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Faction Warfare, abbreviated FW, is where you will find some of the most chaotic PVP in New Eden, and the Gallente/Caldari warzone is the best place to get stuck in. This melting pot of pilots is home to two formidable militias as well as a number of pirate powerhouses. It is also possible to fight in the Amarr/Minmatar war, but given the state of that warzone nowadays you might find yourself starved of fights. In any case, if you’ve just joined, I can’t think of much of a better place for you to start your Eve career. Here I hope to give a well-rounded look at the warzone today and talk about how just about anyone can have an impact on the tide of war.
Galmil
The Gallente Militia has historically been the dominant force in the warzone, it hasn’t always been the case though. Every now and then we start to see the balance of power slip in either direction towards a new ‘era’ of control. I don’t believe for a second that the amassed forces of this militia could lose grip on the slope; as a member of Villore Accords, I’d certainly hope not anyway.
From a lore perspective, many see the Gallente as the freedom fighters of New Eden, as the brave people fighting for liberation against a cold and corporate nation. In reality, though it’s much more of a sibling rivalry where they present the more culturally sensitive and liberal side to the conflict. Tarek wrote up a fantastic series a while back, detailing the rise to power from both sides, check it out if you really can’t decide who the good guys are.
For an alpha clone signing up on this side today, you can expect to join in with a flurry of activity in defending their regions against a steadily advancing horde. There’s certainly fun to be had here and any new recruit will find themselves amongst some of the best fleet commanders and teachers in the area.
Calmil
Approaching silently on the horizon, the Caldari Militia have recently been flipping off the light bulbs that have been long-standing Galmil owned systems. Since Ascension, it has certainly seemed like they’ve attracted more of an alpha clone uprising to fight for the State Protectorate. With careful planning, it looks like this old golem is creaking to life again. You have to consider that maybe we can’t look at them as much of an underdog anymore.
In contrast to the Federation, lorewise the Caldari State is very much a traditionalist society, they take offence to those who may try to impress their culture upon them. It’s for this reason that the Caldari originally held such hostile views towards their Gallentean rivals. At the end of the day they hold their own culture and ideals close at heart and that’s held dear above all. It’s interesting how this cultural difference has developed into the rabid conflict we see today.
To enlist with the State Protectorate is to fight for an organisation on the rise with a clear objective in mind. Whether or not they’ll be successful, we’ll see in time.
How 2 FW
With the influx of newbros in my fleets recently I’ve noticed so many of the same questions cropping up, and for good reason! The entry into FW isn’t necessarily a gentle one and while the mechanics are simple, they won’t be obvious unless you’ve swung around this way before. To avoid turning this into a 20-page long wiki article, I do recommend the Eve Uni Faction Warfare page or Niden’s older articles for an in-depth look at everything there is on offer.
Do note however, that enlisting with a particular faction will affect your standings for the opposing faction negatively. It may be the case that some time down the line you look over and realise that you are locked out certain missions and the faction police want your blood in their hisec. That being said, let’s dive in with a summary.
The first thing that you need to know is that each system is controlled by either of the two warring nations, in this case either the Gallente or the Caldari. The primary function of owning a system is to give your side docking access to that system’s stations. Without control, you will simply be denied and any assets inside will be inaccessible unless you leave the militia or take back the system. There are more benefits to owning many systems, but that goes beyond the scope of what you need to know right away.
The way systems are taken is by seizing control of capture points, known as complexes (or plexes for short). These are the beacons named such as ‘Gallente Novice Outpost’ that you may have seen on your overview or probe scanner. These ‘plexes’ come in four different flavours, flavors that you’ll find that depending on your ship class you may only fit those of a particular size or above. This serves as a balancing tool so that you don’t end up fighting a battleship in your little frigate for example.
Warping to the beacon and taking the acceleration gate will place you into one of these special pockets of space which acts a little like a ‘king of the hill’ or ‘tug-of-war’. As long as your ship is parked inside and close-by the entrance, you will count-down a timer to capture it for your faction. Be aware that if you are attacking a system, the NPC will be hostile and must be eliminated upon entry. Each small victory here will push the contested meter your way just a little bit and bring you closer to the next stage of assault.
Once the system reaches 100% contested, it will enter a vulnerable state during which time you are able to attack that system’s Infrastructure Hub. This large structure will take a medium sized fleet directing their firepower to damage it. Once enough damage is applied, it will ‘flip’ the system and upon next downtime, your faction will gain control.
Now while these mechanics are easy enough to understand, they are used on a vast scale across dozens of solar systems. To attempt to tackle all of this as just one pilot is ludicrous, anyone who wants to get involved needs to become a part of a player corporation. The best advice I can give there is to simply take a frigate into the warzone and just find people! Eve is a social sandbox and if you shake a stick hard enough, you’re sure to find enemies and allies alike.
I will also note that if nothing else you may want to look into names such as The Vomit Comets or Aideron Robotics on the Gallente side. Alternatively, Black Shark Cult or Conoco for the Caldari. If all else fails and you do decide to join alone, you may do so from one of the faction controlled stations in lowsec. Simply select the ‘Militia Office’ from that station services panel while docked and enlist!
Turning the Tide
There are countless ways through which even a capsuleer fresh out of the new player experience can begin to push for victory in the factional warzones. Arguably the best starting point is always going to be getting stuck right in and learning as you go. The mechanics of FW mean that anything which disrupts the enemy faction is ultimately useful to the whole. I can think off the top of my head of several cases where young pilots or alt-character corporations have shifted the power balance purely while they strive to earn ISK out here.
If I remember my own early Eve days well enough, I know that ISK is going to likely be the single key log which stands in the way of waves of content. Fortunately for alphas, upon joining almost any corp you will find that ships will just be available as if like magic. Eve’s veterans want newbros to fight and all you have to do is ask for something to get started with in the following such activities:
Plexing
As previously described, capturing complexes of all sizes is at the heart of FW combat. These pockets of space act as content drivers; if you sit in one long enough then you will find a fight, especially in the more populated central systems. Given the rules enforced in ship sizes, it should usually be a fair fight; one in which either attacker or defender could be the victor. For your first foray into FW I recommend taking every fight you can, following the age-old Eve advice that losing ships is the only way to move forwards. It’s important to learn that anything you buy or are given is a non-permanent asset and you will lose it.
