8 meter aura that lasts for 3.5s and buffs allies that enter for 10.0s Increases movement Speed by 25% Increases Assault Power by 8% Tier +0.25s aura, +0.7s buff Tier 4 +4 Aura Radius Tier 8 Increases Assault Power by 2% ###################################################################################### Spatial Shift Unlocked at 24 Targeted Stationary 1.5 sec 23 Focus 45 sec cooldown Range 20m Switches your position with a single foe's. During the 1.5s cast, the caster and target are Held in place. Additionally, the trip causes the target to become Disoriented for 6.0s. Tier +0.44s Disorient Tier 4 +5 Range Tier 8 Now Immune to damage while casting. ###################################################################################### Phase Shift Unlocked at 27 Instant 18 Focus 40 sec cooldown Increase Deflect chance by 80% for 3.2s Tier +0.1% duration Tier 4 Decrease cooldown by 10.0s an attack is deflected Tier 8 Deflects return 2 magic damage to the attacker ###################################################################################### Affinity Unlocked at 31 Targeted Instant 14 Focus 5 sec cooldown Range 35m Increase all healing an ally receives from you by 12% for 22.0s. Affinity can only affect 1 ally at a time. Tier +2.2s duration Tier 4 No longer has a cooldown Tier 8 +15 Range ######################################################################################
RAW Paste Data
Innate Skill Spell Surge Instant 2 min cooldown Requires 50 Spell Power to activate. While Spell Surge is active, your spells will receive their Surge bonus when cast. ###################################################################################### ###################################################################################### # Assault, all done at level 1. So if you see 0 damage it just means # I don't have the scaling # # # ###################################################################################### Mobile Fire Start off with it Freeform Mobile 1 sec channel no cooldown Range 25m Deal 1 physical damage 3 times over 1.0s to foes. Surge Bonus: Damage increased to 1 per shot. Tier +0 damage per shot Tier 4 +25% Movement Speed while casting when used in combat Tier 8 Generate 2 Spell Power ###################################################################################### Charged Shot Unlocked through AMPs Freeform Stationary 2.4 sec charge 7 sec cooldown Range 35m Deal Magic damage to foes. C1: 2 dmg, 2.0s cd C2: 2 dmg, 3.0s cd C3: 5 dmg, 5.0s cd C4: 10 dmg, 7.0s cd Surge Bonus: Reach full charge in 1.2s Tier +1 damage Tier 4 Expands telegraph width by 1 meter Tier 8 +20% Spell Surge damage ###################################################################################### Ignite Unlocked at level 4 Freeform Mobile 1 sec cast no cooldown Range 35m Deal 2 Magic damage on impact and 4 magic damage over 8.0 seconds to foes. Periodic damage increases over time and applies more frequently. Surge Bonus: Deals 2 on impact and 6 over 8.0s seconds. ###################################################################################### Wild Barrage Unlocked at level 6 Freeform Mobile 2.5 sec channel 12 sec cooldown Range 25m Deal 1 physical damage 12 times over 2.5s to foes. Surge Bonus: Deals damage 16 times. Tier +0 damage per shot Tier 4 Now affects 10 foes Tier 8 Snares foes by 35% while channeling ###################################################################################### Frozen Bolt Unlocked at level 9 Freeform mobile 1.3 sec cast 6 sec cooldown Range 35m Deal 2 magic damage to foes. Snares by 35% for 6.25s Surge Bonus: Deals 2 magic damage Snares by 50% for 6.26s Tier +0 damage, +0.25s Snare Tier 4 Decreases cooldown by 1.0s Tier 8 Increases Snare effectiveness by 15% ###################################################################################### Rapid Fire Unlocked at level 11 Freeform Stationary 1.0 sec channel No cooldown Range 25m Deal 1 physical damage 3 times over 1.0s to foes. Surge Bonus: Damage increased to 1 per shot. Tier +0 damage per shot Tier 4 Restores 25% of a Dash Counter Tier 8 Genereates 2 Spell Power ###################################################################################### Flame Burst Unlocked at level 15 Freeform Instant 9 sec cooldown Range 35m This ability can only be used after a Critical Hit. Deal 4 magic damage to foes. Surge Bonus: Damage increased to 6 Tier +0 damage Tier 4 Expands telegraph width by 1 meter Tier 8 Each magic damage based ability cast reduces the cooldown by 1.0s. ###################################################################################### Assassinate Unlocked through AMPs Freeform Instant 8 sec recharge Deal 3 physical damage to a single foe. If the foe's health is critical (red), damage is increased to 5. Abililty Charges: 3 Surge Bonus: Damage is increased to 4 normally and 7 if the enemy's health is critical. Tier +0 damage, +0 critical damage Tier 4 +1 Max Charges Tier 8 Killing blows restore all ability charges ###################################################################################### True Shot Unlocked at level 21 Freeform Stationary 2 sec then multi-tap 20 sec cooldown Range 40m Deal 5 physical damage to foes. Pierces 35% armor. Fires 3 shots before going on cooldown and each shot fires 50% faster than the last. Surge Bonus: Initial cast time reduced to 1.2 seconds. Tier +0 damage Tier 4 +10 range Tier 8 +15% Armor Pierce ###################################################################################### Magic Missiles Unlocked at level 31 Freeform stationary 1.8 sec channel 8 sec cooldown Range 25m Deal 2 magic damage every 0.6s for 1.80s divided up amongst up to foes. Debuffs Magic Resist by 6% for 12.0s If a single target is impacted, applies debuff twice. Surge Bonus: Deals 3 damage Tier +0 damage Tier 4 Can now be cast while moving Tier 8 Apply full damage to all foes while Spell Surged ###################################################################################### ###################################################################################### ###################################################################################### # Support, all done at level 1. So if you see 0 damage it just means # I don't have the scaling # # # ###################################################################################### Runic Healing Unlocked at level 6 Targeted Mobile 2 sec channel 3 Focus/tick no cooldown Range 35m Heal an ally 1 health every 0.5s for 2.0s If cast while moving, the healing effect is reduced to 1. Surge Bonus: Healing increased to 1 while stationary and 1 while moving. Tier +0 health per tick Tier 4 Penalty for moving while channeling decreased to 20% Tier 8 Now heals a second ally within 5 meters of your target ###################################################################################### Distortion Unlocked at level 6 Freeform Instant 20 Focus 18 sec cooldown Range 35m Apply an absorption shield with 7 health to yourself and allies for 10.0s Surge Bonus: Shield health increased to 10 Tier +0 shield Tier 4 Duration increased to 20.0s Tier 8 Applies 1 Interrupt Armor as long as the shield persists ###################################################################################### Vitality burst Unlocked at level 9 Freeform Stationary 2.6 sec charge 9 Focus/charge 8 sec cooldown Heal yourself and the closest allies. C1: 2 health, 4.0s cd C2: 3 health, 6.0s cd C3: 8 health, 8.0s cd Surge Bonus: Reach full charge in 1.3s Tier +0 health Tier 4 +5 Range Tier 8 While Spell Surged restore 3 health over 4.0s to allies if fully charged. ###################################################################################### Astral Infusion Unlocked at level 11 Targeted Instant 48 Focus 1.0 min cooldown Range 35m Heal an ally for 10 health instantly and 1 health every 2.0s for 6.0s. Once buffed, the ally cannot be affected by Astral Infusion or Phantasmal Armor again for 15.0s Surge Bonus: Heals for 13 health instantly and 1 health every 2.0s. Tier +1 health, +0 health per tick Tier 4 Cooldown reduced by 10.0s Tier 8 Reduces damage taken 35% for 6.0s. ###################################################################################### Healing Salve Unlocked at level 13 Freeform Stationary 1 sec cast 28 Focus No cooldown Range 20m Apply a buff to yourself and the closest allies for 20.0s that heals for 1 health when damage is taken. This effect cannot occur more than once every 3.0s Surge Bonus: Healing increased to 1 Tier +0 health per proc Tier 4 Increases buff duration from 20.0s to 30.0s Tier 8 Increases max Health by 5 ###################################################################################### Dual Fire Unlocked at level 15 Freeform Mobile 1.6 sec cast 9 Focus 5 sec cooldown Range 25m Restore to 1 health to allies and deal 1 magic damage to foes. Increase ally Strikethrough chance by 3% and decreases for Strikethrough Chance by 3% for 13.5s Surge Bonus: Healing increased to 2 Damage increased to 2 Tier +0 health, +0 damage Tier 4 No cooldown Tier 8 Strikethrough buff and debuff increased to 5% ###################################################################################### Healing Torrent Unlocked through AMPs Freeform Mobile 1.3 sec cast 21 Focus Range 35m No cooldown Restore 5 health to yourself and the closest allies. The focus cost of this ability increases by 9 each time it is used within 8.0s of its previous use, stacks twice. Surge Bonus: Healing increased to 7 Tier +0 health Tier 4 Can now be cast while moving Tier 8 Debuff stack cap reduced to 1 ###################################################################################### Call of the Void Unlocked at level 21 Freeform Instant 18 Focus 18 sec cooldown Range 15m Create a 10 meter zone that heals allies within the zone for 0 health every 1.0s for 12.0s Surge Bonus: Heal increased to 1 per second Tier +0 health per tick Tier 4 +2 field radius Tier 8 Reduces all damage taken by 10% ###################################################################################### Regenerative Pulse Unlocked at level 24 Freeform Instant 24 Focus 15 sec cooldown Range 35m Restore 6 health divided up amongst up to allies. Surge Bonus: Restores 9 health Tier +0 health Tier 4 Cooldown is decreased by 5.0s if a single ally is impacted Tier 8 Protects from death for 2.0s divided up amongst 3 allies. ###################################################################################### Sustain Unlocked at level 27 Stationary 1.8 sec charge 12 focus/charge 6 sec cooldown Range 20m Heal yourself and the closet allies. C1: 3 health, 3.0s cd C2: 6 health, 6.0s cd Surge Bonus: Reach full charge in 0.9s Tier +0 health Tier 4 Now targets the lowest health allies Tier 8 +5 Range ###################################################################################### ###################################################################################### ###################################################################################### # Utility, all done at level 1. So if you see 0 damage it just means # I don't have the scaling # # # ###################################################################################### Gate Unlocked through AMPs Self Instant 25 Focus 30 Sec cooldown Blink forward 20 meters. Stun foes in your path for 3.0s Tier +0.1% Stun Tier 4 +1 Interrupt Armor Tier 8 If a foe is interrupted cooldown is reduced by 5.0s ###################################################################################### Cone of Frost Unlocked at 9 Freeform Instant 18 Focus 30 sec cooldown Range 25m Deal 3 magic damage to foes. Roots for 3.35s Tier +0 damage, +0.2s Root Tier 4 Cooldown reduced by 5.0s Tier 8 When the Root effect ends foes are Snared by 35% for 3.0s ###################################################################################### Void Slip Unlocked at 13 Self Instant multi-tap 1.0 min cooldown Transition into for the Void for 3.5s Removes all disables and drops the caster from any threat lists. Using the ability a second time will cause the caster to exit the Void early. Tier +0.3s duration Tier 4 Now removes all dispellable debuffs Tier 8 Restores 2% max Health every 1.0s ###################################################################################### Arcane Shock Unlocked at 15 Freeform Instant 12 Focus 20 sec cooldown Apply a sigil to foes which will automatically interrupt them if they start casting a spell in the 2.4s If a spell is interrupted, all foes will suffer 3 magic damage Tier +0.18s Interrupt, +0 damage Tier 4 Cooldown reduced by 5.0s Tier 8 Purges 1 buff ###################################################################################### Purify Unlocked at 18 Targeted Instant 15 Focus 6 sec cooldown Rage 35m Remove 1 debuff effect from an ally and other allies within 5 meters. Heal for 2 health. Tier +0 health Tier 4 No longer has a cooldown Tier 8 Now dispels all debuffs ###################################################################################### Gather Focus Unlocked at 18 Stationary 2 sec cast 30 sec cooldown Restore 102 Focus. Reduces the effect of all outgoing healing by 35% for 6.0s Tier +6 focus Tier 4 Restores 15% additional Focus when below 200 focus Tier 8 No longer debuffs outgoing healing ###################################################################################### Void Pact Unlocked through AMPs Mobile Instant 42 Focus 1.5 min cooldown Range 8m Create an 8 meter aura that lasts for 3.5s and buffs allies that enter for 10.0s Increases movement Speed by 25% Increases Assault Power by 8% Tier +0.25s aura, +0.7s buff Tier 4 +4 Aura Radius Tier 8 Increases Assault Power by 2% ###################################################################################### Spatial Shift Unlocked at 24 Targeted Stationary 1.5 sec 23 Focus 45 sec cooldown Range 20m Switches your position with a single foe's. During the 1.5s cast, the caster and target are Held in place. Additionally, the trip causes the target to become Disoriented for 6.0s. Tier +0.44s Disorient Tier 4 +5 Range Tier 8 Now Immune to damage while casting. ###################################################################################### Phase Shift Unlocked at 27 Instant 18 Focus 40 sec cooldown Increase Deflect chance by 80% for 3.2s Tier +0.1% duration Tier 4 Decrease cooldown by 10.0s an attack is deflected Tier 8 Deflects return 2 magic damage to the attacker ###################################################################################### Affinity Unlocked at 31 Targeted Instant 14 Focus 5 sec cooldown Range 35m Increase all healing an ally receives from you by 12% for 22.0s. Affinity can only affect 1 ally at a time. Tier +2.2s duration Tier 4 No longer has a cooldown Tier 8 +15 Range ######################################################################################
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I am awake. I don’t recall falling asleep and am not real sure how I got into bed, but I am awake now. There is a very distant ringing in my ears, sort of like the aftermath of a concussive blast that makes you deaf, only this ringing seems far off inside my head. Must have had a rough night I suppose, although honestly I can’t really recall the previous evening or any evening for that matter. Yep, must have been one hell of a night.
I roll out of bed and my feet hit the cold, hard tile floor of my bedroom. Rubbing my hands over my face I try to shake the cobwebs of sleep – and whatever I may have drank last night – out of my head. Glancing out of the nearby window of the bedroom I see a gloomy, overcast sky and a light rain falling on the leafless forest of trees that surrounds my property. Is it fall? I honestly cannot remember. Ugh! I swear God, I will never drink that much again. I have made that same hollow promise a hundred times before I am sure.
Moving off of the bed, I walk down the hall and descend the staircase that leads to the main level of the house, the top three stairs creaking under my weight as they always do. Moving down the stairs, I can see outside through the Amityville Horror-style windows over the entryway that the drizzle and clouds have settled in and are likely going to be hanging around a while. I’m not going to go to work today.
Wait. I don’t have to work today, right? It’s the weekend, isn’t it? I shake my head vigorously and make that same hollow promise to God again. This day is going to be far worse than my night must have been.
The kitchen has a digital clock, so I stumble into it to check the day and time just to be sure I don’t need to call in – ahem – sick. Clock says 9am – I’m late if it’s a weekday – and it is Sunday. Excellent. Time to crash on the couch and do nothing. My God I am tired. That couch is calling my name right now.
I leave the kitchen and move through the archway into the living room, noticing that the hardwoods are just as cold as the tiled floors upstairs. A small shiver moves up my spine and I make a turn towards the thermostat to crank the heat up before lying down and covering up with the throw blanket hanging over the back of the couch.
The worn, cold leather of the couch creaks under my weight. I hear the familiar click of the thermostat as the heat kicks on and pull the blanket in tighter, close my eyes and try to fall asleep. Maybe this hangover – worst one I ever had and I still can’t remember the party. Hell yeah! – will be gone after a good late morning nap.
The whispers start immediately. I bolt upright on the couch, throwing the blanket aside as I do, and scan the room. Aside from me, the living room is empty.
The upstairs bathroom fan is running. Did I leave it on? Did I even go in the bathroom this morning?
I sneak quietly from the living room, through the kitchen and peek around the corner. Silent as a church mouse. I had to have been a ninja in a past life or something. I look up the stairs and see that the bathroom light is on and the exhaust fan is definitely running. Maybe I destroyed the toilet last night and left it running to kill the smell before stumbling to bed, I think.
But the whispering starts again and it is coming from the bathroom. No time for subtlety now, so I bolt up the stairs – the top three creak as usual – and burst into the bathroom. If there is someone in here they are about to get their ass kicked. But the bathroom is empty and the whispering has stopped.
Okay, I am far more hung over than I thought. I flip the bathroom wall switch to kill the lights and the fan then realize my bed isn’t far away at all. Sleep. I need sleep. I am so tired. The bed is there, in my room, dark and inviting. I will just sleep this off and wake up feeling much better. Time for that nap.
I lay down on the bed, sinking into the mattress like butter melting on a hot pan, pull the covers up to my chin, close my eyes and sleep.
Or at least I think I went to sleep. I am definitely awake but I don’t recall falling asleep or dreaming. The darkness has crept into the room like a stealthy thief, casting shadows on the far wall that look like little demons ready to jump out of their two dimensional wall canvas and attack as full blown three dimensional horrors. Must be night time because I can’t see anything through the window, but I can still hear the faint pattering of the rain on the roof.
I throw the blankets back, sit up and rub my face again. Still tired and groggy. And hung over. I leave the demons behind me on the bedroom wall and head to the bathroom. The light is still off so I flip it on. The light from the molded glass fixture dances all over like little crystal ballerinas and the exhaust fan comes on. I sneak a peek into the toilet – Nope. No prayers offered up to the porcelain god in here, I think to myself.
As I turn to the mirror to face myself and dreading the site I will behold in this rough state, sounds from downstairs freeze me in my tracks. It is the unmistakable sound of silverware on plates. Someone is eating dinner in my house.
The top three stairs creak once again as I fly down to the first floor, burst into the kitchen – throwing the door wide as I enter – and head towards the dinner table by the bay window. There are plates here, remnants of a half-eaten meal on each of them. But whoever was here, eating my food, left in a hurry when they heard me coming.
The hardwood floor leading to the front door sounds like a herd of elephants is holding a track meet on it. The bastards are running out the front door. As I quickly head to the entryway, I see the door close and hear the deadbolt click into place.
They have a key? They must have because they just locked the door from the outside. I peer through the stained glass window slits that sit on either side of the front door but I cannot see anyone in the cold, black, rain-soaked night. Enjoy the weather you pieces of shit.
The idea that someone was in my house, eating my food and has a key disturbs me. There were clearly more than one and while my past life ninja skills might help me fight them if they return, I don’t want to pin my survivability hopes on reincarnation theory. Besides, I am just so tired. Let the cops do their job.
I grab the phone off of the wall and dial 911. Nothing. I hang up and try again. Still nothing. There is no dial tone. Did they cut the lines? Bastards.
Now I am pissed. They were in my house, eating my food and now they have cut the phone lines? Well, they don’t have a car because I would have heard it fire up and drive off. Their asses are mine.
As I storm out of the kitchen towards the front door, I leave a trail of dinner plates, silverware, half-eaten food and anything else on the counters strewn on the floor. That dull ringing in my ears has intensified a bit, I am tired and groggy, but I don’t care. I am pissed.
I open the front door so fast I don’t even feel the brass handle in my palm. It slams shut behind me. Taking long, determined strides into my fog-covered front yard – seems the rain has let up – I start scanning for assholes and elbows because I am sure those fuckers are running away. I spend the next hour searching the yard along the tree line but don’t find any sign of people. Whoever they were, they are long gone now and dammit I am still tired as hell. I don’t have time for this.
As I head back to the house, I notice that the lights in the entryway are on. They cast a glowing image of those Amityville windows above the doorway onto the stone slab porch and front yard.
And the front door is open.
I don’t remember closing it but I know I heard it slam shut behind me. I break into a full run and charge into the house, stirring up a vortex of wet, dead leaves in my wake. I notice that the ringing in my ears has increased in intensity and I can hear the din of whispers over the tone in my head.
As I storm onto the cold, slick floor of the entryway I see three people. The first is clearly a priest of some sort. He is holding up a rosary with one hand and has a small, opened bible in the other. The second person is a short, sad looking woman with a floor length coat pulled tight around her, its fur-line trim and collar cinched closed with little wooden pegs.
The third person is my daughter.
I almost forgot I have a daughter. How could I forget her? She is beautiful, standing there in front of me. I have a tremendous sense of loss and realize I miss her so much, but cannot figure out why. Didn’t I just see her the other day? Well, didn’t I?
Images of a beach, the warm salty air on a windy day flash through my mind. My little girl is there and we are flying a kite. I can hear the waves crashing onto the sugar-sand shore and my daughter laughing as we run through the surf flying a kite. It was a great day. And she was so young, beautiful and full of life.
She is crying now, mouth covered by her hands as she scans the area of the entryway we are all standing in. She looks at me quickly then her gaze moves on, searching, but for what?
The sad, little woman with the fur-trimmed coat, however, looks right at me. She has a grim look on her face as she pats the priest on the shoulder and shakes her head. The priest stops waving that stupid rosary around, goes silent and then moves to hold my daughter as if to console her.
“He is here,” says the short woman.
My daughter lets out a sob and the ringing in my ears gets loud.
“He is confused and angry. He doesn’t understand yet.”
My daughter uncovers her mouth and her lips quiver. She squints her eyes as if to hold back more tears. “Can he hear me? What’s he saying?” she asks.
The short woman shakes her head. “It doesn’t work like that. He can hear you, yes. But I don’t hear what he says. Just emotions. Feelings. You can speak to him.”
My little girl, little no longer as I realize she is a full grown woman now, wipes tears away from her eyes, sniffles and offers a smile. I sort of laugh because she must think she is looking at me but instead she is looking just off to my left. But why wouldn’t she be able to look right at me? I am standing right in front of them all.
“Dad, you can go now. We are going to be okay. Mom and I love you and miss you so much but you have to go. You will be better off.” My daughter laughs a little and smiles that smile I always loved to see. “Don’t worry, I won’t let Mom sell the house. I know you love it.”
The ringing in my ears is nearly deafening now but I do not care. Why is she talking to me like this? Why does she want me to leave? And why is she not the ten year old girl from my memory?
I begin screaming these questions to her. The ringing has become full blown pain in my head but I don’t care. I press my hands to my ears trying to block out the noise and continue screaming my questions at my daughter.
The short woman shakes her head again. She casts a sad look towards my daughter. “He is angry. He is screaming at you – I can’t hear the words – but he doesn’t understand why you are saying these things. He is very, very confused. He doesn’t know it is time to move on from this life.”
Wait. What did she just say? I stop screaming and lower my hands. The ringing in my ears is subsiding and instead begins a slow decent into a single, harmonious tone. What does she mean that it’s time to move on?
My daughter smiles again. I have missed that so much. “Daddy, we love you. It is time for you to move on. You can’t keep scaring the hell out of Mom and I. We appreciate you staying with us to make sure we are okay – and we are – but you need to go.”
Behind my daughter, the kitchen doorway suddenly flares to life with the brightest light I have ever seen – pure, clean and inviting. That harmonious tone grows louder. Not painful, but inviting. I look away and to the three people standing before me. They do not see the light. It beckons me, so I begin to walk towards it.
The short woman pats my daughters hand a nods her head. Her smile tells me she knows what is happening even if I do not. I move closer to the light, its beams of white falling over me like long, loving arms pulling me into their embrace. The tunnel entrance is so close now but I stop and turn to look at my daughter one last time. I mouth the words I love you knowing that no sound will come from my lips. The short woman whispers to my daughter. She sobs briefly then says “I love you, too, Daddy.”
I step into the tunnel and let the light take me. The tunnel isn’t very long and the light near the end begins to shift. I can smell warm, salty air and I hear the crash of waves on a sugar-sand shore. My little girl giggles.
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It was the free eyeliner that did it. After over a year of avoidance I caved in and bought a copy of Glamour and yes, it’s as rubbish as it ever was (but “hey, it’s okay if your new sandals require strategically placed plasters to be wearable”. So, there’s that).
Peak Glamour Rubbishness comes on page 91, with a piece by Stephen Armstrong on “girl envy” (yes, I know). It’s one of those sleazy, sugar-coated MRA-in-disguise articles that tells you “hey ladies, you’re so great, what with your ability to multi-task, always look perfect, bear my children and do lots of shitty jobs so that I don’t have to!” Gee, thanks. Always good to know my subjugation is appreciated.
The piece goes on for three pages, providing plenty of choice nonsense to pick from. My particular faves include Armstrong quoting a fellow journalist, George, on what women are like once they’ve had given birth:
Mid-life crisis? Women have no time for that shit. From the outside, pregnancy looks like a nine-month crash course in the meaning of life. We men, on the other hand, seem destined to spend our late forties seeking enlightenment in Lycra that doesn’t fit, on carbon fibre bikes we can’t afford, doing triathlons. Yes, childbirth might do us a favour.
Yes, George. That is EXACTLY what it’s like. Post-natal depression? Never heard of it. Unhappy mothers in their late forties? Don’t exist. And then there’s Armstrong himself on why it looks like we ladies are “having a lot more fun”:
When we see you across the room – through a bustling party, in a high-powered meeting, back to the table after 15 minutes in the powder room or walking towards the bed – there’s something about the way you move, your mischievous smile, the smart joke and the totally sorted view of what’s needed that stops our heart and catches our breath.
It’s at this point you start to wonder whether Armstrong has met any women in real life or bases his whole reading of half the human race on TV adverts and rom coms. Certainly, he doesn’t seem to think women have an inner life in the way that men do. We don’t have any of those messy crises. We don’t feel conflicted or challenged or incompetent. We just sashay across the room, spreading sweetness and light, making everyone feel better with our “totally sorted view”. Jesus Christ. Thank god we’re not actual real, live people since that would really make things inconvenient for Stephen and George.
The whole piece reminds me of another, supposedly different in outlook and intent, which I read earlier today. Discussing feminism and trans rights, the author – a trans woman – offers up a similarly dismissive, dehumanising view of what adult human females are. Apparently we’re not unique individuals, born into and experiencing a female body, with all of the cultural conditioning and oppression that entails. Don’t be silly! As in the Glamour piece, we don’t get to be real in any meaningful sense, although the argument here is not simply that we’re amazing TV advert women, but that our female bodies don’t mean anything anyhow.
The author mocks “transphobic” feminists for their “nostalgic imaginations of feminism’s nature-over-nurture iconification of the True Female Body”. That’s right – STFU about your periods and your menopause, you fucking flat-earthers! Womanhood’s all about performance now, innit, and hence we’re back at Armstrong’s “the way you move, your mischievous smile, the smart joke and the totally sorted view of what’s needed”. It’s not about your body, your mind and what your experiences mean to you. Women are permitted no interiority other than that defined by males. Fuck this shit and fuck any attempts to characterise such thinking as remotely feminist in nature.
What we have is a movement to impose restrictive stereotypes on all people born female that seems to come from both “sides” – the right (Glamour man) who wants to flatter women into submission to his fantasy and the left (anti-feminist trans woman) who treats womanhood as a plastic fantasy albeit one that can be freely chosen. In truth, we are dealing with same side: patriarchy. In both cases, women have to renounce engagement with their own female bodies as they experience them (“girl envy” shall not be sullied by the thought of brown, sticky menstrual blood) in order to play along with an ideal that exists only on the surface, in make-up, tits, labia, vagina, long hair, dresses, the way you walk, the way you talk, but never in the pain you feel and the life you live. It’s what males see and project onto us, not what we experience. That, ultimately, is all we are allowed to be: the surface. It is nothing short of a denial of our humanity.
Male fantasies of what women are may vary in detail, but they have this as their common feature: we are what those born male say we are, not what we suffer, think, desire or need. To pretend that this flatters us or even liberates us from the ravages of gender is frankly absurd. It matters not whether you are mocking women for daring to describe their biological reality – a reality that has been demonised, controlled and talked over for millennia – or “celebrating” women for being the multi-tasking robot dolls you always wanted them to be. You still believe you own us and set the boundaries of what we are permitted to be. No one who truly loves women, respects them and does not believe themselves to be innately superior to them could possibly think like this.
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'It's Death or the Ejection Seat': 50 Years Since the First Space Rendezvous (Part 1)
Just before Christmas in 1965—50 years ago, next week—a pair of Gemini spacecraft serenely circled Earth together and in close proximity. Aboard Gemini VII, astronauts Frank Borman and Jim Lovell were midway through a record-breaking 14-day mission to spend the equivalent of a long-duration lunar voyage in Earth orbit, whilst aboard Gemini VI-A fellow astronauts Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford had taken the lead in executing the world’s first rendezvous between a pair of piloted vehicles in space. It was a critical step toward achieving the late President Kennedy’s goal of human bootprints on the Moon before 1970. Although the Soviet Union had managed to bring two spacecraft close together during the Vostok era, they had not performed true rendezvous. Yet the Gemini success came at the end of two disappointing months which saw a rocket explode, a pair of manned missions combined into one, a vice president fall asleep in the simulator, and a hairy on-the-pad launch abort which could easily have spelled death for Schirra and Stafford.
Flying for longer periods in space, according to flight surgeon Chuck Berry, had “qualified man to go to the Moon.” In August 1965, astronauts Gordo Cooper and Pete Conrad returned in good physical shape after eight days in orbit. Next up, in late October, Schirra and Stafford would spend just two days aloft, but would actively bring their Gemini VI craft close to a Lockheed-built Agena-D target vehicle, launched atop an Atlas booster. The importance of the flight was such that both the prime crew and their backups, Virgil “Gus” Grissom and John Young, were highly experienced. Although it would be Tom Stafford’s first mission, he was already recognized as an expert in space rendezvous. Having said this, Grissom wanted command of the first Apollo mission and pursued it relentlessly. In his autobiography, We Have Capture, Stafford noted that although Young sat through simulations with them, Grissom was often absent, racing cars or boats. Following Gemini VI would come the 14-day Gemini VII, sometime early in 1966, with Borman and Lovell.
All that changed on 25 October 1965.
Although the so-called Gemini-Agena Target Vehicle (GATV) was a fundamental aid in demonstrating rendezvous, docking and performing linked exercises in space, doubts about its reliability were prevalent within NASA. Some managers felt that it could not be trusted to execute maneuvers with a docked Gemini, although Wally Schirra lobbied for it to fly. He also wanted a firing of the Agena’s less powerful secondary propulsion system, although this was not initially incorporated into the Gemini VI flight plan.
First up would be the Agena, mounted atop its Atlas rocket, from Cape Canaveral’s Pad 14, boosted into a 200-mile (320-km) circular orbit. One hundred minutes later, Schirra and Stafford would follow aboard Gemini VI from Pad 19, their Titan II injecting them into a lower orbit. “Two hundred and seventy degrees behind the Agena,” wrote Stafford, “you’d make a series of maneuvers that would eventually raise the orbit of the Gemini to a circular one below the Agena. Then you’d glide up below the Agena on the fourth revolution. At that time the crew would make a series of maneuvers to an intercept trajectory, then break to station-keeping and docking.” This docking would occur over the Indian Ocean—some six hours into the mission—and after which Schirra and Stafford would remain linked for seven hours and return to Earth following their battery-restricted two-day flight. The crew wanted to relight the Agena’s engine whilst docked, but NASA vetoed it as too ambitious.
The rendezvous, Schirra explained years later, utilized the Hohmann Transfer, which he described as “the most efficient, quickest and prettiest way to do a rendezvous,” but added that “it is also intolerant of error; if you blow the rendezvous, fuel and time constraints won’t permit another try.” During their training in the second half of 1965, the astronauts practiced maneuvers again and again, plotting them on boards. In total, they did more than 50 practice runs and spent hours rehearsing the docking with the Agena in a Houston, Texas, trainer. “Housed in a six-story building,” wrote Schirra in his memoir, Schirra’s Space, “it consisted of a full-scale Gemini cockpit and the docking adaptor of the Agena. They were two separate vehicles in an air-drive system that moved back and forth free of friction. We exerted control in the cockpit with small thrusters, identical to those on the spacecraft. We could go up and down, left and right, back and forth. The target could be maneuvered in those planes as well, though it was inert. It would move if we pushed against it, just as we assumed the Agena would do in space.”
On one occasion, Schirra hosted Vice President Hubert Humphrey in the pilot’s seat. Humphrey asked if their voices could be heard from outside the trainer. When Schirra replied that it was sound-proofed, Humphrey asked if Schirra minded him taking a nap. When Humphrey awoke, he asked Schirra to tell him what had happened so that he could tell the people outside. “I was a fan of Hubert Humphrey from that day on,” wrote Schirra.
Gemini VI was the last of the series to run solely on battery power, thus limiting the two astronauts to no more than 48 hours in space. Although by September 1965 NASA was pushing for just one day aloft, if all objectives were completed. “Secondary” experiments were kept to a barebones minimum. Schirra’s attitude was that rendezvous was a significant challenge and left no time to “play” with experiments.
Early on 25 October, out at Pad 14, a team from General Dynamics oversaw the final hours of the Atlas-Agena countdown. The Atlas booster, tipped with the thin, pencil-like Agena, was scheduled to fly at precisely 10:00 a.m. EST. Meanwhile, Schirra—who was struggling to give up smoking—lit up a cigarette during the ride to Pad 19. He felt, wrote Stafford, that “he could survive a twenty-four-hour flight without getting the shakes.” At length, General Dynamics launch manager Thomas O’Malley pressed the firing button for the Atlas-Agena at 10:00 a.m., and the first half of the mission got underway.
Or so it seemed.
There seemed little reason to doubt that the Agena would fly perfectly. The countdown had gone well. The Agena had a heritage of 140 previous flights since 1959, and its reliability was very good. It would separate from the Atlas high above the Atlantic Ocean, then fire its engine over Ascension Island to boost itself into orbit. Finally, at 11:41 a.m., Schirra and Stafford would ride their Titan into space to initiate the rendezvous.
Almost immediately after the Atlas-Agena lifted off, things started to go catastrophically wrong. It would appear that the Agena separated properly from its carrier rocket, but seemed to “wobble” a little, despite the efforts of its attitude-control mechanism to steady it. Right on time, its engine flared to life…and nothing more was heard. It had reached an altitude of about 150 miles (240 km) and was 500 miles (800 km) downrange of the Cape. Fourteen minutes after liftoff, specialists at the Bermuda radar station expected to receive tracking. They saw nothing, save the signatures of five large fragments.
Out at Pad 19, Schirra and Stafford were listening to the updates and were puzzled. “Maybe it’s the tracking station,” Schirra speculated. “Let’s wait for Ascension Island.” Their countdown was held, but at length Ascension, too, saw nothing. Later, the Carnarvon station in Australia saw nothing, and the assumption had to be made that the target vehicle had been lost. Subsequent investigation revealed that the Agena had exploded, due to a pre-launch change in the oxidizer feed sequence protocol. If it represented a failure with the vehicle, the issue spelled trouble for Project Gemini, which depended upon the Agena as its primary rendezvous target. In the meantime, a disappointed Schirra and Stafford were extracted from Gemini VI and headed off into town with Chief Astronaut Al Shepard and backup crewman John Young.
“Boys,” Shepard told them, “what we need is a good party!”
A new Agena would not be ready until early 1966, but a perfect alternative lay on the horizon. Immediately after the Agena’s loss, Frank Borman overheard a conversation between McDonnell officials Walter Burke and John Yardley: the former suggested launching Gemini VII as Schirra and Stafford’s “new” docking target. A study of sending Geminis up in quick succession had been done months earlier and seemed ideal, but for one thing. Burke sketched his idea onto the back of an envelope, but Borman doubted the practicality of installing an inflatable cone onto the end of Gemini VII to permit a physical docking. Several senior NASA managers, including George Mueller and Charles Mathews, dismissed the entire idea, since it would require the launch of both Geminis within an impossibly tight two-week period.
Others thought it could be done. Joseph Verlander and Jack Albert proposed stacking a Titan II and placing it into storage until another had been assembled. The Titan’s engine contractor, Aerojet-General, had stipulated that the vehicle must remain upright, but this could be achieved and the rocket kept on the Cape’s disused Pad 20. Immediately after the first Gemini’s launch from Pad 19, the second Titan could be moved into position and sent aloft within a week. The plan, however, carried little appeal and received little enthusiasm, with most attention focused on swapping the lighter Gemini VI for the heavier Gemini VII, thereby making good of a bad situation by using the Titan II already on the pad to fly Borman and Lovell’s 14-day mission.
Over the following days, as this was discussed in the higher echelons of NASA management, it became evident that if the two spacecraft were swapped, the earliest that Borman and Lovell could be launched would be 3 December 1965. However, if the Gemini VII spacecraft was too heavy for Gemini VI’s Titan, a delay until around 8 December would become necessary to erect the more powerful Gemini VII Titan. It was then envisaged to launch Schirra and Stafford on their rendezvous mission with another Agena sometime in February or early March 1966.
As these plans crystallized, Burke and Yardley posed their joint-flight idea to senior NASA officials, who found few technical obstacles, with the exception that the Gemini tracking network might struggle to handle two missions simultaneously. At first, Flight Director Chris Kraft thought they were out of their minds, but after consulting his control team and Deke Slayton, the head of Flight Crew Operations, relented. The prospects for Burke and Yardley’s plan steadily brightened when it became clear that the heavy Gemini VII—which, after all, was intended to support a mission seven times longer than Gemini VI—could not be lofted into orbit by Schirra and Stafford’s Titan II: the booster lacked the necessary impulse. Yet the question of tracking two vehicles at the same time remained.
Then, another possibility was aired. Could the tracking network handle the joint mission if Gemini VII were regarded as a “passive” target for Gemini VI? Borman and Lovell would launch first and control of their flight would proceed normally as Gemini VI was prepared to fly. As soon as controllers were sure that Gemini VII was operating satisfactorily, they would turn their attention to launching Gemini VI; in the meantime, Borman and Lovell’s flight would be treated like a Mercury mission, wrote Deke Slayton, “where the telemetry came to Mission Control by teletype, letting the active rendezvous craft have the real-time channels that were available.” This mode would continue until “Gemini VI-A”—renamed to distinguish it from the original Agena-based mission—had completed its tasks and returned to Earth. After Schirra and Stafford’s splashdown, Borman and Lovell would again become the focus of the tracking network.
Before NASA Headquarters had even come to a decision, the rumor mill had already informed the press, some of whom reported the possibility of a dual-Gemini spectacular. On 27 October, Administrator Jim Webb and his senior staff discussed the idea and issued a proposal for the joint flight to the White House. He informed President Lyndon B. Johnson that, barring serious damage to Pad 19 after the Gemini VII launch, Schirra and Stafford’s Titan could be flown within days to rendezvous with Borman and Lovell. Johnson, residing at his ranch in Austin, Texas, approved the plan on 28 October, and his press secretary announced it would fly in January 1966. At NASA, however, December 1965 was considered more desirable.
As October turned to November, preparations gathered pace. Gemini VI-A’s Titan was destacked and placed in bonded storage under plastic covers, and the heavy-lift Titan for Gemini VII was erected in its place. Pad Leader Guenter Wendt’s first reaction when he saw the short, nine-day Gemini VI-A pad schedule was “Oh, man, you are crazy!” Although Schirra and Stafford’s mission would essentially not change, that of Borman and Lovell was slightly adjusted to circularize its orbit and mimic the Agena’s flight path as closely as possible. Yet their own mission was fraught with great risk.
Since their assignment to Gemini VII, Borman and Lovell had been intensely focused on their primary objective: to spend 14 days in space, thereby demonstrating that astronauts could physically and psychologically withstand a maximum-length trip to the Moon and back. The results from the two previous long-duration flights, Gemini IV and Gemini V, had been mixed. Jim McDivitt and Ed White had returned fatigued after four days, while Gordo Cooper and Pete Conrad had hardly enjoyed their eight days sitting in an area the size of the front seat of a Volkswagen Beetle. Sleeping in shifts of four or five hours apiece had proven impractical, Borman and Lovell learned, so they resolved to sleep and work together. Moreover, they felt that their “work” time would not benefit from a rigid plan, opting instead for a broader outline which they could adapt in orbit.
At 2:30 p.m. EST on 4 December 1965, Gemini VII roared into orbit. “We’re on our way, Frank!” yelled Lovell as the Titan rolled and pitched in its ascent trajectory, achieving orbit five and a half minutes later. After a station-keeping exercise with the Titan, they settled down to eight days of experiments, ahead of the launch of Gemini VI-A and the rendezvous. As the flight wore on, conditions became increasingly less comfortable, with both men complaining of stuffy noses and burning eyes. The cabin, Borman reported, was too warm. Removing their suits helped, yet even that had been a matter of some debate on the ground.
Days earlier, on 29 November, Bob Gilruth had requested approval from NASA Headquarters for the astronauts to remove their suits after the second sleep period and only don them at critical junctures, such as rendezvous and re-entry. By the time Gemini VII launched, the plan had been amended slightly: One of them had to be suited at all times, but the other could remove his garment for up to 24 hours. Both men, however, had to be fully-suited for rendezvous and re-entry. Still, the intense discomfort was there and, as the mission wore on with no major issues, the rationale behind the one-suit-on/one-suit-off decision became unsupportable.
Even with his suit unzipped and gloves off Borman sweated heavily, while the unsuited Lovell remained dry. After 24 hours, Lovell asked to sleep unsuited, to which Borman agreed, despite his own discomfort. Lovell, the larger of the two, had more difficulty getting out of his suit in the confined cabin and, although he donned some lightweight flight coveralls for a few minutes, he removed them just as quickly, due to the intense warmth.
After four days of this torment, Borman asked the flight controller on the Coastal Sentry Quebec tracking ship to ask Chris Kraft about the chances of both men taking off their suits. Capcom Gene Cernan discussed the request, firstly, with Deke Slayton, before approaching Kraft, but there was little option but to ask Lovell to put his suit back on so that Borman could remove his suit. Concern was mounting, however, about how alert the astronauts would be for the Gemini VI-A rendezvous if they were so hot and uncomfortable. Bob Gilruth certainly favoured both men having their suits off at the same time, and Chuck Berry, looking at the biomedical data, saw clear signs that blood pressures and pulse rates were closer to normal when Borman and Lovell were unsuited. Eventually, on 12 December—the very day that Schirra and Stafford were due to fly—NASA Headquarters finally agreed to allow the Gemini VII crew to remove their uncomfortable suits.
The astronauts’ patience was, however, tried on a number of occasions—most notably when a urine bag broke in Borman’s hands. “Before or after?” asked Chuck Berry. When Borman affirmed it was after, Berry replied “Sorry about that, chief.” After the flight, Lovell would describe their living and working conditions in a similar manner to Cooper and Conrad: like sitting in a men’s toilet for a fortnight without access to a shower. This did not bode well for the physicians. After splashdown, one of their tasks was to examine calcium loss in space, and they would be obliged to not only sift through Borman and Lovell’s liquid and solid waste, but also microscopically analyze the contents of their underwear.
In the meantime, Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford’s Gemini VI-A Titan had been raised on Pad 19 on 5 December. A computer problem quashed hopes to launch on the 11th, but the prospects were bright for a second attempt the next day. Launch was scheduled for six seconds past 9:54 a.m., and the countdown clock ticked perfectly toward an on-time liftoff. Precisely on cue, the Titan’s first-stage engines ignited with a high-pitched whine.
Then, after less than 1.2 seconds, they shut down.
Instantly, Schirra, his hand clasping the D-handle to fire their ejection seats, faced a life-or-death decision. The mission clock on the instrument panel had started running—as it would in response to the vehicle lifting off—but he could feel no movement. If the Titan had climbed even a few inches, there was a very real risk that its full load of volatile propellants could explode in a holocaust. In his autobiography, Stafford remembered vividly the moment that the behemoth came alive and, just as vividly, the instant at which its roar ceased. “The sound of the engines died even though the clock started and the computer light came on, both indications that we had lifted off,” he wrote. “But I could feel that we hadn’t moved. More important, there was no word from [Capcom] Al Bean confirming liftoff, which was critical.” In fact, it was the feeling of stillness that convinced Schirra not to risk ejecting.
Kenneth Hecht, head of the Gemini escape and recovery office, was surprised that he did not eject, but in reality, neither Schirra nor Stafford had much confidence in the seats and instinctively desired to remain with their “bird” as long as possible. Stafford felt that the 20G acceleration of an ejection would have left him with, at best, a cricked neck for months. Moreover, there was a very real risk of death.
Yet Schirra would not have put them in any undue danger. “If that booster was about to blow,” he said, “if we really had a liftoff and settled back on the pad, there was no choice. It’s death or the ejection seat.”
The second part of this article will appear tomorrow.
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Still mourning the loss of Chick-fil-A’s Chicken Salad Sandwiches? Fortunately for you, Chick-fil-A has just the thing to fill the sandwich-sized hole in your heart: more chicken.
On Monday, the Atlanta-based chain announced the addition of two new spicy chicken offerings — Spicy Chick-n-Strips and a Grilled Spicy Deluxe Chicken Sandwich — to be available in select cities across the United States.
CHICK-FIL-A EARNS HIGH MARKS IN CUSTOMER SATISFACTION SURVEY
“We’ve heard from our customers how much they love our current spicy menu offerings, so we’re really excited to give them even more spicy flavor options to enjoy,” said Kanika Patrick, Chick-fil-A’s manager of menu development, in a statement posted to Chick-fil-A’s Chicken Wire.
Both new menu items are essentially re-worked, spicier versions of two of the chain’s existing offerings. The Spicy Chick-n-Strips, much like the original Chick-n-Strips, are hand-breaded and pressure-cooked in peanut oil, but they’re also “seasoned with a spicy blend of peppers,” according to the press release. Likewise, the new Grilled Spicy Chicken Deluxe Sandwich is made with a chicken breast marinated in “spicy seasoning,” which is presumably what gives it an orangey hue.
The sandwiches, too, will be served on Chick-fil-A’s new multigrain brioche bun, along with colby jack cheese, lettuce, tomato and a new Cilantro Lime sauce.
CHICK-FIL-A PATRONS TRASH RESTAURANT AFTER HEATED EXCHANGE WITH STAFF
But before you run off to your nearest Chick-fil-A for a bite, be aware that these new offerings aren’t available just anywhere.
The chain’s new Spicy Chick-n-Strips have only debuted at participating restaurants in Central Texas, South Texas and Philadelphia, while the Grilled Spicy Deluxe Chicken Sandwich is only available at participating locations in St. Louis, Orlando, and Knoxville, Tenn.
“We hope our guests in the test cities will try the new Spicy Chick-n-Strips and Grilled Spicy Deluxe Chicken Sandwich and let us know what they think — their feedback will help us determine whether or not we will roll out the new entrees nationwide in the future,” says Patrick.
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Chick-fil-A's spicy new offerings aren't the only news they've announced in recent weeks: In September, the chain announced plans to build its largest — and also its narrowest — store ever, set to open in 2018 in New York City.
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To Shake Hands or To Not Shake Hands: A Helms Blog
I feel kind of silly even writing about this, but as it seems to be a wee “hot topic” at the moment, I’d thought I share my personal opinion for one reason and one reason only, I don’t want this to be an issue for any other upcoming talents! This business is hard enough to succeed in as it is, and to be honest it really is a stupid thing to have to debate anyway. That being said …
No need to discuss the particulars involved, I’m sure if you’re reading this, you probably already know them by name anyhow. But trust me, this isn’t the first time this has been an issue in the “locker room.” So, here goes: For those of you that don’t know, there is a tradition among locker rooms, not all, but I’d say a lot, and I’d definitely say in the WWE locker room of shaking hands when you get to the building. You go up to the vets, the other boys, the refs, the girls, just whomever you work with, and politely shake their hand … for no other reason than as a sign of respect. That’s ALL IT IS. It’s not a submissive motion, it doesn’t make you less of a man, it’s not a judgment (although you will be judged if you don’t do it) it’s just a way of saying hello in a polite and respectful manner. And in a locker room (such as WWE) that is inhabited by more than a few veterans and guys who have paved the way for us all, respect is kind of a big deal. And that applies to everyone that works there. I’ve seen Taker, HHH, Flair, Austin, Rock, all the big names and a ton I didn’t mention, for brevity’s sake, do this. I did it almost every fucking show! I’d get to the locker room and I’d walk around and say hey to everyone, the only exceptions would be if I just saw them in the last few hours or so. Hell, I do it on Indy shows! Whether it was WFX in Canada, BTW or PWG in Cali, LLUSA DreamWave, IGF in Japan, everywhere I work, I introduce myself to people if I don’t know them and I try to say hey to everyone. I’m sure I’ve missed a hand shake or two in my life but I always made a strong effort. Do some VETS who’ve been around for decades appreciate it if the younger talent makes the first move, of course they do. It’s a simple gesture of respect, which in most cases has been earned. It’s not a “this guy is a bigger star than me or that guy is a better worker than me” it’s not that at all. And if you take it as such, then maybe the problem is within you. And before anyone says anything, yes a VET can be disrespectful at times, I’ve been on the receiving end of that as well, but the difference is, they already have a job!
NOW … if you don’t work there, and you’re trying to get hired, MIGHT I SUGGEST to those of you who don’t know of this tradition that you JUST DO IT! I mean, why would you NOT wanna meet everyone in the locker room that YOU wanna be a part of?? Why would you NOT wanna introduce yourself to the commentators, or referees, or management?? Yeah, it kinda takes some people out of their comfort zone for a second, but so what?? Just do it! Because you know what … it WILL be noticed if you don’t! It WILL be taken as a sign of disrespect … and this is key here … whether that was your intent or not! And it WILL look bad upon you and may even have an effect on whether you get the job that you probably worked your ass off to get a chance at. It’s such a tiny gesture, just do it guys/gals because … and TRUST ME on this … you will have PLENTY of opportunities to get heat later!! Trust me! :-)
In final, to any talents reading this, if you get a chance to get a tryout match with WWE, TNA, LLUSA, ROH, or even if it’s your local Indy promotion, just assume that people are watching. You’re there to get noticed right? Right? So, don’t be shocked when people notice things. It’s the Entertainment world, and I wish it relied solely on your in-ring performance, but that’s not the world we exist in. It never has been and it probably never will be. Besides, would a lil more respect actually hurt our business?? Cuz I think, respect is one of the things it’s missing. Thx for reading.
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Colombia confirmed Thursday that the United States has requested that its South American ally receive inmates from the US-run Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba.
Uruguay and Brazil were also asked to take on “Gitmo” detainees being held under suspicions related to terrorism.
“The government has listened to this request carefully from the United States,” said Foreign Minister Maria Angela Holguin, who said a full study of the matter by the Foreign Ministry will precede any formal decision.
Earlier this week, Uruguay agreed to take in five prisoners from the detention camp as refugees.
US President Barack Obama committed to closing Guantanamo Bay during his first presidential campaign in 2008. Now, well into his second term in office, the prison remains open, housing some 154 terrorism suspects.
Guantanamo Bay, a US naval base-turned detention camp in Cuba, began holding prisoners following terror attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, DC on September 11, 2001.
The prison has since become a target of international and domestic scrutiny over possible violations of human right and international laws.
Colombia and the United States are strong military allies. An extradition policy that sends Colombian prisoners charged with crimes related to drug trafficking to the United States has been in place between the two countries since the late 1990s, but whether Colombia will be able to accept Guantanamo inmates likely depends on its ability to guarantee the security of its struggling prison system.
MORE: Prison code reform good news for 9000 Colombian convicts
Colombian jails have become dramatically overcrowded, leading authorities to approve an early release program for low-level offenders. Corruption within the prison security system, meanwhile, allows captured leaders to run criminal organizations from their cell blocks.
Sources
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South Texas law professor (and my former constitutional law student) Josh Blackman has a very useful summary in National Review of Donald Trump’s lack of respect for the Constitution and the threat this poses to the rule of law if he’s elected. I was aware of much of what Blackman writes, but the following was new to me:
On Meet the Press, Trump was asked whether he would rely on executive action in the manner of President Obama. “I won’t refuse it. I’m going to do a lot of things,” Trump replied. “I mean, [President Obama] led the way, to be honest with you,” he added. But rest assured, Trump noted, “I’m going to use [executive actions] much better and they’re going to serve a much better purpose than he’s done.”
So after years of reveling in criticisms of Obama’s constitutional neglect, including rather sober and well-documented criticisms (if I do so say myself), a plurality has nominated a man who doesn’t even pretend for campaign purposes to respect the Constitution (say what you will about the current president, he certainly promised to respect the Constitution and the separation of powers during his first presidential campaign). This suggests that for a large part of the base, hostility to various unilateral actions by Obama was about dislike of Obama, not in defense of the rule of law. The constitutionalist vote went primarily to Ted Cruz (who wrote a very good introduction to my book), but that vote turned out to be rather small, judging not only by Trump’s victory but also by the fact that Cruz emphasized other issues.
Meanwhile, the Obama fans who have enabled the president’s frequent disrespect for the Constitution and the rule of law, deflecting criticism with allegations of everything from lunacy to racism to “delegitimization” are unlikely to be happy if and when President Trump (uggh!) engages in God-knows-what unilateral actions. When challenged, Trump will cite the Obama administration’s actions regarding Obamacare, immigration and more as precedent. I’ve consistently heard it argued that Obama had “no choice” but to go around the “obstructionist” Congress. So if Congress declines to go along with some of Trump’s more, ahem, creative ideas, what argument will Democrats use against him?
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The Pro Football Hall of Fame will induct their class of 2016 tonight and with that comes the inevitable speculation of who should have or shouldn’t have been inducted.
The Hall of Fame has historically not been kind to the New York Jets all time greats, as they’ve had just four members of their team inducted throughout the years.
But that number should be higher.
Although the Jets don’t have the illustrious history of their crosstown rival, New York Giants, or like many other NFL teams, they have had many great players over the years who deserve a shot to be inducted into Canton.
We’ve gone back and looked at some of the greatest players to ever wear a Jets uniform and selected the top New York Jets who deserve to be in the Hall of Fame.
No. 5 – Larry Grantham LB 1960-1972
Larry Grantham is an original New York Jet, or I should say New York Titan.
The Titans selected Grantham in the first round of the 1960 AFL draft in the team’s inaugural season, and he stayed with the team for the duration of his 13 year career.
Grantham was part of the core group of players that help turn the Titans into the Jets and eventually into Super Bowl champions in 1968.
At just 210 pounds, he was the backbone of one of the great defenses in New York Jets history in the late 1960’s. A defense that helped stifle the high flying, heavily favored Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III to just seven points.
Over the course of his 13 year career with the franchise, Grantham missed just seven games and recorded 24 interceptions and ten fumble recoveries.
Grantham was honored, along with other Jets greats in their first Ring of Honor class of 2010, and for Grantham this meant more than being in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
“I’m not in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and sure, that’s a great big honor, but to me this honor with the Jets is unbelievable.” Grantham said. “Just think of all the players they’ve had up there from 1960 till now. It’s something I can’t put into words. I don’t have the vocabulary to tell you how excited I am about it.”
Among his accolades were five AFL All Star games and five first team All-AFL selections as well as the team MVP in 1971.
No. 4 – Mark Gastineau DE 1979-1988
Mark Gastineau was the first true sack master in the National Football League.
As many know, quarterback sacks have always taken place, but it did not become an official statistic until the 1982 season.
Enter Mark Gastineau.
Gastineau made a career off of terrorizing opposing quarterbacks, and helped form the New York Jets “Sack Exchange” with teammates Marty Lyons, Joe Klecko and Abdul Salaam. The four outstanding lineman would combine for a league leading 66 sacks in 1983.
Gastineau also became well known for his antics on and off the field.
Every time Gastineau would record a sack there would be a subsequent dance that accompanied it. He was so physically intimidated that quarterbacks would lose sleep the night before the game thinking about how they were going to avoid getting crushed by the Jets flamboyant defensive end.
He twice led the NFL in sacks, including a then NFL record 22 sacks in 1984, a record that would stand for 17 years until Michael Strahan broke it in 2001. He was also voted the leagues “Defensive Player of the Year” that same year.
Gastineau retired with a franchise record 107.5 sacks and was selected to five pro bowls in his 10 year career.
He was inducted into the Jets Ring of Honor in 2012.
No. 3 – Winston Hill OT 1963-1976
Winston Hill is without a doubt, the greatest offensive tackle to ever play for the New York Jets.
As quarterback Joe Namath’s blind-side protecter, he made the Pro Bowl eight times, starting 174 consecutive games from 1963 to 1975 despite suffering numerous injuries along the way.
Hill was originally drafted by Jets head coach, then Baltimore Colts coach Weeb Ewbank in the 11th round of the 1963 NFL draft, only to sign with the New York Jets in the upstart AFL that same year.
After the Jets drafted Namath in 1965 and began to turn their fortunes around, Hill would begin an unprecedented streak of seven consecutive Pro Bowl’s beginning in 1967.
A lot of the success of Joe Namath and the New York Jets wide-open passing attack goes to Hill for being an indestructible figure at left tackle all of those years.
Hill was inducted as part of the original class of the New York Jets Ring of Honor in 2010 and is on the 2nd team All-Time AFL roster.
No. 2 – Kevin Mawae C 1998-2005
Kevin Mawae will go down as possibly the greatest free agent signing in New York Jets history.
One season after taking over as head coach of the New York Jets, Bill Parcells began re-tooling the Jets offense.
He went out and traded for Curtis Martin, and signed Vinny Testeverde and Kevin Mawae. The Jets now had one of the best offenses in the AFC.
Mawae was a special player. He revolutionized the center position by using his speed and athleticism to pull like a guard normally would on running plays.
He helped pave the way for several of Curtis Martin’s 1,000 yard seasons with the team, and along the way was selected from 1999-2004.
Mawae would make a total of eight pro bowls in his 16 NFL seasons with the Jets, Seahawks and Titans. He was also a first team All-Pro a total of thee times.
Mawae will not be inducted into the Hall of Fame this year, as he was a semi-finalist for the second consecutive year, but it’s only a matter of time before he becomes the eighth modern-day center to be enshrined into Canton.
No. 1 – Joe Klecko DE/DT 1977-1987
Joe Klecko is the only player in the history of the National Football League to be selected to the Pro Bowl at three different positions.
Whenever the discussion of who SHOULD be in the Hall of Fame arises, he is usually one of the first guys mentioned. He has been eligible for over twenty years now, and has never been able to make the final cut.
In fact several players who are in the Hall of Fame have spoke openly as to why Klecko deserves to be honored among the games greatest players, but Klecko himself harbors no discontent with the Hall of Fame voters.
“I give it no validity one way or the other,” Klecko told NJ.com. “The guys in the Hall of Fame that I played against know what I did. And that committee is the guys that’ll put me on the ballot.”
Outside of Joe Namath and Curtis Martin, Klecko is likely the greatest player to ever wear the New York Jets green and white. In ten seasons he made the Pro Bowl four times, but it wasn’t his statistics that made him a great player, it was his versatility.
Klecko moved from defensive to defensive in 1983, and was named to the Pro Bowl at his new position in 83′ and 84.’ The Jets then switched to a 3-4 alignment in 1985, forcing Klecko to learn a new position, nose tackle. He led the Jets with 96 tackles and five forced fumbles, and tied for second with 7.5 sacks and once again made the Pro Bowl.
His number 73 is retired forever with the New York Jets and he was also a member of the original Ring of Honor class in 2010.
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Joe Lacalandra is a contributing writer to “Jets Wire.” Joe can be reached on Twitter (@JLacalandra), or via email (jlacalandra@gmail.com)
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After the 1970s Controlled Substance Act criminalized all psychedelics, there was a long period of silence in US psychedelic research. That has changed in the last 20 years; since 2002, as many as 26 studies were approved, including landmark research on MDMA-assisted therapy for veterans suffering PTSD. But with President Donald Trump in office, is the resurrected research movement in danger?
“The people really calling the shots are those far closer to Trump than those running the FDA.”
It depends. Two agencies are crucial for the burgeoning field: the US Food and Drug Administration and the Drug Enforcement Agency. Some researchers see the Trump FDA as potentially helpful, since new commissioner Scott Gottlieb has made statements in favor of scaling back regulations. Other researchers are leery of the DEA. That’s because the DEA is overseen by the Department of Justice under the supervision of Jeff Sessions, who has requested that Congress allow him to prosecute marijuana cases in states that have legalized medical marijuana. It’s not yet clear which agency will set the psychedelic agenda, and increased enforcement action from the Justice Department could scare scientists away from the field.
“I do feel very optimistic," says Rick Doblin, executive director of psychedelic research nonprofit MAPS, a leading funder of psychedelic research. "One of the Trump administration's main things is lower regulation. They're pro business and pro making it easier for Big Pharma to get drugs through the FDA. And that benefits us."
But the FDA isn’t as far up the food chain as other influential agencies. DEA licenses are required for psychedelic research. And Trump has given Attorney General Sessions plenty of leeway in drug policy, says Erik Altieri, executive director of marijuana-focused nonprofit NORML. “It seems that the people really calling the shots are those far closer to Trump than those running the FDA,” says Altieri. “The proof will be in the pudding here about who actually sways Trump's opinion, and what he will be willing to tolerate.”
Deregulation and its discontents
Psychedelics remain Schedule 1. They are categorized among a class of substances purported to have no medical application and high risk of abuse, and bearing the harshest penalties for recreational use. Any clinical use of psychedelics in the US must go through a rigorous DEA licensing and FDA approval process.
Many researchers hope that the FDA will maintain the framework developed by a unit called Pilot Drug Evaluation Staff, which first greenlit pilot studies with psychedelics in the early 1990s. Before, the FDA had denied approving or shelved research protocols with psychedelics. But in large part because of practices established by Pilot Drug, like expedited drug review and direct scientist-to-scientist communication between researchers and the FDA, psychedelic research restarted, and has only gained momentum since.
“The FDA is fairly apolitical,” says psychedelic research chemist and pharmacologist David Nichols. He is the president of the Heffter Research Institute, which has funded 12 FDA-approved clinical psychedelic studies since Pilot Drug. Congress would have to push to change that, and he doesn’t believe that will happen. “We're just a flea on the back of this dog.”
Though the FDA is more friendly to psychedelics than ever before, getting the approval to test compounds is a long and complicated process. Doblin hopes that Trump’s FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb will simplify it, thanks to a key Trump administration talking point: deregulation. Gottlieb’s public statements endorse cutting regulatory processes in favor of quickened drug approvals — though he hasn’t specifically addressed psychedelic research.
But deregulation has risks. Regulations are not arbitrary rules; each is set in place for a specific reason. They are designed to reduce risk during studies and prevent harm to patients after drugs go to market. “The unintended consequences [of deregulating] would require so much wisdom on the part of the people making the changes to be staggering,” says Dan Spyker, a former medical officer for the FDA’s Pilot Drug and deputy division director. “You can't just say, 'Well, I'm going to cut the regs.' It's complicated.”
Jag Davies, director of communications strategy at Drug Policy Alliance, agrees. “Overall I would be more concerned about the danger of erasing our food and drug safety standards” than excited about the possibility of easier psychedelic research, says Davies. “I don't think ultimately that's a good thing.”
Back in the drug war
Another federal department has begun to set an increasingly conservative tone towards illicit drugs under Trump: the Department of Justice, which oversees the DEA.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ renewed drug war — highlighted by his two-page memo ordering DOJ staff to pursue harsher sentences for drug offenders, and by his pitch to Congress that the DOJ should be allowed to prosecute medical marijuana providers — has already given drug reform advocates new reason to worry. “We've really stepped into mass mobilization of preparing for the worst, quite frankly,” says NORML’s Altieri.
Marijuana is not a psychedelic, and yet it’s subject to even stricter research regulation. In addition to the requisite DEA and FDA sign-offs, the National Institute on Drug Abuse must supply the cannabis for all studies. Marijuana is legal in eight states and permitted for medical use in 30, so a hardline stance on marijuana is likely to chill all research on illicit drugs, says Altieri. Psychedelics aren’t legal anywhere, so getting approval for a drug like psilocybin might seem like a bigger ask to regulators, he says.
Historically, Health and Human Services — which supervises FDA — defers to the DOJ when it comes to drug policy, says Davies. For instance, during Bill Clinton’s presidency, HHS secretary Donna Shalala proposed federally funded needle exchanges — a harm-reduction program. “Drug czar” Barry McCaffrey overruled her. Psychedelics researchers must obtain DEA licenses to conduct their studies; if Sessions wants to block drug research, he can make the license application process harder, Davies says.
Though researchers know more than ever about psychedelic drugs — and some studies have found promising potential uses for them — none of the research renaissance has translated into law enforcement policy. These laws target people of color and low-income communities, and mandate incarceration for possession. Sessions is unwilling to consider research suggesting medical marijuana may actually help some people; it is unlikely he’ll push for any kind of reform for psychedelics, either. And he’s taken a hard line on sentencing.
Less money means more problems
MAPS’s Doblin thinks MDMA will be made legal for prescription use, in tandem with psychotherapy, by 2021. But, he adds, “I can feel both optimistic, and it's still a long road ahead.” He views Sessions’ hard line on sentencing as “the other sort of counterpoint” to his optimism.
Despite their working relationship with the FDA, researchers are fearful that a Sessions-led Justice Department might undo all the progress made since the ‘90s.“It’s just so scary… Jeff Sessions and the drug war, and that we would go backwards after all this work and money,” says Ann Mithoefer, co-therapist on the ongoing MDMA-assisted psychotherapy and PTSD studies funded by MAPS, alongside her husband Michael. Even Doblin acknowledges that the “overarching political climate” is “very negative.”
Mithoefer and Doblin continue to place their trust in the FDA, even though the DOJ is becoming more hostile. A May 11th meeting with the FDA about the Mithoefers’ MAPS-funded MDMA Phase 3 protocol was “beyond positive,” Doblin says. “We came to an agreement on all the elements of the study’s design.”
The biggest challenge for the study right now isn’t federal regulation. It’s fundraising. Most US voters don’t support legal medical use of most illicit drugs, so funding is difficult. And that’s one final place where Trump administration policy may bog down psychedelic research.
The Trump administration tends to make decisions about mental health care and substance abuse treatment without consulting the body of scientific literature that’s built up over the decades. Trumpcare restricts access to mental health care and substance abuse treatment programs. That’s because the highest priority appears to be budget cuts. So Gottlieb’s “hands-off” rhetoric might not mean much, since HHS secretary Tom Price is more interested in defunding his department than deregulating it. Trump’s proposed budget for 2018 has a 16.2 percent cut for HHS.
Psychedelic research has never received government grants from HHS departments, relying instead on donors to nonprofits like MAPS and Heffter. So, the current administration’s intent to slash the US science budget won’t matter there. But if more scientists have to find private funding to continue their work, psychedelics may no longer be a priority for donors.
That’s a setback. In fact, Heffter’s Nichols had hoped the recent surge in compelling clinical data would encourage HHS to lend its funding support to psychedelic research. The studies are expensive; they can cost more than a million dollars. But if independently funded work had shown enough benefits, Nichols thought, it seemed possible that government funding might be forthcoming. That hope died when Trump took office.
"The funding will be the biggest problem,” Nichols says. “I don't see legal problems, I don't see clinical problems so much. The real problem I see is what the proposed Trump budget would do, not just to psychedelic research, but to biomedical research in general. And it would be a real disaster."
Stephie Grob Plante is the daughter of Charles Grob, a clinical psychedelic researcher and Heffter board member. He was not consulted for this story.
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Most people thinking about making progress with skill building or knowledge acquisition probably expect to see a progressive arc of evolution that increasingly builds on previous knowledge or skills. I learn concept 1, then 2, then 3 etc. I am able to get to 3 because of the knowledge I gained in 2 which I got to because of knowledge gained in 1. When I don’t perceive this progressive arc to be happening—I am at 1 and don’t see that I am making progress to 2–my assumption is that I am stuck in place. This can often mean that I give up on whatever skill or knowledge I am trying to gain, certain that I am stuck in place and conclude that whatever I am trying to learn/do is just not for me.
I want to challenge this type of thinking that is dependent on the assumption that if I do not specifically and consciously perceive progress in skill development or knowledge acquisition, then I am stuck in place.
Arcing Towards a ‘Click’ Moment
I regularly visit a chiropractor and he has been training a colleague at his practice for the last several months. The kind of chiropractor I visit is one where the practitioner must diagnose the patient by first making subtle observations about the kind of musculature and breathing rhythms the patient is in that day and then making specific spinal adjustments based on those observations. It is clear that there are subtle and nuanced observations that must be made in order to diagnose and respond appropriately.
For the last few months, based on conversations that the trainer and trainee have had while treating me and other patients around me, it has been clear that the trainee was struggling to accurately assess the breathing and musculature rhythms. Many of the conversations were the same month over month as the trainee struggled to pick up on the rhythms. In talking with him a bit in the office, it did not appear that he had cognitive difficulties and he seemed to be a reasonably smart individual. Further internet research suggests accurately reading chiropractic rhythms is challenging and requires quite a bit of effort and training.
On one of my recent visits, it was clear something had changed. The trainee accurately diagnosed the rythms and spoke confidently about what he was seeing. It was as though something had just ‘clicked’ for him.
Invisible, but not Stagnant
So we think about skill building or knowledge acquisition as a visible, progressive arc. In reality, while this is often true, it is often analogous to the individual who is observing a construction crew digging, say, a five foot hole for a foundation pylon and pouring concrete into it. To the observer there is little, if anything visible above ground while in reality all progress is taking place out of sight.
Put another way, in our previous framework of normal progression from concept 1 to 2 to 3, when ‘stuck’, the individual may think themselves hopelessly stagnated at 1, unable to progress to 2. In reality, they may actually be progressing, unaware, from -3 to -2 to -1 (where negative numbers are those steps they are not aware they are progressing through), working towards and past 0, the defining line for when their progress ultimately becomes conscious, much like occurred for our trainee chiropractor who struggled, unaware he was making progress, until finally it just clicked.
Don’t Be Deterred—Progress is Sometimes Unseen
If all of the above is an accurate description of how progress sometimes occurs, I think the takeaways merit some discussion, but the one that seems immediately apparent is that lack of immediately apparent progress on skill building, knowledge acquisition, or perhaps most relevantly, complex system integration (such as a new MD who is trying to synthesize years of training into a cohesive system of practicing medicine, or someone who has started a new job and is struggling to wrap their mind around new processes, people and environment) –this lack of perceived progress should not be a deterrent to the participant because very often we are making progress in ways unseen and are within sight of the finish line where things just ‘click’.
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American beer sales have been trending downwards in recent years. After peaking at nearly 219 million barrels in 2008, total U.S. shipments have declined since, reaching just 211.7 million barrels in 2013.
The recent drops in beer sales have been especially pronounced at many of the nation’s top brewers. Total shipments of both Anheuser-Busch InBev (NYSE: BUD) and MillerCoors have slumped as several of their major brands have lost substantial market share. According to data provided by Beer Marketer’s Insights, American sales of seven major brands, including Budweiser, declined by more than 20% between 2008 and 2013.
Click here to see the beers Americans no longer drink
According to Eric Shepard, executive editor at Beer Marketer’s Insights, major beer brands can still point to the last recession as a contributing factor to their current slump. “The people that got hit hardest in the economic recession were your mainstream beer drinkers — lower- to mid-income males, 25 to 34 [years old],” Shepard said.
Another key factor in the weakening sales has been price dynamics. “Beer prices were increased more aggressively over the last five years than wine and spirits,” Shepard said. Many people in the industry believe that, as a result, some customers replaced buying beer with the now relatively less expensive wines and spirits, he explained.
Several other products were also gaining at the expense of big brand-name beers, Shepard noted. While some customers have been moving to wine and spirits, others were switching to imported beer, particularly Mexican imports. Indeed, in the five years through 2013, shipments of Mexican brands Dos Equis and Modelo Especial more-than doubled. Similarly, he added, “Some [drinkers] are moving to craft [beer]. Clearly, there’s been a trade-up in the industry.”
Craft beers have largely bucked the overall downtrend in beer sales. From 2008 to 2013, shipments of craft beer rose by 80.1% to a total of more than 16 million barrels, or 7.6% of the U.S. beer market. While the craft beer category now outsells Budweiser, it remains a relatively niche market. For comparison, the nation’s top-selling brand, Bud Light, shipped 38 million barrels in 2013, accounting for 18% of all beer shipped.
While the last few years have been difficult for many large brewers, they, too, have been introducing new products that combine well-known brand names with new concepts that appeal to consumers. In recent years, Anheuser-Busch has introduced Bud Light Platinum, a higher alcohol content beer with a sweeter flavor; Bud Light Ritas, a margarita-inspired malt beverage; and Shock Top, its own take on craft beer. As of last year, these three brands had captured 2% of the overall beer market.
To identify the seven beers Americans no longer drink, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed figures provided by Beer Marketer’s Insights for all brands with more than 1 million barrels shipped in 2008. All of these seven brands reported a 20% or more decline in shipments in the five years through 2013.
These are the beers Americans no longer drink.
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OAKLAND – If you had told Jordan Bell over the summer that he’d be starting for the Golden State Warriors in a game against the Cleveland Cavaliers on Christmas, the rookie knows exactly what his reaction would have been.
“That’s what’s up,” Bell said, flashing his signature smile.
Bell started for the Warriors in one of their marquee games — a 99-92 win — even though Zaza Pachulia was cleared to play after having missed the team’s last six games because of left shoulder soreness.
The 22-year-old Bell said it’s not only an opportunity that he’d hoped for, it’s one that he’d thought would come.
“I didn’t come here just expecting to ride the bench,” Bell said. Related Articles NBA rescinds DeMarcus Cousins’ technical vs. Charlotte
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Steve Kerr said he started Bell because he matched up better against Kevin Love in what he called a “smaller, faster game.” He said Pachulia will start in the team’s next game against Utah.
Kerr pulled Pachulia aside before the game and explained his rationale to him, something that the center said meant a lot to him.
“One of the things that makes him great is his communication level,” Pachulia said. “It makes him amazing. He’s been a player. He understands what a player may go through mentally.”
Pachulia said he was “totally fine” with Kerr’s decision, adding that he’s willing to do whatever’s best for the team. That being said, he said his chat with Kerr helped clarify things. If they hadn’t talked, he said any player would have second-guesssed themselves.
“Even though you might be the smartest guy or the more experienced guy, you’re still going to go inside of your heart, and feel like, ‘What’s going on?” Pachulia said. “At least you’re going to ask yourself the question…That’s when you’re going to get messed up mentally.” Like our Warriors Facebook page for more Warriors news, commentary and conversation.
Kerr said that the team has missed Pachulia’s physicality and screen-setting in the starting lineup, but that matchups will always dictate his decision on whom he starts.
In what was Bell’s ninth start of the season, he finished with eight points on four-for-seven shooting, six rebounds, three assists, one steal, one blocked shot and one turnover.
Kerr credited him with making the “biggest rebound of the game.”
With 1 minute and 34 seconds left and the game tied at 92-92, Bell crashed the glass, grabbing a huge offensive rebound that led to Klay Thompson making a three-pointer from 27-feet.
“That was the key down the stretch,” Kerr said. “That changed the whole game.”
When asked what was going through his mind when he grabbed that rebound, Bell simply said his shot wasn’t falling so he tried to contribute in another way.
“I made sure to try go to the boards and get as many rebounds as possible, get the light-skinned, skinny dudes some more shots,” Bell said.
Bell was far from perfect, though. Just a few moments earlier, with the Warriors up 92-90 with 3 minutes and 17 seconds left, he committed a key turnover that led to LeBron James tying the game with a floater.
He gave himself a C+ grade on the game, and said he learned a lot from playing against the Cavaliers — mainly, don’t be timid.
“We want him to be more aggressive,” Kevin Durant said. “There were a few times tonight in the pick-n-roll they trapped him in the pocket, and he kind of hesitated a bit.”
Durant, however, was quick to point out that Bell has impressed him with how quickly he picks things up.
“He’s making adjustments each possession, and that’s pretty rare for a rookie,” Durant said. “So he might make a mistake one possession, and then he might do something spectacular the next.”
Draymond Green called Bell’s performance “phenomenal,” and credited him for helping the Warriors win.
Green said having Bell and Pachulia gives the Warriors two great and completely different looks. He said Pachulia is a great passer and a bruiser, while Bell is more quick-paced and athletic.
“They both bring something different to our team, but both are guys that we really need,” Green said.
That was especially clear last season, when the Warriors faced the Cavaliers in The Finals. Green said that Pachulia was key to the Warriors winning because he helped take Tristan Thompson out of the game.
Pachulia, in fact, said he took the Cavaliers’ decision to go small on Christmas as a bit of a nod to him.
“They had to make changes,” Pachulia said. “…I took it as a compliment.”
As for Bell, his childhood dream came true this Christmas. He grew up idolizing LeBron James. And on Monday, in front of a national television audience, he got to guard him for a bit.
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View of Grand Central Terminal from atop the glass walkways in the windows
Grand Central Terminal still stands as one of New York City’s most beloved landmarks, but its history is also a glorious story of creation, decline, and rebirth — much like the story of New York City itself. Originally built by Cornelius Vanderbilt, Grand Central Terminal opened on February 2nd, 1913 atop a previous version, Grand Central Station (also built by Vanderbilt for his New York Central Railroad). The station replaced an even earlier building, Grand Central Depot, built in 1881.
From the very beginning, Grand Central Terminal was intended to benefit both public and private interests — an arrangement that continues to this day. An extensive rehabilitation project in the 1990s restored Grand Central Terminal to its original glory, while the addition of retail and restaurants have made it a popular destination for both tourist and residents alike.
Despite its renown, Grand Central Terminal still holds many secrets and fun facts you may not know. Make sure to join us on our next tour, where we’ll delve deeper into these secrets:
Tour of the Secrets of Grand Central Terminal
10. No One Knows if the “Whispering Gallery” Was Built to Whisper on Purpose
Nestled between the Main Concourse and Vanderbilt Hall is an acoustical architectural anomaly in Grand Central Terminal: a whispering gallery. Here, sound is thrown clear across the 2,000-square-foot chamber, “telegraphing” across the surface of the vault and landing in faraway corners.
Although there are many whispering galleries you can find in New York City, few are as famous as the one you can find in Grand Central Terminal. The real secret is that no one knows whether its whispering gallery was constructed with the intention of producing the acoustic effect that has made it so popular.
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Former Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) said early Sunday that 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 has been "waterboarded" by women who have accused him of unwanted sexual advances.
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"He's been waterboarded," Brewer, a top Trump surrogate, told Jake Tapper on CNN's "State of the Union."
"It's seems like it's really been kind of somewhat of a put-up oppression of Donald Trump from all of these people lining up. It's just unbelievable."
Since the unearthing of a video from 2005 showing Trump making lewd comments about women, multiple women have come forward claiming the GOP presidential nominee sexually assaulted them.
On Saturday, Trump said during a speech in Gettysburg, Pa., that he would sue the accusers.
--This report was updated at 1:08 p.m.
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CASTILE – The golden years of the iconic ‘trestle bridge’ that gracefully spans the Genesee River gorge above the upper falls are gradually coming to an end with the construction and demolition process slated to begin with trail closures on Thursday, Dec. 17.
The bridge is not going anywhere immediately, however, and will continue to operate until a new $70 million bridge is built just 75 feet south of the current bridge by Norfolk Southern, the railroad company that owns the rail. Construction for the new bridge broke ground on Oct. 28 and is expected to carry on through the next 3 years.
A portion of the fabled Letchworth Trail will be closed during construction. On Letchworth’s trail maps, this will be between access points L and K, near Rte. 436, the upper falls and the Glenn Iris Inn.
Access to the Glenn Iris Inn will remain open to foot traffic from other trails.
Norfolk Southern will continue to operate their current train traffic on the trestle bridge of about 12 trains a day until the new bridge is opened in September 2018.
According to Norfolk Southern, the new bridge will be a single-track, 900-f00t long arch. They will also lay 1,200 feet of new track on either side of the Genesee River gorge to align existing tracks with the new bridge.
Many lifelong visitors of the park are chiming in on social media to say their goodbyes to this architectural icon of the Genesee Valley.
“Goodbye old friend,” posted Melissa Rindfleisch Stanley to Facebook. “You will be missed but often remembered.”
The Norfolk Southern Railway subsidiary operates approximately 20,000 route miles in 22 states and the District of Columbia, serves every major container port in the eastern United States, and provides efficient connections to other rail carriers. Norfolk Southern operates the most extensive intermodal network in the East and is a major transporter of coal, automotive and industrial products.
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Peter Sutcliffe, 70, was given the Submariner model by sibling Mick
Authorities concerned such an expensive item could upset other patients
He was jailed in 1981 for butchering 13 women and trying to kill 7 others
It costs £300,000 a year to keep him in Broadmoor Hospital
The Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe was furious after staff at Broadmoor Hospital seized a £5,000 Rolex watch sent to him by his brother
The Yorkshire Ripper was furious after staff at Broadmoor Hospital seized a £5,000 Rolex watch sent to him by his brother.
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Peter Sutcliffe, 70, was given the Submariner model by sibling Mick.
However authorities at the institution were worried about him having such an expensive item that could upset other patients.
'Sutcliffe moaned he wasn't allowed the Rolex and was furious when he saw a member of staff had one,' a source told The Sun.
The source added: 'He said that was unfair and breached his rights... But the fact that he was even sent it shows the kind of life he has been enjoying.'
On their website bosses at the hospital outline how they try to reduce risk to patients.
Information on the site says: 'Patients at Broadmoor Hospital require a highly structured and well staffed therapeutic living environment.
'Reducing risk is a high priority and we aim to provide a safe background to their treatment by making sure our staff build effective relationships and have a good understanding of each patient and the environment.'
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The price of a Rolex Submariner can range from £3,950 to £13,950, according to the website Watch Finder.
Sutcliffe was jailed in 1981 for 20 life terms for butchering 13 women and trying to kill seven others.
His victims' families have welcomed the decision to put Sutcliffe back in jail.
Peter Sutcliffe, 70, was given the Submariner model by sibling Mick (File photo)
Neil Jackson, 58, the son of his second victim Emily Jackson, 42, who was killed in 1976, said earlier: 'I'm glad he is finally losing his cushy lifestyle, but it's not a moment too soon.
'He gets better fed in Broadmoor than I do and I work six days a week.
'Life has been far too easy for him up to now but he is in for a rude awakening.'
Denise Long, 58, whose mother Maureen suffered devastating injuries when Sutcliffe attacked her with a hammer in 1977, said: ‘He should have been hanged.
'I don’t believe he was ever ill – he was just pure evil. He knew exactly what he was doing.
'He should never have been in Broadmoor and I am pleased and think it’s right he suffers in prison.
'I try not to talk about it because it still upsets me. He left the scars on my mum and she couldn’t get over it. You never forget.
'He shouldn’t have had the cushy life he has had in hospital all these years. It’s scandalous the taxpayer has been paying for this.'
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It costs £300,000 a year to keep him in Broadmoor, with a TV in his room and other privileges, compared with £50,000 for a place in a high-security prison.
Authorities at Broadmoor (pictured) were concerned about him having such an expensive items that could upset other patients
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Virtual reality video is still finding its footing, but some of the most high-profile work has been Pixar-style animated efforts — particularly Oculus Story Studio's short film Henry. Now, another company is putting itself forward as a contender: Baobab Studios, co-founded by former Zynga VP of games Maureen Fan and Antz and Madagascar co-director Eric Darnell. Baobab released a teaser for its first film Invasion! on Samsung's Milk VR video service, and it's now announced $6 million in funding led by Comcast Ventures.
Invasion!, which is set to premiere early next year, will be an animated short. Most VR films top out at around 10 minutes, and Baobab isn't planning to deviate from this formula. "From a technology viewpoint, tech changes so quickly that by the time we could finish a full length film, the tech would be obsolete," says Fan. "From an audience perspective, you may not want to put that headset on your head for long periods of time." Fan says there's a "full slate" of VR films on the table that will appear on as many platforms as possible, not just the Gear VR. The company is also working with HTC, which manufactures the Vive VR headset and participated in the funding round, to distribute its work.
"Tech changes so quickly that by the time we could finish a full length film, the tech would be obsolete."
Besides Oculus Story Studio, there are already a handful of well-known VR film companies, including award-winning studio Vrse and Felix & Paul, which signed a partnership with Oculus earlier this year. Baobab's $6 million in funding is far from the only money flowing into VR. Virtual reality camera and filmmaking company Jaunt raised $65 million in September, and live streaming app NextVR got $30 million in a round that also included Comcast Ventures.
A great deal of VR film has been tie-ins with other franchises, so shorts like Invasion! are a step towards creating a medium that's not simply promotions for more traditional formats. The catch is that there's also no clear way to make money from this, at least so far. Fan says that since Baobab doesn't know which platforms it will distribute on yet, it also doesn't know how they'll be monetized. "We know that people will buy headsets if there is good content to watch. We plan on creating compelling experiences that will draw audiences into VR," she says. "We've raised money specifically to create these compelling experiences."
Disclosure: Comcast Ventures is also an investor in The Verge's parent company Vox Media.
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Young women with irregular menstrual periods may be at higher risk of developing—and dying from—ovarian cancer later in life, researchers found in a 50-year study of California women. The new research provides the first evidence linking abnormally long cycles or missed periods to higher ovarian cancer risk. It also challenges a longstanding hypothesis that such risk rises progressively with a woman’s total number of ovulations.
Having fewer ovulatory cycles is widely viewed as a protective factor against ovarian cancer. It’s the reason that hormonal birth control pills, pregnancy, and tubal ligations—which stop ovulation—have been thought to reduce risk for that disease. “This study is certainly curious, because it contradicts what we thought we knew about ovarian cancer and incessant ovulation,” says Mitchell Maiman, an OB/GYN at Staten Island University Hospital in New York.
Although ovarian cancer accounts for just 3% of all cancers in women, it’s the leading cause of gynecological cancer deaths. Less than half of all women diagnosed with ovarian cancer survive more than 5 years. Early symptoms, including abdominal discomfort and bloating, often go unnoticed or are misdiagnosed as irritable bowel syndrome. Because there are no routine screening tests and few markers to identify groups with increased risk of ovarian cancers, most cases are found when they are beyond the point of curing. Age is one risk factor—more than half of all ovarian cancers are diagnosed in women over the age of 63. Heredity is another—10% to 15% of women diagnosed with ovarian cancer have one or more known genetic risk factors.
To identify other risk factors, epidemiologist Barbara Cohn, director of the Public Health Institute’s Child Health and Development Studies in Oakland, California, and colleagues analyzed data from more than 15,000 California women who enrolled in a pregnancy study in 1959. That study sought to track disease risk over the lifetime of the mothers and their children. Menstrual irregularities—defined as a cycles lasting longer than 35 days or a long-term history of infrequent or missed periods—were reported at the beginning of the study, when the average age of the women was 26. Roughly 13% of the women reported irregular periods.
Over the next 50 years, 116 women developed ovarian cancer, 84 of whom died. Women with a history of menstrual irregularities were nearly twice as likely as women with normal periods to develop ovarian cancer and die from it by the age of 70. That link only increased with age, the researchers report in this month’s issue of the International Journal of Cancer. For example, women with menstrual irregularities were roughly three times as likely to develop and die from ovarian cancer by age 77 compared with women with normal periods. At that point in time, the risk from irregular periods was as large as the risk for women with a family history of the disease, Cohn says.
The researchers say it’s likely that many of the women in the study who developed ovarian cancer also suffered from a hormonal disorder called polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS). PCOS is often characterized by irregular or absent periods. But it’s impossible to know with certainty, because those diagnostic criteria were established after the start of the study. PCOS is a known risk factor for endometrial cancer, though previous studies investigating the link between PCOS and ovarian cancer have turned up mixed results—with some pointing toward increased risk, some pointing toward decreased risk, and others turning up no significant association.
Maiman says the new study could guide future research not only about who is at risk for ovarian cancer, but also about who might benefit from screening or prevention efforts. “If validated this could give us one more risk assessment factor to determine high-risk individuals in which screening is prudent.”
But designing such research will require more fine-grained answers several key questions, says Mia Gaudet, a cancer epidemiologist who is the strategic director for breast and gynecologic cancer research at the American Cancer Society in Atlanta. “Research is starting to show that the characteristics of those menstrual cycles may be more important than the number. For instance, were the periods heavier than someone who was cycling regularly? A study devised today would ask different questions,” Gaudet says. “[This is] a first step that warrants a closer look.”
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What Is SAP?
To integrate all departments of organization
Central System for all business Processes to share common information with each user
SAP in Business
Why SAP?
Strategies and Operations
Increased Productivity
Highly Flexible
Risk Reduction
Economic Management
Scalability
Focus on ERP Applications
Central system to manage tasks in module that all work together by sharing information
No duplication of data
Automated project monitoring and multi dimensional and flexible reporting
Evenness of business processes
Easy and quick Planning, Scheduling and Management of resources
Ecommerce integration
Increased competitiveness with integrated, quick, and scalable business processes
Increased resource utilization and greater customer satisfaction
Powerful technical support for organization
Hassle free corporate structure, market chain and business scenario management
Increased time to market with new, categorized products and services
Centralized foundation for the cloud, latest mobile and in-memory technologies
Phases of SAP Implementation Project
Phase 1 – Project Preparation,
Phase 2 – Business Blueprint,
Phase 3 – Realization,
Phase 4 – Final Preparation,
Phase 5 – Go-Live and support
SAP “Systems, Applications and Products in data processing” is the fourth largest software company in the world. SAP provides end to end business solutions for Manufacturing, distribution, financial, logistic etc. SAP module is tightly integrated with sub modules.SAP is an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system by SAP AG, company based at Germany. SAP software suite that is being implemented as part of business re-thinking and Provides end to end solutions for day to day operations.SAP has become quite an important for many organizations to expand their business. Many companies use SAP systems broadly internally for their daily operations and reporting. Most legacy business systems were made up of islands of automation – separate systems that handled some core business needs. SAP is completely automated system to handle financial operations, marketing management, production planning, sales and distribution management, manufacturing management, human resource etc. There is strong connection between system and sub-system to exchange data in order to generate reports at various level of management for daily operations. SAP ERP systems – Business Suite / R/3 and Business One – are fully integrated business real-time systems. It eliminates data deviation between sub-systems and enables end-to-end transactions to be processed. Many companies are implementing the best-of-breed ERP package developed by SAP instead of their old business systems. Along with day to day operations, SAP also enhances business insight by providing real time access to timely information. There are many benefits of using SAP system. SAP system is contemporary and well planned. Support infrastructure is unique in the software industry. The main organization advantage of using SAP is that you get a complete set of integrated, cross-functional organization processes.After implementation of SAP system, the short, medium and long-term strategies of the business are identified, clarified and prioritized. SAP system will be useful to align internal workflows of organization. Organization can decide future state of business. Future state can be specified and project team can bridge the gaps between future system and current system to build a workflow of projectSAP implementation is increased productivity of organization. Employees can process many transactions easily and quickly using their different access credentials. It includes overall reporting and analytics to increase to a level that facilitate operations.SAP Implementation improves process standard, efficiency and flexibility. It eliminates manual and tedious task. SAP architecture is very strong with a process-centric focus and a foundation that operates in real time communication with enterprise wide business processes those are highly flexible.Today, SAP System reduces business risks on solving complex business challenges for long term growth. SAP implementation make all processes automated so it affects to risk factor of organization.Financial operations become more flexible after SAP implementation. Furthermore SAP increases organization benefit, improves financial control, increase efficiency and reduce risk.SAP Solutions are scalable and can be customized according to business needs and easily integrated with future applications. It eliminates high integration costs and the need to purchase third-party software.SAP constantly focuses its ERP applications on utilizing resources, decreasing costs and better performance that is customized for businesses and industries. SAP provides a huge range of business software and enterprise applications – designed for global transactions and supported with globalization services – to empower every aspect of organization. SAP is very useful software to enhance core business and beyond. It makes all business processes quick and easy. SAP will make efficient use of resources and give ensured quality. SAP is useful software for mapping business processes and business flow.
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I gather from a message from a former colleague in the Foreign Office that the DPRK ambassador to London and Aidan Foster-Carter are to debate on perspectives on the current situation on the Korean peninsula on June 9. Even though I suspect that there will be more heat than light in the discussion – both speakers have a robust reputation – this seems to me to be good news.
Even before I learnt of this encounter, NK News editor and publisher Chad O’Carroll had asked whether I would write on the subject of invitations to North Korean speakers. Like me, he had been at a meeting where a North Korean speaker could perhaps explain his – it is very, very rarely her – perspective in a way that no outsider could do. And yet, the occasions when this happens are rare indeed. We were also both aware, of course, of the recent incident at the UN when North Korea diplomats tried to shout down defectors testifying on human rights’ matters and then left the discussion – see here.
In the past, DPRK officials or visitors were reluctant to allow themselves to be exposed to the hostile comment that passes for debate on their country. I can understand this. Back in the 1990s, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office very reluctantly began a dialogue with their North Korean counterparts, at the latter’s request. The unfortunate North Koreans were hardly well-treated. To show Britain’s disapproval of the regime, neither tea nor biscuits were offered, and only security needs ensured that the North Koreans were properly escorted off the premises. The “dialogue” usually consisted of our side telling them how bad they were. Naturally they defended their country – it was their job, after all – but little attention was paid to what they said.
Some years, the FCO asked the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) to host the delegation. IISS was keen to do this, hoping that it would be a stepping stone to some involvement with North Korea. But while IISS did provide better fare than the FCO, the approach was the same. The North Korean speakers were shouted down by people who were not interested in hearing their point of view and who acted as though they knew all they needed to know. Unsurprisingly, as the 1990s progressed, the North Koreans became reluctant to be so treated and stopped going to the IISS.
But North Koreans still did attend some meetings. After years of condemning the Association for Korean Studies in Europe as a South Korean puppet organization, North Korean scholars began to attend its meetings in the 1990s. Indeed, it was at the meeting in Prague in April 1995 that the first gave an account of the alleged discovery of the remains of Tangun, the mythical founder of Korea. The presentation was, I believe, treated with some skepticism and a lively debate. There is a brief reference to the occasion here, but the North Korean papers were not published. Since the Tangun excavations had been carried out under the auspices of Kim Il Sung, perhaps it was understandable that the presenters did not take kindly to criticism.
But it did not stop them coming to subsequent meetings. I chaired a session at the AKSE conference held in Sheffield in 2005 in which North Korea scholars presented papers. They were not very happy at critical comments (or at being held to time), but it worked out quite well, with even a semblance of scholarly debate.