Solo Roaming
Fundamentally the same as plexing in that you are looking for combat, but to roam is to move about and actively hunt for it. In this scenario, you will become the attacker in a plex, the one who slides down an acceleration gate in hope to destroy whatever is inside. There are so many interesting videos out there which will teach you how to do this. Do some research and get questions answered by corpmates and you can rack up kills with even the cheapest of handout ships.
Fleeting Up
The quintessential Eve experience is going to involve joining up with your fellow militiamen in a group activity. The vast majority of fleets will involve being on Teamspeak or Mumble amongst others while a Fleet Commander (FC) directs the gang towards a pre-chosen objective. As an alpha clone, you may find that you have to be placed into a support role such as scout or electronic warfare (EWAR) due to skill requirements. It’s not at all a less worthy position however; as an FC myself I will always welcome the extra help if available. Even in large scale battles, the tracking bonus from a target painting support ship could be all the capital ships need to hone their weapons onto the primary target. It might also be that the one extra scout we have who calls and tackles a ship worth billions of ISK.
Now go Undock
In a way, Faction Warfare is a playground. I originally joined up with Villore Accords in hope to just have a bit of fun on the side while I spent most of my time in wormhole space. It’s certainly provided that, the fights are to be had an instant after undocking and if you stick around long enough, maybe you’ll love it too and end up staying longer than you had planned.
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The pilots of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 were suddenly confronted by a cascading loss of electrical power in which many of the airplane’s vital systems shut down, placing an urgent demand on the crew to understand and deal with the failures.
Before this loss of power occurred the crew had been able to make regular contact with air traffic controllers and the airplane was able to automatically transmit its position.
After it, no word was ever heard again from the pilots. Its two automatic reporting systems, the transponder continually sending the airplane’s position and a separate system reporting the condition of its critical systems at half-hourly intervals, both stopped working.
This new revelation of a serious technical problem and its immediate effects is buried in the arcane detail of a lengthy report (PDF) issued last week by the Australian Transport Bureau, which is directing the search for the Boeing 777. It is the first official acknowledgement of what had previously been only speculation—that there was a sudden loss of electrical power capable of disabling vital systems.
As well as portraying a sudden crisis of control in the cockpit, the report greatly undercuts theories that the pilots themselves went rogue—far from harming the airplane it is much more likely that they were struggling to save it in a situation that most pilots would find hard to master.
The purpose of the report was to reinforce confidence that the undersea search for the airplane is being carried out in the right part of the Indian Ocean and has a high chance of success.
Flight 370 took off from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at 12:42 a.m. (Malaysia time) on March 8, 2014, bound for Beijing. Normally that flight would take around five and a half hours. In fact, it ended seven hours and 38 minutes later somewhere over the southern Indian Ocean, creating the greatest mystery in the history of modern aviation.
The last voice contact with the flight came 37 minutes after takeoff, with the captain signing off with the air traffic controllers in Kuala Lumpur, saying “Good night. Malaysian three seven zero.” The airplane was then on course heading out over the South China Sea.
Two minutes later the blip indicating the airplane’s position on the Kuala Lumpur controllers’ radar screens disappeared—indicating that the transponder was no longer working. At around the same time (as revealed later by military radar that had picked up the flight) the airplane made a sharp left turn, taking it back over Malaysia toward the Strait of Malacca.
The new report is not precise about when the airplane suffered its loss of electrical power: It places the blackout inside a 56-minute window between the final scheduled transmission from the system monitoring the airplane’s critical functions, the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, ACARS, and an unsuccessful attempt by the airline’s dispatchers to contact the crew.
But that window can actually be narrowed: The power loss must have occurred in the time between the attempt from the ground to contact the airplane and the last normal contact between the controllers and the captain, some 44 minutes, and very likely it happened very rapidly after the captain signed off—when the transponder failed.
However, whatever the extent of the power loss, the report makes clear that, remarkably, at least one system was able on its own to recover power and continue functioning.
Twenty-one minutes after the airline’s dispatchers tried to contact the flight the airplane was able to transmit a scheduled electronic “handshake” to a satellite.
Tracking the flight path of the Malaysian jet has always rested on one slender thread of data that was detected by the London-based satellite operator Inmarsat.
An Inmarsat ground station in Australia recorded seven electronic “handshakes” transmitted automatically from the 777 beginning with one before takeoff. From those brief and impersonal pulses and after many hours of calculations the searchers were directed to an area deep in the southern Indian Ocean, called the seventh arc, between latitudes 40 and 50 and more than 1,500 miles from the nearest land mass, southwestern Australia.
The handshakes, more commonly called pings, were sent at hourly intervals.
Amazingly, though, the system used to transmit the hourly pings, the Satellite Data Unit, SDU, was able to reboot itself within 60 seconds of the power failure and was able to send the subsequent hourly pings for the rest of the flight, while the ACARS remained silent, as did the transponder.
What caused the power loss?
The Australian report gives four possible causes:
One, a sudden failure that caused the airplane’s Auxiliary Power Unit, APU, to kick in to restore emergency power.
Two, an action carried out in the cockpit using overhead switches.
Three, someone accessing the Main Equipment Center below the flight deck, pulling out circuit breakers and, later, resetting them.
Four, intermittent technical failures.
Clearly, these possibilities suggest a choice between actions that required deliberate human intervention (using the overhead switches in the cockpit or someone gaining access to the Main Equipment Center, pulling out the circuit breakers and then later resetting them) or the sudden onset of technical failures that the airplane’s backup systems were able to restore, at least in part.
In making this range of possibilities clear the report demonstrates that there is no data that could make a persuasive argument for either scenario. That can only be settled when—or if—the remains of the airplane are found and recovered.
However, this new information seriously undermines one of the most persistent conspiracy theories: that the pilots did it.
First, the theory widely advanced in the early days of the disaster that as a first step to make the airplane “vanish” the pilots switched off the transponder. Nobody switched off anything at that moment—it now appears that a power interruption or failure could have disabled the transponder. (A transponder only works for ground tracking within radar range, otherwise its signals can be picked up only by other airplanes that are nearby.)
Second, that one of the pilots left his seat, opened a hatch in the floor, went down into the Main Equipment Center, pulled out the circuit breakers and later reset them.
I asked an expert on the 777 and its systems to comment.
He said that the idea that a pilot went below to pull one or more circuit breakers was extremely unlikely, even bordering on the absurd. He added: “Few airline pilots would even know how to get down to the lower deck while in flight.
“And even if they tried, few would be familiar with the locations of avionics components, or be able to find the relevant circuit breakers to pull. That kind of information is not even contained in the typical pilot training or operating manuals.”
He also explained that the pilots would most likely need to be following “non-normal” procedures to use the overhead switches that control electrical power generation as part of coping with failure messages flashing on their instrument displays.
Indeed, rather than this being an attempt to harm the airplane, the expert said, the pilots could very well have been implementing “a well-defined non-normal procedure” to respond to what was a “very complex failure”—and that those actions were exactly what the pilots should have done.
However, he added, if it was a failure that went beyond anything anticipated in their training—“like a severe uncontained fire”—the crew may not have fully understood the severity of what was happening. “They would simply have no way of knowing.”
Simultaneously, he said, “they would have been trying to decide whether to divert and get on the ground as fast as possible.”
The captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, was very experienced, with more than 18,000 hours flying time and 8,659 flying 777s. Fariqu Abdul Hamid, the co-pilot, had only 2,800 flying time experience and—this could well have been significant in a crisis, only 39 hours on the 777, no more than a few flights.
Most of the power to run all the 777’s systems and avionics comes from generators attached to each of the two engines. It is distributed throughout the airplane through multiple connections, many with backup systems and controlled by computers. The main concentration of computers, including those controlling the airplane’s communications systems, is in the Main Equipment Center.
In a Daily Beast special report, I examined a scenario in which a fire in the forward cargo hold of the 777, originating in a consignment of lithium-ion batteries that were being shipped on the airplane, could have breached a wall and reached the Main Equipment Center, seriously degrading the airplane’s avionics and leading to the incapacitation of the crew and passengers.
However, the avionics for the Satellite Data Unit, sending the pings, was located not in the Main Equipment Center but well clear of it, in the roof of the cabin behind the wings, because that is where the antenna to access the satellite is best positioned.
The picture in the Australian report of an airplane stricken by a sudden and extensive loss of electrical power, while in no way definitive, is entirely consistent with this scenario.
Indeed, the report gives dramatic new clarity to the “zombie flight” version of events in which the airplane, by then fatally crippled, makes one final change of course and then flies into the vast emptiness of the southern Indian Ocean without any sign of human direction or control. There is also much more detail about the airplane’s final moments in the air.
The report’s account draws on a scenario followed by Boeing in an engineering simulator (first reported by The Daily Beast) that shows Flight 370 cruising at a constant altitude of 35,000 feet for more than 5 hours at which point the airplane begins to run out of fuel.
The assumption is made that once Flight 370 made a left turn over the Straits of Malacca it was then being flown on autopilot. (The new report cautions: “The specific settings input into the autopilot are unknown. Furthermore, it is also unknown what changes (if any) were made to those settings throughout the accident flight.”)
Considering how little is known of what happened to turn the airplane “dark” the reconstruction of the flight and its conclusion is surprisingly graphic. As the 777 runs out of fuel the right engine flames out first, followed by the left engine 15 minutes later. The airplane then descends in a circling glide, covering as many as 100 nautical miles, hitting the water “uncontrolled but stable.”
As luck would have it, the final—seventh—ping sent from the airplane and intercepted by the Inmarsat satellite ground station was sent about 10 minutes before the airplane hit the water. Within those 10 minutes the SDU had lost power from the engines, the APU had automatically started (taking about a minute to restore power) and the SDU, because power had been interrupted, began automatically to log on again with the Inmarsat satellite and completed that process within seconds of the airplane crashing—thereby providing the Inmarsat analysts with one more essential clue to the final position of the airplane.
There can be no precise picture of how the airplane broke up on hitting the water. The only physical remnant from the crash appeared four months ago, washed up on the island of La Réunion near Madagascar in the western Indian Ocean.
That piece of wreckage was a flaperon, a part of the airplane’s flight controls. There is one flaperon on the rear of each wing close to the fuselage. Although it is relatively small, the flaperon is very busy throughout the whole flight. It is part flap, the control surface that is lowered in a series of phases to increase lift for takeoffs and landings, and part aileron, a separate surface that moves up or down to control “roll”—to keep the wings laterally level at all speeds and altitudes or to control the degree of banking in a turn.
Because of its hyperactive role in the airplane’s flight controls the value of the flaperon to investigators is far greater than its size would suggest. Given the final minutes of the flight as simulated by Boeing, its actions would have been essential to maintaining stability in the glide. For that reason its discovery could add some better understanding of how the airplane hit the water.
The flaperon was in remarkably good condition, given that it had spent nearly 17 months in the water. In photographs the only visible sign of damage is that its thinnest part, the trailing edge, is badly shredded. The forward part, where it is hinged to the wing, appears to have made a clean break.
Estimating the forces that produced that break would be an important part of what investigators would do in order to try assess what role the flaperon was performing right up to the moment of impact. And, by looking at that, the investigators could get clues to how violent—or otherwise—the final seconds of the flight were.
The flaperon was taken from La Réunion to France, where it remains in the hands of the Bureau d’Enquetes et d’Analyses, BEA, having been examined there by experts who confirmed that it came from the Malaysian Boeing 777. (The BEA did not respond to a request from The Daily Beast for information on the examination of the flaperon.)
Meanwhile, in Australia the investigators seized on the discovery of the flaperon as a chance to confirm that their search was being conducted in the right place. Was landfall on the island consistent with the path that any floating wreckage would have taken if it originated in the area being searched?
A team at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, CSIRO, including oceanographers and weather experts, had been working for 16 months using a technology called drift modeling, to predict where, if any floating wreckage survived, it would wash up. Now they reverse-engineered the flaperon’s path from La Réunion back to the search area at the other end of the Indian Ocean, based on the elapsed time, distance, and oceanic conditions from July 2015 back to March 8, 2014, the day that the airplane disappeared.
The result, however, was rather less than assured. Indeed, in describing the findings the CSIRO team leader, Dr. David Griffin, was careful to hedge the bets: The arrival of the piece of wreckage on La Reunion Island “does not cast doubt on the validity of the present MH370 search area” he said, but then added, “it is impossible to use the La Réunion finding to refine or shift the search area.”