Since Britain established diplomatic relations in 2000, the DPRK embassy in London has occasionally attended academic meetings as well as meetings organized in Parliament. While the South Korean engagement policy was still in force, such meetings sometimes involved the ROK embassy as well, and the two ambassadors presented their respective views on a variety of issues without much friction even though controversial issues were involved. IISS has also managed to hold meetings with both North and South Koreans present and giving papers, as has our oldest think tank, the Royal United Services’ Institute.
So it can be done. Should it, however? Do not North Koreans only present the official line? As far as diplomats are concerned, this is true. But of course it is true not only of North Korean diplomats. The ambassador of Ruritania, even a third secretary from Ruritania, has a job today, which is to represent and present his or her country. They have, believe me, very little leeway. The diplomat who protested at the UN is unlikely to have acted on his own initiative.
But if you invite one group, why not invite the other? Even if you or I can predict what the North Koreans or whoever it might be will say, it seems to me better to hear it in their words rather than have somebody else ventroliquize them. Exposing people directly to views that they might not otherwise hear can be enlightening. The very fact that North Koreans are willing to go out to what they know are likely to be hostile environments is a positive development. Let us encourage it.
There is always a risk when bringing together those who have – or have to express – strong views. Human rights is one such field, as I know, having been shouted down at a conference for saying that I had doubts about why third-party government took up such issues. But I would still argue that it is worth risking the occasional explosion through exposing hostile groups to each other, even if there is little likelihood of them seeing eye to eye. They may still learn.
Main photo: UN Geneva, Flickr Creative Commons
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The recent clashes between demonstrators and police forces in Ferguson, Missouri over the death of Michael Brown at the hands of police forces has many calling into question the slow, steady rate at which police forces in the United States have become militarized. If we want to stop and potentially reverse this trend, we need to understand its underlying cause–the simultaneous militarization of the civilian population.
For a police for to be effective, it needs a large advantage in military power over the population it is policing. When citizens contemplate committing crimes, they need to know that they are not going to be able to defeat the police in combat, and when police officers contemplate engaging with dangerous criminals, they need to believe that they are very likely to succeed and to survive.
In countries where the police do not have this military advantage, police officers themselves become afraid of criminals and refuse to engage with them. The Central American refugee crisis is a poignant example of this. In some Central American countries, gangs and paramilitary forces have weapons and training that make them capable of successfully defeat police forces in combat and regularly killing police officers. As a result, the police pull out of gang-dominated areas. The civilian populations living in these areas become subject to expropriation by the gangs. Organized crime is more successful than individual crime because organizations can pool individuals, finances, and weaponry, giving the criminals who comprise them a greater chance of successfully winning fights with police forces. This intimidates police officers into inaction or accepting bribes. True, sustainable victory for these organizations only comes once the police force has been corrupted and subdued.
In the United States, militarization of the police began with the formation of SWAT teams (Special Weapons and Tactics). These teams were created during the 1960’s to oppose paramilitary organizations like the Black Panthers or the Symbionese Liberation Army. By equipping SWAT teams with military-grade weapons and training, police forces were able to raise the confidence of officers when engaging with heavily armed threats.
This escalated after the September 11th attacks. Police forces feared a nightmare scenario in which heavily armed, organized terrorists staged assaults on major cities. And with the increased incidence of mass shootings in the United States, police forces have become increasingly fearful of extraordinarily heavily armed individual killers.
Unsurprisingly, once the police have special weapons and tactics, they are like the proverbial man with a hammer–everything starts to look like a nail. And so we have seen a tremendous rise in the incidence of police forces using military tactics in seemingly trivial situations, such as no-knock searches of suspects homes for drugs and other contraband, or containing peaceful demonstrators. Yet police defend these operations on the grounds that they cannot know if the suspects or demonstrators are heavily armed. They claim they are taking precautions for the safety of officers and for the surrounding community. As long as there is a substantive chance that criminals or demonstrators will be heavily armed, police forces will want to be armed yet more heavily so that they can sustain an intimidating power advantage over potential perpetrators and remain confident in their ability to defeat them in combat without sustaining losses.
So the question is, how do we make police officers feel more secure with less? If we reduce the threat citizens pose to police officers, we will correspondingly alleviate the police’s siege mentality. If criminals carried no weapons, police would merely need nightsticks. In Britain, it is against the law for civilians to manufacture, sell, lend, give, or import batons. It is even illegal to carry batons in public. In Britain, most police officers do not even carry firearms–only “authorized firearms officers” may have them. Only 5% of British police officers are authorized to carry firearms. In effect, Britain’s special units are like ordinary American cops. Not only do British officers not carry firearms, but most have no desire to do so–a full 82% of British police federation members are against arming the police more heavily.
How is it possible for police officers to not even carry firearms but nonetheless feel confident they will be able to handle perpetrators? Britain’s has way, way fewer guns per capita than the United States does:
As a result, British police officers do not have to worry anywhere near as much about being attacked and killed with guns:
Americans often despair of doing anything about the number of guns in the country, claiming that it would be impossible to successfully regulate them, but Britain’s history shows that this reasoning is wrong. After World War I, Britain was inundated with surplus weapons. Yet, over the past century, Britain has taken a series of effective steps to take these guns back from citizens and criminals alike:
1920 Firearms Act–Required certificates to purchase firearms, these lasted three years, and specified both the type of gun that could be purchased and the amount of ammunition. Allowed police constables discretion as to who could have the certificate. Made the right to bear arms, dated from 1689, conditional on permission from the police and the Home Secretary. Crime to own a firearm without a certificate, punishable by £50 fine (equivalent to at least £1,700 pounds today, and possibly as much as £13,000) and 3 months in prison. In dollars, that’s roughly $2,800 to $21,700 in today’s money. 1933 Firearms and Criminal Use Act–Cannot possess a firearm unless the bearer can prove to the officer that it is being used for a lawful purpose. Crime to use a firearm to resist arrest, punishable by 14 years in prison. 1937 Firearms Act–Raised minimum gun age from 14 to 17, total ban on automatic firearms, “self-defence” no longer considered an acceptable justification to apply for a certificate, more police liberty to fix conditions on certificates, extended certificates to more weapons left out of earlier laws. 1968 Firearms Act–Codified in a single document all extant firearm regulation. 1988 Firearms Amendment Act–Applicants must provide good reason for possessing a firearm (self-defence considered invalid), firearms must be locked up, ammunition must be locked up separately from the firearm, full ban on guns for people with criminal backgrounds, firearms amnesties were declared in which guns were handed in to the police. 1997 Firearms Amendment No.2 Act–Handguns banned with few exceptions.
We know from the British experience that this kind of serious legislation would be effective, but there is insufficient public support for it in the United States. So long as civilians insist on their right to bear extremely lethal weapons, police forces will continue to demand weapons still more lethal and equipment still more protective, and the militarization of our police forces will continue. In effect, American civilians and American police officers are engaged in an arms race that too often ends in tragedy for both sides.
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Oct 3, 2015-
Indian Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) has instructed its agencies to lift the unofficial blockade against Nepal. MEA sources say that the Ministry has instructed agencies on the ground to lift restrictions from all 6 major and other entry points.
New Delhi had held intensive consultations on its Nepal policy following Prime Minister Narendra Modi's return from UN General Assembly Session. Saturday's decision to ease restrictions comes amid India's reading that the political negoations in Kathmandu have progressed towards a broad agreement following the decsision to register amendments to address grievances of the disgruntled parties.
"While the restrictions could be lifted on Saturday itself, it will take some time to return to normal flow of supplies to Nepal, "Nepal's Ambassador to India Deep Kumar Upadhayay said.
Published: 03-10-2015 17:41
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What do you get when you mix Starbound with Borderlands? One hell of a video game. Pixel Privateers is a game about getting lost in a roguelike world with no real hope of survival – I mean, unless you consider having a huge pile of weapons and unlimited soldiers a chance at survival. This game made me want to keep playing it. I mean, well beyond what I needed for a review. It’s amazing.
Graphically, it’s very similar to the last title by Quadro Delta, Pixel Piracy, but it’s cleaner, with better animation, and much better effects. The sounds are similar, but again, cleaner. It’s like Piracy was their lesson and Privateers was their masterpiece. It’s great watching an independent studio grow and push the envelope, and this is certainly what they are doing.
As far as the story goes, you go through a wormhole, and then the wormhole breaks down and you cannot get back through it. That’s… almost it. There’s little pieces of dialogue, but nothing that interrupts you and wastes a bunch of time. It’s the opposite of Fairy Fencer F Dark Advent in that the story just gives you enough to determine what your next goal is, instead of trying to be the main form of entertainment.
You start with two soldiers, and as the game progresses, you can go to marketplaces and get a few more. These guys then are ready for you to equip, level up, and fulfill needed roles in your team. The classes, Vanguard, Marine, Engineer, Scout, and Medic all feel unique and give you an opportunity to customize your team in many more ways than just “Tank, DPS, Defensive Support, Offensive Support, and Healer” through the equipment system.
I started out having a well balanced team, one sniper scout, a vanguard tank, a medic, an engineer with a turret, and two assault guys with ranged weapons… but, I found that the game tends to lend itself to melee combat quite a bit unless you’re running into enemies with area of effect weapons. I swapped my loadout to a single engineer, two tanks, a medic, and filled the rest with Marines carrying melee weapons, and I ruled the day… until I ran into a guy with a flamethrower who killed half my party. I think that’s what’s great about this game. With the permadeath mode, I felt crippled by such a loss, but, I could always buy more units. The wax and wane of the unit’s power, while still letting each individual soldier get more and more powerful leads you to feel advancement while still giving you situations where it’s risky to keep going without recuperating.
SNERD and I liked this game enough that we had to try multiplayer. Even though we were only given one copy for review, we went and bought a second to team up, and, the multiplayer is even more fun because with a friend on your side, it requires much more coordination and skill.
The only things I really dislike about the game is that when you’re playing single player, to maximize your skill usage you have to pause and go through each individual unit to find an ability to use, turning it almost into a turn based game. It’s possible to tab through, but with 8 characters all having different weapons and skill sets, it’s much easier to just pause. This is okay, but it makes it feel less hectic, and trying to target individual characters can be a challenge. I find that just slamming through enemy hordes is more action-packed, and fun, but a lot less effective overall. Secondly, you’ll have units excel in combat that you think wouldn’t be. My tanks routinely did more damage than the rest of my unit, save for other melee units that dual wield (Marines). I never found a real use for a scout, and couldn’t figure out the benefits of the stealth system at all.
The bosses are unique and fun. The first one you run into is a giant mech, and, really the first time I suffered actual losses. Once I figured out the prevailing tactic against it, though, I swapped up my game plan and we just knocked the shit out of him without really taking any damage.
All in all, Pixel Privateers is a game the two of us couldn’t recommend any more. We are going to put this game in contention for our game of the year 2017, definitely. This is a good sign of the way games are headed. Developers like this should be commended for making unique and truly enjoyable gameplay. In a world full of dodgy steam titles and asset package ripoffs, Pixel Privateers is a title you can purchase knowing you’re in for a wild ride.
Get Pixel Privateers on Steam
Disclosure: We received a copy of this game for free.
Check out the Developers: Quadro Delta
And the Publishers are Re-Logic
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A few weeks ago, I shared a story about a high school teacher who sent the Secular Student Alliance a strange letter referencing the SSA’s Educators’ Brochure (PDF). Here’s an excerpt from his letter:
It was from one of those students that I received this brochure. Not surprisingly, they could not get a teacher to sponsor the club. As educators we are dedicated to conveying the truth to students… They should not feel the need for a safe haven. … Educational staff has the responsibility of preparing students to be responsible adults. We expect all students to be treated with respect. We are not, however, obligated to protect those who choose to be deviants in society.
I’m happy to say there’s an update to the case. Everything looks to be resolved, says the SSA:
We brought the situation to the school’s attention and explained why it was unacceptable. Pointing to the law, the moral landscape, and the bullying that secular students often face, we made it clear that discrimination against nontheistic students in school cannot be tolerated. They agreed. The teacher backtracked and pledged never to discriminate against students for any reason. The administrators reaffirmed their commitment to diversity and the rights of all students to form clubs. They spoke with the teacher to ensure his understanding of the law and to emphasize the consequences should any evidence surface that he’s not obeying it. They made it clear that his personal views would not interfere with how he treats students and that he needs to make sure every student does feel welcome in his classroom. The students are preparing to get their Secular Student Alliance club up and running as soon as the school year starts, with the administration’s and the Secular Student Alliance’s full support. With our eyes — and the administration’s — on the situation, teachers will be on their best behavior. Discrimination will not stand on our watch.
That is great news for everybody involved, especially the students who will now be able to start their group. JT Eberhard deserves a huge deal of credit for getting the administration to see the light.
On a side note, I think it’s a good thing that the SSA is choosing not to release the names of the teacher or the school. You might be able to persuade me otherwise, but I think putting names on this type of case would allow us to say, “Oh, this only happens in that state” and ignore it. By keeping it anonymous, it makes the point that these sorts of shenanigans happen all over the country.
Normally, we’re fortunate when students have the courage to speak up.
In this case, I guess we have to thank the teacher for whistleblowing on himself.
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With all the political ire going on in the United States, it’s sometimes good to put things in perspective.
French presidential candidate Jean-Francois Copé has sparked outrage on Twitter after wildly underestimating the cost of a pain au chocolat pastry. For those who don’t know, the sweet chocolate-filled croissants are somewhat of a national treasure and a staple of any French bakery.
READ MORE: French PM talks US politics with Trudeau, says ‘Trump is rejected by the world’
The political upheaval began Monday during a radio interview with Europe 1, when Copé was asked if he knew the price of the famous French pastry.
“I have no clue, I have no idea … maybe 10 to 15 cents,” Cope said during the interview.
But, in reality, one would be so lucky as to find a bakery in France willing to hand over a pain au chocolate for much less than a euro (about C$1.50).
READ MORE: Gaffe Proof? Trump vs. Clinton tests political pitfalls
Copé’s lack of knowledge surrounding the price of pastries immediately made waves on Twitter, where users coined the hashtag #PainAuChocolatGate to share their outrage over his comments.
“When you learn that #Copé estimated the cost of a #painauchocolat to be between 10 & 15 cents, and then you remember that he was minister of finance,” wrote one Twitter user.
Quand tu apprends que #Copé estime qu'un #painauchocolat coûte entre 10 et 15 centimes puis que tu réalises qu'il a été ministre du budget. pic.twitter.com/ks1EhfSnnp — Dabo (@MissDabo_) October 24, 2016
“Good, if Copé becomes president he will he make pain au chocolat 10 cents,” wrote another.
Bon si Copé devient président, il nous fait le pain au chocolat à 10 centimes ?!#painauchocolatgate — Anne-Sophie (@annesophie_f) October 24, 2016
Wow, with just 2 euros I could throw a huge #PainAuChocolat themed party! — Moi (@ImHavingAMoment) October 24, 2016
One user joked, “Selling pain au chocolat, collectors, very good condition with original bag. 20 Euros firm price.”
Je vends un Pain au Chocolat, collector, très bon état, année 2015, avec sachet d'origine. 20 euros (prix ferme) #Copé #PainauChocolatGate — Olivier Boukhobza (@oboukhobza) October 25, 2016
Copé later took to his own Twitter account to explain his lack of pastry knowledge stating, “I confess to being very conscious of my waistline, so to be honest I stopped eating “chocolatines” long ago.”
Interestingly, this isn’t the first time the famous pastry has gotten Copé in trouble. In 2012, the politician was accused of racism after he said there were neighbourhoods in France where parents would be upset to learn their children had “pain au chocolat torn from their hands by thugs who explain to them we don’t eat during ramadan.”
Il est des quartiers où les enfants ne peuvent pas manger leur pain au chocolat car c'est le ramadan #Draguignan http://t.co/aPUbjPCE — Jean-François Copé (@jf_cope) October 5, 2012
“There are neighbourhoods where children cannot eat their bread with chocolate because it is Ramadan,” read a tweet from Copé expressing the same concerns.
Copé isn’t alone in his controversy – other politicians have bungled the cost of popular food items in the past. Former U.S. President George H.W. Bush admitted he didn’t know how much a gallon of milk cost during a debate with Bill Clinton and Ross Perot in 1992. In 2013, Former British Prime Minister David Cameron also struggled to guess the average cost of a loaf of bread, after a journalist asked him to prove if he understood the cost of living for U.K. voters.
“I don’t buy the value stuff. I have a breadmaker at home,” Cameron said during the interview. He later guessed it would cost “north of a pound” (just over C$1.60).
Now, imagine the outrage if Prime Minister Justin Trudeau failed to come up with the correct price of a large double double at Tim Hortons.
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Studies about what cataclysmic changes automation will bring about in all fields of human activity in the near future should engage the attention of governments, decision makers, leaders and even ordinary people. The possible scenarios being projected may look like science fiction. But the trends which are seen now and their fast pace indicate that there may be more reality than imagination in the accounts.
Automation in this context means the use of robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data manipulation to improve productivity and efficiency. It is set to bring about a revolution in the economy, mainly with respect to employment.
Leading consulting firm McKinsey has said that 50% of the existing jobs in the world will disappear by 2035. It says there are 800 categories of jobs in the world out of which 30% can at present be done by machines. Most routine jobs may be done by robots in the next two years in some places. A report presented at the recent World Economic Forum meet at Davos also pointed to these impending changes. For example, it said that 90% of vehicles will be self-driving electric vehicles by 2035, which will make drivers’ jobs mostly redundant. Almost all occupations will be affected and only those jobs that need extraordinary skills, intelligence and creativity will be done by human beings. Even if these projections are taken with a pinch of salt, there is a need for the world to be prepared to face the prospect of massive joblessness in the coming decades. Formulating strategies to deal with the situation is especially important for countries like India which, even now, find it difficult to explore jobs for its youth. India’s demographic dividend might then turn out to be a debilitating burden. It is middle and lower level jobs, which are the most numerous, that may be axed.
The right response should first be to accept the possibility of change and try not to deny and resist it. The lessons from fighting tractors and computers when they made their appearance should be relevant here. Economic and social policies should be tailored to the new needs. Education and development of the skill sets suitable for the new age should get priority. Politics and governance should follow suit. All these might change beyond recognition. It should be realised that the future is rushing towards us at a speed never seen before. Many countries, including India, have found themselves left out when they could not keep peace with monumental changes in the past. History should not be allowed to repeat itself. Every challenge has many opportunities in it.
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Modder ‘MiGGousT’ is currently working on a Euphoria Ragdoll Overhaul mod for Grand Theft Auto V. This mod aims to improve the game’s physics and bring them closer to the standards set by GTA IV (believe it or not, GTA IV had better Euphoria ragdoll physics than GTA V).
This is still a WIP project, meaning that there are bugs and issues that have not been resolved yet. Despite that, a new version of this mod was released to the public, and can be downloaded from here.
Here are the key features of the mod according to its author:
Targets will try to balance much longer if they’re alive after shot
Targets grab and hold where they’re hurt and try to balance at the same time (Much like RDR), neck shots look extremely brutal ’cause of this when peds try to stop the bleeding with their hands
Shooting someones leg now reproduces correct reaction from them, trying to balance but eventually collapsing if hurt enough
Targets can enter a shock-state when shot in chest
No more weird force shit when blasting someone up-close (Shotgun to face for example lifted target of the ground to create that “Hollywood” effect)
Chance to drop on knees on death and stay there for a while
Armed individuals will sometimes enter “last stand” and shoot you when balancing (Even with two handed weapons)
Shooting in the gut can cause tension in the body to deal with the immense pain
Headshots are usually insta-ragdoll but with a chance of leg twitching, body tension, grabbing the wound
Better electrocuted effect, no more insta dropping and twitching but now targets will try to balance the muscle shock
Running peds over look more natural as they don’t auto-roll over the car
Better bracing for impact reaction
Melee now looks much better with this new “grab where it hurts”-reaction, stabbing especially
Explosion make targets try and cover their heads from the blast, putting their hands above their head
And pushing people is now more easier and their balance is better
Probably a lot of shit I forgot, watch the video and pics and you see what I mean
Enjoy!
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(Natural News) If you ever wanted to know why it is vital that the incoming Trump administration implement dramatic reforms of the pharmaceutical industry, this should answer that question comprehensively.
To say that Big Pharma is corrupt is an understatement, especially after a shocking new study published in the British Medical Journal found that drug makers actually purchase positive field trial results so that it will be easier, cheaper and quicker to get new drugs approved.
As reported by The Daily Sheeple, financial ties between researchers and Big Pharma firms “are independently associated with positive trial results, suggesting bias in the evidence base,” according to the new study.
For their study, which was published in the BMJ, researchers analyzed results from 195 drug trials that were reported in 2013. Led by experts from the University of California-San Francisco, the research team discovered that in more than half of clinical trials – 58 percent – the lead scientist in the study had at least some level of financial ties to the company that made the drug under testing. (RELATED: Keep current with the most recent medical scandals at Medicine.news)
Included in the cozy relationships were direct payments to researchers, honorariums, paid travel expenses, stock ownership and payment for “advisory” work.
In an accompanying editorial, entitled, The Ties That Bind, the BMJ noted:
“Substantial evidence shows that sponsorship or funding of trials of drugs and devices by companies producing the drug or device results in publications that tend to favour the sponsor’s product. Personal financial ties—including travel expenses, honorariums, payment for advisory work, or stock ownership—between commercial companies and authors of reviews, meta-analyses, editorials, and letters are also associated with conclusions favourable to the sponsor.”
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The fraudulent nature of clinical trials involving Big Pharma has been known to insiders for quite some time, including Dr. Marcia Angell, a physician and longtime Editor in Chief of the New England Medical Journal.
“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine,” she has said.
Natural News founder/editor Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, has also tracked the issue of faking drug trial results so that pharmaceutical firms can get their flawed products to market faster.
“There’s no question whatsoever that the bulk of drug company-funded clinical trials are rooted in scientific fraud,” he said. “Much of the entire body of so-called ‘scientific evidence’ cited by the FDA to justify the granting of prescription drug monopolies is nothing more than pharmaceutical voodoo and quackery disguised to look like legitimate science.” (RELATED: The most recent discoveries can be found at Scientific.news)
In a separate news release, Andreas Lundh of the University of Southern Denmark, and Lisa Bero of the University of Sydney, said that more studies, and more transparency, are needed for clinical trials:
“They urge trial authors to share their data and participate in industry funded trials only if data are made publicly available – and suggest journals could help by rejecting research by authors who are unwilling to share their data and by penalising authors who fail to disclose financial ties. The role of sponsors, or companies with which authors have ties, in the research must also be transparent,” EurkAlert reported.
President Trump has vowed to clean out the cesspool that is Big Pharma’s power lock in the nation’s capital.
“Pharma has a lot of lobbyists and a lot of power,” he said during his first press conference as president-elect recently. “There’s very little bidding on drugs. We’re the largest drug buyer in the world, and we’re going to start bidding. We’re going to start saving billions of dollars on drugs.”
In addition to implementing a bidding process and making other changes to how Big Pharma does business, Trump is considering appointing vaccine skeptic, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to a special panel to look into their safety.
J.D. Heyes is a senior writer for Natural News and News Target, as well as editor of The National Sentinel.
Sources:
Trump.news
TheDailySheeple.com
NCBI.NLM.NIH.gov
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Share. With the world's heroes dead, Old Man Logan embarks on his last, great adventure. With the world's heroes dead, Old Man Logan embarks on his last, great adventure.
Welcome to another IGN Comics review. If you've been here before, you know the drill. If you haven't, here's how it works. We grade on a 100-point scale. Numerically this is represented as a 10 point system with 0.1 increments. These scores also translate to particular labels. To learn more about our rating system, look for the red link near our final score at the bottom. For trade, arcs and manga reviews, we'll comment on art and writing along with a final score. Weekly books get a faster treatment due to their shorter length.
One thing to keep in mind is we're often providing you with multiple reviews and multiple scores. Additional Take reviewers will have their scores listed directly after their opinion. The Final Score is not affected by this and is directly determined by the main reviewer.
Any time you feel like commenting on our reviews, you may. Our weekly review index, which is published late Wednesday night, has a comment section. Every review we publish does as well (look below). You can also find our message boards by clicking the link on the left-hand side. Enjoy!
Jesse's Take
Looking back, it's funny to see how so many popular X-Men writers have provided their own unique take on the concept of an elderly Wolverine from a dark, alternate future. Each vision is wildly different. Claremont's "Days of Future Past" Logan is nothing like Paul Jenkins' "The End" Logan, who in turn barely resembles the surprisingly spry Logan of Grant Morrison's "Here Comes Tomorrow." Marvel's writers can't even agree on how Logan's healing factor affects the aging process, much less how life should treat the poor guy decades or centuries after his fellow teammates bite the dust.
Mark Millar joins the long line of comic greats with his return to Wolverine. Unlike his last continuity-driven arc, "Old Man Logan" takes place in a far-flung future where the idea of a superhero is but a sad memory. I'll admit I wasn't necessarily hyped for this storyline, especially compared to Millar's other recent Marvel projects. Ignoring the fact that an elderly Wolverine is a seemingly played out concept, one glance at "Old Man Logan" betrays far too many obvious similarities to popular Westerns like Unforgiven. How can Wolverine possibly measure up to books like Fantastic Four?
By injecting a dour, morose story with a surprising blast of fun, that's how. Make no mistake - Wolverine #66 is a depressing book in many ways. Rarely have we seen Logan so downtrodden, now to the point where he refuses to raise a hand in violence. Still, freed of many of the restraints of continuity, Millar is allowed to cut loose (no pun intended) and craft a story that revels in its own unusual qualities. A gang of inbred hillbillies who all carry the Hulk gene? Okay. A decrepit, blind Hawkeye who refuses to let anyone else drive his car? Sure, why not? Wolverine #66 is a bit slow going, but once the setting has been established and those wonky, Millar-esque qualities poke through, you might find it hard to avoid cracking a smile.
There's no question that Millar is a competent Wolverine writer after "Enemy of the State." That storyline was famous for putting Logan back in costume after several years of rocking the black leather. I'm happy to see him taking the opposite approach now. Wolverine gets more than his fair share of spandex-clad heroics in about a dozen other books. This new, war-torn Marvel landscape is almost a breath of fresh air. I say almost because the "homages" to movies like Unforgiven are too strong to ignore. Wolverine even does his best Clint Eastwood impersonation throughout the issue. Still, Eastwood never fought Hulk children as far as I'm aware.
Whatever faults the writing may have - and there aren't that many - I'm ready to forgive all because of the art. Artistically, Steve McNiven made quite a partner to Millar on Civil War. I wasn't quite sure how his incredibly sharp and clean cut style would translate to what is, for all intent and purposes, a dystopian Western. I needn't have worried. McNiven subtly alters his familiar linework, giving everything a more rough-hewn edge and dialing up the violence several notches. This is some beautiful stuff.
"Old Man Logan" suffers a bit from a derivative feel even as it charts new territory for the character. In the end, it's still a huge improvement over everything we've seen from the Wolverine books since last time Millar was writing. I'm hesitant to add another Millar book to my pile of recommended reading, but I honestly have no choice. This story is already shaping up to be a wild ride.
Jesse's Score: 8.8
Flip the page to see another take from more IGN Review Crew members!
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Sweden has received intelligence about a possible attack on the capital by Islamic State militants, local media reported on Tuesday, and security services said they were investigating undisclosed "information".
Newspapers Aftonbladet and Expressen as well as public broadcaster Swedish Radio, citing unnamed sources, reported the information was related to the threat of an attack, possibly in the capital Stockholm.
Expressen reported Swedish security police (SAPO) had received intelligence from Iraq that seven or eight Islamic State fighters had entered Sweden with the intention of attacking civilian targets.
A security police spokeswoman said she would not comment on any specific details of a threat, but said it was working with regular police as well as national and international partners. "Security police are working intensively to assess received information, and it is of such a nature that our judgement is that we can not dismiss it," she said.
Sweden has not been hit by a large-scale militant attack, but a man is currently is awaiting a verdict for allegedly building a suicide bomb with the intent of staging an attack in Sweden. In 2010 a suicide bomber died when his bomb belt went off prematurely in central Stockholm.
The Swedish terror threat level remained unchanged at level three on a five-grade scale, the spokeswoman said. Norwegian public broadcaster NRK reported Norwegian police were assessing whether or not the Norwegian royal family should proceed with a planned trip to Stockholm this weekend to celebrate the Swedish king's 70th birthday, given the supposed terror threat.
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The Hawai‘i Forest Institute is having a volunteer work day at La‘i‘Ōpua Preserve in Kealakehe on Saturday, April 8, from 8 a.m. until noon.
Volunteers are asked to bring their own water bottle, sunscreen, hat and to wear closed-toe shoes.
The Preserve is located between West Hawai‘i Civic Center and Kealakehe High School on the corner of Ane Keohokālole Highway and Kealakehe Parkway.
For more information, email laiopua.preserve@gmail.com or call (808) 937-2707.
La‘i‘Ōpua Dryland Preserve restoration and outreach activities are part of the “Connections Not Forgotten” project, a dryland restoration project to maintain native forest habitats while engaging volunteers in stewardship activities at Kaʻūpūlehu Dryland Forest, Pālamanui Dry Forest Preserve, La‘i‘Ōpua Dryland Preserve, and the shoreline salt ponds at Kalaemanō Culture Center.
Through Connections Not Forgotten, coordinators and educators are merging traditional knowledge of local habitats and cultural knowledge into restoration activities like dispersing seed, planting seedlings and weeding.
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Last year's May Day in Berlin was the most violent in a decade [GALLO/GETTY]
Lukas sits drinking a beer in Baiz bar, a popular hangout for Berlin's leftwing scene.
He has a steady job, is well-groomed and wears a brand-name jacket. There is nothing that readily identifies him as a leftist radical.
Yet the 25-year-old is explaining what members of Germany's far-left jokingly refer to as "sports groups" - teams of young men whose "sport" consists of beating up neo-Nazis.
"A friend calls and says, 'There are neo-Nazis down in the park, playing their music'," he says, describing one incident he was involved in. "We said, 'Not anymore.' It was the first and last time they were there."
Lukas was in many such brawls in his younger days. Well-built and trained in martial arts, he survived them unscathed, though a friend once caught a broken bottle in the face and still has a thick scar to prove it.
Although he has retired from the "sport" and moved into more organised political activity - which is why he does not want his full name used - Lukas says he is still perfectly comfortable justifying violence against neo-Nazis.
"A friend once told me, 'You have to speak the language that people understand. Those guys, the neo-Nazis, they don't understand any other language'."
'Declaration of war'
Violence, it seems, is increasingly the preferred language of Germany's estimated 6,300 leftwing extremists.
The country, which is still grappling with its Nazi history 65 years after the fall of the Third Reich, has been shaken in recent months by a spate of brazen attacks targeting police, government buildings, large corporations and personal property - notably the almost nightly arson attacks on expensive cars.
In 2009, there were more leftwing than rightwing crimes in Germany [GALLO/GETTY]
Last month, Germany's interior ministry announced that there were 9,375 leftwing crimes committed in 2009 - a startling 39.4 per cent rise on the previous year.
Violent crime, including arson, rose even more sharply, jumping 53.4 per cent to a total of 1,822 offences.
For the first time since the current system of record keeping began in 2001, assaults committed by the left outnumbered those by the right - 849 against 800 - most of which were directed either at police during rallies or at neo-Nazis.
More than 400 cars - mostly expensive ones - were torched in Berlin and Hamburg last year.
In December, about 10 masked attackers set upon a manned police station in Hamburg, setting a patrol car on fire and hurling stones through the windows - an incident the head of the police union branded a "declaration of war".
With the traditional leftwing day of protest, May 1, on Saturday, authorities are bracing themselves.
Last year's May Day in Berlin was the most violent in a decade, with hundreds of arrests and dozens of police officers injured.
Fashionable 'cult'
Yet the causes of this surge in crime and violence remain frustratingly opaque.
Florian Herbs, 26, an unemployed graphic designer and member of the radical group Antifascist Revolutionary Action Berlin (Arab), admits that car burning has become a fashionable "cult".
But beneath that, there is genuine anger about the gentrification of previously poorer, working-class and immigrant districts of Berlin.
Arson has become a popular tool of Germany's leftwing extremists [GALLO/GETTY]
Wealthier residents are moving into leftist and anarchist heartlands such as Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain, pushing up rents and fuelling the clandestine attacks on cars, offices and upmarket property developments.
The backlash, Herbs says, is working: Dozens of attacks on property developments have served as a real deterrent to gentrification, he argues.
"Now nobody wants to buy one of those apartments."
To Lukas, the former "sportsman", the question is: Why shouldn't the left use violence?
"Why should we be the only ones to refrain?" he asks.
"It's too easy to say, 'Violence is terrible'. But this society is full of violence. The difference is that we don't go around beating immigrants."
A new generation
So what do they want? Experts say leftwing German militants today are very different from their predecessors.
Issues such as nuclear weapons and even the more recent anti-globalisation movement have faded in importance.
"The leftwing extremist scene is made up of a very heterogeneous group of people with different ideological views," says Stefan Ruppert, an expert on extremism and an MP for the pro-business Free Democrats party.
"Only the vague goal of overthrowing our existing social order serves as a unifying effect. This complexity ... makes it all the more difficult to grasp the problem as a whole and work out solutions."
His assessment is borne out by Herbs, who says his Arab group, which has 30 to 40 members, is one of about 30 radical groups in the Kreuzberg district alone.
Neighbouring Friedrichshain, another leftwing stronghold, probably has another 30 groups.
Further complicating things, some neo-Nazis - so-called nationalist autonomists, who answer to no political organisation - have come to resemble the radical left "autonomists" in appearance and even share their anti-capitalist views.
"That increases the potential for violence during confrontations between left and right wing extremist groups, which in turn raises the danger for the police forces," Ruppert says.
Legitimising each other
Indeed, some analysts point out that, without each other, the two sides would not have much to do.
"They legitimise each other," said Viola Neu, an expert on political extremism at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation.
Leftwingers blockaded a far-right march in Dresden in February [GALLO/GETTY]
"They are there because the other exists. They are extremely interested in what the other lot is doing. They watch each other, they fight, and their arguments go back and forth."
No one is sure what to expect on Saturday.
Rightwing extremists are planning their own march through the leftist district of Prenzlauerberg - a gesture many on the left see as a provocation.
What is more, the left is full of confidence in the wake of its success in blockading a far-right march in February commemorating the 1945 allied bombing of Dresden. It will try the same on Saturday, forcing the police to intervene.
"Maybe there will be clashes," says Herbs.
"Maybe some people will start throwing things. There is a dynamic to the moment that we can't control."
"We hope it will stay peaceful, but with the capitalist crisis and gentrification, people are very angry. We'll see what happens."
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SINGAPORE - Singapore investment firm Temasek Holdings has made an offer to buy over and take SMRT private at $1.68 per share.
If successful, this means the rail and bus operator will be delisted from the Singapore bourse.
The offer price is a premium over the company's last share price of $1.545 and will see Temasek forking out about $1.18 billion for the rest of the company that it does not own.
Temasek owns 54 per cent of SMRT, which is valued at close to $2.4 billion, based on last Friday's price.
The news comes after the government announced last Friday that it will take over all operating assets of the North-South, East-West and Circle lines, as well as the Bukit Panjang LRT Line, from SMRT for $1.06 billion. This is the net book value - or current value - of the assets, plus GST.
Related Story Returning SMRT to the state
In a statement, Temasek and SMRT said they accept the New Rail Financing Framework (NRFF), as part of a regulatory transition.
However, "there remain significant business risks and challenges, which are beyond the control of SMRT".
SMRT is expected to face challenges - even under the new framework - with costs and uncertainties associated with an ageing and expanded network, the statement noted.
SMRT will also need to focus on delivering on existing and new multi-year programmes to support an ageing and expanded network, including the need to deliver a higher order of rail reliability and service in line with the heightened Maintenance Performance Standards to be determined by the LTA.
"Privatisation will provide SMRT greater flexibility to focus on its primary role of delivering safe and high quality rail service, without short term pressures of being a listed company, in the midst of its transition to a new regulatory framework under the New Rail Financing Framework," the statement said.
The deal has been structured as a scheme of arrangement.
This offers more certainty to a potential buyer, who will get all or none of the company.
Most takeover bids are made through a general offer, which does not guarantee a 100 per cent stake even if the buyer gains majority control.
For Temasek's bid to succeed, a majority of shareholders present at a meeting have to vote for it. These shareholders will have to hold at least 75 per cent of the value of SMRT shares held by all shareholders present at the meeting.
Credit Suisse is advising Temasek on the deal, while Bank of America Merrill Lynch is advising SMRT.
A trading halt of SMRT's shares was called last Friday, and trading will resume on Thursday.
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The Fabulous Fifties
The early days of UFO in the Spanish-Speaking World
by Scott Corrales
Institute of Hispanic Ufology
In July 1947, a number of peasants approached the newspaper of the Spanish town of Albacete with an unusual story: in the first days of that month, they had witnessed the transit of a dark object resembling a derby hat over the village of Balazote. The disquieting object was clearly not an airplane, as residents had seen their fill of aviation during the days of the Spanish Civil War a decade earlier. The headline of the Albacete newspaper did not hesitate to ask “Did atomic explosions draw the attention of beings from another world?” – a question that would be debated by ufologists for a number of decades yet.
Reports suggested that other communities of the region had also been treated to the sight of the unusual object, and on the evening of July 15 that year, the village of Azpeitia was buzzed by a shiny disk that left a wake in the clear skies over the Basque Country. Eyewitnesses said that as the object appeared to come in for a landing, it suddenly rose into the air once more into the skies, but not before emitting several powerful flashes that allegedly lit the surrounding mountain valleys with sun-like intensity.
UFO researcher Iker Jimenez mentions a case 1947 involving a student named Jose Villalobos from the southern Spanish city of Seville, who was headed toward an olive grove in the locality of Montequinto at six o’clock in the evening to sit among the trees and do his homework, aside from seeking relief from the broiling summer heat. Looking up from his books, Villalobos was astonished to see a strange round object surrounded by a metallic ring on the other side of the road from where he sat. The bizarre object was hovering above the olive trees, making a persistent buzzing sound. Eventually the object rose into the air making a “corkscrew-like” counterclockwise motion. Villalobos was apparently unmoved by what he saw and returned to his studies; it was only many years later that he realized he had joined the ranks of UFO witnesses.
In the early 1990’s much attention was given to the experiences of Próspera Muñoz, a resident of the southern Spanish province of Murcia considered by many to have been her country’s first bona fide abductee. Manuel Carballal, in his book Secuestrados por los Ovnis (Espacio y Tiempo, 1991) mentions that the Muñoz incident occurred in the summer of 1947 when Próspera and her sister Ana whiled away the hot summer days in her family’s country home in Jumilla. One day, Próspera saw something through a window that she took at first to be a car; the object glided silently toward the house, and from its recesses emerged two large-headed beings dressed in white coveralls. The beings politely asked for a glass of water and inquired as to the workings of the calendar, with which they were utterly unfamiliar. The strange visitors departed without incident, but returned several nights later with others of their number; Próspera felt the urge to go outdoors and then boarded the unfamiliar vehicle, where she was subjected to tests and the implantation of a “transmitter” inside her skull. After returning home, she would have no recollection of the event for another thirty years.
As the Forties gave way to the Fifties, sightings of strange objects over Spain and France would increase rather than diminish, and worse yet, reports of strange “occupants” would begin to fill newspapers and the first few books and pamphlets circulated on the subject. It was a time of intense social change in a country held in the vise-like grip of an authoritarian government: as Ignacio Cabria notes in his landmark Entre Ovnis, Creyentes y Contactados ( Spain: Cuadernos de Ufologia, 1993): “As information [regarding UFOs] reached us, like some kind of cosmic Marshall Plan, flying saucers began coming to us from the USA along with chewing gum and Walt Disney cartoons...” Despite strict government control of the media, publications like Solidaridad Nacional boldly stated on February, 2 1950 that “Flying Saucers are manned by beings from another planet” while the Fechas newspaper asked: “Is Mars attacking us? The mystery of the flying saucers.” Such headlines were considered sensationalistic, but accurately reflected the interest and concern brought about by the disconcerting lights in the sky. On March 29, 1950, the phenomenon visited Castilian city of Burgos when the air traffic controllers of the city’s airport heard a loud, intensifying whistling sound similar to that of an airplane coming in for a landing, although nothing could be seen. Only a few minutes after 12:00 pm, the traffic controllers would be startled by the appearance of a triangular object approaching the control tower at breakneck speed, flying over it before executing a sharp eastward turn. The startled – and perhaps somewhat shaken – controllers were able to calculate that the triangular intruder was flying at nearly seventeen hundred kilometers an hour, far in excess of the speeds achieved by the fastest jet fighters of the time.
This case would be among the most spectacular and best-documented of the “Spanish Wave of 1950”, as described by Antonio Ribera, who would go on to earn the distinction of being Spain’s foremost UFO researcher. Inspired by the pioneering work of French researcher Aimé Michel, Ribera attempted to track UFO activity along the “ortothenic” lines posited by Michel’s work. His early observations in March 1950 suggested that the bulk of the sightings were taking place along a straight-line between Santa Cruz de Tenerife in the Canary Islands, where an unknown object had been seen hovering over the sea on March 29, Seville and Villafría, the location of the airport in Burgos. “It is interesting to note,” said Ribera in one of his books, El Gran Enigma de los Platillos Voladores, “ that in almost all of these [sightings} the time displacement occurs in the order given. That is to say, from south to north, which appears to indicate that a large mothership could be located at some point over the Atlantic, in the vicinity of the western coast of Africa.” This statement speaks volumes about the thought process, quite generalized at the time, possibly on both sides of the ocean, that the “flying saucers” were scout ships flying out of interplanetary aircraft carriers or motherships. By the time the next major burst of UFO activity occurred in Spain in 1954, Ribera’s “ortothenic” map of Spain would be nearly complete.
Mexico’s Mid-Century UFOs
Is it possible that a Mexican miner, far from home and completely ignorant of the phenomena he was witness to, could have beaten Kenneth Arnold to the title of first witness of the modern UFO explosion?
An intriguing affidavit, dated July 18, 1957 and featured in the appendix section of Trevor James Constable's They Live in The Sky (New Age Press, 1958), sworn by Pierre Perry, president of Arizona's Copper Mountain Mining Corporation, tells the story of how Mr. Perry was on his way to inspect a certain mineral deposit to the north of Prescott, PA on a broiling hot summer day in 1943. Journeying along with Perry were an anonymous prospector and Isidro Montoya, a Mexican miner. The story that follows should by all accounts be a classic in the annals of ufology:
While fording the Agua Fría River on horseback around 5 p.m., Montoya, who was in the lead, shouted: "¡El diablo, el diablo!" (The Devil)
"Overhead," states Perry in his affidavit. "a most terrific drama was unfolding that lasted only a few minutes. A military plane was in sight, so where the two large unidentified flying objects that looked like balloons without baskets. They were luminous and bright as the sun. The UFO's stood still as if waiting for the plane to approach, the pounced towards it. At the same time, they projected a violent luminous ray that could be compared with the large beam of a lighthouse."
What followed was no less spectacular. The cohered energy beam hit its target and brought it down. The three onlookers saw the pilots eject from the plane, but another beam from the unknown craft caused the parachutes to catch fire and the men plummeted to their deaths. "The two bodies were later found," adds Perry.
While unnerved and muttering orisons, Isidro Montoya was by no means a stranger to such visions. After crossing himself, he reportedly told Perry: "El diablo, señor...I have seen the same thing many times, señor..."
The affidavit goes on to indicate that a third spherical intruder joined the two existing UFOs and the trio vanished south toward Mexico at breathtaking speed. The men on horseback turned back to notify the authorities, but military vehicles had already been dispatched. Perry's party guided the recovery team to where they had seen the stricken aircraft crash. "Parts were scattered all over the mountainside."
It is interesting to note, among the cases of these early days of Mexican ufology, the collision of an experimental V-2 rocket on the outskirts of Ciudad Juarez on May 29, 1947. The liberated German projectile was launched from the White Sands Missile Facility and four seconds into the launch, due to a defective gyroscope, headed southward over El Paso and fell in the Ciudad Juarez cemetery. Ironically, this would prove to be but the first of many rocket launches gone astray into Mexican territory.
By 1949, stories about a "flying saucer" collision in Mexico had become widespread. A man named Ray Dimmick told Californian newspapermen that "a shining disk" had collided against a mountain on the outskirts of Mexico City and that he himself had seen the wreckage of a "space craft" some sixty feet across. To add spice to his account, Dimmick alleged that the hapless saucer's dwarfish pilot's remains had been collected and preserved for future study. This Mexican crash would go on to become part of the vast corpus of such events collected by other UFO researchers such as Kevin Randle.
The 1950's dawned upon a world terrified by the seemingly ubiquitous presence of Communism, the very real possibility of atomic annihilation, and the persistent reports of strange vehicles seen in the skies over the northern hemisphere. On March 3, 1950, a Mexican aviation official engaged in a routine tour of inspection of the airports in the northern regions of the country when he saw a curious yellowish disk suspended at an estimated altitude of15,000 over the city of Chihuahua's airport. A press report indicated that two airplanes--whether military or civilian--tried to intercept the object but were unable to reach it.
By mid-March, the saucers were over Mexico City itself. On the 14th, many hundreds of witnesses reported seeing four flying saucers over Mexico's international airport, creating a sensation across the city. Activity reached its peak on March 21, when the El Nacional newspaper reported that an unidentified object was seen so clearly over Mexico City that movie camera operators were allegedly able to capture it on film. Sensational claims continued to emerge, such as the supposed collision of a saucer in the Sierra de Moronesa of Zacatecas--an impact that caused the earth to shake.
People from all walks of life were beginning to report strange objects during this period. A professional wrestler known by his stage name, Aguila Blanca ("White Eagle"), was in his hometown of Querétaro one evening in 1956 when he decided to go to the movies. As he walked across a public park toward his destination, he became aware of a strange light hanging motionless in mid-air, which almost immediately descended upon the city to remain suspended at 200 meters over the ground. According to the wrestler, he was able to make out a series of lights resembling portholes around the structure, which he estimated to be some 50 meters in diameter and made of metal. The object remained motionless for approximately 10 minutes before heading away.
In 1957, when most ufologists were still debating the wisdom of publishing reports indicating that UFOs could in fact land and leave ground traces, Mexican newspaper El Universal Gráfico published a comprehensive account on the alleged landing of a discoidal object in the community farms of San Juan de Aragón, an event witnessed by farmer Gilberto Espinoza. Although the incident had taken place in November of the preceding year, the newspaper ran its story in January 1958. An early UFO pursuit occurred on December 12, 1957, when a “speeding saucer” intercepted a Douglas DC-3 belonging to Aerolíneas Mexicanas over San Luis Potosí. Passengers aboard the aircraft were apparently petrified with fright as the pilot, Capt. Gilberto Alba, coolly put the DC-3 through a series of evasive maneuvers.