It was wise of the scientists to be as careful as this because they had made an embarrassing error in a previous drift model. They originally predicted that the first wreckage would wash up on the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, by July 2014—some 4,000 miles northeast of La Réunion.
When this didn’t happen they went back to the numbers and discovered that the data had been corrupted by a significant miscalculation of the effects of wind on the ocean.
It’s fair to say, then, that drift modeling, no matter how conscientiously conducted, is as yet far from being an exact science.
However, the absence of any further floating wreckage since the flaperon was discovered in July lends credence to the idea that perhaps major parts of the 777 did remain intact after impact and then sank, possibly through wave action forcing water into the engines and empty fuel tanks.
I discussed this possibility with the expert on the 777.
He advised caution on reaching any firm conclusions on the basis of a single piece of physical evidence—particularly when the flaperon is visible only in photographs and not by way of a physical inspection.
Nonetheless, he told me, “Even a pilotless jet could possibly get lucky and enter the water at a shallow angle and minimum sink rate that minimizes the impact.
“Most of the structure could have remained intact, or at least separated into only a few big pieces. Not a lot of extraneous debris may have exited the fuselage, particularly if there was no attempt at opening doors or deploying rafts in the water evacuation.”
That would be encouraging for the undersea search because the larger the pieces of wreckage the more likely they are to be detected.
Last week, when the new report was released, the Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said that he was “hopeful, indeed optimistic, that we will still locate the aircraft.”
The area being searched totals more than 46,000 square miles of which around 29,000 square miles have so far been covered. As a result of the new analysis of the flight path, priority has been given to the southern sector—the total search area is as long as the distance between New York City and Charleston, North Carolina, and about as wide as the I-95 corridor, little more than 60 miles. Using the new calculations, the length may be shortened as the width is expanded.
And, as the area remaining to cover diminishes—according to the math—the chances of finding the Boeing 777 should increase exponentially.
“We are anticipating that the search will take to around mid-2016 to be completed,” the official spokesman for the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, Dan O’Malley, told The Daily Beast.
The search has continued, operating 24 hours a day, during the southern hemisphere winter, even though the conditions were often appalling.
“There have been times when the vessels were obliged to break off searching because of rough weather,” said O’Malley. “The highest waves were 50 feet in a tropical cyclone. When the weather is really poor work becomes very difficult and obtaining adequate rest is difficult too, so it’s also very fatiguing.”
On two occasions crewmembers fell ill and their ships had to break off and return to their home port of Fremantle, 1,700 miles away.
“There is no helicopter with the range to fly out and recover a patient, and it’s too risky to winch a person from a ship in rough conditions. It’s at least 10 days sail for the round trip, so this delays progress on the search,” said O’Malley.
Before the flight disappeared this was one of the most remote stretches of ocean in the world and its floor had never been mapped. Some of the ocean is as much as 20,000 feet deep, with extremes of terrain. Now, after a bathymetric survey using state-of-the-art equipment, the Australians believe that they have an accurate and detailed map of every piece of the seabed.
These extreme depths and challenging terrain call for the most advanced search equipment, an autonomous underwater vehicle, AUV. Since last May rough weather made it impossible to use this system.
This week, with the financial help of the Chinese (153 of the passengers were Chinese), a third ship equipped with an AUV will join the search.
For months the search had been limited to two ships deploying torpedo-like towfish that scan the ocean bed with sonar. “The deep tow equipment is the most efficient method to search large swathes where the seafloor is relatively flat,” explained O’Malley. “However some of the seafloor features have very steep gradients and maneuvering the towfish over them can leave ‘terrain avoidance’ gaps in the data. These are the areas we will search with the AUV.”
One thing is for sure among many that are not: Should the searchers find the remains of an airplane that took 239 people to their deaths in such baffling circumstances it will be an unmatched achievement in the history of air crash investigations, and the only thing that can finally explain what really happened.
Update, 12/11/15: Three days after the publication of this story the Australian Transport Safety Bureau amended the section of their report that referred to the power loss.
The original text, “power loss occurred” was changed to read “power loss to the SDU.”
In an exchange of emails with the Daily Beast, spokesmen for the ATSB said that the data used in their report related only to the power outage suffered by the Satellite Data Unit, and added that “it is not known if any other systems stopped working during this time”—or whether other systems were affected by the same loss of power that affected the SDU.
There is, however, an explicit clue that not only were other systems affected but that the power problems were related to avionics systems located in the Main Equipment Center below the flight deck.
As the story makes clear, the failure of the jet to send regular half-hourly reports monitoring its vital systems via the ACARS, Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, is at the heart of the mystery about what made the flight suddenly go “dark.”
It is important to realize that the ACARS messages are sent to a satellite via the SDU, as were the “pings”. After the SDU had suffered a power loss and re-booted it resumed sending the pings – but no further ACARS messages were sent. (The transponder, which also stopped working, used a different antenna to communicate directly with radar, not with a satellite.)
The ACARS data is collected and processed in the Main Equipment Center and then sent to the SDU through dedicated data-carrying lines called busses. Something happened that caused that connection between the MEC and the SDU to be broken, and it remained so for the rest of the flight.
At the same time, the SDU, located well away from the airplane’s lower deck in the roof of the cabin behind the wings, was the only part of the airplane’s communications left working, providing the sole clue to the course of the final hours of Flight MH370. In effect, the SDU had successfully isolated itself from whatever systems were failing elsewhere.
The new amendment to the ATSB document says, flatly, “…the transponder loss of comms [communications] and other aircraft systems are not discussed.”
Well, so be it, that may not be “discussed.” But left unchanged in the report are the four theories put forward to explain the loss of power, as explained in the story above, and they include inferences of foul play by either the crew or others. No evidence is offered to support these theories—nor, obviously, is there any intention of discussing how extensive the loss of power really was.
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Late last Saturday night, two fights. The first a boxing match in Manchester, between Carl Frampton and Scott Quigg. Frampton won, then said that it had all been pretty boring. Online, there was so much talk about how dull the fight had been that the next day’s papers ran stories about fans demanding refunds. The second fight was in London, at the O 2 Arena. You won’t have read about it in the printed press, but you might have seen it online. Because it was the single most talked about sports event on Twitter that day, beating the Premier League, the Six Nations and Frampton v Quigg. It was a middleweight mixed martial arts contest between Anderson Silva and Michael Bisping, five five-minute rounds in the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Among the UFC’s many millions of fans what happened at the O 2 is already famous. For everyone else, here’s a short sketch.