Argentina’s Early Saucer Cases
If countries could hold an award ceremony for the one of their number that has endured some of the strangest and most terrifying UFO cases, Argentina would certainly emerge the winner or at least the runner-up. The world’s fifth largest country, with a landscape that includes the sub-Arctic conditions of Patagonia and the rainforests of the Gran Chaco, the Andean range and a coastal plain that offers some of the best cattle grazing fields on the planet, has plagued – rather than visited – by UFOs since the earliest days of the phenomenon’s modern stage and well into the colonial and pre-European past. The sightings of strange objects in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s were followed almost immediately by incidents involving occupants at a time when most researchers in the U.S. were understandably leery about going as far as suggesting that the strange lights in the sky could be manned. Nor were these visitors the type whose craft landed in France in the 50s, shaking hands and embracing stunned farmers (the Antoine Mazaud case of 1954) –South America’s UFO occupants would prove to be unreasonable and terrifying.
The same month that officials at Spain’s Burgos airport were buzzed by an unknown triangular object, and while Mexico’s own air authorities witnessed the disk-shaped craft over Chihuahua, an Argentinean cattleman named Wilfredo Arevalo, not one given to musing about life elsewhere in the universe, was about to step into the pages of the history of the unknown. On Saturday, March 18, 1950, Arevalo had driven out to survey his ranch, Estancia La Blanqueada in Lago Argentino, some thirty kilometers distant from El Calafate, Province of Santa Cruz, with a farmhand to inspect the herd. It was then he noticed an object “shaped like the planet Saturn” issuing a reddish light some 20 meters away from the one of the livestock pens.
Even more perplexing was the fact that another similar object hovered at a higher altitude as if keeping watch over its sister ship. The farmhand squealed and promptly hid under the dashboard, leaving Arévalo to stare stunned at the bizarre object that had appeared out of nowhere. Stranger than the object itself, however, was the semi-transparent dome that revealed the presence of four occupants – human looking and wearing grey outfits. At one point, one of the beings noticed Arévalo’s vehicle and the reddish orb rose into the air, vanishing at speed. Both Arévalo and his farmhand – now recovered from the shock – got out of the pickup truck to inspect the area over which the strange device had hovered. The grass was charred and the temperature at the site was warmer than the surrounding area. (Note: there is quite a bit of controversy regarding this case, as the witnesses – Arévalo and his farmhand – were unable to be located by successive generations of researchers).
Argentina’s UFO chronicles in the mid-20th century began, as we can see, not just with what have come to be called the CE-1 cases but full-blown CE-III cases – a fact that attracted U.S. researchers Jim and Coral Lorenzen, who were the first to devote ample space to Latin American cases in their writings, even in the world was not ready for the high-strangeness quotient that some of these cases involved. In 1953, for instance, Eberto Villafañe was in the vicinity of Ichigualasto, Cerro del Valle (not far from the Huacañita mica mine) hunting guanacos when he decided to camp out. In the middle of the night he was overwhelmed by a blast of heat and woke up to see “a lovely woman” wearing green coverall. Singed by the heat, the hunter decided not to stick around.
Puerto Rico in the 1950s
Puerto Rico – an eternal UFO hotspot that has blazed into searing, white-hot prominence several times in the 20th century – began its contemporary sequence of UFO cases on June 20, 1947, four days prior to Kenneth Arnold’s history-making encounter over Mount Rainier. Mrs. Maria Ayuso witnessed the passing of a “bright object at high speed over the skies of San Juan” at 5:30 p.m. from Puerta de Tierra in San Juan. Nor was Mrs. Ayuso alone in this – her husband, Dr. Rómulo Ayuso, was driving the family car when his wife suddenly asked him to pull over and look at the strange flying disk in the heavens. “The intense light it gave off,” said Maria Ayuso, was similar to what can be reflected by an aluminum pan held against the sun’s rays.” The newspaper article of this early sighting appeared in the July 10, 1947 issue of San Juan’s El Mundo newspaper.
El Mundo’s issue for the previous day, coincidentally, had also carried the story of four witnesses – Americo Paoli, Miguel Orozco, Francisco Rodriguez and Julio Salazar – who reported seeing four luminous discs heading south in the night sky as they stood outside a pharmacy in San Juan at 2:35 am. Paoli, the manager of a taxi stand, noted that the objects “appeared to be flying at high speed and in pairs, separated by a short distance,” adding that “they were plate-shaped when tilted in such a way” that he could see their circumference, although they weren’t perfectly round. An attorney and his wife also reported seeing the same intriguing objects, adding that they had a “shiny, straw-like color.”
As the sightings continued sporadically into the early 1950s, even newspaper writers themselves were having sightings. Miguel Angel Santin, senior writer for El Mundo, and an unnamed co-worker were returning to their homes in the Puerto Nuevo sector of the city around ten thirty at night when they saw a luminous object traveling from east to west. “We thought that it couldn’t be a shooting star due to its trajectory, as these tend to fall very quickly. Furthermore, it gave off a greenish cast. The object was at an altitude of some 15 degrees and at an azimuth of some 5 degrees.”
By 1952, UFO activity over the Caribbean island was in full swing, with cases being reported from parts of the island’s geography that would become well known in subsequent decades for the volume of reports issuing from them, particularly the waters of the Mona Passage between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. On May 13, 1952 at seven o’clock in the evening, Miguel Angel Garcia, a prominent politician, was seated with his family at their residence in the city of Mayaguez, commanding a view of the city and its bay from a considerable elevation. García, his wife, daughter and son-in-law interrupted their conversation to look at two orange disks—one larger than the other-- flying high over the Mona Passage. The politician promptly went inside for his field glasses and returned to study the unusual objects. The larger of the disks had “the apparent size of the sun, according to Garcia, and was static while the smaller one maneuvered around, switching positions with each other. García’s daughter Fredita managed to photograph the strange aerial ballet between the orange disks but nothing appeared on the film due to shortcomings in the Verichrome film employed. Other residents of Mayaguez also saw the disks, but believed them to be military devices from the Ramey Strategic Air Command base on the island’s northwestern tip.
On August 3rd of that year, guests and staff at San Juan’s Caribe Hilton hotel reportedly saw a pair of saucer-shaped objects flying at a considerable height over the ocean. The staff members – Dominic Tutela and Ramón Rodriguez – said that they had looked out over one the ballroom terraces facing the sea at 7:45 that evening and saw the two discs, flying in a north-northeast direction high above the water. The Hilton experience is not without humor, as one of the guests who shared the sighting with the hotel workers believed the objects to be “giant butterflies with extremely bright bodies,” and had to be reassured that there were no giant butterflies to be found on the island.
Martians in Spain
By the mid-1950s, interest in platillos voladores (sometimes shortened to plativolos) was widespread in many, if not most, Spanish-speaking countries. Hollywood’s contributions to the notion of visitors from another world – and the inevitable bug-eyed monsters – had already graced screens of movie theaters in Madrid, Buenos Aires and Mexico City. It was not uncommon to see the cartoon image of the flying saucer associated with progress and the technological future: business establishments with such names as “los OVNIS” or even “los marcianos” (the Martians) sprouted in many neighborhoods, where ballpoint pens (plumas atómicas – “atomic pens”) were replacing the fountain pen in growing numbers.
A nascent body of people interested in knowing more about the phenomenon – ranging from scissors-toting scrapbookers to serious students of the metaphysical – was emerging in these countries. Some of them were devoted believers in spiritualist and theosophical doctrines who added belief in “visitors from another planet” as the next logical step in the evolution of the soul; others were academics and less spiritually inclined individuals who saw the possibility of “flying saucers” as being proof that humankind was finally advanced enough to be worthy of notice by infinitely more advanced spacefarers.
From the musings and lectures of the metaphysicians emerged the early contactees, those who went beyond listening to the long messages dictated by trance-mediums or automatic writers to claim firsthand experiences with the “space brothers”. There is a certain charm to the early contactee accounts coming out of Latin America, as they contain elements strongly reminiscent of Jules Verne’s novels – portrayals of individuals coming into contact with the advanced technology of an alien race as opposed to a reclusive genius, with the resulting minute descriptions of the technology employed. In Spain, the emerging contactees and scholars of the new phenomenon shared a common origin, at least in Madrid: La Ballena Alegre (the Merry Whale), the basement of the street-level Cafe Lyon. In the smoke-filled recesses of this underground world, playwrights and priests gathered together to listen to the compelling oratory of Fernando Sesma, journalist and true believer, author of a newspaper column on the subject of the otherworldly. Sesma’s esoteric get-togethers would – in the fullness of time – give birth to one of the most spectacular UFO myths ever recorded: the UMMO affair. But in 1955, all eyes were on an alleged “Martian stone” given to Alberto Sanmartin, a hospital orderly, by a humanoid entity that irradiated love and understanding. The orderly bemusedly accepted the stone – crawling with strange glyphs – and watched the humanoid descend into a ravine, board his spacecraft and take off into the night sky. While many called the experience into question, others saw the stone as the first bona-fide proof of an alien presence on Earth. Severino Machado, a priest, became Sanmartin’s strongest supporter, devoting hours of study to the mysterious signs on the stone.
Father Machado’s long hours of study resulted in a pronouncement: the stone was not from Mars but from Saturn! The glyphs (considered random rubbish by an epigrapher who had examined it earlier) contained the following message: “Message from Saturn to Earth – we are on a round-trip voyage to establish links of friendship with all of Earth. There is a shorter path to reach you by employing the conjunction of a celestial body between Saturn and Earth...” and so forth. The priest and the “Martian stone” would eventually find their way to Sesma’s lectures at The Merry Whale. Machado has the distinction, however, of being the author of one of the first books on “flying saucers” published in Spain: Los Platillos Volantes Ante La Razón y la Ciencia (Madrid, 1955). “I am writing for the astronomer, for the physicist and for the man of science,” says Machado in his book, “in order that they may compare and contrast what I am saying and so that they may ascertain the truth of my words.”
But these ruminations on alien visitors weren’t all that was going on in Spain at the time. In the early morning hours of December 6, 1954, a young construction worker named Juan Martínez was cycling his way to work in the town of Rentería amid the bone-chilling winter rain. As his bicycle progressed along the road, he noticed a large object moving at high speed down the middle of the road and away toward him, giving off a dull yellowish light. Upon negotiating a curve on the road, he came face to face with a featureless rectangular craft with a single “spotlight” built into its structure. Terrified, Martinez fled the scene. A construction foreman inspecting the site would later find signs of flattened vegetation and very large footprints, as well as scattered debris. Months later, a truck driver and other local residents would report seeing a reddish object landing near the location, adjacent to a slate quarry, before taking off again in a vertical direction at high speed.
One of the most charming stories of this early period of Iberian sauceriana remains, without a doubt, the encounter between a group of fifteen boys engaged in a pick-up soccer match outside the city of Badajoz in August 1956. Their animated afternoon game was interrupted by a sudden and deafening buzzing sound that came from the sky; all of the players looked up to see a strange object flying directly toward the barren field they used as makeshift soccer pitch. The object -- described as an elongated craft with a transparent cockpit “similar to that of a military aircraft” -- descended to within a few feet of the ground. Half of the players ran off to seek the help of grownups while the other half remained riveted to the spot until their elders arrived. The earthlings allegedly perceived movement within the craft, “greenish silhouettes” that responded with strange gestures to the frantic, friendly waving of the older humans. What could have been a perfect opportunity for a meeting of worlds ended abruptly as the object took to the air, accelerating into the distance.
Mexico’s Earliest Contactees
In January 1954, across the ocean from Spain and far from the animated get-togethers in a Madrid speakeasy, a man named Armando Zurbarán was negotiating the dangerous hairpin curves of the road connecting Mexico City to Acapulco. Zurbarán’s only concern at the time was reaching the Pacific port city before sunrise, in order to meet a business associate. He had left Mexico City at 2 A.M., ready to cover the six-hour trip. At some point during the drive, he was overcome by sensation of lethargy that caused him to pull over. Not far ahead on the road, he was able to see a number of men clad in overalls with wide belts gathered around a strange, brilliantly lit object. Before he realized, and having no idea how it happened, he was walking toward the object, escorted by the longhaired men. A slight buzzing sound filled his ears as he entered the saucer. Zurbarán was going down in history as his country's first contactee, and this was his first question to the ship's captain: Why had he been chosen for this honor?
The stunned businessman was treated to a review of the smallest details of his life on a screen within the vehicle's wall and a tour of the ship's interior, guided by one of the fair, long-haired crewmen (reminiscent of Adamski's Venusians) who answered each of the puzzled human's questions in detail. The space travelers, he learned, employed an gravity repulsion system to cover the distance between their home world and Earth, scanning the space ahead of them with a radar-like device to dispel any objects that may lie in their path. Unlike other contactee stories of the time, Zurbarán's visitors did not claim to originate from any planet in the Solar System, nor did they mention their planet of origin by name.
The craft, he learned, had taken off while he was unaware and was now in space. Zurbarán peered out a porthole, hoping for a glimpse of the world seen from above, but could only see a grayish mist until at a distance of 40,000 kilometers, the ship's captain pointed out the planet to him through another porthole. Excited by the vista, the human asked the Captain if he could perhaps be taken to visit their world, but his request was turned down. He was told that perhaps someday such an invitation would be tendered, at the right moment.
So far, we are faced with typical abductee fare, reading more like the diary of Jules Verne's Professor Arronax when taken aboard Captain Nemo's Nautilus. But Zurbarán's experience departs from others in this respect: he was able to sleep a normal sleep and eat with the UFO's crew. His description of taking a shower in space is particularly memorable: "I shall never be able to forget it. That bathroom was a new and unimaginable experience for me. Standing upright, facing an angle of the wall filled with tiny holes, I was covered in warm air, and as it grew stronger, it became transformed into damp air, impregnating my skin like a warm, wet breeze. When I was completely drenched, I was offered a sort of liquid soap that I rubbed all over myself, from head to toe. Standing once more before the warm air sprinklers, I felt the soap begin to evaporate and my skin become completely clean. The air then ceased to be damp, turning dry and warm instead...becoming colder until agreeably cool."
After their meal, the Captain proceeded to regale Zurbarán with his world's philosophy, religion and history: children and the elderly received special consideration, and there was equality between the occupations. The average life span was of some 250 years, and collaboration had replaced competition in the area of commerce...a utopia made possible by a being they termed "The Master" or "Beloved Number Nine", who was at the heart of their religion, and who had ruled them for a span of three thousand earth-years.
The spaceship returned Zurbarán to his car by the roadside. Confused but excited by his experience, he continued the balance of his drive to Acapulco, learning upon his arrival that it had only taken him an hour and a half to complete a six-hour journey.
A year before Zurbarán’s experience, another experience involving allegations of contact between an unsuspecting human and visitors from space had occurred far from Acapulco. In August 1953, a humble taxi driver named Salvador Villanueva, had been hired by an American couple to drive them from Mexico City to Laredo, Texas (an undertaking that probably deserves a story all to itself). Halfway along the journey, Villanueva’s cab broke down, prompting his passengers to hike back to the nearest town in search of a mechanic or a tow truck. He would never see them again.
Alone on the arid roadside, Villanueva was startled by the unexpected arrival of a longhaired man wearing “a kind of aviator outfit” and bearing a helmet under his arm. The man asked him in a gentle voice if there was something wrong with the car. The cabbie was startled by the strange flashing belt worn by his interlocutor and was unable to reply. The stranger donned his helmet and went away. Villanueva put the tire jack back into the trunk and made ready to spend the night in the wilderness; his sleep was eventually interrupted by a tapping on the driver’s side window – the helmeted stranger had brought a companion, dressed in the same “aviator” type gear.
A conversation ensued in which the strangers told Villanueva they were from another world, one with a single ocean and not many, like our planet. They offered to show Villanueva their own “automobile”; the taxi driver accepted and soon found himself staring at “a flattened sphere, like a ball with some of the air taken out” with round portholes. The entire craft – as Villanueva would tell researcher Ramiro Garza – resembled “a buoy buried in the ground” more than anything else.
Within the strange vessel, Villanueva reported seeing “enormous steering wheels” arrayed in three different rows. There was no visible machinery, only a sort of sofa. The “aviators” sat on either end of the sofa and the taxi driver occupied the middle, looking out at the world through the vessel’s transparent hull (opaque from the outside). The vessel took off and the strange men offered Villanueva “a view of his world and their own” before returning him to the roadside—five days later, as he would learn with consternation. The contactee reported feeling in high spirits and filled with optimism, although a series of painful, crippling headaches followed shortly after.
Abandoning the damaged car to its fate, Villanueva hitched a ride back to Mexico City, where he underwent medical care for the uncontrollable migraines. In the fullness of time he would write Yo Estuve en el Planeta Venus about his experiences on the second planet from the Sun and the aftermath, stressing that Venus was insect-free and with a flora consisting predominantly of fruit trees, some of them similar to those on Earth; all Venusians had the same shoulder length hair and enviable physiques, but Villanueva was startled by the presence of smaller creatures standing no taller than eighty centimeters. These were not children, but smaller versions of adult Venusians “freshly minted” through “a laboratory process”.
The notion of Venus, Venusians and saucers from the second planet would play a major role in popular culture: in 1960, Mexican comedians Viruta and Capulina (Gaspar Henaine) would star in Los Astronautas, a comedy in which X7 and X8 – voluptuous Venusian females true to the space opera tradition – come to Earth in search of husbands and whisk the hapless protagonists off to their home world.
Midpoint of a Decade
This was also the period of the first serious books on the phenomenon and of the creation of the early research organizations. Some of these early texts were compilations of U.S. cases, ranging from the Kenneth Arnold sighting to the experiences of Daniel Fry in New Mexico, with lengthy disquisitions on the possibility of life in the universe. Ismael Diego Pérez, a Mexican author, self-published “¿Son los platillos voladores una realidad?” (Are flying saucers real?) in 1955; a year later Hector Espinoza would release Enigma Interplanetario: Los Plativolos y Barcos del Espacio (Interplanetary Engima – Flying Saucers and Vessels from Space), discussing the probable propulsion methods employed by putative spaceships. In Spain, Eduardo Buelta’s Astronaves sobre la Tierra (Spaceships Over the Earth) would appear in 1955 in Barcelona, while the irrepressible Fernando Sesma’s own Los Platillos Volantes Vienen de Otros Mundos (Flying Saucers Come From Other Worlds) would hit the newsstands in Madrid that same year. Ironically, it would be Sesma’s alien-flavored chat sessions that would give rise to BURU, Spain’s first UFO research organization, although some complained that the acronym, if it meant anything all, was a secret that Sesma kept to himself.
But the honor of being the first UFO book in Spain, according to Ignacio Cabria, fell upon Manuel Pedrajo, a native of the northern city of Santander, who was fascinated by the Scandinavian “ghost rocket” crisis of 1946 and became an avid collector of news clippings regarding flying saucers. In 1954, he presented his book Los Platillos Voladores y la Evidencia (Flying Saucers and the Evidence) for publication but had it rejected. Undaunted, Pedrajo self-published and his thousand or so copies were sold almost immediately by those interested in reading his conclusions on the “Martian” origin of the flying saucers and the expeditions launched to our big blue marble from the Red Planet.
In Argentina, 1956 would witness the creation of the CODOVNI organization (Comisión Observadora de Objetos Voladores No Identificados) by aviation pioneer Ariel Ciro Rietti and Cristián Vogt. Only a year before, Captain Jorge Milberg would translate and write the prologue for Flying Saucers From Outer Space, published by Circulo Aeronautico. The distinction, however, of being the first UFO related book written in Argentina corresponds to an earlier author, James Dawson (pseudonym) who wrote ¿Vienen de Otro Mundo los Platos Voladores? in 1953, followed by Origen, Estructura and Destino de los Platos Voladores by Jorge Duclout the same year. Cristián Vogt would pen his own work on flying saucers, El Misterio de los Platos Voladores, in 1956.
Interest in the UFO phenomenon at the time was on the rise, perhaps due to saucer activity during the 1954-56 period, mirroring the increase of cases in Europe and the northern part of South America. On December 28, 1954, a troupe of actors driving from the city of San Rafael to Mendoza along Route 143 noticed a bright light near Cerro Guaiqueria – bright enough to cause the driver to pull over in order for all the passengers to get a better look at the phenomenon. One of the women in the car, Maria Luisa G.H. de Amaya, a history professor and gifted concert pianist, claimed having seen two humanoid figures standing beside the bright source of light; the first figure appeared to be scooping something off of the ground to hand to the second one.
The unknown craft was described as having the shape of two deep, superimposed bowls joined at their edges, irradiating a bluish light that illuminated the entire object and generated a sort of fog around it. No doors or windows were visible, although all present agreed that its size, roughly similar to that of a bus, was one of the most impressive features. At no time were the onlookers blinded by the light or suffered any physical effects. Moments later, both figures vanished into the light, which rose into the air and faded in an out, as though appearing and disappearing, all the while issuing smoke from its base. The percipients placed the entire duration of their sighting at between thirty minutes to an hour. According to Mrs. Amaya, the emotional impact of seeing this unknown object and its occupants was second only to the birth of her first child.
In 1955, witnesses in the Buenos Aires suburb of Caseros reportedly saw a UFO containing white-garbed humanoid occupants, seemingly laughing and even backslapping. When one of the humanoids became aware of the onlookers, he touched one of the instrument panels visible in the object’s “cockpit”, prompting the UFO to disappear, yet again, at breakneck speed. At least four major reports involving flying saucers and occupants emerged from Entre Ríos, Salta and Córdoba.
Activity at the halfway point of the 1950s was not circumscribed to Spain, Mexico and Argentina – other countries like oil-rich Venezuela were stepping onto the scene with fascinating cases of their own. Perhaps the best known of these is the now-legendary case involving truck drivers Gustavo González and Juan Ponce on November 28, 1954 near the town of Petare. At two o’clock in the morning, as the two men were on their way to drop off a shipment, they found the road obstructed by a large, luminous sphere that hovered above the pavement. Curious, both men got out of the truck for a better look, only to be confronted by a very unpleasant sight: a three or four foot tall creature, covered in hair, with clawed eyes and glowing eyes. Unafraid of the animal or creature, Gonzalez grabbed it and hoisted it into the air to throw it, but the entity gave the startled driver a push that sent him flying over a dozen feet back. Ponce ran to the aid of his fellow driver, attacking the hairy creature with a knife. But far from stabbing deep into the monster’s vitals, the knife appeared to strike something as hard as rock or metal. At that moment, two other creatures resembling the first emerged from the bushes; the non-humans jumped into their glowing sphere of light, but not before flashing a blinding light at the humans.
Coral Lorenzen’s “Flying Saucers: Evidence of the Startling Invasion from Outer Space” offers an interesting additional note to this case. One of the physicians who attended Gustavo Gonzalez’s wounds following the otherworldly scuffle reported that he had been a witness to the Petare incident while out on a night call. He had seen the object and the stopped truck, as well as the confrontation, but feared becoming the object of negative publicity and his statements to the Venezuelan authorities regarding this case included a request that his name not be associated with Gonzalez’s and Ponce’s struggle against the unknown assailants.
As the Decade Ends
UFOs had all but vanished from Puerto Rican skies during a four-year stretch since 1952. But that would come to an end on March 11, 1957 when Pan Am Airlines Flight 257 from New York to San Juan, Puerto Rico, had a brush with the unknown: at four thirty in the morning, while passengers slept or engaged in quiet conversation with each other, the pilot, Captain Matthew Van Winkle, was forced to make a violent evasive maneuver to avoid a collision with a strange bolide that was heading right toward the airliner. Passengers and flight attendants – except for those who had wisely never unfastened their seatbelts – flew out of their seats and crashed into the bulkheads. According to reports, the pilot had seen an object described as having "a shiny greenish core and an outer ring that reflected the inner glow." Frantically executing an evasive maneuver, Van Winkle climbed 1500 feet above the object in a matter of seconds. According to San Juan’s El Mundo newspaper, Van Winkle’s initial impression was that he was seeing the burning exhaust gases of a rocket airplane, followed by a glowing light. Pilots from other airlines two to three hundred miles away, flying the same route toward Puerto Rico, reportedly saw the same object. John Walsh, a pilot with TransCaribbean Airways, very much doubted that “he’d seen a meteorite.”
In Spain, one of the most significant cases of the last third of the decade took place in Girona, near the Ter River, in October 1958. José Angelú was driving home from work around seven o’clock in the evening when an unusual sight in the heavens caused him to stop. A powerful source of white light was approaching a copse of pine trees near the road, closing in at high speed. After reaching the dense trees, the flashing light vanished and Angelú believed for a moment that he had witnessed a plane crash. Getting out of his car, the witness ventured into the woods to find the downed aircraft, but never expected to see the sight that hovered in air before him: suspended some twenty feet off the ground was an aluminum-colored oval object with a small transparent dome, issuing a buzzing sound “similar to nozzles issuing a powerful rush of air.”
But the good samaritan’s bewilderment would increase exponentially upon realizing that the buzzing object was the least remarkable item – staring at him intently only a short distance away were two large-headed humanoid creatures, dressed in dark suits made of an unfamiliar, leather-like fabric. The encounter lasted an estimated fifteen minutes before the strange creatures entered the object and took off into the night.
The files of the late, great researcher Antonio Ribera included a case from the summer of 1958. Three witnesses – Juan Corrons, Francisco de Rojas and Maria Rosa Amadó – were chatting on the rooftop of the Rojas home in downtown Barcelona late in the afternoon. Suddenly, they became aware of a silvery cylindrical object flying slowly in a north-south direction. Reports of such “motherships” would become a staple in Catalonian UFO reports, most notably the Vallés sightings in eastern Barcelona province. “Nearly all of them,” wrote Ribera, “involved large motherships, silver cylinders glowing intensely under the rays of the sun at dawn and at sunset.” On October 24, 1959, one such mothership flew over the eastern Vallés, seen by hundreds of witnesses who described it as a silver cylinder, tilted at a 45-degree angle.
Newspapers and radio stations were flooded with mail from witnesses reporting what they had seen and requesting explanations; debunkers had a hard time brushing the sighting off as “weather balloon” activity. On December 16, another “mothership” was reported at daybreak toward the east. Two days later, twin saucers were reported over the same area. These observations would continue well into the first few months of 1960.
Argentina’s UFO activity would continue unabated during the final third of the 1950s. In August 1957, less than twenty kilometers from the town of Quilino, Province of Cordoba, a serviceman with the Argentinean Air Force heard a very loud and acute buzzing sound. He got out of his tent to take a look and was startled to see a disk-shaped object coming in for a landing, causing a whirlwind that shook surrounding trees and grass. Frightened, the airman reached for his sidearm but was unable to draw it. “It appeared to be welded to its holster,” he would later say. A voice issued from the unknown craft, assuaging his fear and informing him that “interplanetary visitors already had a base in the region of Salta” and would soon make their presence known all over the world. Their avowed mission, it seems, was to discourage humans from misusing atomic energy.
Although we have concentrated on the early days of the UFO phenomenon in four countries – Argentina, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Spain – it is almost impossible to end any examination of matters ufological in the 1950s without including the Antonio Villas Boas (AVB) case from Portuguese-speaking Brazil. Many researchers and writers have agreed that were it necessary to sum up ufology in a single case, the one involving the strange experience of this young Brazilian farmer would indisputably be the one to select.
Veteran Brazilian ufologist Fernando Cleto reminisces about the surreal days of this most unusual case: "...being a friend of Joao Martins, I already knew enough about the event in his own words. One one occasion, I read letters written by Villas Boas and even managed to see a small model of the "flying saucer" and of one of its occupants--small rustic statuettes whittled out of wood by Villas Boas himself. I also recall that Joao Martins was completely opposed to making this case known to the public, for which reason it was disclosed much later[...]after Dna. Irene Granchi disclosed the case overseas, I published my own opinion in this regard in a Belgian or British magazine--I can't remember which. I made an observation which greatly favored the Villas Boas case."
As if the incredible AVB required any further bolstering, Fernando Cleto managed to show that there had indeed been sightings of the same elongated oval vehicle elsewhere in Brazil prior to the date of the events in the AVB case.
"I remember," says Cleto, "that a few days prior to October 15, 1957, there was a case in the interior of the State of Goiás. A car was forced off the roadway by a force issuing from a "flying saucer". The driver described something that bore a strong connection to what Villas Boas had seen. He compared the UFO to a helicopter, at first, with the power to exert traction...and to have seen occupants similar to those seen by Villas Boas. There is no doubt that on November 6, 1957, Colonel Ivo Gastaldoni, who was on the way to the hospital to see his newly born daughter, was summoned by his command to see a UFO hovering directly over the Cumbica Air Base. The colonel remarked that the object was high up in the air and well out of the reach of the base's fighters. His overall impression was that it resembled some sort of egg-shaped craft with a helicopter blade spinning over the ovoid fuselage.
"The event with the driver before October 15, 1957, when added to the November 6 case," writes Cleto. "coincided with the description given by Villas Boas for his own object and impressed me greatly. It was as if a certain model of UFO carrying a very special crew complement had been operating a given region of Brazil for a given period of time while on a special mission." Ufologist Cleto notes in his memorandum regarding the AVB case that Joao Martins' reluctance to disclose the particulars of the astonishing event was to keep mentally unbalanced individuals from conjuring up similar scenarios. But what exactly happened to Antonio Villas Boas?
The deposition taken by investigator Dr. Olavo T. Fontes and subsequently delivered to Brazil's Ministry of the Navy remains the cornerstone of research into the case. It was taken in Fontes' office on February 22, 1958 and witnessed by journalist Martins himself.
Villas Boas began by stating that he was 23 years old at the time and was a farmer by profession. He lived on a fazenda on the outskirts of Sao Francisco de Sales, Minas Gerais, not far from Sao Paul and came from a large family composed of two brothers and three sisters who all lived in the immediate area. The young farmer explained that it was their custom to work two shifts during the planting season: one at night, which he was responsible for, and another by day that was handled by farmhands.
On October 5, 1957, Villas Boas went to bed at 11:00 p.m. following a party at the farmhouse. He shared the room with his younger brother Joao, and they were both witnesses to a strange nocturnal light that lit up the entire room and had its source in one of the animal pens on the farm.
It was ten days later--on October 15--that Antonio Villas Boas would have his historic experience. While driving his tractor, he noticed a shining star that increased in brightness as if descending to earth. "In a matter of seconds," he told his interviewers. "it turned into a very shiny oval object headed straight for me. He tried to escape from it by speeding up the tractor, but the object had already landed some 10 to 15 meters ahead of the tractor. "It got closer and I was able to see, for the very first time, that it was a strange device with a slightly rounded shape, encircled by small lights and with a large, enormous red light in front, from which came all the light I could see when it was higher...the machine's shape was now clearly visible. It resembled a large, elongated egg with three spurs in front." AVB added the curious detail that "something appeared to be spinning at high speed on top of the vehicle and gave off a reddish fluorescent light."
Seized by terror, Antonio jumped off the tractor in hopes of eluding his pursuers on foot, but the furrowed terrain made a speedy getaway impossible. The next thing he new, someone had seized him by the arm. It was a figure much shorter than he, wearing a "strange outfit" and a helmet. The farmer pushed the figure away and managed to knock it to the ground, but three more similarly-dressed figures turned up, seizing him by his arms and legs, and bore him off to the waiting craft. Villas Boas indicated that he did not go off meekly to face whatever fate was in store for him: he kicked, screamed and hurled insults at the helmeted intruders. Given the narrowness of the vehicle's access stairway, the farmer managed to break away from his captors, but their uncanny strength and superior numbers overpowered him once more.
The humanoids dragged him into the craft, where he was stripped naked and subjected to several indignities. His captors drew a blood sample from his chin using a chalice-like device, and after slathering him with a strange liquid that covered his entire body, he was taken to a room--unfurnished but for a couch--were he was left alone for some twenty minutes, by his count. At this point, a mixture of fear, nausea and coldness, coupled to the stench of a strange gas that was pumped into the room, led him to vomit in one of the corners.
"After a long time," Villas Boas said, "a noise at the door startled me. I turned in that direction and was shocked to see that it was now open and a woman was entering the room, walking toward me. She was approaching slowly, perhaps amused at the astonishment that must have been visible on my face. My jaw had dropped and with good reason. This woman was completely naked, as was I, and barefoot. She was also pretty; although different from the women I'd known. Her hair was an almost whitish shade of blonde, as if bleached with peroxide, straight and not very abundant, neck-length and with the ends curled inward. Her eyes were blue and large, narrower than round and slanted outward--like the pencil-painted eyes of those girls who fancy themselves Arabian princesses and make their eyes look slanted; that's what they were like. Only it was a completely natural effect, since there was no paint at all involved."
The strange liquid which had been spread over his body, apparently some sort of aphrodisiac, began to work as Antonio felt less tense as the small woman began to caress him, ultimately seducing him. "It sounds incredible," he confessed to Fontes and Martins during the interview, "given the situation I was in. I believe that the liquid they rubbed on me was the cause of it. All I know is that I felt an uncontrollable sexual excitement, which had never happened to me before. I forgot about everything and held the woman, returning her caresses with my own. We ended up on the couch, where we had relations for the first time. It was a normal act and she responded like any woman. Then came a period of more caressing followed by more sexual relations. In the end, she was tired and breathing quickly. I was still excited, but she now refused and tried to get away. When I noticed that, I cooled down too. That was what they wanted from me, a good stallion to improve their stock."
The door opened once more and two of the "crewmen" appeared, summoning the woman away. Before leaving, she turned to the farmer and pointed at her belly, then pointing him, and finally at the heavens. Curiously, Villas Boas took this to mean "she would return to take me from where it was she came."
After having served as breeding stock, Antonio was unceremoniously led off the vehicle, which took off immediately. Returning to his tractor, Villas Boas learned that the time was now five thirty in the morning. Estimating that it had been around 1:15 a.m. when he was abducted, his entire experience had lasted some four hours and fifteen minutes. "My mother told me shouldn't become involved with those people again. I didn't have the courage to tell my father, since I had already told him about the light that appeared over the pens, and he didn't believe me, telling me that I was seeing things..." Villas Boas concluded.
After his traumatic experience, Villas-Boas withdrew from public life to pursue his studies, earning a law degree and becoming a practicing attorney in the city of Formosa, Goias, while running a small business on the side. He died in late 1992 in the city of Uberaba, in Brazil's Triángulo Minero.
In June 1993, the late Dr. Walter K. Buhler, president of the Sociedad Brasileira de Estudios Sobre Discos Voadores (SBDEDV), disclosed the fact that between 1962-63, his organization had received an anonymous letter from the U.S., inviting Villas-Boas to visit this country in order to examine a recovered flying saucer in the possession of the American military. This letter was sent to Formosa, state of Goiás by Dr. Buhler. Allegedly, Villas Boas's son advised him that his father had indeed visited to the United States to inspect the object but had kept silent the rest of his life concerning the visit.
Conclusion
“There is no truth to the rumor that flying saucers are from Spain, or are piloted by Spaniards.” This statement, made in 1948 by no less than Gen. Charles Spaatz, the U.S. Army Air Force Chief of Staff, could have easily been echoed by one of his military counterparts across the ocean in an effort to reassure the public that the ubiquitous flying objects being reported everywhere at the time (and commanding a fair share of Hollywood budgets) were not from the U.S. or piloted by Americans.
The fact of the matter is that many sky watchers – civilian and military alike – were wondering exactly what was the provenance of the strange objects filling their skies. In a world emerging from a global conflict and entering the uncertainty of the Cold War, rumors ran rife. Were the objects Nazi holdout weapons being used by what former U.S Defense Secretary Rumsfeld would’ve termed “dead-enders”? Or more unsettling still, the results obtained by technicians from the former Third Reich now at the beck and call of the Soviet regime? To some, perhaps, the possibility of hostile or meddlesome visitors from another star system was more palatable than the first two.
The fact that the rest of the planet underwent the same intense UFO activity in the mid-20th century is often lost among the cascades of information regarding the Roswell Crash and its ancillary incidents. Nevertheless, Spanish and South American files present the reader with a no less impressive array of cases from that very same period in time. P
©2007 Scott Corrales. Scott is a writer and translator of UFO and paranormal subjects in Latin America and Spain. His work has appeared in magazines in the U.S., U.K., Japan, Spain and Italy. He is also the author of Chupacabras and Other Mysteries (Greenleaf, 1997), Flashpoint: High Strangeness in Puerto Rico (Amarna, 1998) and Forbidden Mexico (1999). He lives in Pennsylvania, where he edits Inexplicata: The Journal of Hispanic UFOlogy. He may be reached at lornis1@juno.com.
image from istockphoto.com
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Awful Announcing dug up this Los Angeles Times article from July 9, 1960, proving the dumb debate has been going on at least that long. Let the Dean take you to school:
"I've called two near no-hitters this year," he said, "and have kept the listerners informed from the fourth inning on. "It's insuting the listeners to make them think they're silly and superstitious enough to believe my telling them that a no-hitter is going on will affect the game. "I'm not breaking a precedent," he continued. "Other announcers do the same. You see, no one expects a listener to hang on every word for three hours. They leave the radio from time to time and this service must be rendered.
No one really believes an announcer can jinx a pitcher, right? How would any no-hitter ever be pitched, since every single one of them was noted before the final out? Yet on Tuesday, YES Network broadcaster Michael Kay was fighting with fans on Twitter who blamed him for ruining Hiroki Kuroda's no-no. Wonder if any Root Sports viewers are bitching out Dave Sims for mentioning Felix Hernandez's perfect game. People are stupid.
[Awful Announcing]
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Being an astronaut is among the most dangerous jobs in the world. Of the 544 human beings that have been to space (so far), 18 of them have died during a spaceflight mission. That adds up to a 3.3% mortality rate, which far exceeds that of any other profession.
Spaceflight is hard. And in the grander scheme of things, our current level of spaceflight technology is still relatively juvenile. Sometimes, we still have a tough time just getting cargo into orbit:
The 2015 Antares explosion just above the launch pad. Luckily, this was not a crewed launch. Image: NASA.
With the first human spaceflight deaths having occurred fifty years ago this year, we're approaching a couple of morbid anniversaries. Here are the five biggest spaceflight disasters in history, in chronological order:
APOLLO 1
This one isn't technically a spaceflight disaster, since the astronauts never made it off of the ground. But it did occur inside of what was supposed to be a flight-ready spacecraft that was strapped to the top of a Saturn IB rocket, so it still counts.
The crew of the ill-fated Apollo 1 capsule. From left to right: Grissom, White, Chaffee. Image: NASA.
The incident: Under NASA's Apollo Program that would later take astronauts to the Moon, Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee had been selected as the first human crew to launch into space inside of the Apollo spacecraft.
Their mission was to test the command module in orbit for up to 14 days, which would (hopefully) prove that the new spacecraft was practical for a journey to the Moon.
The date was January 27, 1967. And NASA's internal deadline was to land a human being on the Moon before 1969 came to a close.
With an official launch date set for the following month, the Apollo 1 crew was loaded into the command module in order to conduct a full pre-flight countdown simulation. This was to be a plugs-out test: the spacecraft would be running on its own internal power, providing life support, and going through the motions of a real countdown procedure.
As they sat atop their rocket on launch pad 34, a communications problem developed and the countdown was put on hold at T-minus 10 minutes. Grissom remarked "how are we going to get to the Moon if we can't talk between two or three buildings?"
Less than a minute later, a fire broke out inside of the cockpit, spreading rapidly through the 100% pure-oxygen environment of the spacecraft. The astronauts had only a few seconds to radio for help as they attempted to open the hatch, but the cumbersome mechanism prevented escape.
Within seconds, the entire spacecraft was engulfed in flames—with the astronauts trapped inside.
Inside of the Apollo 1 module, post-fire. Image: NASA.
The fire was initially caused by an unknown ignition source (some claim faulty wiring); the 100% oxygen atmosphere combined with flammable materials had made the capsule into a death-trap.
A post-mortem showed that the astronauts had died of cardiac arrest. When the fire quickly melted through their Oxygen tubes, the three men were exposed to lethal levels of carbon monoxide—this would have caused them to asphyxiate and rapidly lose consciousness.
Leading up to the incident, Apollo astronauts had already expressed concerns with the design and quality of the new spacecraft, with some even warning their colleagues to 'get out immediately' if anything seemed off. Disaster was almost inevitable.
The crew of Apollo 1 had this cryptic photograph taken as a joke... Image: NASA.
The aftermath: Upon review, the Apollo command module was found to be hazardous and carelessly assembled, with investigators even citing a misplaced socket wrench that was found inside of the cabin. As a result, the spacecraft was redesigned and its construction was more carefully monitored going forward (after all, it was going to the Moon—it should at least be put together accordingly).
ONE GRUESOME FACT: THE 3.3% MORTALITY RATE FOR ASTRONAUTS DOES NOT INCLUDE THE APOLLO 1 INCIDENT. IF IT DID, THAT NUMBER WOULD CLIMB TO 3.86%.
Despite the new policies and procedures NASA put in place following the Apollo 1 disaster, this incident marked the beginning of a long and tragic trend. In every single spaceflight fatality, the root cause has always been that of hardware malfunction—never astronaut error. And despite the fact that aerospace engineers have often warned of such problems long before they arise, astronaut safety has repeatedly been compromised by a phenomenon that's come to be known as "go fever."
Just 30 months after the first crewed Apollo capsule burst into flames on the launch pad, Apollo 11 made its historic Moon landing in July of 1969.
SOYUZ 1
The Soyuz program was the Soviet Union's answer to the United States' Apollo program. The key difference was that the Soyuz was designed to accommodate two people, while the larger Apollo capsule could carry three.
This approach may have offered the Soviets a real shot at beating their American counterparts, had the Soyuz capsule been more up to the task (and had their giant N1 Rocket not suffered 4 consecutive failures before being scrapped).
Up until the mid-1960's, the Soviets had been well ahead of the Americans in terms of spaceflight achievements—they'd flown the first man in space, the first woman, sent the first probes to the Moon and Venus, conducted the first spacewalk, successfully landed the first probe on the Moon, and so on. Then, at the height of the race to the Moon, the Apollo 1 fire happened, and the future of NASA's Apollo program seemed uncertain.
An artist's rendering of a Soyuz spacecraft. Image: NASA.
On April 23, 1967 (just three months after the Apollo 1 disaster), the Soviets launched their newly-hatched Soyuz 1 capsule on an ambitious first test-flight, with Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov on board.
This ambitious mission was to include a second capsule, Soyuz 2, carrying three astronauts—two of whom were intended to transfer from Soyuz 2 to Soyuz 1 prior to landing safely back on Earth. But nothing went according to plan.
In addition to being one of the Soviet Union's most skilled and qualified cosmonauts, Komarov was also an engineer in the Soyuz program, along with Yuri Gagarin, the first human to go into space, and Alexei Leonov, the first person to conduct a spacewalk.
Throughout the development of the Soyuz capsule, engineers clashed with their superiors (many of whom were higher-ups in the Communist party) over the multitude of design flaws and technical challenges involved in the development of Soyuz. Despite the risks involved, Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 2 were ordered to go ahead as planned.
Portrait of Vladimir Komarov with the Communist sickle and hammer (for dramatic effect). Image: Roscosmos, modified by Dan Levesque.
The incident: Things began to go poorly as soon as Komarov reached orbit. Solar panels failed to deploy, power to the instruments was intermittent, and some of the important navigation instruments weren't working at all.
As a result of this poor performance—which included periodic loss of communications—Komarov was ordered to terminate the mission and reenter the Earth's atmosphere. Soyuz 2 was scrapped as well, in part due to bad weather.
While he managed to regain some control and should have been able to land safely, the main parachute on the Soyuz capsule failed to open. Komarov released the reserve chute, but it didn't work either. As a result, the first Soyuz mission plowed into the Earth at approximately 140 km/h (80 mph), and Komarov was killed on impact.
Allegedly, this is a photograph of Komarov's charred remains, recovered from the crash site. Image: RIA Novosti/Photo Researchers Inc..
The aftermath: Despite knowing about all of the problems with the Soyuz and its not being ready, the mission was forced to go ahead. It was later discovered that, had Soyuz 2 launched and attempted to rendezvous with Soyuz 1, it too would have been doomed—the parachute system was defective in both spacecraft, and all four cosmonauts would have died.
Allegedly, Komarov knew that the spacecraft was doomed and didn't expect to make it back alive. But he also knew that, if he refused the mission, his replacement would be Yuri Gagarin—a close friend. He refused to have a friend die in his place, and instead insisted on taking the assignment himself.
Similarly to Apollo 1, the Soyuz failure resulted in a complete overhaul of the Soyuz spacecraft, as well as an 18-month hiatus on all Soviet human spaceflight activities. By the time Soyuz 3 and Soyuz 4 completed the original mission in January of 1969, NASA had already orbited the Moon, and would make the first landing just 6 months later.
SOYUZ 11
After losing the Moon race to the Americans, the Soviet Union abandoned its hopes of landing on the lunar surface in favor of establishing a permanent space station in Low-Earth Orbit.
This was seen as strategically superior to having any kind of presence on the Moon, which was too far away from Earth to be strategically relevant (it would take a few days to travel between Earth and the Moon, whereas a missile launched from orbit could strike a target on Earth within minutes).
Following an unsuccessful docking attempt with the Salyut 1 space station made by Soyuz 10, the crew of Soyuz 11 was to make a second attempt.
An artist's depiction of the Soyuz-Salyut docking maneuver. Image: Ria Novosti.
The docking maneuvers went smoothly, and the Soyuz 11 crew was able to board the Salyut 1 space station, becoming the first human beings ever to inhabit a space station. However, the triumph wouldn't last long.
The incident: After arriving on June 7, 1971, the three cosmonauts made their departure from the Salyut on June 30th—after a record-setting 22 days in orbit.
Everything went as planned, up until the point when the Soyuz service module (which provided power and other logistics) detached from the descent module (which had a heat shield designed for reentering the Earth's atmosphere). The small explosive mechanism that detached the two modules caused the seal of a pressure-equalization valve to loosen.
At 168 kilometers above the surface of the Earth, the atmosphere of the cabin began leaking out into space, replaced by an airless vacuum. The cosmonauts inside were unable to fix or plug the leaking valve, asphyxiating and losing consciousness in less than a minute.
The Soyuz 11 crew became the first human beings to board a space station. Image: Joachim Becker/SpaceFacts.
The cosmonauts quickly succumbed to the vacuum of space—the oxygen and nitrogen in their blood would have begun to bubble and boil (under zero atmospheric pressure), causing blood vessels to rupture.
Ground crews responsible for retrieving the cosmonauts found them unconscious and unresponsive. Not knowing that their internal injuries made them impossible to revive, first responders attempted to administer CPR:
The aftermath: Investigations determined that the faulty design in the one pressure-equalizing valve had caused the issue, and that there was no way the cosmonauts could have fixed the problem quickly enough to survive.
More than any other previous human spaceflight mission, the Soyuz 11 incident proved that getting spaceflight right is really difficult. Even something as seemingly small as a faulty valve could cost space travelers their lives—or, had it been known about, it could have been easily prevented.
SPACE SHUTTLE CHALLENGER
It goes without saying that the Challenger disaster was the most shocking spaceflight disaster in history.
The Challenger space shuttle launching during STS-6. Image: NASA.
Both the Apollo 1 and Soyuz 1 disasters revealed the complete failure of mission managers to address the technical issues brought up by engineers. Unfortunately, the space shuttle era was marked by two disasters in which known issues had been pushed aside and ignored rather than addressed.