Silva is 40 and from São Paulo. He has more Twitter followers than some countries have citizens, 7.47m. Those who know say Silva may be the greatest martial artist in the world. Another of the UFC’s fighters, Dan “The Outlaw” Hardy, describes Silva as “a modern-day Bruce Lee”. Hardy has a 10in tattoo of Lee along his left shin. Between 2006 and 2012, Silva won 16 fights in a row, the longest streak in the UFC’s short history. He lost the title at the end of 2012. Since then he’s suffered a broken leg and been banned for a year because he failed a drugs test. Before the fight against Bisping the retired UFC fighter Forrest Griffin explained that Silva had already broken one of the main rules of mixed martial arts – “don’t be over 40”.
Bisping is 36, born in Cyprus, brought up in Manchester. If Silva is trying to make it back to the summit, Bisping is still trying find it. He has been in the UFC for a decade, a perennial top-10 contender who has never been given a title shot. In 2013, the retina of Bisping’s right eye became detached after he was kicked by another Brazilian fighter, Vitor Belfort, who had been banned in 2006 for failing a drugs test. Bisping has had five rounds of surgery, but it’s still not fixed. After that, Bisping swore that he would never again fight anybody who had used performance-enhancing drugs, but he broke the rule for Silva, a fighter he once idolised. “This man is a cheat. This man is a fraud,” said Bisping at the weigh-in, when he and Silva were face to face. “All the needles in your ass, all the steroids will not help you, you pussy.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Britain’s Michael Bisping punches Anderson Silva during their fight at the UFC fight night at the O2 Arena in London on 27 February 2016. Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian
There are a lot of misconceptions about MMA. The main one is that it is, in any way, a simple sport. It is endlessly technical and complex. An athlete could spend a lifetime trying to master just one of the key disciplines it combines, wrestling, striking and grappling. For instance, to succeed on the mat a fighter needs a sound understanding of Brazilian jiu jitsu, which, one teacher tells me, contains more than 2,500 techniques, each designed to counter another. They say MMA is human chess. It is sometimes so intricate that it can seem entirely unfathomable. Silva, though, is so extravagantly talented that even a newcomer can appreciate his skill. He has an almost supernatural ability to sense punches coming and sway away from them, like a sapling in a strong wind. Some opponents simply can’t hit him. “There are times when you watch him fight,” Hardy told me, “and you think: ‘This is like watching The Matrix.’”
Silva also has all the arrogance of a great champion. He spent much of the first two rounds taunting Bisping, leaning back and beckoning him on. Bisping, unimpressed, stood off and demanded Silva step up and start fighting. Bisping is not a hugely skilful fighter, nor a very powerful striker, but he has great stamina and enormous quantities of that intangible quality – heart. MMA, like boxing, is scored on a 10-point must system and Bisping won the first two rounds simply because he landed so many blows.
My enjoyment drained away, and in its place grew a queasy uneasiness
Silva seemed almost too busy looking good to bother with the business of scoring points. He wanted to win with a flourish, in a big finish. It was brilliant sport and it brought each and every one of the 17,000 people inside the O 2 to their feet. Me included.
Then it happened. At the end of the third round, Bisping’s mouthguard flew loose during a flurry of punches. The referee, Herb Dean, picked it up. The rules of MMA state that to reinsert the mouthpiece, Dean had to wait for “the first opportune moment without interfering with the action”. Seconds later, Bisping reached what he thought was an opportune moment. Silva disagreed. As Bisping turned his head to ask Dean for the guard, Silva, quick as a snake, flew his knee into Bisping’s jaw. Bisping crumpled. As he fell, the buzzer rang for the end of the round. Silva started to celebrate, medical and coaching staff started to swarm around Bisping and the O 2 erupted. Only the fight wasn’t over.
One point MMA fans and fighters make over and again is that its sport is, in one key regard, safer than boxing because in MMA a knockout ends the fight. There is no standing count. After being knocked unconscious, no one gets a second chance to get hit in the head all over again. Dean would say later: “I saw that when he fell he was not unconscious.”
Silva had made a mistake, Dean suggested, by standing off Bisping, when he should have followed up with another blow and so forced Dean to stop the fight. The UFC had a medical consultant and five local doctors at the fight. In rugby union medics take 10 minutes to make head injury assessments. In the NFL they have between eight and 12. At the O 2 , the UFC’s doctors had 60 seconds.
Bisping, bleeding profusely from his nose, brow and cheeks, fought on. My enjoyment drained away and in its place grew a queasy uneasiness. Instinct made me think “someone should have stopped this fight”, but if they had, Bisping would have been robbed of the greatest victory of his career. He won on points, because he had landed many more scoring shots in three of the five rounds. Immediately after the decision was announced, Silva said in Portuguese: “Sometimes it’s just like Brazil, total corruption.”
Oddly, the phrase got lost in translation over the PA. Soon after, the 17,000 fans filed out into night, some furious, some exhilarated, some overjoyed, some dismayed. But here’s the thing: there wasn’t one among them who wanted their money back.
‘UFC wouldn’t exist without John McCain’ Facebook Twitter Pinterest Excited fans at the O2 Arena. Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian
Boxing has been sanctified by all the fine minds who have fallen for it through the years. From William Hazlitt through Norman Mailer to Joyce Carol Oates. Some say MMA has a long history too. They stretch it back to pankration, a combat sport staged at the ancient Olympics. The UFC, though, is a modern phenomenon. The inaugural event was in November 1993 and so far as great writers go, it has one major advocate: David Mamet. In 2007 Mamet wrote an article for the Guardian describing MMA as the future of American sport.
The day before Bisping v Silva I met Lorenzo Fertitta in the boardroom on the top floor of Claridge’s. As I shake Fertitta’s hand, it’s another of Mamet’s lines that comes to mind. From Glengarry Glen Ross: “You see this watch? This watch cost more than your car.”