The incident: On January 28, 1986, the Challenger space shuttle launched on what was to be its 10th spaceflight. Temperatures at the launch pad over the previous night had reached as low as −8°C, which is significantly below the minimum acceptable launch conditions of 4°C.
As a result, the contractor responsible for designing and manufacturing the solid rocket boosters strapped to the side of the shuttle's external fuel tank recommended against launching under such conditions. Mission managers at NASA ignored this warning, and went ahead with the launch anyways—another incidence of go fever, just 19 years after the Apollo 1 disaster.
As a result, a crack formed in the rubber O-rings separating the hot gases from mixing in the rocket boosters. That crack became a breach. And that breach caused the external tank, which the shuttle was attached to, to rupture and explode.
Challenger meets disaster just 73 seconds into launch. Image: NASA/UPI.
The aftermath: One of the major issues leading up to the Challenger disaster was that, internally, NASA engineers would cite a 1-in-100 chance of catastrophic failure on any given space shuttle mission. On the other hand, administrators and mission managers often cited a 1-in-10,000 chance of failure—and this was even seen as overly pessimistic.
Challenger STS-51-L crew portrait Image: NASA.
All told, this disaster claimed the lives of seven astronauts—one of whom was a civilian schoolteacher—and exposed the severity of the mismanagement within NASA's human spaceflight program. But it wouldn't end there.
SPACE SHUTTLE COLUMBIA
On February 1st, 2003, NASA and its aging space shuttle were exposed once again.
April 12, 1981: the first launch of Columbia, and the first launch of the space shuttle. 21 years later, Columbia would make its final (and disastrous) flight. Image: NASA.
The incident: During the launch of STS-107, a piece of foam detached from the external tank and struck the wing of the shuttle at supersonic velocity. The resulting damage to the wing's heat-shield tiles made it impossible for the shuttle to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere without being destroyed. But nobody bothered to do anything about it.
Once again, NASA engineers had long warned about such a problem occurring—foam had caused damage before, but never to such an extent as it did during STS-107. Unfortunately, nobody knew the extent of the damage. And arrogantly, mission managers refused suggestions to inspect for any possible damage.
Despite warnings from engineers, Columbia didn't make it back to Earth. Image: Scott Lieberman.
Their logic was simple: even if they did find that Columbia's heat shield had been compromised, there was nothing they could do about it (according to them). They argued that it was best that neither they nor the crew knew about this potentially disastrous incident—better that the crew died not knowing their fate, rather than learn of their fate only to wait in Low-Earth Orbit for a rescue that would never come.
As a result, Columbia's mission continued as normal. The crew was never even informed that their heat shield might be compromised. And during re-entry, Columbia burnt up in Earth's atmosphere, and the lives of all seven astronauts on board were lost.
Recovered debris from Space Shuttle Columbia. Image: NASA.
The aftermath: Since the disaster, reports have surfaced detailing a hypothetical rescue mission that could have been mounted by NASA, had the damage to Columbia's heat shield been detected.
Unfortunately, despite repeated disasters in which NASA administrators have ignored the warnings of the engineers who actually work on their hardware, incidents like these have continued to occur. Not even two decades have passed between either of these tragedies at NASA, and yet the memory of the previous disaster and its causes seems to drain away.
Columbia's STS-107 crew portrait Image: NASA.
Following the Columbia incident, NASA made the measured decision to utilize its aging space shuttle fleet to finish construction of the International Space Station, which it did successfully. The shuttle officially retired in 2011 after 135 flights, two of which were disastrous.
In the end, the space shuttle program retired with the worst track-record of any spacecraft, ever. While engineers had estimated a somewhat uncomfortable 1-in-100 chance of failure, the actual figure after 30 years of operation came in at 1-in-67.5.
With NASA's new Orion capsule expected to launch carrying human astronauts sometime in the early 2020's, let's hope that, this time, the aging space agency doesn't forget its long and storied past.
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So far, our results for Assault are much more in line with what we expected. On the PTR right now, the Assault maps (Temple of Anubis, Hanamura, and Volskaya Industries) are only going to Sudden Death about 9% of the time. This is really good news. The “time bank” system we created for Assault Maps results in drastically fewer ties. And this is what we were hoping to achieve.
The Escort maps (Dorado, Watchpoint: Gibraltar and Route 66) are better than the 35% we saw in beta, but still aren’t where we want them to be. We’re seeing Sudden Death rates of anywhere on the PTR from about 16-18%.
And when it comes to the Hybrid Maps (Numbani, King's Row, and Hollywood), the rates for Sudden Death on the PTR are hovering around 20-29%.
Initial match time for Assault, Escort, and Hybrid maps will be reduced from 5 minutes to 4 minutes
Sudden Death Timer will be reduced from 2m00s to 1m45s
Hey everyone,The feedback we’ve been seeing from those of you helping us test our upcoming patch on the PTR has been amazing. Thank you so much for your efforts!Now that we’ve had some time to read through and really process your posts, I wanted to take the opportunity to let you know some changes we plan to make based on that feedback.+ You like seeing your Skill Rating.+ You like the strong leaver penalty.+ You like the Assault map changes.+ You like that premade groups are called out in the UI.- You don’t like the coin flip.- You don’t like Sudden Death.Regarding those last two points, even though we feel like tuning the attacker vs. defender advantage in Sudden Death is achievable—and we’re really close right now—the community perception is that one side always has a clear advantage on Assault, Escort, and Hybrid maps, and (as a result) you feel the coin flip mechanic is unfair. The balance is the easy part for us, but the perception issues are much more challenging. Challenging and important.In this situation, we feel like we can compromise and make changes that can improve most players’ experience in Competitive Play. So, in the short term, we’ve got some tweaks coming that will help balance out attack/defend win rates in Sudden Death. In the long term, we’re actually looking to remove the coin flip and Sudden Death from the game altogether.If you’ve been following our Developer Updates on Competitive Play, one of the things we talked about was our desire to greatly reduce the chances of a match resulting in a tie or Sudden Death. Back in beta, under the old system, we were seeing Sudden Death happen about 35% of the time. It felt too frequent and we didn’t like it. So, we changed our scoring systems and our game formats for Assault, Hybrid, and Escort as a result.We feel like both the Escort and Hybrid maps are still resulting in Sudden Death too often.Based on this data and your feedback, here are a few changes we’re looking to make immediately to Competitive Play:These adjustments should make Competitive Play games a little shorter, giving you the opportunity play more of them. They’re also fairly quick to implement, since they don’t require a lot of additional work to the core of the system. As a result, you’ll see these go live with Competitive Play and our Summer season (assuming we like what we see on the PTR).In addition to the above, and because we’ve received a lot of positive feedback on the new Assault map format, we’re going to try to apply the same “time bank” system to Escort and Hybrid maps.What this means is that, if both teams push the payload all the way to the end of the map with time leftover, you’ll go into a second round on the same map. We’ll remember how much time was on the clock for each team, and then you’ll have that amount of time to push the payload as far as possible. At the end of this second round, we’ll also look at how far your team pushed the payload vs. how far the enemy team pushed their payload. Push it farther than the other team and you win.The only ties that you’ll encounter in the “time bank” system are if a) neither team pushes the payload at all (an exceedingly rare edge case!), b) neither team manages to “capture” the payload (this is limited to Hybrid maps), or c) both teams manage to push their payloads all the way to end of the map in overtime. If we’re seeing ties happen less than 9% of the time in Assault right now, we should see even fewer Hybrids and Escorts resulting in a tie using this format.So, getting back to that Sudden Death mechanic…We’ve wrestled with this feature a lot. Our first version of Sudden Death in the beta felt very balanced to us. In that version, we resolved ties by going to a single point on a randomly selected Control map (Ilios, Lijiang Tower, and Nepal). Even though we thought this was a really fair way to resolve ties, we still received a ton of negative feedback on the format from beta participants. What we found was that people didn’t like playing on a different map and they didn’t like that it was a different game mode. So, we tried to come up with a Sudden Death mechanic that would play out on each map that was balanced and not too time intensive for players (i.e. the format you’re playing on the PTR right now).I think the Sudden Death format we have now is very good, and is actually much more balanced (and I’m looking at real stats here) than players are exaggerating it to be. However, it’s clear that players, at least the vocal ones, are largely not pleased with any form of coin flip or any form of asymmetrical resolution to the maps. We’re very open to changing and tweaking this system, but we’re also realizing that Sudden Death mechanics, in whatever format we might use, all have problems and we may be in a situation where we won’t be able to please the majority of our competitive players.With that in mind, we’re looking at a variety of different, longer-term solutions that involve removing the coin flip and Sudden Death completely. For example, right now we’re exploring ways to allow for matches that would otherwise result in Sudden Death to instead resolve in a draw where neither team wins or loses. In that situation, our goal would be to make sure the match still felt rewarding for both teams, and that players could walk away feeling like it was time well invested. It’s important to remember that the removal of Sudden Death/the addition of draws would accompany the format changes to Escort and Hybrid maps, which means that draws should be VERY rare overall.We think both of these updates would make a big difference and address a lot of the feedback we’re hearing.This brings me to a difficult decision we have to make.The extent of the updates we mentioned above are non-trivial. There is a lot of work that needs to be done to remove the coin flip and change the format again in Escort and Hybrid maps, which means that they’re not something we do can overnight. In fact, they’re not something we can realistically do until our Fall season. While we think they’re good changes to make, we don’t feel that holding back Competitive Play until the Fall is the right thing for the game right now. Instead, our goal is to release Competitive Play in our next content patch and kick-off our Summer season with the current ruleset.There’s a few reasons for this: We want players to be able to work towards Competitive Play rewards sooner rather than later. We’ve also gotten a ton of positive feedback from people who are playing and enjoying the system right now on the PTR. And, perhaps most importantly, we feel like starting the Summer season will allow us to learn a lot about what works in Competitive Play and what doesn’t—even more than we have from the PTR. I’ve mentioned previously that I believe Competitive Play is the type of system that will require a few seasons before we reach the place where we want to be. We need to run the system through its paces, in the live game environment, so that we can see how the community as a whole uses and reacts to it. By getting the system out there sooner, we can start making meaningful improvements sooner too.Speaking of improvements, while major changes to Competitive Play likely won’t be coming for a few months, we’re looking to get the Escort/Hybrid map changes and draw functionality on the PTR in the near future. Right now, if all goes well, we think we’ll be able to have those changes ready for testing sometime in late July.---------------------------Hopefully this all makes sense! We’re always listening to your feedback and, as a result, we’ll continually iterate on Competitive Play. Each season will get better, and we’ll hope you’ll stick with us for that journey.
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In the course of going to bat for Fox head Roger Ailes -- who has been the subject of two big cover stories this week -- Rush Limbaugh tore apart the results of a recent poll about Fox News viewers.
In Rolling Stone's article entitled 'How Roger Ailes built the Fox News Fear Factory' author Tim Dickinson writes:
"The result of this concerted campaign of disinformation is a viewership that knows almost nothing about what's going on in the world. According to recent polls, Fox News viewers are the most misinformed of all news consumers. They are 12 percentage points more likely to believe the stimulus package caused job losses, 17 points more likely to believe Muslims want to establish Shariah law in America, 30 points more likely to say that scientists dispute global warming, and 31 points more likely to doubt President Obama's citizenship. In fact, a study by the University of Maryland reveals, ignorance of Fox viewers actually increases the longer they watch the network. That's because Ailes isn't interested in providing people with information, or even a balanced range of perspectives. Like his political mentor, Richard Nixon, Ailes traffics in the emotions of victimization."
The poll Dickinson is referring to came out last December and drew exactly those conclusions -- they are not, as Rush suggests, the conclusions of Dickinson.
Regardless, Rush believes that the real conclusions to be taken from this study is not that Fox viewers are uninformed, but that non-Fox News viewers just haven't caught up to reality yet. Meaning: Muslims really do want to establish Sharia law, there is no such thing as Global Warming, etc.
He neglects to touch on the Birther conclusions. Naturally, it's the Rolling Stone readers who are the "kooks." Audio below.
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Todd Starnes has a pulse on today's culture and shines a discerning light on political correctness that has indoctrinated the minds of people from every walk of life. I am grateful the Lord has given Todd a platform that he faithfully uses to declare Christ's truth.
- Franklin Graham
Legendary Preacher and Cultural Leader
The Deplorables' Guide to Making America Great Again should be required reading for every high school student and every patriot in America. Page after page, Todd reminds us that every generation has a responsiblity to defend our freedom. Todd delivers a dose of deep-fried reality served up with a heaping helping of his signature Southern humor.
- Mike Huckabee
Former Arkansas Governor, Presidental Candidate, and Author
Jesus said, "You shall know the truth, and it will set you free." Much of America is having a hard time listening to truth and finding true freedom. Check out ole Starnes's rendition of why our culture is turning away from timeless truths and turning on the messengers that espouse them.
-Phil Robertson
"The Duck Commander"
If you want to know why the Left thinks you are a "Deplorable" and what to do about it, read The Deplorables' Guide to Making America Great Again. Todd Starnes is a Southern-fried conservative and more importantly, a Christian, who has a gift for speaking the truth and saying it in a way that makes it memorable!
- Jerry Johnson
President, National Religious Broadcasters
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Will Carroll once wrote that Josh Hamilton is “sui generis when it comes to a lot of things.” Carroll’s focus centered on projecting lost time due to injury. But that statement encapsulates what has become one of the more unique stories in baseball.
Certainly, when looking for comparable players in baseball, for injuries, projections, or path to the majors, Hamilton is unique. His path to the majors was abnormal. He missed the wear and tear of hundreds of games, but he also ravaged his body with drugs and went through significant weight loss. He also missed developmental time in the minors, which likely would have put him in the big leagues in his early twenties.
Perhaps with Hamilton we have to abandon comparisons in baseball. Perhaps his comparisons are more fitting in literature or mythology. The Rangers have picked up on this, as they play the theme from the movie “The Natural” when Hamilton homers.
In that film, as many of you likely know, the hero in the story has a checkered past and comes back from a long absence from the game to dominate his competition. But, as easy as the fictional Roy Hobbs made the game look at times, he was also prone to slumps. The narrative demanded that he battle demons, both internal and external. His past, one he tried so hard to move beyond so he could fulfill his dream of playing baseball better than anyone that ever lived, caught up with him.
Hamilton, our real-life protagonist, battles demons on a daily basis. In his autobiography, he talks of a vision he had of a devil’s face in the clouds during a minor league game. He tells how just having one beer after a game can destroy everything he has tried so hard to rebuild.
Hamilton tells how he became so adept at finding drugs that he could walk into a restaurant and guess which customer or employee was the most likely to be holding cocaine, a process he said he could accomplish with surprising accuracy in only minutes. He had an embarassing and public relapse in January of 2009. That incident reminded us all that his story may not be have a Hollywood ending.
And yet, Hamilton has had his share of Hollywood moments. He had a memorable All-Star weekend in 2008, when he hit an amazing 28 home runs in one round of the Home Run Derby. He spoke with ESPN’s Erin Andrews after his round and told her how he had actually dreamt of the moment beforehand.
He won the AL MVP last year, hitting .359/.411/.633 for the year while leading the Rangers to the franchise’s first World Series appearance. He’s playing well again this year, even though he missed a little over a month with a broken shoulder. His team is in the middle of an impressive run and leading the AL West again.
But he has a disease and has to resist temptation every day. Should we call him a tragic hero? Perhaps, yet his battle isn’t against fate. He’s not a character in a Greek tragedy, though his life has been tragic at times. He’s not a hero who fights destiny, his battle is against the disease of addiction. Even his successful return to baseball is diminished somewhat. It’s diminished by the seasons he has lost.
How good could he have been? Well, at times it looks like he could have been one of the best players that ever lived. He has a beautiful, powerful swing. He also runs well and is a good fielder. But, there’s a chance he would have been even better.
His multiple injuries can’t necessarily be tied to his past since players of all types break bones. But that the point from Carroll made earlier—we can’t know because, outside of a cause like World War II, we don’t know of a bunch of other players that essentially missed four years of baseball heading into their prime. We certainly don’t know any that missed four years due to crack and alcohol addiction and came back to be one of the best players in the game.
What we do know is that in his constant struggle against addiction and things like the accident at Rangers Ballpark earlier this month almost seem like some kind of trial from the Old Testament. Something where our hero is tempted, tortured, and tried, maybe just to see how he’ll react. Hamilton’s life reminds us of a tragic play, one in which we can hope the story will have a happy ending.
The Rangers seem determined to try to make 2011 a storybook season. They’ve been on a tear of late, winning 12 straight games starting on the Fourth of July, a winning streak that withstood the accident in the stands and the hospitalization of CEO Nolan Ryan.
The Rangers’ past success has usually followed their hitting. They are currently second in the American League in batting average and last in strikeouts, so as a team, they put the ball in play and constantly pressure their opponents’ defenses. Conversely, Texas’ defense ranks well in several statistical measures and excels and getting outs on balls in play, as summarized here.
The loss of standout third baseman Adrian Beltre for the next few weeks may adversely affect their run-prevention in the short term. But reports of Beltre’s strained hamstring make it sound similar in severity to the one Jose Reyes dealt with over the All-Star break. Reyes missed right around two weeks, and the Rangers hope Beltre’s absence will be similarly brief and, therefore, minimize the effect of his loss.
Texas’ pitching is ranked in the middle of the pack for ERA in the American League. However, their top two starters, Alexi Ogando and C.J. Wilson, have excelled this year.
The Streaks: Drysdale and Hershiser in Parallel by Shane Tourtellotte Two consecutive scoreless innings pitched streaks bound two hurlers together in history.
Ogando’s story, while not quite as remarkable as Hamilton’s, still impresses. The former minor league Rule 5 draft pick had to wait out a four-year ban from entering the United States before he could join the team. He served his punishment for participating in an immigration scheme, and since his eventual promotion last year, Ogando has moved from reliever to starter and has posted a career ERA+ of 184.
As the West’s top team continues to succeed, the Seattle Mariners lost their 14th straight game going into Sunday. On July 1, Seattle sat only 3.5 games back of Texas in the division standings. Just over three weeks later, they were 14.5 back.
Texas is primed to repeat as division champions, and if they can hold off the Angels, maybe they can overcome the tragedy at their ballpark earlier this year. Maybe their best player can, too.
References & Resources
Arthur Miller, The Natural
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In Western Tanzania tribes of wandering foragers called Hadza eat a diet of roots, berries, and game. According to a new study, their guts are home to a microbial community unlike anything that's been seen before in a modern human population – providing, perhaps, a snapshot of what the human gut microbiome looked like before our ancestors figured out how to farm about 12,000 years ago.
"There have been relatively few studies of gut microbiota among humans eating pre-industrial diets, relative to humans eating post-industrial ones," said Lawrence David, a microbiologist from Duke University, who was not a part of the study. The new study, published today in Nature Communications, is timely and important, David says, because it provides a snapshot of pre-industrial human's gut microbiota. It also indicates that the ecosystem in our guts adapts not only to our diets but to the environments we live in.
Researchers have known for decades that the biota in our gut vary depending on what we eat. But the Hadza microbiome still turned out to be surprisingly different.
To study the difference between the ancient and modern gut, researchers analyzed stool samples from 16 Italian urbanites and 27 Hadza foragers, of both genders.
The Italians' gut flora was generally what they expected in Western diets, with some Mediterranean influences. The Hadza's poop, however, was like stepping into a lost continent of microbe biodiversity. "The Hadza gut mibrobiome has an entirely unique combination of bacteria from any western population, or rural African population, that's been sampled," said co-author Alyssa Crittenden, a nutritional anthropologist from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Many of the bacteria are species that the researchers had never seen before. And even familiar microbes were present in unusual levels in the Hadza belly. "The Hadza not only lack the 'healthy bacteria,' and they don't suffer from the diseases we suffer from, but they also have high levels of bacteria that are associated with disease," Crittenden said.
Wiggum plots showing the relative abundance and diversity of gut biota from different cultures. The Hadza's doesn't just have unexpected amounts of known bacteria, it has many species that have never been observed before. Image: Amanda Henry
In westerners, Bifidumbacterium is a microbe that many nutrition scientists thought was essential to good gut health, but it is almost completely absent in the foragers. Likewise, high counts of the bacteria Treponema have been linked to maladies like Crohn's disease and irritable bowel syndrome. Neither of these diseases exist among the Hadza, but their guts contain abundant Treponema.
Modern humans have only spent 5 percent of our history as farmers. Before that, most of our species were foragers of some type or other. "Studies like this one are rare opportunities for generating hypotheses about the bacteria that are most sensitive to diet and metabolism in the gut," said David. The Hadza's stomachs represent a reference ecosystem for comparing our modern lifestyles.
That's not to say you should start stocking up on exotic roots, berries, and wild game hoping to create the perfect balance of beneficial bacteria for your belly. Crittenden and her research partners warn against turning their research into a diet, even if the link between the Hadza's gut microbiome and their lower rates of gastrointetinal illness prove true. "Even if you try to emulate the diet of the Hadza, you're not living in the environment," explained Amanda Henry, a dietary ecologist from the Max Planck Institute in Germany, and a co-author of the study. "There are transfers from the soils, from the animals." In other words, it's not just what the Hadza eat that contribute to their remarkable gut flora, it's where and how they are eating it, too.
Among the communities of gut microbiomes that have been sampled – from Americans to Italians to Koreans to vegans – the Hadza's is drastically different. But, what really surprised the researchers was how different the gut communities were between the sexes. The females had much higher levels of several bacteria known to break down fibrous veggies. Both sexes eat copious amounts of tuborous roots, the women do most of the digging, while the men hunt or collect honey. "Even though both groups bring food back to camp, they both snack, so they both eat more of what they collect," Henry said. For the research team, this was just more evidence of how much the gut biota can vary, even between people who spend their entire lives eating different quantities of roughly the same diet.
This research is provocative, but there is a lot more work before the many new questions it raises can bring us answers about the human gut. Henry says she'd like to get samples from more people, and across a broader swath of time. "We really need to look at how gut microbiomes vary by season," she said.
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I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there appears to be a bit of war against homebrewing in Illinois. It all started when the Illinois Liquor Control Commission (ILCC) told the Peoria Jaycees that homebrewed beer would not be allowed to be served at their beer festival, even though homebrew was a part of that fest for the last 19 years. More recent happenings involved Chicago homebrew general store Brew Camp being shut down a couple weeks ago because they did not have a food service license (really???) and a few days ago, homebrew shop Brew and Grow had all of their homebrewed beer confiscated. It is becoming more and more challenging to be a homebrewer lately, and homebrew clubs have not been immune to these challenges. CHAOS (Chicago Homebrew Alchemists of Sud) Brew Club encountered a bit of a set-back after their Cinco de Cerveza event in May when David Williams, co-founder of CHAOS, received a cease and desist order from the city, which encouraged Williams and the other members to seek out a way to reorganize so that such events could happen in the future, worry free.
“Certainly Cinco de Cerveza forced our hand and made us come to this new structure sooner,” said Williams. “But the main driver of the new structure was the growth of our club and making sure that we grew in the future, legally.” The city told Williams that CHAOS could continue to host events but they could not be open to the public, which motivated them to form a legitimate, 5013c non-profit that will provide craft beer and homebrewing education and appreciation. They can now legally host events but must maintain an active roster of members, and only those members will be permitted entry.
So, how does one become a member? There are a number of different membership options to meet the needs of individuals that are homebrewers and those that just want to attend the events. “If you would like to be a member, want to try things out, we have a trial membership that we offer year round. If you wanted to go to an event or check out the brew house, see what CHAOS is all about, the trial membership is a great way to do it,” said Williams. James Lewis, the Vice President under the new organizational structure, continued to promote the trial membership by stating that it “will allow you to brew in the brew house like an Apprentice Brewer level member can, so you can reserve a time to brew as long as someone else is there to walk you through the whole thing. Then there’s the Friend of CHAOS level member, and this level is for those individuals that don’t need to brew here.”
What makes CHAOS Brew Club unique is the brew house. “We have a brew house which is great because many of us in Chicago have a difficult time brewing at home because our apartments are small, it’s not a feasible thing,” said Lewis. Brewer-level members have 24/7 access to all of the equipment needed to brew beer; all you need to bring is a fermentor and the ingredients! “But some of our members don’t need [the brew house] so if you just want to go to classes and events, you want to be a part of CHAOS but don’t need access to the brew house, then Friends of CHAOS is the level of membership for you,” said Lewis.
CHAOS events have increased in popularity over the year and it was quite a blow when news that events were shut down indefinitely. But CHAOS is back and better than ever, thanks to the hard-working members that have reorganized the structure of the club, and they will host a Harvest Festival on October 20th. “We are doing it a little bit different this year because we need to make it a private event so we will have an active roster. In order to get in you need to be on that active roster. And there are a couple ways to do that. We just launched new membership tiers so there are a couple ways to get in. If you are already a member, you have nothing to worry about, you just come on in,” said Williams. “But it is our second annual event of this theme where we are having ciders and seasonal ales.” There is also going to be plenty of edibles to help soak up those seasonal libations. “We’re going to have a lot of different foods like apple-cider pulled pork, brats and kraut, and applewood bacon smoked hot dogs,” said Lewis. And, rumor has it, that I will be making some pumpkin beer bread!
The CHAOS Brew Club Harvest Festival will be held this Saturday, October 20th from 3pm to 8pm. Membership is required for entry so be sure to visit their website and choose the membership level that best suites your needs. “This is CHAOS’s reemergence,” said Williams. “We had to take a bit of a hiatus because we had to figure out legally where we stood with the city, changing our membership structure, reorganizing as a not-for-profit. We’ve kind of been laying low while we figured all of those out. But now that we have all of that behind us, we’re ready to get back out there and offer as much as we can to the city of Chicago. Our events are a great way for us to bolster this community that we’re trying to build.” I’ll see you there! Welcome back, CHAOS!
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An industrial park in Haiti with extensive ties to the Clinton Foundation continues to be granted federal aid without oversight mandated by law, according to a report published last week.
The Government Accountability Office investigation found that projects associated with the Caracol Industrial Park in north Haiti were green-lighted by the United States Agency for International Development in spite of the fact that the legally-required sustainability reviews of those projects were not completed.
“USAID/Haiti officials have not completed a 611(e) certification for every activity that might require it and have provided inconsistently detailed information in the completed certifications,” the GAO report noted. The certification is needed to determine a “host country’s capability to effectively maintain and utilize” any proposed project expected to cost more than $1 million.
“Consequently, the agency may not be in full compliance with the 611(e) requirement, and agency officials may lack access to information about risks to the sustainability of large infrastructure activities,” the GAO also noted.
The Caracol Industrial Park is one of the flagship reconstruction projects in Haiti funded by international donors after a massive earthquake devastated the impoverished Carribbean nation in 2010.
The GAO had been looking into US-taxpayer backed reconstruction efforts as a whole. Over half of the $1.7 billion allocated by Congress for post-earthquake recovery has not yet been spent. One-third of that money has not yet been allocated to any project, the report noted.
The Clinton Foundation helped establish Caracol alongside The State Department, the Haitian government, and the Inter-American Development Bank. It opened in 2012, while Hillary Clinton was still Secretary of State, and has been overseen, in part, by her husband, former president Bill Clinton, in his capacity as co-chair of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission and as a Clinton Foundation board member.
The GAO report singles out a power plant constructed for the industrial park as an example of a project that may not have been carried out in full compliance with the law. While a sustainability certification was completed by USAID in April 2011, the GAO later found that the Haitian government did not in fact possess the capacity to independently operate and maintain the plant.
“[R]evenue from industrial park tenants for the Caracol Industrial Park power plant has been less than expected and has not helped to cover plant operations and maintenance costs to the extent planned,” the GAO report says.
The findings of the report come at a time when the activities of the Clinton Foundation have come under an increased amount of scrutiny from journalists and public watchdog groups.
Many critics have charged that the Clintons’ handling of the reconstruction effort has the appearance of a “pay-to-play” operation given both the extent of their control over efforts and the fact that the Clintons’ friends and donors have won the rights to carry out many projects.
“It seems like the Clinton Foundation operates as a slush fund for the Clintons,” Bill Allison, a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation, said in April, in a statement to the New York Post.
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In an interview with BBC’s Zane Lowe that’s set to air next week, producer Rick Rubin confirmed that he’s currently working the follow up to Kanye West’s Yeezus. NME reports that they are currently “looking at vocal ideas” for the album.
In the interview, Rubin also recounted the first time that West showed him Yeezus demos:
“There were loads of great ideas and there were many many tracks and we listened to everything together. He originally came over and said ‘I wanna come play you my new album’ and I thought we’d be listening to a finished album. Then we listened to about three hours of music, most of which didn’t have vocals, and at the end I was like ‘wow, so what’s it gonna be?’ I’m thinking it’s a year away and he was like ‘well, I’m putting it out in like 5-6 weeks.’ It was just a funny conversation because it was completely normal to him, it’s just the way he works … today, Kanye West is coming in and we’re starting looking at vocal ideas for things for the next album.”
The interview will air in four parts throughout the week on BBC Radio 1, much like the DJ’s interview with West last year.
In related news, last night Dave Chappelle described his first encounter with the rapper on Jimmy Fallon and it’s pretty funny. Watch that below:
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The Texans have decided against keeping Duane Brown on the PUP list to open the season, as Mark Berman of FOX 26 tweets. In related news, the Texans are expected to activate J.J. Watt, Aaron Wilson of The Houston Chronicle tweets. The defensive lineman has made a speedy recovery from surgery to repair a herniated disk.
Watt, 27, has never missed a regular season game in his five-year career. It sounds like that streak will stay alive, at lesat for now. In each of the last four seasons, Watt has earned Pro Bowl and First-Team All-Pro selections, solidifying himself as one of the most terrifying defensive players in the league.
Last year, Brown graded out as the 16th best tackle in the NFL out of 77 qualified players. Brown earned a strong 86.0 grade for his pass blocking with a less impressive 70.4 score for run blocking. By leaving him off the PUP list, the Texans are leaving open the possibility that Brown may be ready before Week 7. However, he will not be in the lineup Week 1.
Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports Images.
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SYDNEY, Australia — The Australian police arrested five men on Saturday who they said had been planning terrorist attacks to be carried out next weekend, during a national holiday. Prime Minister Tony Abbott said the men had been inspired by the Islamic State extremist group.
The police said they believed that two of the men, both 18, had been preparing to attack police officers in Melbourne, Australia’s second-largest city, during the Anzac Day holiday on April 25. Anzac Day honors the landing of troops from the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps on the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey during World War I. This year is the centennial of the landing, and large-scale public commemorations are planned for next Saturday, Sunday and Monday.
“We believe that the potential attack was inspired by the Daesh death cult in the Middle East,” Mr. Abbott said at a news conference here hours after the arrests. Daesh is an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, which controls territory in Iraq and Syria.
The arrests followed raids early Saturday on several residences in Melbourne by about 200 police officers.
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Take note fashion victims and behold these tiny crochet shorts and ball-hugging crochet pants made entirely from 100% recycled vintage blankets. Not only are these duds dazzling, but they’re eco-friendly, too!
I have a feeling crochet bottoms will be the new tiresome “ugly Christmas sweater” phenomenon. Humans just can’t help themselves, can they?
Here’s what Etsy shop Lord von Schmitt has to say about their designs:
Afghan blankets are original pieces of folk art, hand made by artisans across America since the 1960’s and well before. With scissors and a sewing machine I transform vintage crochets into wearable sculpture!
Oh, and they’re not just for men either, there’s a selection for women as well. I dunno about these, this is where hipsterdom and the parody of hipsterdom meet in some sort of metaphysical paroxysm of idiocy that crawls up its own ass.
Via Bored Panda
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GrabtheGames and Deadbreed have teamed up to offer fans of the brand new hardcore MOBA game Deadbreed, a chance to play in the Early Access of the game. This key is for a PC Deadbreed Undertaker Beta Pack, a $9.99 value.
How?
1. "Like" Deadbreed Facebook page
2. Join Grab The Games Steam Group
3. Claim Your key below with valid email address
This giveaway will be valid While supplies last
Deadbreed® is a creepy-themed multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game with RPG features. The game will appeal to those that want a deep, hardcore gaming experience and greater influence on how their character looks but more importantly plays. The hero customization factor is a major strategic and tactical game play element as you'll figure out what equipment and play style/s work best for each of you heroes - should you play her/him as a melee warrior, ranged archer or perhaps a wizard, or are you skillful enough to adapt your hero's build during the match to counter what the enemy team is building?
Whats included?
- The Undertaker Beta pack includes Early Access to the game,
- The leviathan Halfbreed Sentinel: Behemoth,
- The Friday the 13th Bare Bones bonus Hero Corpus,
- Weekly gain of Keys that will give you access to locked objects.
“An Early Access Beta Pack is your chance to experience and have an impact on Deadbreed® as it progress through the final stages of development. Be aware that, while our Early Access offer is already a great representation of the game, it’s still work in progress and therefore contains bugs, unfinished features and some unpolished content.
Deadbreed, and this giveaway, are played via Steam. Make sure you have a Steam account in order to redeem your key and play the game. Unfortunately Oceania and Asia servers currently unavailable.
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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.
WASHINGTON – Despite freezing funding for most aspects of the US government at 2010 levels, the US House agreed Wednesday evening to increase military aid to Israel substantially.
Most significantly, the House added $205 million in first-time funding for the Iron Dome project, a short-range rocket defense system. The money was pledged by President Barack Obama last May, but had been stalled until now.
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In addition, military aid allocations from Israel should increase from 2010 levels of $2.775 billion to $3b. for fiscal year 2011, while those for Egypt and Jordan will hold constant from 2010.That increase is dictated by the 10-year memorandum of understanding the US has negotiated with Israel, but it could have been frozen along with other spending increases since the House passed a continuing resolution for 2010 budget levels as a stopgap funding measure so government didn’t shut down, after Congress failed to pass a FY2011 spending bill through the normal process.Other expenditures for Israel, including more than $200m. for the Arrow long-range missile defense system and the medium-range David’s Sling, will also keep the same amounts as their 2010 levels.The continuing resolution with its increased funding for Israel was passed 212-206 by the House and still needs to be approved by the Senate and signed into law by Obama.“Given the scrutiny that our nation is appropriately giving to every dollar expended for all purposes – including the defense of the United States and its allies – it is a mark of the great importance of these projects that they were included in this funding bill,” said Rep. Steve Rothman, a New Jersey Democrat, who helped shepherd through the additional money. “This funding sends a strong message, to both our enemies and allies, by providing more total dollars than ever before toward these rocket and missile defense programs.”
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Former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, who dropped out of the race for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination in October said Friday that Hillary Clinton can't count on his support for the presidency."I would not vote for Hillary Clinton," he told Willie Geist on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." While Webb was definitive about not voting for Clinton — an opinion he expressed after repeating his criticism of her leadership and decisions as secretary of state, saying she has "been wrong on every issue since 9/11" — he left the door open to crossing party lines to get a change in the nation's governance."Would you vote for Donald Trump?" Geist asked."I'm not — I'm not sure yet," Webb said. "I don't know who I'm going to vote for.""This is nothing personal about Hillary Clinton, but I think the reason that Donald Trump is getting so much support right now is not because of the racist, you know, et cetera, et cetera, it's because people are seeing him, a certain group of people are seeing him as the only one who has the courage to step forward and say we've got to clean out the stables of the American governmental system right now," Webb continued."We've got to make it work. If you're voting for Donald Trump you may get something very good or very bad."If you're voting for Hillary Clinton you're going to be getting the same thing" the country has now."Do you want the same thing? Six percent of the people in the country, maybe, want the same thing."
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Ever since the Illinois Supreme Court struck down a pension reform bid in May, prompting Moody’s to downgrade the city of Chicago to junk, the state’s financial woes have becoming something of a symbol for the various fiscal crises that plague state and local governments across the country.
The state High Court’s decision was reinforced late last month when a Cook County judge ruled that a plan to change Chicago’s pensions was unconstitutional.
As we’ve discussed at length, these rulings set a de facto precedent for lawmakers across the country and will make it exceedingly difficult for cities and states to address a pension shortfall which totals anywhere between $1.5 trillion and $2.4 trillion depending on who you ask.
For Illinois, the situation is especially vexing. As you can see from the following graphics, the state’s unfunded pension problem is quite severe.
(Charts: Chicago Tribune)
As the New York Times explains, "pension costs in many American states and cities are growing much faster than the money available to pay them, causing a painful squeeze. Officials who try to restore balance by reducing pensions in some way are almost always sued; outcomes of these lawsuits vary widely from state to state. Some of the worst problems have been brewing for years in Illinois, particularly in Chicago, where the city’s pension contributions have long been set artificially low by lawmakers in Springfield, the state capital. With more and more city workers now retiring, a $20 billion deficit has materialized."
And while we’ve spent quite a bit of time discussing the various issues involved in the pension debate from overly optimistic return assumptions to the use of pension-obligation bonds as stopgap measures, even we were surprised to learn just how convoluted the fiscal situation truly is in Illinois.
As the following excerpts from a Reuters special report make clear, Illinois is in bad shape, and fixing things isn’t going to be easy.
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From Reuters
"Multitude of local authorities soak Illinois homeowners in taxes"
Mary Beth Jachec [a] 53-year-old insurance manager gets a real estate tax bill for 20 different local government authorities and a total payout of about $7,000 in 2014. They include the Village of Wauconda, the Wauconda Park District, the Township of Wauconda, the Forest Preserve, the Wauconda Area Public Library District, and the Wauconda Fire Protection District.
Jachec, looking at her property tax bill, is dismayed. "It’s ridiculous," she said.
A lot has been said about the budget crisis faced by Illinois - the state government itself is drowning in $37 billion of debt, and has the lowest credit ratings and worst-funded pension system among the 50 U.S. states. But at street level, the picture can be even more troubling.
The average homeowner pays taxes to six layers of government, and in Wauconda and many other places a lot more. In Ingleside, 55 miles north of Chicago, Dan Koivisto pays taxes to 18 local bodies. "I pay $271 a month just to the school district alone," he said. "And I don't have children."
The state is home to nearly 8,500 local government units, with 6,026 empowered to raise taxes, by far the highest number in the U.S.
Many of these taxing authorities, which mostly rely on property tax for their financing, have their own budget problems. That includes badly underfunded pension funds, mainly for cops and firefighters.
A Reuters analysis of property tax data shows that the sheer number of local government entities, and a lack of oversight of their operations, can lead to inefficient spending of taxpayer money, whether through duplication of services or high overhead costs. It leads to a proliferation of pension funds serving different groups of employees. And there are also signs that nepotism is rife within some of the authorities.
On average, Illinois’ effective property taxes are the third highest in the U.S. at 1.92 percent of residential property values.
In many Illinois cities and towns, high taxation still isn’t enough to keep up with increasing outlays, especially soaring pension costs, and some services have been cut. For example, in the state capital Springfield, pension costs for police and fire alone will this year consume nearly 90 percent of property tax revenues, according to the city's budget director, Bill McCarty.
Sam Yingling, a state representative who until 2012 was supervisor of Avon Township, north of Chicago, has become an outspoken critic of the multiple layers of local government.
Yingling said when he left the township three years ago, the township supervisor's office had annual overheads from salaries and benefits of $120,000. He claimed its sole mandated statutory duty was to administer just $10,000 of living assistance to poor residents.
The large number of local governments is a legacy of Illinois' 1870 constitution, which was in effect until 1970. The constitution limited the amount that counties and cities could borrow, an effort to control spending.
So when a new road or library needed building, a new authority of government would be created to get around the borrowing restrictions and to raise more money. Today, for example, there are over 800 drainage districts, most of which levy taxes.
And it isn’t only the number of authorities that is a concern. Illinois has about one sixth of America’s public pension plans – 657 out of almost 4,000.
Local authorities in Illinois are mandated by law to keep the Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund, with 400,000 local government members, fully funded. They had to contribute $923 million in 2014, up from $543 million in 2005.
However, there is no such requirement for the local pension funds. The result: Many of these funds throughout the state are woefully underfunded, and some have less than 20 percent of what they need to meet obligations.
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The piece - which you're encouraged to read in full as it contains several of the most egregious examples of government waste and inefficiency you'll ever come across - goes on to say that reform simply isn't an option, as the Illinois legislature is filled with lawmakers who have at one time or another themselves benefited from the state's sprawling local bureaucracies. Reuters also says it has identified nearly a dozen instances where husbands employ wives, mothers employ daughters, and fathers hire sons," suggesting nepotism weighs heavily on the already elephantine system.
Bear in mind that this is the same state whose court system refuses to allow efforts at pension reform to move forward, and while all of this may seem like a recipe for default disaster, just remember, PIMCO sees a lot of "long-term value" in Chicago's debt.
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Toronto Blue Jays fans hoping for a major bullpen overhaul are going to be disappointed.
Blue Jays general manager Alex Anthopoulos hit the airwaves Sunday to talk about the blockbuster Josh Donaldson trade with the Oakland Athletics, but the conversation naturally progressed to what his next moves may be.
Anthopoulos on possibility of adding Andrew Miller "we don't expect to be involved with the big dollars in the bullpen pieces" #BlueJays — MLB Network Radio (@MLBNetworkRadio) November 30, 2014
Up to 10 teams were rumored to be in on Miller, including the Blue Jays. Not only is Miller now off Toronto's radar, other high-priced relief arms such as David Robertson or Francisco Rodriguez appear to be as well, according to Anthopoulos.
There are still options on the market, however, that would improve the club without breaking the bank. Veteran right-hander Jason Grilli could be a somewhat affordable option on a short-term deal, and Joba Chamberlain would be another option to fill the void in the 'pen.
The Blue Jays also have some interesting internal options to step up in high-leverage situations in 2015. Aaron Sanchez proved he can handle big-league hitters when it counts after getting called up late last season, compiling a 1.09 ERA in 24 appearances. Daniel Norris is another young arm that could compete for a bullpen spot in spring training.
Anthopoulos also revealed during the radio appearance the team is - not surprisingly - looking into upgrades at second base and left field.
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A woman raped and then dumped in a bush in India claims she was attacked by the same five men who first raped her three years ago.
The victim - a 20-year-old college student from India's lowest caste - was dragged inside a car, drugged and then assaulted.
NDTV 4 The 20-year-old student, pictured speaking to local media from her hospital bed, claims she was raped a second time by the same men who attacked her in 2013
Google Maps 4 The young woman had moved to Rohtak after she was first raped in a bid to escape her attackers
She believes the men attacked her a second time because she refused to drop a court case against them for the 2013 assault.
She was first attacked when she and her family lived in Bhiwani. Two of those men were arrested, only to be released on bail.
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After this, she and her family relocated 30 miles east to the city of Rohtak in order to escape them.
The attackers' families attempted to settle the case out of court - but their £56,000 offer was refused by the woman.
Her brother told the Hindustan Times: "We had filed a case in the court for the arrest of the remaining three and re-arrest of the two out on bail.
"We were getting constant threats from the accused to reach a compromise outside the court, but we remained firm. That’s why they have attacked her again."
Getty Images 4 Protesters call on the government to do more to stop sexual assaults in the wake of a particularly horrific 2014 attack
From her hospital bed, she told local broadcaster NDTV: "I came out of college and there were those very five men in the car.
"Three were inside and two of them were outside."
Police said they were planning to register a case against the accused and a team was travelling to Bhiwani to investigate.
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Bento is the Japanese equivalent to the American bagged lunch, but it’s also an art form in itself, and is strongly integrated into Japanese culture. Bento is a lunch turned into a scene or portrait, all within the confines of a small box, and created out of edible materials.
(Images via womansday, flavoreddelights, digeratilife)
Oekakiben is a style of bento called picture bento, that involves creating a scene or depicting animals out of the meal. Above, we see three little pigs, a frog, and an incredibly detailed depiction of Canadian geese.
(Images via japanpowered, sparklemag, fudology, walyou, mariomayhem)
Kyaraben bento typically refers to bento that depicts characters from popular cartoons, films, or video games. The images above are all from video games, including a Playstation controller, a portrait of Mario, the Big Daddy character from the Bioshock series, Pac Man ghosts, and even Pac Man himself! The collection is rounded out with Yoshi and Kirby.
(Images via geekartgallery, instructables, geekadelphia, thatsnerdalicious)
Star Wars has fans across the globe, and thankfully some fans spent the time to create these beautiful depictions of scenes and characters from the films. A Jawa with Tattooine’s twin suns framed in the background, is followed by a TIE fighter and an Imperial Stormtrooper (with the Death Star over his shoulder). A surprisingly accurate noodle Chewbacca gives the Rebellion an appearance.
(Images via animatrixnetwork, femtalks, cutestfood)
These characters come from children’s books and movies. It’s amazing how much one can accomplish with a bit of rice and carefully placed edible odds and ends. A giant Totoro from Hayao Miyazaki’s film My Neighbor Totoro and Pooh bear from the best selling children’s book series (and television, and film) are alongside the monstrous characters found in Where the Wild Things Are.
(Images via myspace, oneinchpunch, lostateminor, neatorama)
A lot of bento is made for children’s lunches at school, so their is a natural trend towards anime and cartoon characters. This series depicts a Pokemon character, the world-famous Homer Simpson, Astro Boy, and Stitch, from the popular kids’ movie, Lilo and Stitch.
There are bento competitions where people attempt to create the most aesthetically pleasing (or creative) bento boxes. These amazingly detailed bento would likely win any prize. While these particular bento share a high skill level, they vary wildly in their subject matter: a famous Japanese painting is reproduced in stunning detail, a panda is depicted curled up in the box, and a woman spends her day at a spa. A fully realized cat lies on its back, ready to play, while the much less cute portraits of a man and a zombie fill their own boxes.
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Constituent removing and chemical identification
A preparative thin layer chromatography plate (PTLCP) was used to achieve constituent removal. Each band on the plate corresponded to one constituent and was regarded as a positive sample (namely targeted constituent marked by letter M+). The rest of bands was defined as the corresponding negative sample (marked by letter M−).
Next, we used Ultra-performance liquid chromatography (UPLC) and quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (Q-TOF MS) to identify the constituent of each band, and to determine whether there were residual compounds in the corresponding negative sample. Using this method, the constituents in the positive samples were preliminarily identified (Supplementary Fig. S4) as berberine (BER), palmatine (PAL), coptisine (COP), epiberberine (EPI), jateorrhizine (JAT), and columbamine (COL), respectively. The levels of the removed constituents in the negative samples were nearly undetectable (Supplementary Fig. S4). Furthermore, the molecular structures of the removed constituents were not damaged by the removal procedure (Supplementary Fig. S5).
Identification of the active constituents
The growth and metabolism of living organisms are accompanied by heat/energy production, which can be affected by pathological changes or the action of drugs. Therefore, it is possible to evaluate changes in microbial heat production in the presence or absence of different drugs using microcalorimetry. Accordingly, we determined the bioactivity of R. coptidis extract, removed samples, and added samples in terms of bacteriostasis.