The front man of the UFC is Dana White, but Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta are the brothers who own it. They are also the principal shareholders in Station Casinos. Forbes estimates that Lorenzo is worth $1.56bn. In 2001, he and Frank bought the UFC for what Lorenzo describes as the “very, very reasonable price” of $2m. Last year, the company behind the UFC, Zuffa, made around $600m. There is a feeling within the organisation that 2015 was a tipping point. James Elliott, the UFC’s general manager in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, describes the past six months as a breakthrough moment. By the end of the year, UFC was being watched, it says, in 1.2 billion households in 158 countries. UFC London sold out in 27 minutes. UFC Dublin sold out in 60 seconds. In July, it signed a six-year, $70m kit sponsorship deal with Reebok.
James Elliott, UFC general manager for Europe, and UFC co-owner Lorenzo Fertitta on its growth. James Elliott, UFC general manager for Europe, and UFC co-owner Lorenzo Fertitta on its growth.
To understand the success of the UFC today, you have to go back before what Lorenzo Fertitta calls the modern era. In the US, MMA grew out of the Brazilian tradition of Vale Tudo, “anything goes” contests between rival martial arts gyms, each with its own fighting style. The concept was exported to the US by Rorion Gracie, grandmaster of jiu jitsu, scion of one of the most famous fighting families in the world, and, as a 1989 article in Playboy put it, “the toughest man in the United States”. The UFC was concocted by Gracie and three partners. One was John Milius, who wrote and directed Conan the Barbarian. Another, an advertising executive named Art Davie and the last the promoter Bob Meyrowitz, a pioneer of pay-per-view TV. Milius thought the fights should take place in a pit. Davie suggested a ring surrounded by a moat filled with either sharks or alligators. In the end they settled on an eight-sided cage.
The British martial arts teacher Windy Miller says: “The worst thing that ever happened to MMA was that people started calling it a cage.” The fencing serves a practical purpose – in a ring, fighters would slip through the ropes while they were grappling – but the phrase cagefighting came to carry all the wrong connotations, largely because the UFC wanted it that way. Hardy describes these as the wild west days of the sport, no gloves, no weight categories, no rules. At the first UFC, victory could be won only by “knockout, surrender, doctor’s intervention, or death”. The card included a fight between a Dutch karate fighter and a 500lb sumo wrestler. The doctors ended up picking the wrestler’s teeth out of the karate fighter’s feet. By the late 90s, the UFC was in danger of extinction, despite the efforts Meyrowitz had made to improve its image. Political pressure had driven it off cable TV. John McCain led the campaign. He called it “human cockfighting”.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest A packed crowd at the O2 Arena. Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian
Fertitta says the UFC “wouldn’t exist as it does today without John McCain”, because “that’s what allowed us to step in and gave us the opportunity to buy the business”. As a kid, Fertitta used to go to the fights in Vegas. After his MBA, Fertitta started working for the Nevada Athletic Commission, which regulates boxing and combat sports. He wanted to get into the fight business, but not the boxing business.
Boxing “was, in a sense, broken. There was no other business or industry I could think of that had been around for so long, had generated billions of dollars in revenue, yet had no value. There was no brand associated with it at all”. In the UFC, he saw an opportunity. “It was a very tarnished brand and a broken business. The one thing we did see was there was a brand and there was structure, something we could at least start with.”
The Fertittas knew a little about MMA as they were doing some jiu jitsu training. When their attorneys insisted that their UFC ownership contract include a dispute resolution clause, the brothers agreed that in the event of a boardroom deadlock they would stage a sport jiu jitsu fight against each other, over three five-minute rounds, refereed by their friend White. As White often says when talking about the UFC’s success “fighting is in our DNA”, but Fertitta’s understanding of sport was far less important than his understanding of sports administration. Zuffa made one crucial change to the business strategy. Instead of shying away from independent regulation, it would encourage it. He approached a few key athletic commissions – Nevada, Texas, Florida – and, Fertitta says, asked them: “How can we create a set of rules that will address whatever issues you have?” Zuffa decided to use what Fertitta calls “the gold standard for sport in the world – the Olympics”.
It borrowed rules from the Olympic sports of Greco-Roman and Freestyle wrestling, boxing, taekwondo and judo. “We essentially combined those four martial arts and created the unified rules of MMA.” Some people still imagine that MMA has no rules. It’s part of what Fertitta calls the massive hangover from the early days, but the rulebook runs to eight pages. There are 31 fouls for which a fighter can be docked points or disqualified. They include butting, eye-gouging and striking the throat, groin, spine or back of the head.
At the same time, the list of ways an MMA fighter is allowed to inflict damage is a lot longer and some techniques, such as the ground and pound (where one fighter straddles the chest of another on the mat and pummels his head with his fists) are particularly brutal. For the fans and fighters, these are essential parts of the sport. Hardy says that while Zuffa needed to bring in rules, it also needed to make sure that it remained “rooted in the reality of combat”. Hardy started out in taekwondo, but when it was admitted to the Olympics the rules changed and he lost interest. “I felt it took it much more towards sport, and too far away from fighting.” Hardy, who studied fine art at Nottingham Trent, would like the rules of MMA to be little looser. “As a purist I would love the fighters to be able to kick the head of a downed opponent,” he says. “But with the sport where it is right now, I can see how that would set us back.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Russia’s Rustam Khabilov throws Norman Parke of Northern Ireland at the O2 Arena event.
Outside the Octagon, Zuffa doesn’t just regulate, it overregulates. It was its route to being sanctioned and, ultimately, to being back on cable TV. These days it is even on BBC3. It’s as if, having come so close to being banned, it has resolved to be one better than it needs to be ever since. As Elliott explains: “The way we set up the medical provision for instance is that we go above and beyond that which we are required to do, and certainly that which the boxing authorities would have in place.” Its health and safety record is excellent, especially when set next to other combat and collision sports. There have been several deaths in the wider sport of MMA, but the worst injury anyone has suffered in the UFC is a broken bone.
The UFC was quick to understand the growing concerns about the long-term effects of concussion and the way the issue had been mishandled by other sports. In 2012, it entered a partnership with the Cleveland Clinic to understand better what the sport was doing to fighters’ brains. It sends dozens of its fighters for brain scans and cognitive testing. “We want,” Elliott says, “to understand and get in front of any issues before they arise.”