The normal growth thermogenic curve for S. dysenteriae at 37°C is shown in Fig. 2a. The heat flow power-time (HFP-t) curve showed that the S. dysenteriae metabolic profile included two main stages (stages 1 and 2) and five phases, (lag phase [a–b], the first exponential growth phase [b–c], transition phase [c–d], the second exponential growth phase [d–e], and the decline phase [e–f]). The quantitative thermokinetic parameters of the HFP-t curve for S. dysenteriae growth could be delineated using the equation (1): where P 0 and P t represent the heat flow power at time 0 or time (min), respectively. To test the reliability of the microcalorimetry, we repeated the experiment on eight occasions in untreated bacteria and obtained good reproducibility. We then quantified the following thermokinetic parameters from the HFP-t curves in the presence of difference concentrations of the samples: p 1 , p 2 , t 1 and t 2 (Table 1). PCA revealed that k 2 and t 2 explained 87% of the variation of samples, including the R. coptidis extract, removed samples, and added samples. Therefore, we focused on parameters k 2 and t 2 in this study.
Figure 2: Results of identification of the active constituents. (a) Heat flow power-time (HFP-t) curve for control S. dysenteriae cultured in L.B. culture medium alone. (b, c) Effects of the R. coptidis extract, removed constituents, and negative samples on HFP-t curves of S. dysenteriae growth. (d) Contributions of the removed constituents and their corresponding negative samples to the bacteriostatic activity of R. coptidis. (b–d) Control: S. dysenteriae alone; reference: R. coptidis extract (0.8 mg/mL); removed samples: BER+, COP+, EPI+, PAL+, and (JAT + COL)+; negative samples: R. coptidis extract lacking COP (COP−), EPI (EPI−), PAL (PAL−) and JAT + COL combined (JAT + COL)−. The measurements of relative inhibition ratio were performed in triplicate and error bars represent standard error of the mean. P value compared to R. coptidis extract determined by two-way ANOVA. Full size image
Table 1: Thermokinetic characteristics of R. coptidis (200 μg/mL) and samples containing different concentrations of BER on S. dysenteriae growth at 37°C (n = 3, Mean ± SD) Full size table
Figures 2b, c illustrate the effects of R. coptidis (0.8 mg/mL) extract, removed constituents, and corresponding negative samples on the HFP-t curves of S. dysenteriae. We found that, compared with the control and the R. coptidis extract, the kinetics of the removed and negative samples showed marked variation (Supplementary Table S1).
Next, we calculated the inhibition ratio I as equation (2) and the relative inhibition ratio RI as equation (3) to quantify the contributions of the individual constituent to the bacteriostatic activity of R. coptidis extract. As shown in Fig. 2d, BER, COP, EPI, PAL, and JAT + COL removed inhibited the growth and metabolism of S. dysenteriae; of which BER and COP had the greatest effects. The bacteriostatic activities of BER− and COP− were significantly lower than that of R. coptidis extract (P < 0.01). Furthermore, the bacteriostatic activities of EPI−, PAL−, and (JAT + COL)− were not significantly different to that of R. coptidis extract. Thus, BER and COP appear to be the main bacteriostatic constituents of R. coptidis extract with contributions to the bacteriostatic activity of 54.10% and 39.75%, respectively (Fig. 2d). where K 2c is the growth rate constant of the second exponential growth phase of S. dysenteriae in the culture medium alone; k 2s is the growth rate constant of the second exponential growth phase of S. dysenteriae exposed to the test samples; I s is the inhibition ratio of samples under evaluation; I e is the inhibition ratio of R. coptidis extract (reference); and RI is the relative inhibition ratio.
Constituent adding and chemical identification
After confirming that BER and COP were the main bioactive constituents of R. coptidis, we added BER to its negative sample (BER−) to final concentrations of 0, 15, 45, 60, 80, and 120 μg/mL, which was equivalent to the relative content of BER in R. coptidis extract was (14.52%, based on the no-show detection process). HPLC was used to confirm the chemical compositions of the added samples. We also prepared added samples of COP at concentrations of 0, 8, 16, 32, 64, and 128 μg/mL, similar to the COP content in R. coptidis extract (5.3%, based on the no-show detection method). The HPLC profiles are shown in Fig. 3a, b and Supplementary Fig. S6.
Figure 3: HPLC chromatograms following the adding of BER or COP and results of the bioassays. (a) HPLC profiles following BER added to the negative sample lacking constituent BER to final concentrations of 0, 15, 45, 60, 80, and 120 μg/mL. (b) HPLC profiles following COP added to the negative sample lacking constituent COP to final concentrations of 0, 8, 16, 32, 64, and 128 μg/mL. (c, d) heat flow power-time (HFP-t) curves of S. dysenteriae at 37°C exposed to R. coptidis extract or samples containing different concentrations of BER (c) or COP (d). S. dysenteriae in culture medium alone was used as the blank control. The concentration of R. coptidis extract was 200 μg/mL. The final concentrations of BER were 0, 15, 45, 60, 80, and 120 μg/mL. The final concentrations of COP were 0, 8, 16, 32, 64, and 128 μg/mL. The negative samples (BER− and COP−) were prepared by removing BER or COP from the R. coptidis extract. Full size image
Levels of the active constituents
The bacteriostatic activity of samples adding BER or COP was assessed by microcalorimetry (Fig. 3c,d), and I and RI were calculated (Tables 1 and 2). The relationship between RI and BER or COP concentrations are shown in Fig. 4. To determine the correlation between the concentrations of active constituents in added samples and I, we calculated the change in I induced by the each concentration of active constituents (P) using equation (4): where I n is the inhibition ratio of the negative sample lacking the targeted constituent; I i is the inhibition ratio of the negative sample following the targeted constituent added; and W is the corresponding total concentration of the targeted constituent causing I i .
Table 2: Thermokinetic characteristics of R. coptidis (200 μg/mL) and samples containing different concentrations of COP on S. dysenteriae growth at 37°C (n = 3, Mean ± SD) Full size table
Figure 4: Relationship between the concentration of added BER/COP and I, and the potency of BER/COP on inhibiting the growth of S. dysenteriae at 37°C. The measurements of potency per unit weight and inhibition ratio were performed in triplicate and error bars represent standard error of the mean. Full size image
As illustrated in Fig. 4, the relative potencies of COP (i.e., P COP ) and BER (i.e., P BER ) were similar (red curves in Fig. 4). For both constituents, their relative potencies increased with increasing weight. However, the potency started to decrease when the weight passed a threshold level. Therefore, the peak values in the P COP and P BER curves (e and f in Fig. 4) are likely to show the greatest potencies. Therefore, the concentrations of COP and BER that showed the greatest efficiency were 32 μg/mL and 80 μg/mL, respectively. We calculated that the greatest efficiency of COP and BER is at the relative concentrations 14.45% and 31.92%, respectively.
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IBM Says Uncle to AWS on $600 Million CIA Cloud
After nine months of disputing that Amazon Web Services should not have been awarded a massive contract to build a private cloud for the US government's Central Intelligence Agency, IBM has withdrawn its protest seeking an injunction to prevent AWS from moving ahead with the project.
"In light of the government's recent submissions emphasizing its need to move forward on the contract, IBM has withdrawn its motion," IBM spokesperson Clint Roswell told EnterpriseTech. "IBM maintains its position that the GAO's findings were appropriate."
The CIA cloud project, which could add up to $600 million in revenues over a four-year term with an optional five year extension for even more, is the first time that AWS has built a private cloud explicitly for a third party.
The cloud subsidiary of the online retailing giant was awarded the contract back in February, and neither the CIA nor AWS would even confirm that the deal existed. But then IBM filed a bid protest with the Government Accountability Office right after the award, so there is a paper trail; news of this protest did not surface until June. Once that protest became common knowledge, Amazon confirmed the deal existed and said that it was going to fight IBM's protect of the manner in which the CIA cloud deal was awarded. The GAO was tight-lipped about the whole thing, but rumors were going around that the GAO told the CIA that it had to reopen the bidding and do a better job comparing pricing for the two bids from ASW and IBM.
The GAO eventually released a redacted version of its report on the CIA cloud deal (PDF), upholding many of the criticisms raised by Big Blue. The report showed that IBM did indeed have a lower price, at $93.9 million for the first phase compared to $148 million for AWS, but that the CIA also thought that AWS had the better technical solution and that this outweighed the price differential. The workload that the CIA wants to run in its cloud is an unspecified MapReduce application, presumably running a variant of Hadoop, and the companies were pit against each other to load up thousands of virtual server nodes to chew on 100 TB of raw data put on object storage that could handle 6 reads/second and 2 writes/second.
After the GAO sided with IBM on a few points in its protest (and with AWS on a few others), asking the CIA to do a re-evaluation of the deal. Amazon filed its own complaint with the US Court of Federal Claims in July, saying this was not necessary, and two weeks ago Judge Thomas Wheeler ruled in favor of AWS. IBM filed an injunction to stop the work from proceeding on the CIA cloud, but has now reconsidered that position. Quite likely after getting some pressure from Uncle Sam, which wants to get on with building the CIA cloud.
There is a lot more at stake here than a single, juicy government contract.
First, Amazon CTO Verner Vogels has been adamant over the years that, by definition, cloud means public cloud, and the company has resisted any suggestion that what companies and governments want is a mix of private cloud capacity and public cloud capacity, and the idea that any organization would want to run only on a private version of AWS was anathema to AWS. But, this is precisely what the CIA wants, and as it turns out, it is precisely what it will be getting.
So it would seem to be only a matter of time before other organizations will be knocking at the door of AWS asking for something similar. Certainly very large organizations are going to be able to get more leverage to have AWS build them a private cloud that is compatible with the public cloud – just like the hyperscale datacenter operators of the world are able to get customer systems at dirt-cheap prices from Hewlett-Packard and Dell. Given the stringency of government security, particularly for the military and the intelligence agencies, other security-sensitive industries such as banking and insurance and maybe even government supercomputing labs someday may be inclined to hire AWS to build them a private cloud, too.
The other effect of the AWS deal to build the CIA cloud is that it gives Amazon credibility for very large government contracts, above and beyond the GovCloud public cloud it has set up in the American northwest back in the summer of 2011. The idea with GovCloud is to keep it public, meaning make government agencies share the same physical servers, storage, and networks to drive up utilization. This is the whole point of a public cloud. But, some local, state, and Federal agencies cannot or will not share the same facilities, much less the same systems, with other agencies because of physical and virtual security concerns. And they will probably start asking for private AWS clouds, too.
What affect this will have on the AWS business in unclear. The business is on track to have somewhere around $2 billion to $2.5 billion in revenues this year, and no one knows if it is profitable or not. If it is like the rest of Amazon, then AWS is not making money, and there is every reason to believe that this is the case given the business philosophy of company founder Jeff Bezos. Amazon wants to compete aggressively on technology and price, own markets, and figure out how to bring money to the bottom line later.
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Though conservative websites routinely sell anti-Obama t-shirts, the news that Freshjive, a unabashedly liberal streetwear boutique, will be retailing its own wearable slam on the President has led some observers to throw an XXL fit. The Freshjive T-shirt — a riff on Shepard Fairey's famous Obama poster — combines the message "Hope is fading fast" with an image of the President's face that appears to be melting. Is liberal youth beginning to bail on the President?
Freshjive's rejection of Obama is significant: “Ouch,” winces Rachel Sklar at Mediaite. Expect a "conflicted reaction" from any Democrat who knows that Freshjive founder and "streetwear pioneer" Rick Katz once spoke of designing a "F*** off, Bush" tee. Now, "he seems to be sending Obama pretty much the same message."
"'Hope is fading fast': A devastating take on the iconic Obama poster"
Funny you should mention Bush: This shirt reflects the way Obama has “maintained continuity” with his “disgraced predecessor,” writes J. Rosencrantz on Freshjive's own blog. We didn't vote for a “multi-tiered, state-always-wins version of justice” or broken promises to close Guantanamo or a “massive escalation” in Afghanistan.
"Continuites 5"
This is good news for Republicans: "On some issues," says Donald Douglas at the American Power blog, "Obama is trying to hang onto the political center (look at his Afghanistan decision to back McChrystal's troop search) lest his 'fading hope' turns out to be a political avalanche of dissatisfaction among moderates." If radical stunts like this can push Obama leftward, we'll see independent moderates shift rightward.
"Freshjive calls out Obama: 'A devastating take on the iconic Obama poster"
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SEE THE WEEK'S LATEST COVERAGE OF THE OBAMAS:
• Google's Michelle Obama photo flap
• Gatecrashing the White House
• Obama and the global warming scandal
• Obama: No more Mr. Nice Guy
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Ahold on Monday confirmed reports that it plans to close two of its small-format stores as it rethinks its strategy for the fresh-focused, urban concepts.
The company said it would close its Everything Fresh store in Philadelphia and its Bfresh store in Brighton, Mass., this Saturday, leaving two units of the format in the Boston market. Last year Ahold had shuttered another Bfresh store in Fairfield, Conn.
“The decision to close the Everything Fresh store was a difficult one, but the location was always considered a ‘learning lab’ and we intend to use those learnings going forward,” said Christopher Brand, a spokesman for Ahold.
The 3,700-square-foot Everything Fresh store debuted in 2014 as a small-format experiment that gave rise to Bfresh. The news of its pending closure was first reported Monday in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Ahold said last year it had secured a second location for a Bfresh store in Philadelphia, and the Inquirer reported that Ahold had secured two additional sites for the concept in Philadelphia.
Brand said the company is evaluating its options for the remaining Philadelphia sites.
Ahold also said that its two Bfresh stores that remain open in Somerville and Austin, Mass., and its Eastside Market store in Providence, R.I., would be integrated into Ahold’s Stop & Shop brand, based in Quincy, Mass. The stores have been operating as part of Ahold’s Fresh Formats division.
“As part of our brand-centric strategy, Stop & Shop plans to develop new, small store format opportunities,” said Mark McGowan, Stop & Shop president, in a statement. “Fresh Formats was specifically created to develop and test format opportunities to understand what works and what doesn’t work in urban and other small store locations. We will apply key learnings from Bfresh and the Eastside Marketplace – such as innovative technology, fresh prepared meals, a health-focused assortment and exciting ways to engage customers digitally and online – to Stop & Shop stores more broadly and to future alternative and small format store opportunities.”
The company said it planned to open a new small-format store in 2018 at a site in Newton, Mass., that had been slated for a new Bfresh location.
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To say to 2013-14 season was a disappointment for Damien Brunner would be an understatement as both he and the New Jersey Devils struggled to find consistency throughout the seven-month marathon known as the NHL season. The games he really excelled in for New Jersey last season he was hovering around the net, making slick passing plays, and working well with the playmakers on the Devils power play. But there were too many games where he was not a factor, where he didn’t have any jump and on some nights he was frankly invisible at times.
This upcoming season the team has added Martin Havlat and Mike Cammalleri to the forward group; a group that is all but unchanged from last season save for Ryan Carter (still an unsigned UFA that the Devils would like to bring back). As their roster looks currently there are 14 forwards signed, which could mean a trade is inevitable, especially if they bring Carter back; Brunner is young enough (28) that other teams would be interested in him, but our gut feeling is he is staying put.
In Brunner’s defense, it was his first full 82-game NHL season – his rookie season was the 48-game lockout-shortened campaign with the Detroit Red Wings. But as he said, that’s not really an excuse he wants to use in explaining his up-and-down season in New Jersey. “I was still having a hard time sometimes (during the season), it was a tight schedule because of the Olympic break. I tell you, it’s tough,” Brunner explained to The Hockey Writers following the final game of last season, “when you play your whole life in Europe, you’re not used to the traveling, time differences and especially the amount of games too.”
Damien Brunner shows some power play prowess in Edmonton:
“Sometimes it creeps up on you and you find yourself just tired; the problem is that when you are tired you couldn’t find time to refill your energy so I just have to find ways. I have to be better at that next season, find ways to get back on track quicker because in an 82-game schedule, everyone has lulls. I have to keep them short, and just try to help the team (however I can) and not make too many mistakes.”
Most of his points were scored in bunches, and a knee injury (as well as healthy scratches) interrupted his productivity. “I’ve talked about it a lot during the season, and at the end,” Brunner said, “there were a lot of ups and downs. But after the Olympic break I thought I played pretty good hockey, (was) playing the right way. I think I still can improve, like scoring more — I had a lot of scoring chances; I have to be better next year.”
Chemistry shouldn’t be much of an issue, and Brunner will have a full year under his belt now of understanding the system that coach Pete DeBoer is employing. “I’m looking forward to it; I really liked working with the coaching staff,” Brunner said to THW. “I have a lot of respect for Lou (Lamoriello), how he handles this organization, how he treats us. It’s good when you have guys around you that look you in the eyes and you know what they think instead of yapping and going behind your back. That’s what I like about this organization, everyone is straight forward and that’s how you get better.” There were a few times during the season where teammates (Patrik Elias, Dainius Zubrus) got in his face on the ice about missing an assignment or messing up a play.
Many who watched the Devils season game-in and game-out realize that Brunner was a lot better at the end of the season than he was in the middle or beginning and he agreed. “I was way better at the end of the year, the last twenty games,” the Swiss winger told THW. “The coaches have taught me that as long as you create scoring chances, don’t be frustrated, it comes back; and for me it was real important to see that, and get my legs underneath me too, I really got that jump again. When I feel I have that jump I can beat guys one-on-one, I can create scoring chances for my linemates; for me I take a lot of positive stuff out of the last twenty games — even though I didn’t score that much — I really got that feeling again that I can be a good player in this league.”
Damien Brunner displays some of the moves he is capable of pulling off:
The Devils also believe that he can be a good player in this league and if he can put up say 50 points this season, it would likely mean they are in the hunt for a playoff spot in the Eastern Conference. Last season he complied 25 points (11g-14a) in 60 games in a crazy schedule — factoring in good health, comfort in the system and with his teammates, 50 points in 82 games doesn’t seem too far fetched; but time will tell.
Dan Rice can be reached via Twitter: @DRdiabloTHW or via Email: drdiablo321@yahoo.com
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I’ve never really paid much attention to the Chevy Volt. It always came off as just another hybrid to me, so I chose to ignore it. I can no longer refuse to sit back and say nothing, however. A short while back I stumbled upon a Facebook group dedicated to owners of the Volt and my awakening experience has forced me to break my vow of silence.
Although composed of just under 3,500 fans, “Chevy Volt Owners” may be the most active Facebook group page in existence. Even after a solid five or six scrolls down the news feed, the timestamps on the posts revealed that they were no more than two hours old. Needless to say, my curiosity was piqued. How much could people really be saying about the Chevy Volt? Turns out quite a bit.
With my eyebrows furrowed in confusion, I delved into the mystery behind the page and began reading some of the posts and comments more in-depth. It only took mere seconds before the smug alert began to sound in my head, but being the level-headed guy that I am, I gave the page the benefit of the doubt. Surely not all of the fans of the page could be so pretentious.
I was grossly mistaken.
One of the first posts I came across was from a man who had put together an ad mock-up which he planned to have posted in his local newspaper in an effort to raise awareness of the Chevy Volt. He wanted to get feedback from other Volt owners and find out whether there were any overlooked details in the ad, but even after a string of suggestion-laden comments and a few updated drafts, he decided to contact the editor at the newspaper instead of sending it into print. No word on whether or not that actually happened, but either way, the story is just one of the many conundrums that arose during my time on the group’s page.
Some other Volt owners suggested that a more effective way of raising awareness would be to come up with a “Volt Challenge that involves ice buckets.” I conducted a thorough investigation Google search of “Chevy Volt Ice Bucket Challenge” and was relieved to find zero relevant results, but it did bring something else to my attention.
Apparently there are countless videos of Chevy Volt owners talking about their experiences with their plug-in hybrid, the most grueling of which stretches on for an unbearable 38 minutes and 24 seconds. I couldn’t make it through more than six minutes, but as there are nearly 50,000 views and the video has been “thumbs-upped” 247 times, there is a good chance that a few poor souls have sat through the entire painstaking duration. In fact, while browsing through a selection of the 225 comments, I was able to find a few shamelessly honest people who admitted to taking 40 minutes out of their day to watch the entire thing. Not surprisingly, comments about their personal Chevy Volt soon followed.
Despite my newfound angst for the Volt, I can sort of, but actually not really understand where owners of the hybrid are coming from. The 2015 Chevy Volt is able to travel up to 380 miles with a full tank of gas and a fully charged battery. On the electric motor alone, it can achieve a range of 38 miles, which is further than some of the other plug-in hybrid vehicles on the market. That’s all fine and dandy, but I still don’t believe that the Volt is worthy of the undoubtedly puzzling, cult-like following that it currently has. I especially don’t think that anyone wants to see anyone dumping ice water over their head on behalf of the hybrid.
These recent Chevy Volt findings are solid evidence that “South Park” is one of the most geniously-scripted shows out there. Although the stories are overly exaggerated for satirical purposes, they couldn’t be any more accurate. That’s especially true for the episode entitled “Smug Alert” which plays on the egocentric attitude of hybrid owners. The moral of the episode is that hybrids really are great, but owners of the vehicles should not be smug about owning them or act as if they are above anyone else.
I can only hope that Chevy Volt owners take heed. If you want to have your Facebook groups and post your YouTube videos that is perfectly fine by me. I will steer clear of them from here on out. All I ask is that you refrain from posting Volt “awareness” ads in your local newspaper, and for the love of all things good and holy in this world, please, keep the ice in your freezers and the buckets in your basements.
Believe me when I say that no one else really gives a shit.
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I just finished reading a biography of Robert G. Ingersoll. It included a description of a very large and lavish house on Lafayette Square where he lived while in Washington. Does the house still stand, and what was the address?
— John F. Jones, Washington
What was Robert Ingersoll’s address? Answer Man is confident many readers are wondering, “Who the heck was Robert Ingersoll?”
Well, he is the most famous American you never heard of.
Col. Ingersoll — he fought for the Union in the Civil War after raising a cavalry regiment from Illinois — was a lawyer who counted the wealthy and powerful among his clients. He was a committed Republican who stumped for GOP candidates. He was a silver-tongued orator whose lectures drew thousands — and earned him thousands of dollars a pop. He was also, by all accounts, a really nice guy.
And Ingersoll accomplished all of this without believing in God.
Ingersoll’s disbelief was the quality that most fascinated the 19th-century audiences that packed theaters to hear him speak. He was known as the Great Agnostic. Some called him blasphemer or infidel.
Ingersoll was born in upstate New York in 1833 to an abolitionist minister and his wife. He knew the Bible backward and forward but preferred the work of Shakespeare. Ingersoll objected to organized religion, especially its obsession with damning non-believers to hell.
He thought religion should be destroyed. “In its place,” he wrote, “I want humanity, I want good fellowship, I want intellectual liberty . . . the religion of art, music and poetry . . . that is to say, the religion of this world.”
He was the Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins of his day, but without those writers’ acid tone. To read Ingersoll is to encounter a man ahead of his time. He supported equality for African Americans, women’s suffrage, even D.C. voting rights.
At a suffrage meeting in Washington in 1880, Ingersoll said: “I do not believe that only the rich should vote, or that only the whites should vote, or that only the blacks should vote. I do not believe that right depends upon wealth, upon education, or upon color. It depends absolutely upon humanity. . . If any woman wants to vote I am too much of a gentleman to say she shall not. . . . This Government was founded upon the idea that the only source of power is the people. Let us show at the Capital that we have confidence in that principle.”
Ingersoll moved to Washington in 1878 to practice law with his brother. He took a house at 25 Lafayette Square, on the northeast corner of the park, across from the White House. He gave numerous lectures, including more than a dozen at National Theatre.
Republican candidates were eager for Ingersoll to speak on their behalf — he was especially close to James Garfield — but aside from a brief stint as Illinois’s attorney general, he was never rewarded with public office. Politicians felt voters would react badly to the presence of a blasphemer in their cabinets.
Ingersoll’s house on Lafayette Square — and a larger house at 1315 K St. NW that he moved to in 1883 — were centerpieces of a lively social life. He lived there with his wife, two daughters and extended family. He entertained often. Occasionally the sidewalk outside would be occupied by people praying for him to convert. None succeeded.
In 1885, Ingersoll moved to New York City. The house on Lafayette Square became apartments, then the Cosmos Club, then was torn down about 1909. Ingersoll’s K Street house became an early location of American University’s Washington College of Law before being razed after the 1950s.
Washington’s Steven Lowe stumbled across Ingersoll’s writings about 12 years ago.
“I was just infatuated with his story and his brazen, no-holds-barred, speak truth to power sort of thing,” Lowe said. He revamped an Ingersoll-centric walking tour that a group called Washington Area Secular Humanists had prepared and put online at www.ingersoll.wash.org.
Ingersoll died in 1899 and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. The Great Agnostic once described his creed thusly: “Happiness is the only good. The way to be happy is to make others so. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here.”
Hard to argue with that, though many people still do.
To read previous columns, go to washingtonpost.com/johnkelly.
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Parris and I have always been big supporters of the various charities, both fannish and mundane, that raise funds through auctions at SF and fantasy conventions. It's a great way to raise money for worthy causes, have a little fun, and get some unique items into the hands of collectors. In fact, I just finished shipping off five huge boxes of books, games, t-shirts, and other collectables to our hotel in Reno, to donate to the various charity auctions at worldcon.(Some items will go to SFWA Emergency Medical Fund auction, some to the BWB fund-raising drive to pay for their party, some to the worldcon's own charity).Unfortunately, there are a couple items that won't be auctioned at worldcon. We had hoped to bring a couple of signed scripts from the first season of the HBO series GAME OF THRONES with us, and the good folks in Belfast were kind enough to donate them. Dan Weiss sent them across the pond (registered and priority, signature required).All that arrived was a battered envelope and Dan's cover letter.The US post office delivered the envelope in a plastic baggie with a pre-printed note apologizing for the "damage." But this was no error in handling. The envelope was torn open at one end, and both scripts were gone, though Dan's letter remained.I am convinced the scripts were stolen.Last year we donated a signed STAR TREK script to a charity auction and it brought $1200. These two scripts may not have gone for quite that much, but they would have brought home some significant bucks. Someone in the US Post Office (we believe the package made it across from Belfast relatively unscathed) recognized their value and removed them.So... I am putting out the word to all my fans and readers. Whoever sold these scripts will presumably try to cash in at some point. So if any of you ever see scripts fitting this description turn up on ebay, one of its competitors, or on some dealer's table -- notify me at once, and report the stolen property to whatever local authorities are appropriate.Here's what was taken: two teleplays, final shooting scripts for episodes nine and ten of season one, "Baelor" and "Fire and Blood," autographed by writers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss and director Alan Taylor, printed on white paper.Like Bloodraven, I have a thousand eyes and one. So let's keep 'em all peeled, boys and girls.
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On Tuesday, CNN’s Ashleigh Banfield got seriously angry at one of Donald Trump‘s top advisers over a tweet that effectively said Hillary Clinton killed government workers by her own hand.
The House Benghazi Select Committee released a new report on the 2012 terror attacks today, and Trump organization legal counsel Michael Cohen presumably decided to mark the occasion with this tweet, hours before the release:
On today’s Legal View, Banfield remarked that “this is libel” for Trump’s team to straight up imply that Clinton “murdered” an ambassador. She went on to point out that Cohen had a much more favorable opinion of Clinton just two years ago.
After discussing the contents of the poll Cohen brought up, Banfield completely lost her cool with the insinuation he made about his boss’ political rival.
“Let’s be really frank here, people. Don’t call someone a murderer of an ambassador for God’s sake,” said Banfield. “It is offensive to Americans that want the truth to what’s going on in politics! Please, give us a break!”
Watch above, via CNN.
[Image via screengrab]
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As the singer, guitarist and chief songwriter for the Hates -- Houston's most enduring punk rock band and a local institution -- Christian Kidd (nee Christian Arnheiter, Christian Oppression and Christian Anarchy) has seen a lot.
And with the band nearing its 35th anniversary (with Kidd as the only constant), the man known even among non-music fans downtown as "the guy with the huge Mohawk" has put pen to paper for a memoir written with wife Alexis Kidd, Just a Houston Punk.
More a series of snapshots of his and the Hates' musical careers than straight bio, it offers a lot of recollection and reminiscences of the city's music scene of years gone by, from clubs like the Axiom, the Vatican and Pik-n-Pak to bands who once gigged across the city with names like Legionnaire's Disease, Jerry Falwell and the Vibrating Crosses, and Chernobyl Sunrise. The book takes the Hates story right up to the band playing recent Free Press Summer Fests.
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A handful of words deep in President Barack Obama’s proposed budget would put the kibosh on a pair of strategies that high earners can use to funnel large sums into Roth individual retirement accounts.
The president is looking to slam the door on so-called back-door route into Roth IRAs as well as to close off the ability to roll after-tax contributions in a company 401(k) plan into a Roth IRA. The second strategy was simplified by a 2014 ruling from the Internal Revenue Service.
The brief reference in the massive budget document—“Limit Roth conversions to pre-tax dollars,” on page 121—was spotted by Jeffrey Levine, a CPA and IRA technical consultant with Ed Slott & Co. in Rockville Centre, N.Y.
The Treasury Department’s explanation of the budget proposal confirms Mr. Levine’s first impression: that it would end these two strategies that depend on converting after-tax contributions to a conventional IRA or workplace retirement plan into a Roth.
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At the grocery store, juggling your shopping list with a gallon of milk, a basket of food, and your phone usually ends up with a “Spill in aisle 4.” Starting today, you can leave your phone in your pocket and view notes on your Android Wear device. Just start Keep from the app list or say “OK Google, open Keep” to begin browsing notes on your wrist. To take a new note, you can still use “OK Google, take a note.”
Swipe up and down to browse through notes, tap to view a particular note, or just tap the plus sign and speak to create a new note. You can also add reminders to notes directly from your Android Wear watch. With this update, Keep will support recurring reminders too!
We also recently launched the ability to add labels to notes in the Keep Android app and on the web to help you stay organized. Use labels like “Inspiration” and “To-dos” to never miss an idea or task.
So whether it’s taking notes on Android Wear, setting reminders, or adding labels to notes, use Keep to make sure you never lose a thought.
Google Keep is available for free on Google Play for your Android devices (Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich and above), the web , and the Chrome Web Store .
Posted by Ranna Zhou, Product Manager and Chief Notetaker for Google Keep
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Lenovo just announced they would be bringing out a Windows 10 phone in China in support of the launch this summer. What makes this fascinating is that Lenovo built the only Windows phone that I thought could have given the iPhone a run for the money, but they never moved it out of China—and this was about the time they’d decided to sell their phone division off.
As you can imagine they came to regret this mistake and bought the division back and have since bought Motorola from Google. They are also the only company that has tried to create someone like Steve Jobs who can uniquely pitch products. So, with the right mix of product and magic, they could have the right stuff to spin the market like a top and maybe take the fight to Apple.
The Problem with Android
Android is the most successful competitor to Apple’s iOS today but it mostly competes on price, not on user experience. Google doesn’t believe in marketing (except really cute animals for some reason) and they are relatively inconsistent in their enforcement across their phone ecosystem. In addition, the carriers tend to control the update process and Google isn’t particularly aggressive with regard to forcing timely upgrades, so the experience with Android, in terms of consistency and end-to-end ease of use, tends to lag behind iOS.
Certainly design choice is far higher with Android phones than iPhones but too much choice apparently isn’t a good thing because consumers not only have a hard time choosing, the rolling release of Android devices means they can seldom go a month with a new phone not looking out of date because another better phone has launched.
Samsung dominates the Android space but they are actually losing share to Apple now (Android isn’t doing that well in general against iOS) and vendors like HTC are all but out of business, suggesting that Google has largely lost interest in this effort and the Android OEMs aren’t able to effectively make up for this.
Windows 10 Opportunity
Windows Phone has been in decline as well but Microsoft continues to fund the effort and their phones have been far more consistent and have had some strong advantages in terms of certain features like photography and cloud file sync (OneDrive). Windows 10 is a cross platform product promising a much tighter relationship between PCs, tablets, and smartphones running this OS than even Apple can provide. Apps will remain a problem, but people don’t seem to be chasing them as much as they did in earlier years and cloud services that run on all mobile platforms are becoming more prevalent anyway. This provides an opportunity to create a stronger value for this platform than has existed for some time, but what is needed is a vendor who can execute more like Apple does.
Lenovo
Nearly a decade ago, in China, I saw what I believed was the best alternative to the iPhone that had (at the time) yet entered the market. It was from Lenovo and it too was a screen only phone but it had a design that was very different than Apple’s. It looked more distinctive, more iconic, and I thought it would have done well against the iPhone. It was from Lenovo and it won design awards and it was a no-compromise phone priced in line (unsubsidized) with iPhones of its time.
Lenovo also was quick to realize the potential of leveraging both Microsoft and Intel in a device like this because of the combined pooled resources of both firms. This is what helped create the Windows PC in the first place, and having a lot of executives out of IBM’s old PC division gave them the perspective that if it was done once it could be done again.
Lenovo is also the only company that has a true Steve Jobs surrogate, at least with respect to launching products. They’ve recruited Ashton Kutcher to help them with their mobile efforts (he actually played Steve Jobs in the movie) and he has not only aggressively promoted the Lenovo Yoga tablets, he has helped design them—a role very similar to what Steve Jobs did at Apple.
Wrapping Up: A Perfect Storm
This all leads to a potential perfect storm product with Lenovo’s announced (but otherwise secret) Windows 10 Smartphone: Weakening Android, potentially leveraging both Intel and Microsoft, an iconic award winning design, the end to end promise of Windows 10, and a Steve Jobs like roll out with Ashton Kutcher again playing the role of Steve Jobs.
Done right and released internationally, this phone has the potential of being an upset product much like the iPhone was. We won’t know until we see it, but this summer, Lenovo and partners could become the first company, other than Apple, to ever do what Apple and Steve Jobs did regularly: disrupt an existing market with an amazing and magical new product.
We’ll see, but this does give us one more thing to look forward to. Your next phone could come from Lenovo, Microsoft, and Intel if they bring it out of China this time (and I expect they will). Wouldn’t that be interesting?
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Procrastinators waste too much time, but to get over this bad tendency, you need to know why you procrastinate . Dr. Joseph Ferrari of DePaul University has categorised a few basic types of time-wasters, and has solutions for them too.
The Science Behind Why We Procrastinate Some research says the best way to spark creativity is to walk away and that the best ideas come… Read more Read
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Dr. Ferrari is the author of Still Procrastinating? The No-Regrets Guide To Getting It Done. In the book, he rounds up several studies done on procrastination by him as well as other psychologists. OfficeTime took his findings and created this flowchart to help you identify the type of procrastinator you are:
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After identifying the type of procrastinator you are, you can lean on Dr. Ferrari's findings and advice to tackle the issue.
Thrill Seekers
Dr. Ferrari's research shows that procrastinators who say they "work best under pressure" are probably fooling themselves. Most likely, they are wasting time by not getting started because of what psychologist M. Zuckerman calls "sensation seeking." The race against the clock is comes with a thrill, an adrenaline rush, which is what they seek.
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Dr. Ferrari advises getting your rush from a different place. For example, instead of relying on the deadline for the rush, take delight in doing something well before time:
Do you want to feel good? Then complete a task when you have time to do it. You'll experience the thrill of finishing early. Do you find (Christmas) shopping unpleasant? Make it more attractive so that you finish it before the deadline. Then celebrate! The next time you accomplish a task early, such as filing your taxes before April 15, plan a party with friends. That should make you feel good.
Ideally, make the reward something that you want and can get instantly. For example, checking out Facebook for a few minutes . Journalist Charles Duhigg says that curbing an instinct like checking Facebook is actually what makes you procrastinate after a point, because you're fighting that instinct and it eventually explodes. So rather than that, make it a part of your schedule. Break big tasks into smaller pieces with shorter deadlines, and set up rewards.
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Avoiders
Dr. Ferrari says avoiders prefer to not learn more about their strengths and weaknesses in various skills. By not making a decision that impacts their own lives, they get to either stand in judgement of those who made a bad decision, or bask in the glory of a good decision made by anyone else. But in both cases, they avoid blame. To counter this, Dr. Ferrari recommends maintaining a journal:
Challenge those irrational thoughts that make you decide not to act. Try keeping a daily journal. Many things that we tell ourselves to put off doing sometimes are really not connected with the task. Instead, they are related to the feelings we have about doing the task or about the outcome if we finish the task. Keep a journal—write down your thoughts and then challenge them. What is the worst that could happen if you finish a certain task? It's adaptive and constructive for you to know your strengths and weaknesses. If you avoid making decisions and knowing who you are, you cannot live your life to the fullest.
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We have a full guide on how you can keep a personal, private journal online to log these thoughts.
Another thing that avoiders are prone to is decision fatigue, purely because they don't exercise their "decision-making muscle" enough, Dr. Ferrari says:
The key here is to practice making simple decisions and then progress to making more complex decisions—build your multithinking strength. Just as an athlete or someone training for a marathon does, you need to get your multithinking muscle in shape by frequently making decisions.
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The paralysing fear of potential doom is what makes you an avoider, so make a conscious effort to make more decisions by yourself and focus on successes.
Indecisives
What the chart describes as indecisives, Still Procrastinating describes as perfectionists. We've already talked about how perfectionism leads to procrastination , but Dr. Ferrari explains it better while talking to Fast Company:
One of the reasons people don't finish tasks is their fear of being evaluated. "People don't want to have their ability judged, they'd rather have their effort judged," says Ferrari. While perfectionists may fear negative judgments, however, perfectionists may fear the consequences of positive ones too, said Ferrari: "If I do well, you might expect more from me next time, and I don't know if I can come through," said Ferrari.
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As French philosopher Voltaire put it so well, "The perfect is the enemy of the good." So how do you get over perfectionism? Dr. Ferrari says the first step is to recognize that your quest for perfectionism isn't going to get you any extra points or sympathy:
Regardless of whether you identify as a perfectionist or not, research shows there is no marked difference in the way others perceive your delay. "You're not going to get sympathy," says Ferrari. In other words, calling yourself a perfectionist won't get you out of the fact that you aren't getting things done.
Also, keep the big picture in your mind at all times. It's easy to get caught up in the finer details, but if you know the main or larger objective and have that clear, you are more likely to prioritize what you should do. Once you've achieved your main goal, move on.
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With these tips, hopefully you should be able to get over your procrastination problem and start getting things done. If you're still struggling, Dr. Ferrari's book is a treasure chest of information about the subject. And you might also want to check out the full infographic at OfficeTime linked below for a few time-waster-beating strategies.
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Top 10 Time Killers | OfficeTime via Lifehack
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× Charges pending for homeowner who shot, killed 3 intruders
CHICAGO – Police say charges are now pending against a homeowner who shot and killed three intruders inside his Southeast Side home.
The homeowner told police three people broke into his home Sunday night through the basement and he acted in self-defense, shooting the alleged intruders before locking himself inside a room and calling police.
When police arrived at the scene at 103rd and south Ewing, they found the bodies of a 22-year-old man, 24-year-old woman and a 17-year-old boy inside.
One was shot in the head, the others were shot multiple times.
So far police won’t say exactly what the homeowner is being charged with, but he did have a valid firearms card.
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Sheffield United left it late to turn their dominance into a League One victory at Peterborough.
The table-toppers squandered a host of chances before Billy Sharp struck from point-blank range with three minutes to go for his 20th goal of the season that extended their lead at the top to five points.
Sharp pounced at the back post after strike-partner James Hanson had headed down a cross from the right.
It sparked jubilant scenes among a travelling army of almost 4,000 Blades fans at the ABAX Stadium.
Chris Wilder's men had looked like drawing a blank with Hanson being denied by Posh goalkeeper Luke McGee either side of half-time.
Hanson also fluffed the rebound on the first of those occasions with Daniel Lafferty lashing a follow-up over after the second opportunity.
Hanson also headed wide late on, but then turned provider for Sharp to settle the contest in the 87th minute.
Blades goalkeeper Simon Moore was a virtual spectator. His only real task was keeping out a 30-yard drive from Marcus Maddison in the second half.
Home debutant Anthony Grant also flashed a long-range blast wide late on for a home side who were short on attacking ideas.
Report supplied by the Press Association.
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Halt and Catch Fire is what many consider the next "Mad Men" style television show. A show set in the Silicon Prairie in Dallas, TX in the mid 80's, with its characters eager to have a hand in molding the future of technology. While season 1 had low ratings and average reviews, AMC saw something in it that could have potential. Season 2 proved that to be true--at least critically--with the second season clocking in with a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Halt and Catch Fire has been acclaimed as one of the best shows of the year, but due to what many believe to be a lack of marketing, the ratings for the show have remained roughly the same as season 1. This is a show that deserves a third season and proper marketing to reach a broader audience. Everyone signing this petition would love to see season 3 continue the stories of the characters who are battling their way through an evolving technological era.
I'm writing this on behalf of the Halt and Catch Fire viewers who have fallen in love with the show. Attached is a sheet with over 2,000 signatures from all over the world requesting that the show be renewed. After the ratings for the second season finale were released, it became clear that this is a show that might not make the cut for a third season.
Those of us who have signed this petition believe that the low ratings were due to a lack of sufficient marketing. We strongly believe that this show is AMC's next Mad Men—its next Breaking Bad. We believe its a show with strong characters, story, acting, direction, and style. We think it has the capacity to become a truly memorable and classic piece of television. It just needs another chance and proper marketing to let people know its out there. Below are some statements from signers:
“Halt and Catch Fire is, in my opinion, one of the best shows on television. The characters and the story are so captivating and so representative of what I want to see more of in storytelling. It would be a tragedy not to be able to see more. Ratings systems are outdated; most viewers cannot watch life, and there are so many of us who (like myself) stream online via legal channels (xfinity tv offers free streaming with subscription). Please know that there are fans who are completely in love with this show and its characters, and that we all would hate to see such a stunning story cancelled after only two seasons.” - Megan Poirier, MA
“This is the first program since Breaking Bad that has gotten me to consistently tune in to AMC. Would love to see this program to continue as it keeps getting better and better. I really believe that you have an all time classic in your hands.” - Matt Farmer, WA
“Halt and Catch Fire needs to see a Season 3, at least. Not just because I love the show but because it hasn't been given a proper chance. I'm from the West Coast and I didn't see any adverts or commercials to indicate the show even existed. I'm completely zombied out AMC, I suggest that AMC nurture other shows as much as they do TWD. I LOVE Halt and I'm not a fan of TV but I'm willing to pay a cable bill just to see it!” - Sasha McArthur, BC
What makes Halt and Catch Fire so great is that its a bold show. Its a show about people building new technology out of their houses and garages, and how this affects their personal lives. It might not sound like much from the surface, but your showrunners, writers, and all others involved have done a phenomenal job creating a complex and gripping story.
Halt and Catch Fire is set in a time period not often touched on in media. This show is one of the first, but film and television like this seems as though it might be on the cusp of becoming more popular in the future. For example, Danny's Boyle's film Steve Jobs is being released later this year. Based off the trailer, it has much the same vibe and intensity as Halt and Catch Fire.
“Brilliant show, I can identify with what some of the characters are going thru, both technically and emotionally, the high and lows of coming up with great ideas that sometimes just don't seem to take off with the rest of the world. It also makes me reminisce about my days back in the 80's staying up all night with my computers, playing, learning, programming, trying to come up with the next big thing. Highly recommended, and definitely needs the chance to have a 3rd Season.” - Luis Larin, TX
“As a child of the 80s who grew up watching the II industry events depicted in the show--and the music--I love it, and I hope it will continue!” - Charles Milam, KY
“This is one of the most enthralling TV shows I have seen in a long time. Having grown up in the 80s, and going through the emergence of clone PCs and the rise and fall of the Commodore 64 and online gaming, I'm totally hooked!” - Mike Paull, SW
“I was working in the computer industry in DFW during the 80's. This show is so spot on! I love the cast and the storyline. Please give us more of Cameron, Joe, Donna and Gordon. I laughed so hard when Gordon had the investors in his garage and they were from Sabre, EDS, Tandy and GD. Only one I didn't work at was GD.” - Michelle Goodwin, TX
Any other network might immediately say that something like this is a boring topic; that there isn't a large enough demographic interested in something such as people trying to have a hand in the quickly evolving tech era of the 1980's. AMC has always been a network that makes bold television. Its what has always set AMC apart from other channels, and AMC's boldness has made it one of the best networks on television. We believe you have something special here. If it is at all possible, we ask that you renew Halt and Catch Fire for another season and strengthen the marketing for the show.
Thanks,
Victoria R. and 2,000+ viewers of Halt and Catch Fire
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ANALYSIS/OPINION:
Oh my, this can’t be good.
Four voting machines were reported stolen from a precinct manager’s car just days before Georgia’s special congressional election.
Channel 2 Action News said the equipment was taken out of a Cobb County precinct manager’s vehicle — and he didn’t report the theft for two days.
The machines are used by poll workers to check in voters and check off those who’ve cast ballots.
Brian Kemp, Georgia’s secretary of state, said his office has opened an investigation.
“It is unacceptable that the Cobb County Elections Office waited two days to notify my office of this theft,” Kemp said. “We are taking steps to ensure that it has no effect on the election tomorrow. I am confident that the results will not be compromised.”
Cobb County’s elections director Janine Eveler said the data on the machines is “hard to access,” and voters and candidates shouldn’t worry — that nothing untoward can happen to taint the election process.
Hmm. Perhaps.
But you know what else is “hard to access?”
Information stored on Department of Veterans Affairs computers. But those computers were hacked and data for some 20 million or so veterans was compromised.
And guess what else is “hard to access?”
Medical data. Yet Anthem’s IT system was hacked in 2015, and roughly 80 million patient and employee records were compromised. Tricare’s was in 2011, compromising about five million military beneficiaries.
Ashley Madison, the adultery cheat site, was hacked in 2015, exposing 33 million user accounts that were supposedly safe and secure — “hard to access,” so to speak. eBay was hacked in 2014, exposing about 145 million users’ accounts, including personal information, to who knows whom. JP Morgan Chase, Home Depot, Target, Citibank — all professing “hard to access” data and security systems; all compromised nonetheless.
Not saying anything will happen to cause mayhem at the ballot boxes in Georgia on Tuesday, due to these stolen machines.
Just saying that when an official says not to worry, that a machine’s data is “hard to access” and all should be well — that’s worrisome in and of itself. It’s denial and deception.
And rest assured, the missing machines will indeed become a factor if Democrats don’t see their candidate of choice win.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.
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Syrian army troops backed by pro-government militia members have entered rebel-held neighbourhoods of the central city of Homs after laying siege to the districts for nearly two years.
Activists on the ground and the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group on Tuesday both confirmed the operation.
"The Syrian army and the National Defence Forces have achieved key successes in the Old City of Homs," Syrian state television said.
It said troops were advancing in several besieged neighbourhoods in the area, and had "killed a number of terrorists".
"They have entered into one area, Wadi al-Sayeh, which lies between Juret al-Shiyah and the Old City," said Abu Bilal, an activist trapped inside the blockade, who spoke to AFP news agency via the internet.
Rami Abdel Rahman, director of the Syrian Observatory, said regime forces began the advance a day earlier.
"The military operation began yesterday after National Defence Forces were deployed to strengthen the regime troops' presence," he told AFP.
Elsewhere in Syria, two mortar rounds landed near schools in predominantly Christian districts of Damascus, killing one child and wounding 41 other people, state media said.
Syria's official news agency said one of the shells struck a school in the Bab Touma neighbourhood, killing one child and wounding 36 others.