Most UFC fighters and fans argue that the risk of long-term brain damage is considerably smaller in their sport than it is in boxing, even though the gloves they use are so slight that some call them sleeping pills. “I want to be able to chew my food when I’m older,” Hardy says, “and the MMA rule set is the safest place for me to test myself in a controlled environment.”
UFC vice-president of athlete health and performance Jeff Novitzky on setting up the sport's anti-doping programme. UFC vice-president of athlete health and performance Jeff Novitzky on setting up the sport’s anti-doping programme.
The best example of Zuffa’s approach, though, is its anti-doping policy. There’s no doubt that the sport of MMA has a doping problem. Jack “The Stone” Mason, who has fought 47 professional MMA fights, tells me that he dreads to think how many of them were against fighters who had taken steroids. In the UFC, Silva’s was only one of the more high-profile cases.
The UFC’s solution was to hire the best anti-doping expert it could find, Jeff Novitzky. He has joined the UFC from a 22-year career in federal law enforcement, the past 12 of them spent in anti-doping. Novitzky worked on the Balco laboratories case that brought down Marion Jones and Barry Bonds. Then, in the words of the cyclist Tyler Hamilton, he “drove a bulldozer into the bike-racing world” and busted Lance Armstrong. The UFC asked Novitzky to draw up its anti-doping programme. “It wasn’t lip service,” Novitzky says. “They were looking to clean up their sport, they were dead serious about it.” Novitzky has designed what he describes as the best anti-doping programme in professional sports. “And frankly,” he says, “there is not really a close second.” All UFC athletes are now subject to random testing, every day of the year.
UFC on social media UFC on social media
The programme is being eased in. Right now, Novitzky says, it’s running at about 60-70% of what it will be. In the meantime, fans have fun spotting the fighters who once had ripped bodies but whose physiques seem to have mysteriously softened in recent months.
Novitzky says that what drew him to the UFC was the opportunity “to build a programme from the foundation up”, as if he’d been given a blank piece of paper to work on. That touches on another key reason for the UFC’s success. It was in such a mess when the Fertittas took it over they were able to rebuild it as it liked, applying lessons they had learned from other sports. Lorenzo Fertitta says: “Boxing provided a tremendous roadmap, from a case study standpoint, as far as what to do and what not to do.” It felt boxing had become too fragmented, including too many titles at too many weights. “When we bought the company we sat down and I said, ‘Somebody buy me a Ring magazine from the 1950s. I want to go back to when boxing was simple and I want to see what the weight classes were.’” The UFC has eight weight classes. Boxing has 17, multiplied by the many different governing bodies.
On top of that, he says, “boxing came to the point where it was really only about the main event, it wasn’t about the show”. At a UFC event the card is stacked and at UFC London the O 2 was packed from the first fight, at 5.45pm, to the finish five hours later. But the single most important point is this, according to Fertitta. “Boxing had failed the fans because they had been unable to put on the fights the fans wanted to see. We waited, what, six or seven years to see Mayweather v Pacquiao?” There is, he says, “no running, there is no hiding in the UFC”. He’s right because the UFC has something close to a monopoly on the sport. For the top fighters, the UFC is pretty much the only option in MMA. At the end of 2015, it had 573 fighters under contract and it’s the UFC’s matchmakers who decide who fights who, where and when.
That control extends into all areas. The UFC is a thoroughly modern model of a sports business and where it once borrowed from other sports, other sports would now love to be able to copy it. It controls promotion and production, some aspects of regulation and, increasingly, distribution. It realised early on, as Fertitta says, that the best way to “reposition the brand and reposition the sport, really comes through our athletes”. The athletes are its best advocates. “At first, people think: ‘Gosh, these guys are just a bunch of bar room brawlers,’” Fertitta says. But “when they get to meet them they see that they are martial artists. They are intelligent. It is about the competition. It is about the sport. It is not about, in any way, the violence.”
So in 2005, it launched its own reality TV show, Ultimate Fighter, so that viewers could get to know the athletes and their backstories. It gathered a group of fighters, had them live and train together and then compete for a UFC contract. In the next two years, UFC had a 1,258% increase in revenue, including a 1,700% increase in PPV sales.
Since then, the UFC has turned down broadcast deals with HBO and ESPN because it didn’t want to give up control of production. Off-the-record conversations with some of its broadcast partners reveal that the UFC has a reputation for being notoriously demanding to work with. Its move into distribution meant UFC London was available only on Fight Pass, its online streaming service.
Add it all up and UFC has become so prominent that its name is almost synonymous with the wider sport of MMA. That, says Fertitta, “is one of the biggest misunderstandings”. MMA, he says, “is a vibrant industry, that happens every weekend, all around the world”. He estimates that there are 3,000-4,000 fights every year. The UFC stages 42 of them. It’s in those smaller promotions that the megastars such as Conor McGregor cut their teeth. “That’s how he got his experience, how he got his name and his following, and eventually our talent scouts find somebody like that and bring them into the UFC.” At these lower levels, MMA feels very different indeed.
‘We used to put a couple of mats down on my friend’s garage floor’ Facebook Twitter Pinterest England’s Joe Harding waits to restart his fight with Geir Kare Nyland of Norway in their BCMMA fight at the Charter Hall in Colchester on 20 February 2016. Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian
A week before Silva fought Bisping at UFC London, one of those smaller events was taking place in a leisure centre just outside Colchester. It was called BCMMA and it was run by Jack Mason, a fighter, promoter and trainer who, like Hardy and Bisping, is an old hand in that he’s been on the scene for a decade or so. Hardy says his second professional fight was on the end of the pier in Portsmouth. He was paid £100 for it. “I didn’t know anything about my opponent. I didn’t do any kind of medical testing and everybody was smoking.” MMA is evolving so quickly that Hardy, 33, says he is “part of the last generation that will remember the sport before it was a sport”.
It is the same with Mason. When he started, there weren’t any gyms to train in. “We used to put a couple of mats down on my friend’s garage floor,” he says. When Mason wanted to study new techniques, he would either look them up on YouTube or buy or borrow a VHS tape. Now there are MMA gyms across the country. Mason runs two, BKK Fighters, one in Colchester, the other in Chelmsford. One of BKK’s fighters, Arnold Allen, has just made it to the UFC. He fought, and won, on the undercard at UFC London. Allen is 22 and baby-faced. He wears a moustache that somehow makes him look even younger.