In a separate attack, another mortar round exploded near the Mar Elias Church in the Dweilaa district, wounding five people.
On Tuesday, another town in the area, Assal al-Ward, fell into government hands, state TV said.
As the fighting continued, the Al-Watan daily said that the speaker of parliament would announce the date of the country's presidential elections next week.
They are expected to be held in June, before the end of Assad's seven-year term on July 17.
Electoral rules require candidates to have spent the last 10 years in Syria, effectively preventing the opposition-in-exile from competing against him.
Saudi criticism
For his part, on Tuesday Prince Saud al-Faisal, foreign minister of Saudi Arabia, whose government strongly backs the Syrian opposition, joined international criticism of Syria's decision to press ahead with the vote.
"The announcement by the Syrian regime to hold elections is an escalation and undermines Arab and international efforts to peacefully resolve the crisis based on the Geneva I conference," Saud said in Riyadh.
Meanwhile, on ground a rebel source told AFP news agency they received at least 20 US-made TOW anti-tank missiles from a "Western source"
"Moderate, well-organised fighters from the Hazm movement have for the first time received more than 20 TOW anti-tank missiles from a Western source," the source said on condition of anonymity, and without specifying who had supplied the rockets.
The Hazm movement, part of the opposition Free Syrian Army, brings together mainly ex-army officers and soldiers who defected from the military to join the revolt.
"More have been promised should it be proven that the missiles are being used in an effective way," the source said.
"Dozens of fighters have been trained with international assistance in the use of these missiles."
The source said the weapons have been used in flashpoint areas of Idlib, Aleppo and Latakia provinces in the north.
Amateur video distributed by the opposition Masarat media network showed rebels unpacking, loading and firing several missiles at unnamed locations in the Syrian countryside.
"Most of the targets were tanks," said the rebel official, adding that "the 20 missiles have been used 100 percent effectively, always hitting their targets."
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ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Kurdistan Region President Masoud Barzani said Wednesday that Kurdish forces would not withdraw from lands they reclaimed from ISIS before the start of the Mosul operation last month, explaining that this was agreed with the United States and Iraqi government.Speaking in the town of Bashiqa, which was liberated by the Peshmerga in the first week of this month, Barzani warned human rights organizations that have recently accused Kurdish forces of demolishing homes in some liberated areas that those who cooperated with ISIS have no place among the Kurds, while all others are warmly embraced.“Different ethnic and religious groups living together is the kind of Kurdistan we want,” the Kurdish president said in a speech to Peshmerga commanders. “Every individual regardless of their beliefs is free to live in Kurdistan and we are proud of it,” he added.“Mullahs calling for prayer, Church bells ringing and Yezidis worshiping in their temples is what we want and what we will keep,” he said. “These are new times. ISIS is facing defeat.”Since ISIS swept across Iraq in June 2014, taking over Mosul and other territories left undefended by fleeing Iraqi forces, the Peshmerga have pushed the militants out of many of those territories, mainly in so-called “disputed areas” that were claimed by both the federal government in Baghdad and the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG).Kurdistan authorities have said that the Peshmerga have reclaimed some 90 percent of Kurdish lands that were in dispute, and Barzani said Wednesday that those lands shall remain under the KRG’s control.“We have a deal with America, between the Pentagon and the Peshmerga ministry -- and with the Iraqi government -- that the defense lines before the Mosul operation are non-negotiable,” Barzani declared. “Our only goal is to protect the security of people in these areas and for the Peshmerga to back it. We will never ever again let you be displaced and you can count on us for that,” he said in comments directed at Iraq’s Kurds. “Almost all Kurdish areas have been cleared of ISIS terrorists.”Responding to some internal criticism over why Peshmerga forces have been losing lives fighting for Mosul – which belongs to the federal government – Barzani explained that Kurdistan could not be safe unless nearby Mosul was free from ISIS.
“My answer to those who say ‘what do we have to do with Mosul?’ I say Kurdistan will not be safe as long as there are terrorists in Mosul,” the president said. “For the security and stability of the Kurdistan Region and its people it’s important that the Peshmerga take part in the liberation of Mosul operation. Before ISIS, 300,000 Kurds were living in Mosul. How can we turn our backs on them?” he asked.
Iraqi and Kurdish forces, backed by US-led coalition forces, began the offensive to liberate Mosul on Oct. 17. Iraqi forces are now inside the city, where they have reportedly cleared up about a third of its east bank on the Tigris River. Before the offensive, it was decided that only Iraqi forces would enter Mosul, and that the Peshmerga, who were tasked with liberating towns and villages around Mosul, would stay out of the city itself.There have been some recent reports by human rights groups accusing Peshmerga forces of not allowing all people to return to their homes, or demolishing some non-Kurdish homes in areas liberated from ISIS during the offensive.While not addressing to those reports directly, Barzani warned that anyone who cooperated with ISIS would not be allowed to return to lands liberated with Peshmerga lives.“In this region that has been liberated, sadly some people welcomed ISIS and guided and supported them and became accomplice in their crimes. Now that ISIS is being defeated, not a single one of those people is allowed to come back to a land Peshmerga have liberated with their blood,” Barzani said. “Those who assaulted our women, no matter where in the world they may live, we will never forgive them and will avenge.”He added that, “those who were with ISIS and supported it, are our enemy, whether they are Kurds, Arabs or Turkmen, and we will treat them the same as ISIS. That is our policy and let organizations that are concerned with human rights know that.”He noted that Kurdistan has embraced hundreds of thousands of refugees and internally displaced from other parts of Iraq – more than 1.6 million by the last official count.“If our policy was attacking others and displacing them why would we open our arms and hearts to more than 1.5 million refugees?” Barzani asked.“We do not accept harming any innocent people. Those who did not accept the rule of ISIS and left their places and sought shelter in Kurdistan are our brothers and sisters and more than welcome. We will protect them without discrimination,” he explained. “We respect those organizations and their work but they must also be fair.”Striking a defiant tone, he added: “If they talk about people who supported ISIS and that they should be able to return to their homes, that will never happen and they will have the same fate as ISIS’s, let them say what they may. “Our policy is clear and we make no compromise on the security and stability of the Kurdistan Region with anyone.”He warned that, even though ISIS is in retreat from Mosul and is nearing defeat in Iraq, Kurdistan cannot become complacent.“We don't know what will come to us after ISIS. We cannot say ISIS is gone and let’s relax now. This kind of challenge and threat will always be there. Therefore we should do for the Peshmerga several times more than what we ever did in the past -- better organize ourselves, upgrade our weapons, improve our training and be ready for any threat.”Commenting on a Kurdish independence referendum that he had announced more than two years ago but which became derailed by the ISIS blitzkrieg across Iraq, Barzani said that the Kurdish independence was non-negotiable.“Some people say where is the independence, where is the referendum? And I say that independence is a natural right of our people and we will not give up on it under any circumstances or pressure,” the president said.“But I have also always said that this is a process that should take place in peace and without violence. It must be done through dialogue,” he added.“On my last trip to Baghdad I raised this issue and I spoke about it very openly. And it is pleasing to know that there was a response and once there is a response, it is a way to reach an outcome. If we cannot be good partners, then let us be good neighbors and brothers. We should never again go through yet another phase of war and bloodshed. I suggest this in order to avoid further bloodshed and bigger problems,” said Barzani, who has maneuvered through many of the serious rows between the KRG and the Shiite-led government in Baghdad.“If we reach an understanding with Baghdad then there may not even be a need for referendum, and even if there is the need, it will be a lot easier and more recognized and we will get better support from the outside world,” the Kurdish president said. “If we don't reach an understanding, then we will go ahead with our referendum.”
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By Kelly O’Grady
There I was, like any other day riding public transportation, I was on my way to the comic book store and I was really in a great mood; As I read my fantasy novel a dark shadow fell on me, “Can I sit next to you” asked a voice with a thick Eastern- European accent. I looked up and saw an old man with a cane and he was wearing a garish knitted turtleneck sweater, which should have been the first tip off of what was going to transpire next. He looked like Bela Lugosi in a Cosby sweater, a terrifying combination.
“Sure you can sit down next to me” I said, and so he did, in doing so he brushed his knee against mine and left it there; it was weird but I figured he was injured or something, (hence the cane) and asked if that was okay. Sometimes I find myself being overly polite and getting into situations I could’ve have avoided, this was one of them.
“Uhh, okay?” I said, (like a guy who something bad is going to happen to) His corduroy clad knee was pressed next to mine for a few minutes as the Muni train lurched down the track. Of course this wasn’t enough for the old man and I felt his hand land on my knee like a dirty old pelican and he asked if that was okay.
I didn’t even say anything this time he just did it. Now, at this time any reasonable person would say “ Excuse me sir, I don’t want your dirty mitts off my fucking knee, please remove it.”
But I didn’t because once again I’m overly polite and I thought “Maybe that’s what is normal in Bulgaria or wherever he’s from?” My eyes went back to my Fantasy novel:
“Lyrion Gannister penetrated the lusty witch for a fortnight straight, she had told him all of her secrets of her body and her loins were well oiled. When they weren’t fucking they ate Chicken pot- pies and roasted berries, the winter was coming and so was Lyrian Gannister.”
Then the old man interrupted my reading and asked in a low voice “ Is this okay?!!” and his hand shot right for my private area, I leapt up like a blow up balloon man and got off ten blocks from my stop. I didn’t feel like going to the comic book store anymore. I felt like taking a chemical shower. With my day ruined I went to my (then) Girlfriend’s house for some kind of sympathy, but no; she just laughed at me.
The end.
*Illustrations by Kelly O’Grady
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The verdict is completely absurd.
Eight months after the nation watched an armed militia take over a wildlife refuge in Oregon to protest federal land ownership, a jury has come back and said that the militia members are “not guilty.” This includes not guilty of a charge that describes what everyone knows these militants did, considering that they live-streamed themselves doing it: conspiracy to prevent Bureau of Land Management and US Fish and Wildlife employees from doing their jobs at the wildlife refuge.
Again, this is literally what they did. They armed themselves and took over a wildlife refuge, preventing federal workers from going into the facility and doing their jobs. Ammon Bundy, the militants’ leader, even participated in interviews in which he called for more people to join him in his cause.
In fact, the militants staged their protest because they want to get federal employees out of these lands. The Bundys and other militants would like to see the federal government give up federal lands to locals. This, they argue, would free the territory of environmental regulations that they see as burdensome — but are meant to preserve endangered animals and nature — and enable more exploitation of the lands’ resources by allowing, for example, more unfettered farming, mining, and hunting.
Your imagination doesn’t have to stretch very far to realize what was happening
The defense argued there was no intent to keep federal employees off the refuge. But come on. An armed group occupied a federal building. Your imagination doesn’t have to stretch very far to realize what was happening.
Yet a jury found them not guilty.
It is impossible to ignore race here. This was a group of armed white people, mostly men, taking over a facility. Just imagine: What would happen if a group of armed black men, protesting police brutality, tried to take over a police facility and hold it hostage for more than a month? Would they even come out alive and get to trial? Would a jury find them and their cause relatable, making it easier to send them back home with no prison time?
One doesn’t have to do much imagining here, either. The social science is pretty clear: People are much more likely to look at black people and see criminals and wrongdoers. They don’t get the privilege of innocence in the same way that white people — including these militants in Oregon — do.
The public is much more likely to associate black people with criminality
Time and time again, studies have found that the public is more likely to associate black people with criminality and violence.
As part of a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2014, researchers interviewed 264 mostly white, female college students and found that they tended to perceive black children ages 10 and older as “significantly less innocent” than their white counterparts.
“Children in most societies are considered to be in a distinct group with characteristics such as innocence and the need for protection,” Phillip Goff, an author of the study, said in a statement. “Our research found that black boys can be seen as responsible for their actions at an age when white boys still benefit from the assumption that children are essentially innocent.”
Another study found that people tend to associate what the authors call “black-sounding names,” like DeShawn and Jamal, with larger, more violent people than they do “white-sounding names,” like Connor and Garrett.
“I’ve never been so disgusted by my own data,” Colin Holbrook, the lead author of the study, said in a statement. “The amount that our study participants assumed based only on a name was remarkable. A character with a black-sounding name was assumed to be physically larger, more prone to aggression, and lower in status than a character with a white-sounding name.”
from the start, a black person on trial is far more likely to be seen as someone who could have done wrong
These are the biases that people harbor when judging black people. It means that from the start, a black person on trial is far more likely to be seen as someone who could have done wrong.
As one example of how this shows up in the US legal system, a 2012 report by the US Sentencing Commission found that black men received sentences for drug trafficking that were 13.1 percent longer than the sentences white men received — more time for the same crime.
In contrast, Americans by and large don’t have automatic negative biases against white people. In fact, some white people might find the militants relatable — the militants look like them, and they’re protesting a cause that might seem agreeable to a lot of people struggling to make ends meet in rural areas.
The defense in the Oregon trial exploited this. Matt Schindler, one of the attorneys for the defense, said in his closing statement, “How did any of these people benefit from protesting the death of rural America?” Translation: These guys were trying to speak out against problems that afflict you. How could you turn against them?
Just imagine trying a similar argument for an armed group of a different race.
Watch: The Oregon standoff, explained in 3 minutes
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Bob Weber, The Canadian Press
EDMONTON -- Recent research predicts restrictions on energy companies withdrawing water from the Athabasca River are a preview of what's to come under climate change.
Low summer water levels by mid-century could be costing the oilsands industry billions of dollars in lost production, said Simon Donner, a professor of geography at the University of British Columbia and co-author of a paper published in Climate Change.
"Climate change is going to affect the river so much it'll actually affect how much the industry can withdraw. This summer is basically a preview of the future."
Earlier this week, Alberta's energy regulator suspended a total of 73 temporary industry licences to take water from the Athabasca and Peace rivers because of low flows. Alberta Environment reports that water flows at the Athabasca station are about 43 per cent below average for this time of year.
Get used to it, said Donner.
Using mathematical models, he and co-author Doris Leong found that while overall precipitation in the Athabasca basin is likely to increase under climate change, the bulk of that flow will come earlier and earlier in the year.
Spring runoff is expected to begin up to a month earlier by 2050.
More precipitation in the area is already falling as rain, even in the winter. That shrinks the huge reservoir of water stored up as snow, reducing the amount released gradually over the summer.
"Snow is like this reservoir that slowly melts as you go spring into summer," Donner said. "If more of that is falling as rain, it kind of flattens it out so that the peak happens earlier and it's not as high.
"When you get to the summer, you end up with pretty low flows."
The researchers found that by mid-century -- well within the expected lifespan of most oilsands developments -- low water levels leading to withdrawal disruptions will increase by up to 40 per cent.
Those flow disruptions will translate into a 22 per cent increase in interruptions to oilsands operations, equivalent to more than two years of oil production per decade, they say.
"In some cases ... we're talking up to two months or more per year in which the regulators would do what they did (this week) -- no more water."
The findings assume that the provincial government will maintain and enforce current policy on water use from the river.
"What we're really talking about here is a tradeoff between industrial water demand and natural water needs," said Donner.
Industry is taking steps to reduce its dependence on the Athabasca. Some companies remove water from the river and store it on site for when flows are low. Imperial Oil's Kearl facility stores enough water to cover three months, said spokesman Pius Rolheiser.
Environmental groups have advocated for water storage to be made mandatory for any new oilsands projects.
Other companies have reduced their withdrawals by being more efficient and recycling water they do withdraw. Suncor's withdrawals have declined by about 57 per cent since 2007 despite more than tripling production, said spokeswoman Erin Rees.
Such efforts do add costs in an industry already challenged by low prices for its product.
Donner said it's an example of how industry will increasingly be forced to take climate change into account.
"It really just points to how long-term planning for the industry cannot ignore that the climate's changing."
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Dollarama CFO Michael Ross is cagey about what products will be sold at Dollarama for $3 beginning in August. With more than 700 locations in all ten provinces, Dollarama is the undisputed leader in the dollar-store category in Canada. But retailers are notoriously wary of giving competitors any kind of edge.
Colleen Imrie, who works and goes to school in the area, picks up some goods at a Dollarama store at Spadina Ave. and Adelaide St. in this 2011 file photo. ( RICK MADONIK / TORONTO STAR )
Ross reluctantly admits soccer balls will be sold for $3. If you want to know more, you’ll have to shop a Dollarama, as legions of Canadians apparently already have. While retailers across North America are watching their sales flatline or slide, Dollarama stands out as a clear winner. The democratization of shopping has made Dollarama a popular destination for the rich and the poor, a trend that is boosting sales at luxury retailers and deep discount retailers and leaving general merchandise retailers in the lurch.
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There’s even a name for it: Cross-shopping. At Dollarama, it’s called profit. Yesterday, the Montreal-based firm announced a rise in first-quarter profit of 40 per cent to $42.6 million. Ross said there’s easily room for an additional 50 Dollaramas a year for the next five years in Canada. And while it’s tempting to pin the increase in sales on hard economic times, Ross said Dollarama shoppers include families of high and low incomes. There is growing retail research to support his claims. WWD reported in April that credit card data shows luxury consumers are very comfortable shopping the other end of the price scale. In the U.S., 25 per cent of Nordstrom shoppers also shop at the Dollar Tree, Leon Nicholas, director of retail insights at Kantar Retail, told WWD.
Consumer psychologist Kit Yarrow has described it as “an anticachet around being wealthy.” In Canada, Dollarama is a destination retailer for seasonal items, party items, kitchenware and stationary, regardless of income, says Ross.
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In February 2009 the company began rolling out items priced $1.25-$2. The move boosted traffic and sales. According to the financial results released Wednesday, about 51 per cent of the company’s sales were from items costing more than a dollar, compared with 44 per cent a year before. Ross says Dollarama has no plans to expand into the U.S., where Dollar Tree Inc. reported record first quarter earnings in March. Dollar Tree operates about 4,350 stores in the U.S. Dollar Tree Canada operates 99 stores primarily in the west and Ontario after purchasing 86 stores from Vancouver-based Dollar Giant last year. It plans to add about 25 stores in Canada in 2012. “Dollar Tree is a far larger operation overall, but Dollarama should continue to dominate in Canada for some time. Dollarama has 7.5 times the number of locations in this country, and is still growing, as compared to Dollar Tree. It will take years for Dollar Tree to catch up,” said Ed Strapagiel, executive vice-president of Kubas Primedia. “There isn’t anything sacred about the $1 price point at a dollar store. The early concept was ‘everything for a dollar,’ but this was an obvious gimmick and has since been abandoned. What a dollar store stands for now is the cheapest practical solution for very basic products. This concept can be maintained even when the price is sometimes $3.” Competition from other retailers – Walmart announced this year it would be bulking up on dollar items – doesn’t worry Ross. Dollaramas located near Walmart stores do better business. “Customers don’t have to walk 100,000 square feet to find those low-priced items. They go into the store and it’s wall-to-wall, but the race track is only 10,000 square feet.”
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Senate Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in July of 2017. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images.
By Jonathan Larsen
Companies that retained the lobbying services of a longtime chief of staff and “dear friend” of Sen. Maj. Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), appear poised to benefit from the tax bill going before Congress this week.
Kyle Simmons served as McConnell’s chief of staff for at least 12 years, after which he became a lobbyist and, eventually, a founding partner of the Washington lobbying shop the Simmons & Russell Group. Lobbying-disclosure forms show that in the most recent quarter, Simmons personally lobbied the Senate on behalf of 10 companies and the trade group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA). The forms list “tax reform” as one issue he worked on for all of them, most of which have publicly called for lower tax rates.
The companies for which Simmons lobbied on tax reform in the third quarter include American Airlines, Anheuser-Busch, Eli Lilly, ExxonMobil, Google, Toyota, and Wal-Mart. Prior to this quarter, Eli Lilly and Google had not paid Simmons & Russell to lobby on tax issues.
Disclosure forms do not break out how much money Simmons & Russell made on specific issues, and most forms include one or two additional issues, but the forms that include tax reform add up to $560,000 paid to Simmons & Russell for third-quarter lobbying.
Prior to serving as McConnell’s chief of staff, Simmons worked in Republican campaign politics, eventually running McConnell’s 1996 campaign.
In a 2010 speech about Simmons on the Senate floor, McConnell had to pause several times and at times appeared to cry while discussing the departure of his “colleague . . . confidante, and . . . dear friend.” Simmons has donated to McConnell’s campaigns as recently as last year, as well as to McConnell’s PAC, the Bluegrass Committee; the National Republican Senate Committee; and to McConnell favorites including Sen. Luther Strange (R-Ala.), who lost a bitter primary earlier this year against Judge Roy Moore.
The lobbying disclosure forms do not specify whether Simmons lobbied McConnell or any other individual senator. In response to an email from TYT, Simmons’ partner Bob Russell, who served as chief of staff to former Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.), did not address that or other questions about their tax lobbying.
Several measures that would benefit Simmons’ clients found their way into either an early Senate version of the bill, or the final version negotiated between both chambers that is being voted on this week.
American Airlines will get a leg up on foreign competitors thanks to a tax on overseas assets. One measure that made it into the Senate version—only to be stripped out at the last minute by the parliamentarian—was an excise tax that would have applied to some foreign airlines.
Anheuser-Busch, another Simmons client, will be helped by an amendment that did survive in the final version and is aimed at aiding craft breweries but reportedly could be worth $12 million to Anheuser-Busch. That amendment was inserted by Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), who also served on the conference committee that negotiated the final bill.
Data from the Center for Responsive Politics show that Simmons donated $1,000 to Portman’s most recent campaign. Simmons also donated to other GOP conference committee members, including $1,000 to Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) and $1,000 to Sen. John Cornyn’s (R-Texas) Alamo PAC. Republican senators on the committee were appointed by McConnell.
Other Simmons clients also stand to benefit. Pharmaceutical companies—which are represented by the PhRMA group—and tech companies such as Google are expected to profit greatly from the bill’s provisions on repatriating foreign earnings.
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This page has been updated to provide a record of the final week of D78 stock trains operating on London Underground, as well as the farewell rail tour. An archive copy of this page, as it appeared on the final day of public operations on April 21st, can be found here.
April 2017 marked the end of an era on London Underground’s District line, as the last of the venerable D78 stock were withdrawn from passenger service. After 37 years of plying their trade between east and west London, the fleet’s time was up, being replaced by the brand new, air-conditioned, walk-through S stock as part of a multi-million pound upgrade programme for the network. The last public service train operated on Friday 21st April, with a final farewell railtour taking place two weeks later, on Sunday 7th May.
Out of 75 individual units only six remained by the final week, formed into three trains. Over the course of the week, each train gradually migrated to Ealing Common depot as services wound down, prior to being dispatched away from the London Underground network. The final service brought down the curtain on over 100 years of conventional, DC-motored rolling stock operation across the sub-surface lines. Like the A60/62 and C69/77 stock before them, the D78s are now nothing more than a memory, replaced by the trains of the future ready to take on the baton of service for the next 30 years.
What was a D78 stock?
The London Underground D78 stock were a family of trains constructed by Metro-Cammell between 1978 and 1981 in their Washwood Heath workshops. An innovative design at the time, the trains were the first on the Underground to use a modern joystick-style control handle, replacing the previous spring-loaded ‘deadman’s’ device found on earlier stocks, as well as a modern ‘train management system’ for the diagnosis and rectification of faults, in preference to an earlier, more generic system. Much progress was also made with ride quality, but the most radical and noticeable difference for passengers were the single-leaf doors, a big departure from anything that had been seen in other rolling stock designs of the era. Ordered at a time of dwindling passenger numbers on the network, the design was intended to both reduce maintenance costs and reflect the lower patronage, but despite being replicated in the later 1983 tube stock the doors would continue to be a drawback for the trains, as passenger numbers rose and station dwell times increased.
However, unlike their smaller cousins, the D78 stock soldiered on, and would undergo a comprehensive midlife overhaul between 2004 and 2008. The unpainted aluminium finish of the trains was swept away, replaced by the striking red, white and blue corporate livery as seen on all other Underground stock by this time. Further innovations would be added to the fleet, with the stock continuing to be a pioneering train for the network. For the first time on any London Underground rolling stock, LED information displays were provided on the side of the trains, as well as a brand new passenger information system inside the train, bringing audiovisual announcements to the sub-surface railway for the first time – although the C69/77 stock had been given audio announcements some years prior, they were still without the internal LED screens provided on the D78s. Other enhancements included the provision of an accessible multi-purpose area, CCTV throughout the trains and a more modern and durable interior. It is in this condition that the trains lasted, until the first was withdrawn in January 2015 as the rollout of the new S stock fleet commenced.
Why were the trains withdrawn?
Simply put, the D78 stock trains no longer met passenger expectations, despite their overhaul less than fifteen years ago. Passenger numbers on the Underground continue to grow year by year, with more capacity being needed to transport people across the length of the city. To ensure that the network is as prepared as possible for any future growth, a brand new fleet of trains – the S stock – was ordered in 2008. At a cost of £1.5billion for 1,395 individual cars, the order is said to be the largest ever single rolling stock order in Britain. The trains feature improved passenger information systems – including the ability to broadcast real-time service updates – as well as larger carriages with walk-through gangways, allowing passengers to spread down inside and use more available space. The standardised fleet operates in two lengths – 8-car S8 stock on the Metropolitan line, and 7-car S7 stock stock on the Circle, District and Hammersmith & City lines.
But it’s not just the trains that need upgrading to ensure that the network is fit for the future: much of the sub-surface railway operates using conventional signalling systems from the 1920s, 1930s and 1950s, which is also coming to the end of its life and is constraining the ability to operate more services across the network. A new, automatic signalling system is to be installed, allowing more trains to run closer together, without the need for line side signals. The veteran D78 stock trains could not be equipped for automatic train operation, and so had to be replaced by the new trains to realise these capacity benefits.
Which D78 stock trains survive?
By the final week, six units of D78 stock remained operational on the network. Each unit was formed of three cars, and units were coupled together to make up trains, creating three six-car rakes from the six units. Five of these units were ‘single-ended’, meaning that they had only one driver’s cab. The sixth unit was the last surviving ‘double-ender’, meaning that it had a cab at both ends, which allowed for greater fleet flexibility when the trains were in squadron service. Even-numbered units faced the west end of the line, whilst those units ending with an odd digit faced east. The six remaining units were thus:
7007 The lowest-numbered train to survive to the final week, 7007 holds the rare honour of carrying the Olympic torch, travelling from Wimbledon to Wimbledon Park with the torch on board as part of the London 2012 Games’ Olympic Torch Rally. The driving car was adorned with the Olympic Rings and special London 2012 slogans, which were carried throughout the Games from 24th July 2012 to early January 2013. Along with 7032, it was part of the last train of D78 stock to operate with passengers on the London Underground network. 7018 7018 led a somewhat unremarkable life on the Underground, but by the final week was the lowest surviving west end unit. For much of 2017 the unit was paired with 7007 – putting the two lowest numbered units together – but was reformed in early April. Paired with 7057, this unit made its last trip on Thursday 20th April, with decommissioning commencing shortly after the unit stabled at Ealing Common depot. 7032 As the last of the traditional sub-surface railway rolling stock, the D78s are unique even amongst themselves. Despite standardisation, each unit has its own quirks and foibles, even down to the sound of the traction motors. 7032 was to earn a place in the history books, becoming part of the last train of D78 stock to operate on the London Underground network along with 7007. 7037 Through a twist of fate, every surviving east end D78 unit ended in the number 7 – some co-incidence! During the final week, 7037 was formed up with the final surviving double-ended unit 7526 – the west end driving cab of which is numbered, you guessed it, 7527. 7057 By the final week 7057 was the highest numbered surviving single-ended unit, out of a stock that originally numbered to 7129. This train saw out its final days in service alongside 7018, operating for the final time on Thursday 20th April. Starting from Lillie Bridge depot, the train operated during the morning peak, before 7057 led the set into Ealing Common depot to stable for the final time. 7526/7 As the last surviving double-ended unit, 7526/7 worked its last days in service as the east end unit of a train, meaning that its west-end cab, that is 7527, was buried in the middle of a six-car train. In theory, it is possible to operate a double-ended D78 stock alone, however three cars would lack any meaningful capacity on the network. In the past, however, three-car units of D78 stock did briefly operate on the East London line, to cover for A60/62 stock which was undergoing refurbishment.
Where did the D78 stock run in the final week?
A handful of D78 stock trains appeared in service on the District line right up to the final day in service. As always with the operational railway, these plans could change at short notice – and they did! Service disruption resulted in a number of curtailments, reformations and diversions – right up to the final public trip – which kept would-be D78 stock hunters on their feet. A final run out in normal passenger carrying service took place on Friday 21st April, with a special farewell charity railtour taking place two weeks later, on Sunday 7th May. There were three D78 stock trains, each made up of two units, remaining in service for the last week in operation, although not all – and, indeed, sometimes none at all – were out on the line simultaneously. Each morning, the allocations for any D78s that made it out onto the line were posted here, all of which are now reproduced for posterity on this website. The six units were formed as shown below, and you can click through to see the workings for each set over the duration of the final week in service.
7032+7007 7526+7037 7018+7057
Rail enthusiasts and Londoners alike headed out onto the network to #CatchTheD for one final time, sharing their photographs and thoughts across social media. Some enthusiasts were kitted out with apparel mimicking the original seating moquette of the old trains, whilst station staff made celebratory announcements to mark the occasion. Commemorative pin badges were available too, raising money for the Poppy Appeal, whilst the London Transport Museum also commissioned a range of merchandise acknowledging the longevity and popularity of the venerable workhorses.
So what did the final train actually do?
The final train that could be ridden with a normal Oyster or contactless card or Travelcard ran on Friday 21st April 2017. The train operated as set 4, starting from Upminster depot and shut tingly back and forth between there and Richmond for the majority of the day, before stabling – for the final time – at Ealing Common depot, shortly after 1830. A defective train at Bromley-by-Bow in the morning looked as though it could scupper the plans for a seamless farewell, causing significant disruption to the District line for much of the day. Fortunately, though, the service control team on the District line were keen to ensure that everyone was able to get their opportunity to ride the final train, keeping it as close to its booked path as possible. They largely succeeded too, with only one alteration – a short trip reversing at Gunnersbury, itself an unusual move – required to keep things running smoothly.
On the final run through to Ealing Broadway from Upminster, passengers were also treated to a rare excursion through a little-used siding at West Ham, also allowing other – emptier – service trains to overtake and provide an important capacity boost for the evening rush hour before the final train continued on its way. Upon reaching Ealing Broadway, the train was ceremoniously waved off by London Underground staff using an old-fashioned green flag, before trundling into the depot at Ealing Common to rapturous applause. The curtain came down on the D78 stock trains after thirty-seven years of service.
Film maker Geoff Marshall was on hand to record the events of the day, compiling a short video capturing the emotion and atmosphere experienced by those on board. Also, a small group of enthusiasts – led by rail historian and broadcaster Tim Dunn – joined the train to recreate a photograph taken shortly before the D78 stock trains entered service in 1980. Despite the alterations to the train’s interior since refurbishment, the parallels could easily be seen, assisted by the faux moquette scarves worn by two of the re-enactors. Whilst the original photograph was taken in a sterile depot environment using London Transport staff, the re-creation was taken whilst the train was in service and in motion, causing great interest from the general public on board the train.
What’s this about a railtour? What even is a railtour?
A railtour is a special trip along a railway line, often organised when trains are being withdrawn for the final time. Such a special occasion took place on Sunday 7th May for the D78 stock. Organised by the London Transport Museum, tickets were strictly limited for the special trip, with the tour selling out well in advance of its operation.
The D78 Farewell tour began at High Street Kensington at 0955 and terminated at Ealing Broadway at 1750, with a lunch break at the Piccadilly line station of Northfields. The train covered all of the District line destinations served routinely by the D78 stock – i.e. everywhere but the short section between High Street Kensington and Edgware Road – but unlike some other farewell tours the train did not venture away from District tracks, aside from the short trip to Northfields for lunch.
So that’s it then? No more D78 stock?
Well. Not quite. There may yet be opportunity to ride on the D78 stock again – but it won’t be on London Underground. Vivarail have purchased the majority of the redundant rolling stock, and are refurbishing and upgrading the trains for continued use on the national rail network. Originally marketed as a cheaper alternative to expensive new-build trains, the project has evolved to offer small quantities of high quality, bespoke rolling stock, filling a niche where conventional mainline trains may not be economical. The innovative scheme will see the D78 stock fitted with either an underfloor diesel engine or high capacity battery pack, allowing the units to operate away from electrified tracks. The trains – known as the D-Train or Class 230 – could be a viable solution for little-used rural branch lines, with a number of orders having been placed. The prototype train debuted in passenger service in June 2017, operating a shuttle service to the Rail Live exhibition at Long Marston. The first production trains should enter regular service in December 2018, operating the Bedford to Bletchley line with operator West Midlands Trains.
Two further trains have been retained by London Underground for engineering use. Heavily modified and reformed into permanent five-car formations, the trains will be used during the autumn leaf-fall period to lay a special substance known as ‘sandite’ on the tracks. This improves adhesion between trains and the running rails, lessening the affects of that age-old reason of ‘leaves on the line’. The Rail Adhesion Trains, as they will be known, have replaced an older formation made up of redundant A60/62 stock and will see use on the more rural areas of the Metropolitan line.
One car – 7012 – has also been retained for posterity by the London Transport Museum, and can be seen at its depot at Acton Town during occasional open days. The storage site is a Mecca for transport enthusiasts, with numerous items of redundant London Underground rolling stock – as well as heritage signage, posters, artefacts and more – available for close inspection.
The D78 stock
37 Years of Service ~ 1980-2017
Credits & Acknowledgements:
I am grateful to everyone who has assisted me with the compilation of this page. The information contained within has been drawn from a number of sources, including the ever-informative District Dave’s forum, Richard Griffin’s comprehensive SquareWheels.org.uk and a number of internal London Underground sources.
The downloadable and printable timetable sheets are my own work, with copyright for the design remaining with me. The information contained on each sheet is drawn from the latest District line working timetable, which can be viewed in full on the TfL website. It must – once again – be stressed that all information is subject to change at any time in the best interests of the service, and I cannot be held responsible if the information is inaccurate. You are free to print and distribute these sheets – including online – provided that attribution is maintained.
Photographs on this page have been supplied by a number of fellow enthusiasts, supplemented by some from my own collection. All copyright remains with the original photographer, and no images may be reproduced without the express prior consent from the copyright holder. Where no photographer is attributed, the copyright remains with me. I am indebted to Andy Carter, Tommy Cooling, Jason Cross, Tim Easter, Richard Griffin and Anne Maningas for allowing me to use their photographs.
Finally, additional special thanks goes to Richard Griffin for inspiring this page through his historical pages for the final days of the 1959 stock in January 2000. 17 years on, an archive of those pages can still be found on his website.
Featured image: The original Metropolitan District Railway depot at Lillie Bridge remains in use, once again housing District line trains after spending many years as an engineering depot. Three trains of D78 stock and two trains of S7 stock are seen after dark on the 4th May 2015. The central unit is double-ended train 7526/7, the last to survive in use on the Underground. © Tim Easter
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Sara Thomas Monopoli was pregnant with her first child when her doctors learned that she was going to die. It started with a cough and a pain in her back. Then a chest X-ray showed that her left lung had collapsed, and her chest was filled with fluid. A sample of the fluid was drawn off with a long needle and sent for testing. Instead of an infection, as everyone had expected, it was lung cancer, and it had already spread to the lining of her chest. Her pregnancy was thirty-nine weeks along, and the obstetrician who had ordered the test broke the news to her as she sat with her husband and her parents. The obstetrician didn’t get into the prognosis—she would bring in an oncologist for that—but Sara was stunned. Her mother, who had lost her best friend to lung cancer, began crying. The doctors wanted to start treatment right away, and that meant inducing labor to get the baby out. For the moment, though, Sara and her husband, Rich, sat by themselves on a quiet terrace off the labor floor. It was a warm Monday in June, 2007. She took Rich’s hands, and they tried to absorb what they had heard. Monopoli was thirty-four. She had never smoked, or lived with anyone who had. She exercised. She ate well. The diagnosis was bewildering. “This is going to be O.K.,” Rich told her. “We’re going to work through this. It’s going to be hard, yes. But we’ll figure it out. We can find the right treatment.” For the moment, though, they had a baby to think about. “So Sara and I looked at each other,” Rich recalled, “and we said, ‘We don’t have cancer on Tuesday. It’s a cancer-free day. We’re having a baby. It’s exciting. And we’re going to enjoy our baby.’ ” On Tuesday, at 8:55 P.M., Vivian Monopoli, seven pounds nine ounces, was born. She had wavy brown hair, like her mom, and she was perfectly healthy. The next day, Sara underwent blood tests and body scans. Dr. Paul Marcoux, an oncologist, met with her and her family to discuss the findings. He explained that she had a non-small cell lung cancer that had started in her left lung. Nothing she had done had brought this on. More than fifteen per cent of lung cancers—more than people realize—occur in non-smokers. Hers was advanced, having metastasized to multiple lymph nodes in her chest and its lining. The cancer was inoperable. But there were chemotherapy options, notably a relatively new drug called Tarceva, which targets a gene mutation commonly found in lung cancers of female non-smokers. Eighty-five per cent respond to this drug, and, Marcoux said, “some of these responses can be long-term.” Words like “respond” and “long-term” provide a reassuring gloss on a dire reality. There is no cure for lung cancer at this stage. Even with chemotherapy, the median survival is about a year. But it seemed harsh and pointless to confront Sara and Rich with this now. Vivian was in a bassinet by the bed. They were working hard to be optimistic. As Sara and Rich later told the social worker who was sent to see them, they did not want to focus on survival statistics. They wanted to focus on “aggressively managing” this diagnosis. Sara was started on the Tarceva, which produced an itchy, acne-like facial rash and numbing tiredness. She also underwent a surgical procedure to drain the fluid around her lung; when the fluid kept coming back, a thoracic surgeon eventually placed a small, permanent tube in her chest, which she could drain whenever fluid accumulated and interfered with her breathing. Three weeks after the delivery, she was admitted to the hospital with severe shortness of breath from a pulmonary embolism—a blood clot in an artery to the lungs, which is dangerous but not uncommon in cancer patients. She was started on a blood thinner. Then test results showed that her tumor cells did not have the mutation that Tarceva targets. When Marcoux told Sara that the drug wasn’t going to work, she had an almost violent physical reaction to the news, bolting to the bathroom in mid-discussion with a sudden bout of diarrhea. Dr. Marcoux recommended a different, more standard chemotherapy, with two drugs called carboplatin and paclitaxel. But the paclitaxel triggered an extreme, nearly overwhelming allergic response, so he switched her to a regimen of carboplatin plus gemcitabine. Response rates, he said, were still very good for patients on this therapy. She spent the remainder of the summer at home, with Vivian and her husband and her parents, who had moved in to help. She loved being a mother. Between chemotherapy cycles, she began trying to get her life back. Then, in October, a CT scan showed that the tumor deposits in her left lung and chest and lymph nodes had grown substantially. The chemotherapy had failed. She was switched to a drug called pemetrexed. Studies found that it could produce markedly longer survival in some patients. In reality, however, only a small percentage of patients gained very much. On average, the drug extended survival by only two months—from eleven months to thirteen months—and that was in patients who, unlike Sara, had responded to first-line chemotherapy. She worked hard to take the setbacks and side effects in stride. She was upbeat by nature, and she managed to maintain her optimism. Little by little, however, she grew sicker—increasingly exhausted and short of breath. By November, she didn’t have the wind to walk the length of the hallway from the parking garage to Marcoux’s office; Rich had to push her in a wheelchair. A few days before Thanksgiving, she had another CT scan, which showed that the pemetrexed—her third drug regimen—wasn’t working, either. The lung cancer had spread: from the left chest to the right; to the liver; to the lining of her abdomen; and to her spine. Time was running out.
This is the moment in Sara’s story that poses a fundamental question for everyone living in the era of modern medicine: What do we want Sara and her doctors to do now? Or, to put it another way, if you were the one who had metastatic cancer—or, for that matter, a similarly advanced case of emphysema or congestive heart failure—what would you want your doctors to do? The issue has become pressing, in recent years, for reasons of expense. The soaring cost of health care is the greatest threat to the country’s long-term solvency, and the terminally ill account for a lot of it. Twenty-five per cent of all Medicare spending is for the five per cent of patients who are in their final year of life, and most of that money goes for care in their last couple of months which is of little apparent benefit. Spending on a disease like cancer tends to follow a particular pattern. There are high initial costs as the cancer is treated, and then, if all goes well, these costs taper off. Medical spending for a breast-cancer survivor, for instance, averaged an estimated fifty-four thousand dollars in 2003, the vast majority of it for the initial diagnostic testing, surgery, and, where necessary, radiation and chemotherapy. For a patient with a fatal version of the disease, though, the cost curve is U-shaped, rising again toward the end—to an average of sixty-three thousand dollars during the last six months of life with an incurable breast cancer. Our medical system is excellent at trying to stave off death with eight-thousand-dollar-a-month chemotherapy, three-thousand-dollar-a-day intensive care, five-thousand-dollar-an-hour surgery. But, ultimately, death comes, and no one is good at knowing when to stop. The subject seems to reach national awareness mainly as a question of who should “win” when the expensive decisions are made: the insurers and the taxpayers footing the bill or the patient battling for his or her life. Budget hawks urge us to face the fact that we can’t afford everything. Demagogues shout about rationing and death panels. Market purists blame the existence of insurance: if patients and families paid the bills themselves, those expensive therapies would all come down in price. But they’re debating the wrong question. The failure of our system of medical care for people facing the end of their life runs much deeper. To see this, you have to get close enough to grapple with the way decisions about care are actually made. Recently, while seeing a patient in an intensive-care unit at my hospital, I stopped to talk with the critical-care physician on duty, someone I’d known since college. “I’m running a warehouse for the dying,” she said bleakly. Out of the ten patients in her unit, she said, only two were likely to leave the hospital for any length of time. More typical was an almost eighty-year-old woman at the end of her life, with irreversible congestive heart failure, who was in the I.C.U. for the second time in three weeks, drugged to oblivion and tubed in most natural orifices and a few artificial ones. Or the seventy-year-old with a cancer that had metastasized to her lungs and bone, and a fungal pneumonia that arises only in the final phase of the illness. She had chosen to forgo treatment, but her oncologist pushed her to change her mind, and she was put on a ventilator and antibiotics. Another woman, in her eighties, with end-stage respiratory and kidney failure, had been in the unit for two weeks. Her husband had died after a long illness, with a feeding tube and a tracheotomy, and she had mentioned that she didn’t want to die that way. But her children couldn’t let her go, and asked to proceed with the placement of various devices: a permanent tracheotomy, a feeding tube, and a dialysis catheter. So now she just lay there tethered to her pumps, drifting in and out of consciousness. Almost all these patients had known, for some time, that they had a terminal condition. Yet they—along with their families and doctors—were unprepared for the final stage. “We are having more conversation now about what patients want for the end of their life, by far, than they have had in all their lives to this point,” my friend said. “The problem is that’s way too late.” In 2008, the national Coping with Cancer project published a study showing that terminally ill cancer patients who were put on a mechanical ventilator, given electrical defibrillation or chest compressions, or admitted, near death, to intensive care had a substantially worse quality of life in their last week than those who received no such interventions. And, six months after their death, their caregivers were three times as likely to suffer major depression. Spending one’s final days in an I.C.U. because of terminal illness is for most people a kind of failure. You lie on a ventilator, your every organ shutting down, your mind teetering on delirium and permanently beyond realizing that you will never leave this borrowed, fluorescent place. The end comes with no chance for you to have said goodbye or “It’s O.K.” or “I’m sorry” or “I love you.” People have concerns besides simply prolonging their lives. Surveys of patients with terminal illness find that their top priorities include, in addition to avoiding suffering, being with family, having the touch of others, being mentally aware, and not becoming a burden to others. Our system of technological medical care has utterly failed to meet these needs, and the cost of this failure is measured in far more than dollars. The hard question we face, then, is not how we can afford this system’s expense. It is how we can build a health-care system that will actually help dying patients achieve what’s most important to them at the end of their lives.
For all but our most recent history, dying was typically a brief process. Whether the cause was childhood infection, difficult childbirth, heart attack, or pneumonia, the interval between recognizing that you had a life-threatening ailment and death was often just a matter of days or weeks. Consider how our Presidents died before the modern era. George Washington developed a throat infection at home on December 13, 1799, that killed him by the next evening. John Quincy Adams, Millard Fillmore, and Andrew Johnson all succumbed to strokes, and died within two days. Rutherford Hayes had a heart attack and died three days later. Some deadly illnesses took a longer course: James Monroe and Andrew Jackson died from the months-long consumptive process of what appears to have been tuberculosis; Ulysses Grant’s oral cancer took a year to kill him; and James Madison was bedridden for two years before dying of “old age.” But, as the end-of-life researcher Joanne Lynn has observed, people usually experienced life-threatening illness the way they experienced bad weather—as something that struck with little warning—and you either got through it or you didn’t. Dying used to be accompanied by a prescribed set of customs. Guides to ars moriendi, the art of dying, were extraordinarily popular; a 1415 medieval Latin text was reprinted in more than a hundred editions across Europe. Reaffirming one’s faith, repenting one’s sins, and letting go of one’s worldly possessions and desires were crucial, and the guides provided families with prayers and questions for the dying in order to put them in the right frame of mind during their final hours. Last words came to hold a particular place of reverence. These days, swift catastrophic illness is the exception; for most people, death comes only after long medical struggle with an incurable condition—advanced cancer, progressive organ failure (usually the heart, kidney, or liver), or the multiple debilities of very old age. In all such cases, death is certain, but the timing isn’t. So everyone struggles with this uncertainty—with how, and when, to accept that the battle is lost. As for last words, they hardly seem to exist anymore. Technology sustains our organs until we are well past the point of awareness and coherence. Besides, how do you attend to the thoughts and concerns of the dying when medicine has made it almost impossible to be sure who the dying even are? Is someone with terminal cancer, dementia, incurable congestive heart failure dying, exactly? I once cared for a woman in her sixties who had severe chest and abdominal pain from a bowel obstruction that had ruptured her colon, caused her to have a heart attack, and put her into septic shock and renal failure. I performed an emergency operation to remove the damaged length of colon and give her a colostomy. A cardiologist stented her coronary arteries. We put her on dialysis, a ventilator, and intravenous feeding, and stabilized her. After a couple of weeks, though, it was clear that she was not going to get much better. The septic shock had left her with heart and respiratory failure as well as dry gangrene of her foot, which would have to be amputated. She had a large, open abdominal wound with leaking bowel contents, which would require twice-a-day cleaning and dressing for weeks in order to heal. She would not be able to eat. She would need a tracheotomy. Her kidneys were gone, and she would have to spend three days a week on a dialysis machine for the rest of her life. She was unmarried and without children. So I sat with her sisters in the I.C.U. family room to talk about whether we should proceed with the amputation and the tracheotomy. “Is she dying?” one of the sisters asked me. I didn’t know how to answer the question. I wasn’t even sure what the word “dying” meant anymore. In the past few decades, medical science has rendered obsolete centuries of experience, tradition, and language about our mortality, and created a new difficulty for mankind: how to die.
One Friday morning this spring, I went on patient rounds with Sarah Creed, a nurse with the hospice service that my hospital system operates. I didn’t know much about hospice. I knew that it specialized in providing “comfort care” for the terminally ill, sometimes in special facilities, though nowadays usually at home. I knew that, in order for a patient of mine to be eligible, I had to write a note certifying that he or she had a life expectancy of less than six months. And I knew few patients who had chosen it, except maybe in their very last few days, because they had to sign a form indicating that they understood their disease was incurable and that they were giving up on medical care to stop it. The picture I had of hospice was of a morphine drip. It was not of this brown-haired and blue-eyed former I.C.U. nurse with a stethoscope, knocking on Lee Cox’s door on a quiet street in Boston’s Mattapan neighborhood. “Hi, Lee,” Creed said when she entered the house. “Hi, Sarah,” Cox said. She was seventy-two years old. She’d had several years of declining health due to congestive heart failure from a heart attack and pulmonary fibrosis, a progressive and irreversible lung disease. Doctors tried slowing the disease with steroids, but they didn’t work. She had cycled in and out of the hospital, each time in worse shape. Ultimately, she accepted hospice care and moved in with her niece for support. She was dependent on oxygen, and unable to do the most ordinary tasks. Just answering the door, with her thirty-foot length of oxygen tubing trailing after her, had left her winded. She stood resting for a moment, her lips pursed and her chest heaving. Creed took Cox’s arm gently as we walked to the kitchen to sit down, asking her how she had been doing. Then she asked a series of questions, targeting issues that tend to arise in patients with terminal illness. Did Cox have pain? How was her appetite, thirst, sleeping? Any trouble with confusion, anxiety, or restlessness? Had her shortness of breath grown worse? Was there chest pain or heart palpitations? Abdominal discomfort? Trouble with bowel movements or urination or walking? She did have some new troubles. When she walked from the bedroom to the bathroom, she said, it now took at least five minutes to catch her breath, and that frightened her. She was also getting chest pain. Creed pulled a stethoscope and a blood-pressure cuff from her medical bag. Cox’s blood pressure was acceptable, but her heart rate was high. Creed listened to her heart, which had a normal rhythm, and to her lungs, hearing the fine crackles of her pulmonary fibrosis but also a new wheeze. Her ankles were swollen with fluid, and when Creed asked for her pillbox she saw that Cox was out of her heart medication. She asked to see Cox’s oxygen equipment. The liquid-oxygen cylinder at the foot of the neatly made bed was filled and working properly. The nebulizer equipment for her inhaler treatments, however, was broken. Given the lack of heart medication and inhaler treatments, it was no wonder that she had worsened. Creed called Cox’s pharmacy to confirm that her refills had been waiting, and had her arrange for her niece to pick up the medicine when she came home from work. Creed also called the nebulizer supplier for same-day emergency service. She then chatted with Cox in the kitchen for a few minutes. Her spirits were low. Creed took her hand. Everything was going to be all right, she said. She reminded her about the good days she’d had—the previous weekend, for example, when she’d been able to go out with her portable oxygen cylinder to shop with her niece and get her hair colored. I asked Cox about her previous life. She had made radios in a Boston factory. She and her husband had two children, and several grandchildren. When I asked her why she had chosen hospice care, she looked downcast. “The lung doctor and heart doctor said they couldn’t help me anymore,” she said. Creed glared at me. My questions had made Cox sad again. “It’s good to have my niece and her husband helping to watch me every day,” she said. “But it’s not my home. I feel like I’m in the way.” Creed gave her a hug before we left, and one last reminder. “What do you do if you have chest pain that doesn’t go away?” she asked. “Take a nitro,” Cox said, referring to the nitroglycerin pill that she can slip under her tongue. “And?” “Call you.” “Where’s the number?” She pointed to the twenty-four-hour hospice call number that was taped beside her phone. Outside, I confessed that I was confused by what Creed was doing. A lot of it seemed to be about extending Cox’s life. Wasn’t the goal of hospice to let nature take its course? “That’s not the goal,” Creed said. The difference between standard medical care and hospice is not the difference between treating and doing nothing, she explained. The difference was in your priorities. In ordinary medicine, the goal is to extend life. We’ll sacrifice the quality of your existence now—by performing surgery, providing chemotherapy, putting you in intensive care—for the chance of gaining time later. Hospice deploys nurses, doctors, and social workers to help people with a fatal illness have the fullest possible lives right now. That means focussing on objectives like freedom from pain and discomfort, or maintaining mental awareness for as long as possible, or getting out with family once in a while. Hospice and palliative-care specialists aren’t much concerned about whether that makes people’s lives longer or shorter. Like many people, I had believed that hospice care hastens death, because patients forgo hospital treatments and are allowed high-dose narcotics to combat pain. But studies suggest otherwise. In one, researchers followed 4,493 Medicare patients with either terminal cancer or congestive heart failure. They found no difference in survival time between hospice and non-hospice patients with breast cancer, prostate cancer, and colon cancer. Curiously, hospice care seemed to extend survival for some patients; those with pancreatic cancer gained an average of three weeks, those with lung cancer gained six weeks, and those with congestive heart failure gained three months. The lesson seems almost Zen: you live longer only when you stop trying to live longer. When Cox was transferred to hospice care, her doctors thought that she wouldn’t live much longer than a few weeks. With the supportive hospice therapy she received, she had already lived for a year. Creed enters people’s lives at a strange moment—when they have understood that they have a fatal illness but have not necessarily acknowledged that they are dying. “I’d say only about a quarter have accepted their fate when they come into hospice,” she said. When she first encounters her patients, many feel that they have simply been abandoned by their doctors. “Ninety-nine per cent understand they’re dying, but one hundred per cent hope they’re not,” she says. “They still want to beat their disease.” The initial visit is always tricky, but she has found ways to smooth things over. “A nurse has five seconds to make a patient like you and trust you. It’s in the whole way you present yourself. I do not come in saying, ‘I’m so sorry.’ Instead, it’s: ‘I’m the hospice nurse, and here’s what I have to offer you to make your life better. And I know we don’t have a lot of time to waste.’ ” That was how she started with Dave Galloway, whom we visited after leaving Lee Cox’s home. He was forty-two years old. He and his wife, Sharon, were both Boston firefighters. They had a three-year-old daughter. He had pancreatic cancer, which had spread; his upper abdomen was now solid with tumor. During the past few months, the pain had become unbearable at times, and he was admitted to the hospital several times for pain crises. At his most recent admission, about a week earlier, it was found that the tumor had perforated his intestine. There wasn’t even a temporary fix for this problem. The medical team started him on intravenous nutrition and offered him a choice between going to the intensive-care unit and going home with hospice. He chose to go home. “I wish we’d gotten involved sooner,” Creed told me. When she and the hospice’s supervising doctor, Dr. JoAnne Nowak, evaluated Galloway upon his arrival at home, he appeared to have only a few days left. His eyes were hollow. His breathing was labored. Fluid swelled his entire lower body to the point that his skin blistered and wept. He was almost delirious with abdominal pain. “Sometimes I just want to curl up with a good book and burn it.” They got to work. They set up a pain pump with a button that let him dispense higher doses of narcotic than he had been allowed. They arranged for an electric hospital bed, so that he could sleep with his back raised. They also taught Sharon how to keep Dave clean, protect his skin from breakdown, and handle the crises to come. Creed told me that part of her job is to take the measure of a patient’s family, and Sharon struck her as unusually capable. She was determined to take care of her husband to the end, and, perhaps because she was a firefighter, she had the resilience and the competence to do so. She did not want to hire a private-duty nurse. She handled everything, from the I.V. lines and the bed linens to orchestrating family members to lend a hand when she needed help. Creed arranged for a specialized “comfort pack” to be delivered by FedEx and stored in a mini-refrigerator by Dave’s bed. It contained a dose of morphine for breakthrough pain or shortness of breath, Ativan for anxiety attacks, Compazine for nausea, Haldol for delirium, Tylenol for fever, and atropine for drying up the upper-airway rattle that people can get in their final hours. If any such problem developed, Sharon was instructed to call the twenty-four-hour hospice nurse on duty, who would provide instructions about which rescue medications to use and, if necessary, come out to help. Dave and Sharon were finally able to sleep through the night at home. Creed or another nurse came to see him every day, sometimes twice a day; three times that week, Sharon used the emergency hospice line to help her deal with Dave’s pain crises or hallucinations. After a few days, they were even able to go out to a favorite restaurant; he wasn’t hungry, but they enjoyed just being there, and the memories it stirred. The hardest part so far, Sharon said, was deciding to forgo the two-litre intravenous feedings that Dave had been receiving each day. Although they were his only source of calories, the hospice staff encouraged discontinuing them because his body did not seem to be absorbing the nutrition. The infusion of sugars, proteins, and fats made the painful swelling of his skin and his shortness of breath worse—and for what? The mantra was live for now. Sharon had balked, for fear that she’d be starving him. The night before our visit, however, she and Dave decided to try going without the infusion. By morning, the swelling was markedly reduced. He could move more, and with less discomfort. He also began to eat a few morsels of food, just for the taste of it, and that made Sharon feel better about the decision. When we arrived, Dave was making his way back to bed after a shower, his arm around his wife’s shoulders and his slippered feet taking one shuffling step at a time. “There’s nothing he likes better than a long hot shower,” Sharon said. “He’d live in the shower if he could.” Dave sat on the edge of his bed in fresh pajamas, catching his breath, and then Creed spoke to him as his daughter, Ashlee, ran in and out of the room in her beaded pigtails, depositing stuffed animals in her dad’s lap. “How’s your pain on a scale of one to ten?” Creed asked. “A six,” he said. “Did you hit the pump?” He didn’t answer for a moment. “I’m reluctant,” he admitted. “Why?” Creed asked. “It feels like defeat,” he said. “Defeat?” Sign Up for The Sunday Archive Newsletter Read classic New Yorker stories, curated by our archivists and editors. “I don’t want to become a drug addict,” he explained. “I don’t want to need this.” Creed got down on her knees in front of him. “Dave, I don’t know anyone who can manage this kind of pain without the medication,” she said. “It’s not defeat. You’ve got a beautiful wife and daughter, and you’re not going to be able to enjoy them with the pain.” “You’re right about that,” he said, looking at Ashlee as she gave him a little horse. And he pressed the button. Dave Galloway died one week later—at home, at peace, and surrounded by family. A week after that, Lee Cox died, too. But, as if to show just how resistant to formula human lives are, Cox had never reconciled herself to the incurability of her illnesses. So when her family found her in cardiac arrest one morning they followed her wishes and called 911 instead of the hospice service. The emergency medical technicians and firefighters and police rushed in. They pulled off her clothes and pumped her chest, put a tube in her airway and forced oxygen into her lungs, and tried to see if they could shock her heart back. But such efforts rarely succeed with terminal patients, and they did not succeed with her. Hospice has tried to offer a new ideal for how we die. Although not everyone has embraced its rituals, those who have are helping to negotiate an ars moriendi for our age. But doing so represents a struggle—not only against suffering but also against the seemingly unstoppable momentum of medical treatment.
Just before Thanksgiving of 2007, Sara Monopoli, her husband, Rich, and her mother, Dawn Thomas, met with Dr. Marcoux to discuss the options she had left. By this point, Sara had undergone three rounds of chemotherapy with limited, if any, effect. Perhaps Marcoux could have discussed what she most wanted as death neared and how best to achieve those wishes. But the signal he got from Sara and her family was that they wished to talk only about the next treatment options. They did not want to talk about dying. Recently, I spoke to Sara’s husband and her parents. Sara knew that her disease was incurable, they pointed out. The week after she was given the diagnosis and delivered her baby, she spelled out her wishes for Vivian’s upbringing after she was gone. She had told her family on several occasions that she did not want to die in the hospital. She wanted to spend her final moments peacefully at home. But the prospect that those moments might be coming soon, that there might be no way to slow the disease, “was not something she or I wanted to discuss,” her mother said. Her father, Gary, and her twin sister, Emily, still held out hope for a cure. The doctors simply weren’t looking hard enough, they felt. “I just couldn’t believe there wasn’t something,” Gary said. For Rich, the experience of Sara’s illness had been disorienting: “We had a baby. We were young. And this was so shocking and so odd. We never discussed stopping treatment.” Marcoux took the measure of the room. With almost two decades of experience treating lung cancer, he had been through many of these conversations. He has a calm, reassuring air and a native Minnesotan’s tendency to avoid confrontation or overintimacy. He tries to be scientific about decisions. “I know that the vast majority of my patients are going to die of their disease,” he told me. The data show that, after failure of second-line chemotherapy, lung-cancer patients rarely get any added survival time from further treatments and often suffer significant side effects. But he, too, has his hopes. He told them that, at some point, “supportive care” was an option for them to think about. But, he went on, there were also experimental therapies. He told them about several that were under trial. The most promising was a Pfizer drug that targeted one of the mutations found in her cancer’s cells. Sara and her family instantly pinned their hopes on it. The drug was so new that it didn’t even have a name, just a number—PF0231006—and this made it all the more enticing. There were a few hovering issues, including the fact that the scientists didn’t yet know the safe dose. The drug was only in a Phase I trial—that is, a trial designed to determine the toxicity of a range of doses, not whether the drug worked. Furthermore, a test of the drug against her cancer cells in a petri dish showed no effect. But Marcoux didn’t think that these were decisive obstacles—just negatives. The critical problem was that the rules of the trial excluded Sara because of the pulmonary embolism she had developed that summer. To enroll, she would need to wait two months, in order to get far enough past the episode. In the meantime, he suggested trying another conventional chemotherapy, called Navelbine. Sara began the treatment the Monday after Thanksgiving. It’s worth pausing to consider what had just happened. Step by step, Sara ended up on a fourth round of chemotherapy, one with a minuscule likelihood of altering the course of her disease and a great likelihood of causing debilitating side effects. An opportunity to prepare for the inevitable was forgone. And it all happened because of an assuredly normal circumstance: a patient and family unready to confront the reality of her disease. I asked Marcoux what he hopes to accomplish for terminal lung-cancer patients when they first come to see him. “I’m thinking, Can I get them a pretty good year or two out of this?” he said. “Those are my expectations. For me, the long tail for a patient like her is three to four years.” But this is not what people want to hear. “They’re thinking ten to twenty years. You hear that time and time again. And I’d be the same way if I were in their shoes.” You’d think doctors would be well equipped to navigate the shoals here, but at least two things get in the way. First, our own views may be unrealistic. A study led by the Harvard researcher Nicholas Christakis asked the doctors of almost five hundred terminally ill patients to estimate how long they thought their patient would survive, and then followed the patients. Sixty-three per cent of doctors overestimated survival time. Just seventeen per cent underestimated it. The average estimate was five hundred and thirty per cent too high. And, the better the doctors knew their patients, the more likely they were to err. Second, we often avoid voicing even these sentiments. Studies find that although doctors usually tell patients when a cancer is not curable, most are reluctant to give a specific prognosis, even when pressed. More than forty per cent of oncologists report offering treatments that they believe are unlikely to work. In an era in which the relationship between patient and doctor is increasingly miscast in retail terms—“the customer is always right”—doctors are especially hesitant to trample on a patient’s expectations. You worry far more about being overly pessimistic than you do about being overly optimistic. And talking about dying is enormously fraught. When you have a patient like Sara Monopoli, the last thing you want to do is grapple with the truth. I know, because Marcoux wasn’t the only one avoiding that conversation with her. I was, too. Earlier that summer, a PET scan had revealed that, in addition to her lung cancer, she also had thyroid cancer, which had spread to the lymph nodes of her neck, and I was called in to decide whether to operate. This second, unrelated cancer was in fact operable. But thyroid cancers take years to become lethal. Her lung cancer would almost certainly end her life long before her thyroid cancer caused any trouble. Given the extent of the surgery that would have been required, and the potential complications, the best course was to do nothing. But explaining my reasoning to Sara meant confronting the mortality of her lung cancer, something that I felt ill prepared to do. Sitting in my clinic, Sara did not seem discouraged by the discovery of this second cancer. She seemed determined. She’d read about the good outcomes from thyroid-cancer treatment. So she was geared up, eager to discuss when to operate. And I found myself swept along by her optimism. Suppose I was wrong, I wondered, and she proved to be that miracle patient who survived metastatic lung cancer? My solution was to avoid the subject altogether. I told Sara that the thyroid cancer was slow-growing and treatable. The priority was her lung cancer, I said. Let’s not hold up the treatment for that. We could monitor the thyroid cancer and plan surgery in a few months. “Laundry or composting?” I saw her every six weeks, and noted her physical decline from one visit to the next. Yet, even in a wheelchair, Sara would always arrive smiling, makeup on and bangs bobby-pinned out of her eyes. She’d find small things to laugh about, like the tubes that created strange protuberances under her dress. She was ready to try anything, and I found myself focussing on the news about experimental therapies for her lung cancer. After one of her chemotherapies seemed to shrink the thyroid cancer slightly, I even raised with her the possibility that an experimental therapy could work against both her cancers, which was sheer fantasy. Discussing a fantasy was easier—less emotional, less explosive, less prone to misunderstanding—than discussing what was happening before my eyes. Between the lung cancer and the chemo, Sara became steadily sicker. She slept most of the time and could do little out of the house. Clinic notes from December describe shortness of breath, dry heaves, coughing up blood, severe fatigue. In addition to the drainage tubes in her chest, she required needle-drainage procedures in her abdomen every week or two to relieve the severe pressure from the litres of fluid that the cancer was producing there. A CT scan in December showed that the lung cancer was spreading through her spine, liver, and lungs. When we met in January, she could move only slowly and uncomfortably. Her lower body had become swollen. She couldn’t speak more than a sentence without pausing for breath. By the first week of February, she needed oxygen at home to breathe. Enough time had elapsed since her pulmonary embolism, however, that she could start on Pfizer’s experimental drug. She just needed one more set of scans for clearance. These revealed that the cancer had spread to her brain, with at least nine metastatic growths across both hemispheres. The experimental drug was not designed to cross the blood-brain barrier. PF0231006 was not going to work. And still Sara, her family, and her medical team remained in battle mode. Within twenty-four hours, Sara was scheduled to see a radiation oncologist for whole-brain radiation to try to reduce the metastases. On February 12th, she completed five days of radiation treatment, which left her immeasurably fatigued, barely able get out of bed. She ate almost nothing. She weighed twenty-five pounds less than she had in the fall. She confessed to Rich that, for the past two months, she had experienced double vision and was unable to feel her hands. “Why didn’t you tell anyone?” he asked her. “I just didn’t want to stop treatment,” she said. “They would make me stop.” She was given two weeks to recover her strength after the radiation. Then she would be put on another experimental drug from a small biotech company. She was scheduled to start on February 25th. Her chances were rapidly dwindling. But who was to say they were zero? In 1985, the paleontologist and writer Stephen Jay Gould published an extraordinary essay entitled “The Median Isn’t the Message,” after he had been given a diagnosis, three years earlier, of abdominal mesothelioma, a rare and lethal cancer usually associated with asbestos exposure. He went to a medical library when he got the diagnosis and pulled out the latest scientific articles on the disease. “The literature couldn’t have been more brutally clear: mesothelioma is incurable, with a median survival of only eight months after discovery,” he wrote. The news was devastating. But then he began looking at the graphs of the patient-survival curves. Gould was a naturalist, and more inclined to notice the variation around the curve’s middle point than the middle point itself. What the naturalist saw was remarkable variation. The patients were not clustered around the median survival but, instead, fanned out in both directions. Moreover, the curve was skewed to the right, with a long tail, however slender, of patients who lived many years longer than the eight-month median. This is where he found solace. He could imagine himself surviving far out in that long tail. And he did. Following surgery and experimental chemotherapy, he lived twenty more years before dying, in 2002, at the age of sixty, from a lung cancer that was unrelated to his original disease. “It has become, in my view, a bit too trendy to regard the acceptance of death as something tantamount to intrinsic dignity,” he wrote in his 1985 essay. “Of course I agree with the preacher of Ecclesiastes that there is a time to love and a time to die—and when my skein runs out I hope to face the end calmly and in my own way. For most situations, however, I prefer the more martial view that death is the ultimate enemy—and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light.” I think of Gould and his essay every time I have a patient with a terminal illness. There is almost always a long tail of possibility, however thin. What’s wrong with looking for it? Nothing, it seems to me, unless it means we have failed to prepare for the outcome that’s vastly more probable. The trouble is that we’ve built our medical system and culture around the long tail. We’ve created a multitrillion-dollar edifice for dispensing the medical equivalent of lottery tickets—and have only the rudiments of a system to prepare patients for the near-certainty that those tickets will not win. Hope is not a plan, but hope is our plan.
For Sara, there would be no miraculous recovery, and, when the end approached, neither she nor her family was prepared. “I always wanted to respect her request to die peacefully at home,” Rich later told me. “But I didn’t believe we could make it happen. I didn’t know how.” On the morning of Friday, February 22nd, three days before she was to start her new round of chemo, Rich awoke to find his wife sitting upright beside him, pitched forward on her arms, eyes wide, struggling for air. She was gray, breathing fast, her body heaving with each open-mouthed gasp. She looked as if she were drowning. He tried turning up the oxygen in her nasal tubing, but she got no better. “I can’t do this,” she said, pausing between each word. “I’m scared.” He had no emergency kit in the refrigerator. No hospice nurse to call. And how was he to know whether this new development was fixable? We’ll go to the hospital, he told her. When he asked if they should drive, she shook her head, so he called 911, and told her mother, Dawn, who was in the next room, what was going on. A few minutes later, firemen swarmed up the stairs to her bedroom, sirens wailing outside. As they lifted Sara into the ambulance on a stretcher, Dawn came out in tears. “We’re going to get ahold of this,” Rich told her. This was just another trip to the hospital, he said to himself. The doctors would figure this out. At the hospital, Sara was diagnosed with pneumonia. That troubled the family, because they thought they’d done everything to keep infection at bay. They’d washed hands scrupulously, limited visits by people with young children, even limited Sara’s time with baby Vivian if she showed the slightest sign of a runny nose. But Sara’s immune system and her ability to clear her lung secretions had been steadily weakened by the rounds of radiation and chemotherapy as well as by the cancer. In another way, the diagnosis of pneumonia was reassuring, because it was just an infection. It could be treated. The medical team started Sara on intravenous antibiotics and high-flow oxygen through a mask. The family gathered at her bedside, hoping for the antibiotics to work. This could be reversible, they told one another. But that night and the next morning her breathing only grew more labored. “I can’t think of a single funny thing to say,” Emily told Sara as their parents looked on. “Neither can I,” Sara murmured. Only later did the family realize that those were the last words they would ever hear from her. After that, she began to drift in and out of consciousness. The medical team had only one option left: to put her on a ventilator. Sara was a fighter, right? And the next step for fighters was to escalate to intensive care.
This is a modern tragedy, replayed millions of times over. When there is no way of knowing exactly how long our skeins will run—and when we imagine ourselves to have much more time than we do—our every impulse is to fight, to die with chemo in our veins or a tube in our throats or fresh sutures in our flesh. The fact that we may be shortening or worsening the time we have left hardly seems to register. We imagine that we can wait until the doctors tell us that there is nothing more they can do. But rarely is there nothing more that doctors can do. They can give toxic drugs of unknown efficacy, operate to try to remove part of the tumor, put in a feeding tube if a person can’t eat: there’s always something. We want these choices. We don’t want anyone—certainly not bureaucrats or the marketplace—to limit them. But that doesn’t mean we are eager to make the choices ourselves. Instead, most often, we make no choice at all. We fall back on the default, and the default is: Do Something. Is there any way out of this? In late 2004, executives at Aetna, the insurance company, started an experiment. They knew that only a small percentage of the terminally ill ever halted efforts at curative treatment and enrolled in hospice, and that, when they did, it was usually not until the very end. So Aetna decided to let a group of policyholders with a life expectancy of less than a year receive hospice services without forgoing other treatments. A patient like Sara Monopoli could continue to try chemotherapy and radiation, and go to the hospital when she wished—but also have a hospice team at home focussing on what she needed for the best possible life now and for that morning when she might wake up unable to breathe. A two-year study of this “concurrent care” program found that enrolled patients were much more likely to use hospice: the figure leaped from twenty-six per cent to seventy per cent. That was no surprise, since they weren’t forced to give up anything. The surprising result was that they did give up things. They visited the emergency room almost half as often as the control patients did. Their use of hospitals and I.C.U.s dropped by more than two-thirds. Over-all costs fell by almost a quarter. This was stunning, and puzzling: it wasn’t obvious what made the approach work. Aetna ran a more modest concurrent-care program for a broader group of terminally ill patients. For these patients, the traditional hospice rules applied—in order to qualify for home hospice, they had to give up attempts at curative treatment. But, either way, they received phone calls from palliative-care nurses who offered to check in regularly and help them find services for anything from pain control to making out a living will. For these patients, too, hospice enrollment jumped to seventy per cent, and their use of hospital services dropped sharply. Among elderly patients, use of intensive-care units fell by more than eighty-five per cent. Satisfaction scores went way up. What was going on here? The program’s leaders had the impression that they had simply given patients someone experienced and knowledgeable to talk to about their daily needs. And somehow that was enough—just talking. The explanation strains credibility, but evidence for it has grown in recent years. Two-thirds of the terminal-cancer patients in the Coping with Cancer study reported having had no discussion with their doctors about their goals for end-of-life care, despite being, on average, just four months from death. But the third who did were far less likely to undergo cardiopulmonary resuscitation or be put on a ventilator or end up in an intensive-care unit. Two-thirds enrolled in hospice. These patients suffered less, were physically more capable, and were better able, for a longer period, to interact with others. Moreover, six months after the patients died their family members were much less likely to experience persistent major depression. In other words, people who had substantive discussions with their doctor about their end-of-life preferences were far more likely to die at peace and in control of their situation, and to spare their family anguish. “Great—now everybody at work is going to know.” Can mere discussions really do so much? Consider the case of La Crosse, Wisconsin. Its elderly residents have unusually low end-of-life hospital costs. During their last six months, according to Medicare data, they spend half as many days in the hospital as the national average, and there’s no sign that doctors or patients are halting care prematurely. Despite average rates of obesity and smoking, their life expectancy outpaces the national mean by a year. I spoke to Dr. Gregory Thompson, a critical-care specialist at Gundersen Lutheran Hospital, while he was on I.C.U. duty one recent evening, and he ran through his list of patients with me. In most respects, the patients were like those found in any I.C.U.—terribly sick and living through the most perilous days of their lives. There was a young woman with multiple organ failure from a devastating case of pneumonia, a man in his mid-sixties with a ruptured colon that had caused a rampaging infection and a heart attack. Yet these patients were completely different from those in other I.C.U.s I’d seen: none had a terminal disease; none battled the final stages of metastatic cancer or untreatable heart failure or dementia. To understand La Crosse, Thompson said, you had to go back to 1991, when local medical leaders headed a systematic campaign to get physicians and patients to discuss end-of-life wishes. Within a few years, it became routine for all patients admitted to a hospital, nursing home, or assisted-living facility to complete a multiple-choice form that boiled down to four crucial questions. At this moment in your life, the form asked: Do you want to be resuscitated if your heart stops? Do you want aggressive treatments such as intubation and mechanical ventilation? Do you want antibiotics? Do you want tube or intravenous feeding if you can’t eat on your own? By 1996, eighty-five per cent of La Crosse residents who died had written advanced directives, up from fifteen per cent, and doctors almost always knew of and followed the instructions. Having this system in place, Thompson said, has made his job vastly easier. But it’s not because the specifics are spelled out for him every time a sick patient arrives in his unit. “These things are not laid out in stone,” he told me. Whatever the yes/no answers people may put on a piece of paper, one will find nuances and complexities in what they mean. “But, instead of having the discussion when they get to the I.C.U., we find many times it has already taken place.” Answers to the list of questions change as patients go from entering the hospital for the delivery of a child to entering for complications of Alzheimer’s disease. But, in La Crosse, the system means that people are far more likely to have talked about what they want and what they don’t want before they and their relatives find themselves in the throes of crisis and fear. When wishes aren’t clear, Thompson said, “families have also become much more receptive to having the discussion.” The discussion, not the list, was what mattered most. Discussion had brought La Crosse’s end-of-life costs down to just over half the national average. It was that simple—and that complicated.
One Saturday morning last winter, I met with a woman I had operated on the night before. She had been undergoing a procedure for the removal of an ovarian cyst when the gynecologist who was operating on her discovered that she had metastatic colon cancer. I was summoned, as a general surgeon, to see what could be done. I removed a section of her colon that had a large cancerous mass, but the cancer had already spread widely. I had not been able to get it all. Now I introduced myself. She said a resident had told her that a tumor was found and part of her colon had been excised. Yes, I said. I’d been able to take out “the main area of involvement.” I explained how much bowel was removed, what the recovery would be like—everything except how much cancer there was. But then I remembered how timid I’d been with Sara Monopoli, and all those studies about how much doctors beat around the bush. So when she asked me to tell her more about the cancer, I explained that it had spread not only to her ovaries but also to her lymph nodes. I said that it had not been possible to remove all the disease. But I found myself almost immediately minimizing what I’d said. “We’ll bring in an oncologist,” I hastened to add. “Chemotherapy can be very effective in these situations.” She absorbed the news in silence, looking down at the blankets drawn over her mutinous body. Then she looked up at me. “Am I going to die?” I flinched. “No, no,” I said. “Of course not.” A few days later, I tried again. “We don’t have a cure,” I explained. “But treatment can hold the disease down for a long time.” The goal, I said, was to “prolong your life” as much as possible. I’ve seen her regularly in the months since, as she embarked on chemotherapy. She has done well. So far, the cancer is in check. Once, I asked her and her husband about our initial conversations. They don’t remember them very fondly. “That one phrase that you used—‘prolong your life’—it just . . .” She didn’t want to sound critical. “It was kind of blunt,” her husband said. “It sounded harsh,” she echoed. She felt as if I’d dropped her off a cliff. I spoke to Dr. Susan Block, a palliative-care specialist at my hospital who has had thousands of these difficult conversations and is a nationally recognized pioneer in training doctors and others in managing end-of-life issues with patients and their families. “You have to understand,” Block told me. “A family meeting is a procedure, and it requires no less skill than performing an operation.” One basic mistake is conceptual. For doctors, the primary purpose of a discussion about terminal illness is to determine what people want—whether they want chemo or not, whether they want to be resuscitated or not, whether they want hospice or not. They focus on laying out the facts and the options. But that’s a mistake, Block said. “A large part of the task is helping people negotiate the overwhelming anxiety—anxiety about death, anxiety about suffering, anxiety about loved ones, anxiety about finances,” she explained. “There are many worries and real terrors.” No one conversation can address them all. Arriving at an acceptance of one’s mortality and a clear understanding of the limits and the possibilities of medicine is a process, not an epiphany. There is no single way to take people with terminal illness through the process, but, according to Block, there are some rules. You sit down. You make time. You’re not determining whether they want treatment X versus Y. You’re trying to learn what’s most important to them under the circumstances—so that you can provide information and advice on the approach that gives them the best chance of achieving it. This requires as much listening as talking. If you are talking more than half of the time, Block says, you’re talking too much. The words you use matter. According to experts, you shouldn’t say, “I’m sorry things turned out this way,” for example. It can sound like pity. You should say, “I wish things were different.” You don’t ask, “What do you want when you are dying?” You ask, “If time becomes short, what is most important to you?” Block has a list of items that she aims to cover with terminal patients in the time before decisions have to be made: what they understand their prognosis to be; what their concerns are about what lies ahead; whom they want to make decisions when they can’t; how they want to spend their time as options become limited; what kinds of trade-offs they are willing to make. Ten years ago, her seventy-four-year-old father, Jack Block, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, was admitted to a San Francisco hospital with symptoms from what proved to be a mass growing in the spinal cord of his neck. She flew out to see him. The neurosurgeon said that the procedure to remove the mass carried a twenty-per-cent chance of leaving him quadriplegic, paralyzed from the neck down. But without it he had a hundred-per-cent chance of becoming quadriplegic. The evening before surgery, father and daughter chatted about friends and family, trying to keep their minds off what was to come, and then she left for the night. Halfway across the Bay Bridge, she recalled, “I realized, ‘Oh, my God, I don’t know what he really wants.’ ” He’d made her his health-care proxy, but they had talked about such situations only superficially. So she turned the car around. Going back in “was really uncomfortable,” she said. It made no difference that she was an expert in end-of-life discussions. “I just felt awful having the conversation with my dad.” But she went through her list. She told him, “ ‘I need to understand how much you’re willing to go through to have a shot at being alive and what level of being alive is tolerable to you.’ We had this quite agonizing conversation where he said—and this totally shocked me—‘Well, if I’m able to eat chocolate ice cream and watch football on TV, then I’m willing to stay alive. I’m willing to go through a lot of pain if I have a shot at that.’ “I would never have expected him to say that,” Block went on. “I mean, he’s a professor emeritus. He’s never watched a football game in my conscious memory. The whole picture—it wasn’t the guy I thought I knew.” But the conversation proved critical, because after surgery he developed bleeding in the spinal cord. The surgeons told her that, in order to save his life, they would need to go back in. But he had already become nearly quadriplegic and would remain severely disabled for many months and possibly forever. What did she want to do? “I had three minutes to make this decision, and, I realized, he had already made the decision.” She asked the surgeons whether, if her father survived, he would still be able to eat chocolate ice cream and watch football on TV. Yes, they said. She gave the O.K. to take him back to the operating room. “If I had not had that conversation with him,” she told me, “my instinct would have been to let him go at that moment, because it just seemed so awful. And I would have beaten myself up. Did I let him go too soon?” Or she might have gone ahead and sent him to surgery, only to find—as occurred—that he survived only to go through what proved to be a year of “very horrible rehab” and disability. “I would have felt so guilty that I condemned him to that,” she said. “But there was no decision for me to make.” He had decided. During the next two years, he regained the ability to walk short distances. He required caregivers to bathe and dress him. He had difficulty swallowing and eating. But his mind was intact and he had partial use of his hands—enough to write two books and more than a dozen scientific articles. He lived for ten years after the operation. This past year, however, his difficulties with swallowing advanced to the point where he could not eat without aspirating food particles, and he cycled between hospital and rehabilitation facilities with the pneumonias that resulted. He didn’t want a feeding tube. And it became evident that the battle for the dwindling chance of a miraculous recovery was going to leave him unable ever to go home again. So, this past January, he decided to stop the battle and go home. “We started him on hospice care,” Block said. “We treated his choking and kept him comfortable. Eventually, he stopped eating and drinking. He died about five days later.” “Whoa! That’s a little clingy.”
Susan Block and her father had the conversation that we all need to have when the chemotherapy stops working, when we start needing oxygen at home, when we face high-risk surgery, when the liver failure keeps progressing, when we become unable to dress ourselves. I’ve heard Swedish doctors call it a “breakpoint discussion,” a systematic series of conversations to sort out when they need to switch from fighting for time to fighting for the other things that people value—being with family or travelling or enjoying chocolate ice cream. Few people have this discussion, and there is good reason for anyone to dread these conversations. They can unleash difficult emotions. People can become angry or overwhelmed. Handled poorly, the conversations can cost a person’s trust. Handled well, they can take real time. I spoke to an oncologist who told me about a twenty-nine-year-old patient she had recently cared for who had an inoperable brain tumor that continued to grow through second-line chemotherapy. The patient elected not to attempt any further chemotherapy, but getting to that decision required hours of discussion—for this was not the decision he had expected to make. First, the oncologist said, she had a discussion with him alone. They reviewed the story of how far he’d come, the options that remained. She was frank. She told him that in her entire career she had never seen third-line chemotherapy produce a significant response in his type of brain tumor. She had looked for experimental therapies, and none were truly promising. And, although she was willing to proceed with chemotherapy, she told him how much strength and time the treatment would take away from him and his family. He did not shut down or rebel. His questions went on for an hour. He asked about this therapy and that therapy. And then, gradually, he began to ask about what would happen as the tumor got bigger, the symptoms he’d have, the ways they could try to control them, how the end might come. The oncologist next met with the young man together with his family. That discussion didn’t go so well. He had a wife and small children, and at first his wife wasn’t ready to contemplate stopping chemo. But when the oncologist asked the patient to explain in his own words what they’d discussed, she understood. It was the same with his mother, who was a nurse. Meanwhile, his father sat quietly and said nothing the entire time. A few days later, the patient returned to talk to the oncologist. “There should be something. There must be something,” he said. His father had shown him reports of cures on the Internet. He confided how badly his father was taking the news. No patient wants to cause his family pain. According to Block, about two-thirds of patients are willing to undergo therapies they don’t want if that is what their loved ones want. The oncologist went to the father’s home to meet with him. He had a sheaf of possible trials and treatments printed from the Internet. She went through them all. She was willing to change her opinion, she told him. But either the treatments were for brain tumors that were very different from his son’s or else he didn’t qualify. None were going to be miraculous. She told the father that he needed to understand: time with his son was limited, and the young man was going to need his father’s help getting through it. The oncologist noted wryly how much easier it would have been for her just to prescribe the chemotherapy. “But that meeting with the father was the turning point,” she said. The patient and the family opted for hospice. They had more than a month together before he died. Later, the father thanked the doctor. That last month, he said, the family simply focussed on being together, and it proved to be the most meaningful time they’d ever spent. Given how prolonged some of these conversations have to be, many people argue that the key problem has been the financial incentives: we pay doctors to give chemotherapy and to do surgery, but not to take the time required to sort out when doing so is unwise. This certainly is a factor. (The new health-reform act was to have added Medicare coverage for these conversations, until it was deemed funding for “death panels” and stripped out of the legislation.) But the issue isn’t merely a matter of financing. It arises from a still unresolved argument about what the function of medicine really is—what, in other words, we should and should not be paying for doctors to do. The simple view is that medicine exists to fight death and disease, and that is, of course, its most basic task. Death is the enemy. But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually, it wins. And, in a war that you cannot win, you don’t want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You don’t want Custer. You want Robert E. Lee, someone who knew how to fight for territory when he could and how to surrender when he couldn’t, someone who understood that the damage is greatest if all you do is fight to the bitter end. More often, these days, medicine seems to supply neither Custers nor Lees. We are increasingly the generals who march the soldiers onward, saying all the while, “You let me know when you want to stop.” All-out treatment, we tell the terminally ill, is a train you can get off at any time—just say when. But for most patients and their families this is asking too much. They remain riven by doubt and fear and desperation; some are deluded by a fantasy of what medical science can achieve. But our responsibility, in medicine, is to deal with human beings as they are. People die only once. They have no experience to draw upon. They need doctors and nurses who are willing to have the hard discussions and say what they have seen, who will help people prepare for what is to come—and to escape a warehoused oblivion that few really want.
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Russian state-owned media does little to hide its preferences in the U.S. presidential election.
News reports about the race for the White House on Russian television devote most of their time to elaborating on Donald Trump's allegations that Hillary Clinton is corrupt and the election is rigged.
"Clinton has a choice. Either she gets the presidency or she goes behind bars," pro-Kremlin journalist Dmitry Kiselyov said during his flagship Sunday program on the state-controlled Vesti channel. Unlike the anti-establishment Trump, he told viewers, Clinton has the full backing of the U.S. security services, "oligarchic" corporations and the media.
Other reports on the Kremlin-controlled TV channels that are the primary source of news for most Russians have highlighted concerns about Clinton's health, linked her to sex scandals and suggested the Democratic Party is "panicking" over recent polls.
"My colleagues at these channels completely back Trump and show all the bad things about Clinton," said Aleksei Venediktov, the editor of liberal Russian radio station Ekho Moskvy.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly rejected claims that the Kremlin would like to see Trump win the White House. Experts, however, point to strong similarities between their positions on major foreign policy issues, including Syria and Ukraine.
The Russian media is pushing Trump's candidacy "very, very aggressively," according to a European Union official who monitors the Russian media and spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak publicly on the issue.
The presidential battle has been widely covered, though it usually appears in news bulletins after domestic news and stories about Russia's military action in Syria.
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Eric and Matt could not be more earnest in their quest to feed the world.
These two fresh-faced LA boys founded Local Roots four years ago. Their first purchases were broken-down, 40-foot shipping containers—this is apparently easy to do, since it is cheaper for shipping companies to just churn out new ones rather than fix broken ones. Local Roots then upcycles them into modular, shippable, customizable farms, each of which can grow as much produce as five acres of farmland. The idea is to supplement, not supplant, outdoor agriculture. And Ars got a look at one of these "farms" when it was set up in New York City recently.
Every aspect of the TerraFarm, as the repurposed shipping containers have been dubbed, has been designed and optimized. The gently pulsing LED lights are purplish—apparently, that’s what lettuce likes—and the solution in which the plants are grown is clean and clear. The "farm" is bright and vibrant, and it smells great in there.
This environment came about because Local Roots consulted a lot of experts. It employs horticulturalists, mechanical, electrical, and environmental engineers, software and AI developers, and data and nutrition scientists. The company does this to ensure that the growing conditions and produce are always optimal—both for the plants' growth and their nutritional content.
TerraFarms use no pesticides, herbicides, or fertilizers—they don’t have to. This means they generate no toxic runoff, and the produce fits most definitions of organic food. They use 99-percent less water and obviously much less land than outdoor farms. Since the farms are indoors, they are not subject to the vagaries of weather, be it the extreme temperatures, storms, and droughts brought on by climate change or the more mundane conditions of heat, cold, or dryness that exist outside of LA.
They can be moved anywhere—desert, tundra, underground, and even Mars, as both Eric and Matt pointed out independently of each other. Wherever the TerraFarms are, their conditions will be constantly monitored by the experts back at HQ in Vernon, California, just outside of downtown LA, where Local Roots recently built a huge new facility.
The difference two weeks makes
Most of the crops that we grow today have been bred for the stability of the final product, whether a fruit or leaf or root. This way, the produce can last for the two weeks it takes to truck it from where it's grown (California, for example, which produces more food than any other state) to wherever it's headed. But TerraFarms is intended to reside and be staffed near distribution centers for major retailers, never further than 50 miles from the consumers eating the produce. So most of that same two-week period will elapse while the produce is in your fridge.
Regardless of their location, TerraFarms will provide people with fresh, local, organic produce all year long. Local Roots thus seems to have managed to attain both the benefits of small organic farms—i.e., fresh, local produce—while keeping the benefits of large, industrialized agriculture, like technical expertise and centralized distribution.
Local Roots already provides food to Tender Greens and Mendocino Farms, and the United Nations World Food Programme has just purchased TerraFarms to provide produce to developing areas of the world; although the Food Programme supplies essentials like rice and beans, about two million people still suffer from micronutrient deficiencies which other produce can alleviate.
A solution like this in a developing economy doesn't seem to make much sense on the surface. But the company is now claiming that it has achieved cost parity with traditional, outdoor farming. It's the first in the indoor/urban/vertical farming model to have done so, possibly because the shipping containers allow them to generate more farmland more quickly and more cheaply than can be done in a warehouse or other indoor systems.
Thus far, Local Roots has concentrated on growing greens—lettuces and some herbs. Since these are highly perishable, they benefit the most from being grown locally and getting to consumers quickly. But in principle, each TerraFarm can be customized to grown anything, anywhere. Which might be a very good thing, as climate change is not going to be good for the coffee crop.
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LAYTON — A veteran Utah Highway Patrol trooper was shot multiple times without warning early Friday by a man who troopers say fled and died a short time later from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Sgt. Paul Kotter, a 15-year veteran and the man in charge of training new recruits, was wearing his bulletproof vest when 21-year-old Drew Morgan Moyer, of Layton, allegedly fired at least three shots at him as the trooper turned to walk back to his patrol car.
"The individual shot Sgt. Kotter, it appears three times — twice in the lower back, which thankfully his bulletproof vest stopped, and once in the rear. Sgt. Kotter then returned fire," UHP Col. Danny Fuhr said.
It was unknown Friday whether Kotter's shot hit Moyer or how many times Kotter fired. At least eight bullet holes could be seen in and around the driver's side door of Moyer's vehicle.
The incident began about 2 a.m. near Hill Field Road and state Route 193. Kotter and three other troopers were working an overtime shift in a construction zone, essentially staying with their patrol vehicles with the red and blue lights flashing to prompt motorists to slow down.
Moyer reportedly drove out of a nearby apartment complex and into an area of the construction zone that was closed to the public, Fuhr said. He pulled up next to Kotter.
Fuhr said Kotter could smell alcohol on Moyer's breath and told him he couldn't be in that area. Kotter is believed to have collected information from Moyer he planned to run on the laptop in his patrol car when he was shot as he walked back.
"One of the other sergeants said it sounded like a full automatic weapon going off and he ducked for cover," Fuhr said.
Nearby construction workers who also heard the shots and saw what happened ran to the other troopers to get their attention.
The trooper who had ducked for cover quickly got in his car and went after Moyer. He caught up with Moyer's car after it crashed into the back of a truck. When troopers approached the wrecked vehicle, they found Moyer dead inside with an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.
"It appears as though the last action was to take his own life," Fuhr said.
Photo: Davis County Jail
Investigators did not know Friday whether the self-inflicted gunshot wound or the crash came first.
Kotter was taken to a local hospital to have bullet fragments removed from his buttocks area. Fuhr described him as "smiling" and being in good spirits, and mostly just concerned about how his family would handle the news.
"We thank God he's OK. It could have been quite a different story. All in all, he's doing well," he said.
Kotter came out of surgery and is expected to make a full recovery. He may be released from the hospital Friday night pending his condition, according to Utah Highway Patrol.
The south gate of Hill Air Force Base was closed for several hours as troopers investigated.
Because Kotter was driving an unmarked patrol car, Layton police — who will help conduct the investigation into the shooting — said a dashboard camera was not installed in his vehicle. Video from the other patrol cars, however, will be reviewed as part of the investigation. Because Kotter was working an overtime construction shift, he was not wearing a body camera.
Utah court records show Moyer has a minor adult criminal history in Utah. He took a plea in abeyance in 2013 to misdemeanor drug possession, possession of drug paraphernalia and a misdemeanor traffic violation.
Kotter is a graduate student at Weber State, where he is pursuing a master's degree in criminal justice. He has also taught at the university's police academy for about 10 years and is involved in cadet training there, said Bruce Bayley, a Weber State professor who directs the postgraduate criminal justice program.
We thank God he's OK. It could have been quite a different story. –Col. Danny Fuhr, UHP
On Friday, Weber State created the Officer Down scholarship for graduate students who are working as law enforcement officers and injured in the line of duty. Kotter will be named the scholarship's first recipient.
"We were trying to find a way to help him and his family to cover some of the economic burden," Bayley said. "Our intent is to take (away) one less worry."
Officers deal with unusual work hazards that warrant the community's support, which the university is trying to give by creating the scholarship, according to Bayley.
"Something as simple as working in a construction zone, and you get shot — that's the profession," he said.
Bayley praised Kotter's work with the police academy at Weber State, calling it exemplary.
"The citizens of Utah should be very proud to have Sgt. Kotter out there in the field protecting them. (He is) just very friendly, really cares about people, very professional," he said. "He's a real credit both to UHP, to the academy, to our graduate program of criminal justice and to the state overall."
Contributing: Ben Lockhart, Jed Boal
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