Last year Allen was called up as a late replacement for his first fight in the UFC. He had a week’s notice, but won so well that he earned a $50,000 bonus. He used the money to move to Montreal so he could train at the famous Tristar gym. Mason sees Allen as a member of the new generation. “They have been training since they were children, and their level is just crazy compared to mine when I started,” he says.
When he was 16, Allen decided to leave school and become a professional MMA fighter. He even wrote the goal down in his notebook. His ambition was more specific still: he wanted to become a UFC world champion. Whereas Mason and Hardy fell into MMA, Allen grew up with it.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Belgian welterweight Brian Bouland hits Jamie Pritchard, a featherweight from Newquay, England, in their professional catchweight BCMMA fight. Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian
Every fighter at Mason’s event in Colchester wants the very same thing Allen does. A couple of fighters on the top of the bill, Luke Barnatt and John Maguire, have been to the UFC and are trying to find their way back. Others are pros on the lower levels hoping to be picked up by the UFC’s talent spotters. Still more are amateurs, hoping to make the switch to the professional sport. Allen is living their dream, but it isn’t easy. After his victory at the O 2 , Allen pleads: “Somebody sponsor me, please.” He’s shocked by how expensive life is in Montreal. While the UFC’s top fighters are making plenty, money is tight lower down the ranks and while the UFC helps arrange medical insurance for its fighters, Allen is struggling to pay for his meals.
The best estimate is that between 2005 and 2011, 13.6% of the UFC’s revenue went on the fighters’ wages. In many American sports, the split is nearer 50-50. In 2015, when its revenue was around $600m, Zuffa spent “over $100m” on “athlete costs including compensation, insurance, medical and travel”. The former UFC champion Griffin says that the UFC’s formula is simple: “If you sell tickets, you make money.” There’s pressure on the fighters to entertain, as well as to win, and Allen is annoyed that he let his last fight go to a decision and missed out on a “finishing” bonus.
Conor McGregor: can anyone stop the UFC's bearded kingmaker? Read more
At BCMMA in Colchester, no one is getting rich. Not even Mason, the promoter, who ended up with a profit of around £100. But then, like so many of the MMA community at this level, Mason isn’t in it for the money. BCMMA was a sell-out, but a lot was spent bringing in fighters from overseas, from Portugal, Poland, and, in particular, Norway and France.
Competitive MMA is banned in the latter two countries. In France, MMA is struggling to be recognised by the Ministry of Sport, largely, it says, because of opposition from the judo federation. “Our only option in France at the moment to hold an event is to apply as an entertainment,” says Elliott. “And we refuse to do that. Because this is a sport. MMA is a sport.”
It sometimes seems a fine line. While the 17,000 at the O 2 were well-educated in the intricacies of MMA and so knew where that line lay, many of the hundreds in Colchester didn’t. At one point, the referee had to ask two ladies to stop screaming “elbow him in the face”. It was, he explained, an amateur bout and so that move wasn’t allowed.
Most of the audience were there to see a Polish heavyweight named Rafal Cejrowski. Plenty had flown over especially to watch him. He was fighting João Mimoso, who is, no joke, a Portuguese university professor.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest A young boy watches fighters warm up before their BCMMA fight.
Their fight was especially brutal. Less human chess, more like two big men belting each other in the face. Before it started, the security guards closed in around the Octagon. Cejrowski’s fans have a reputation for storming the fencing and, indeed, as soon as he had won, they started hurling themselves over the judges’ tables to reach the Octagon.
Despite that, BCMMA is one of the bigger and better-run events on the domestic circuit. It works with the UK Mixed Martial Arts Federation, which was formed three years ago to try to bring more order to the sport, and also SafeMMA, a body that works to ensure minimum standards of medical provision. SafeMMA has a list of volunteer doctors, often GPs, who attend events and perform medical checks before and after fights. It has also set up a register of fighters, to ensure they take six-monthly blood tests for hepatitis C, hep B and HIV.
UFC gender breakdown UFC gender breakdown
One of the overseas fighters at BCMMA had a problem with his hep C test, so Mason spent the night before the show escorting him to London for an emergency test. Backstage, a paramedic ran through a few simple tests after the fights. If the medic picks up any problems, the fighter is issued with a medical suspension so promoters who are signed up to SafeMMA won’t use them again until it has passed.
This is all very new. I’m told that as recently as three years ago, things were very different. It was around that time that UKMMAF was formed. Its secretary, Nigel Burgess, explains that while the fighters “are doing blood sweat and tears in the gym”, the UKMMAF officials “are doing blood, sweat and tears in front of our PCs and in meetings with councils”. It has introduced coaching courses, refereeing courses, and judging courses, are putting in place the pyramids and pathways that make up the grassroots of all sports. Its biggest problem at the moment is securing insurance cover.
There is a long way to go, but Burgess believes the sport will soon be in the Olympics. So does Fertitta and he thinks it will happen within the next decade. He says the IOC “see the popularity of what we are bringing to the table”. It is a business, he says, and “believe me they are paying attention to the ratings that we are generating”. Even the online stream of BCMMA pulled in 31,000 viewers, spread around Europe and the US.
MMA and the UFC are going to continue to grow. Fertitta says that the sport is around 20% of where it will be in a decade. What’s happening in the UK is also under way around the rest of the world. In 2015, the UFC staged its first events in Seoul, Melbourne, Krakow, Manila, Monterey and Glasgow. Its fighters are drawn from 45 countries, and its TV audience from 158.
Because, Fertitta says, here’s the thing: “What we have is this incredible thing where you take two athletes, at the top of their game, in the most incredible shape and you put them in the Octagon and you let them use any martial art they want to compete. And it translates. Immediately. Overnight.
“No matter what colour you are, what language you speak, what country you are from. It is fighting. And at some level, people get it.”
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The Sacramento Zoo’s red panda cub has already lived a trying life -- and it is not yet two months old.
Born June 8th, the nameless cub has yet to be officially revealed to the public. A combination of an infected cut, difficulties gaining weight and inconsistent care from his mother means the little guy is still slowly being nursed to health.
"He's had a little bit of a rough start," Dr. Anne Burgdorf, Sacramento Zoo veterinarian told the Sacramento Bee. Red pandas "can be shy and prone to stress."
Although this means the baby has been under the care of the zookeepers, he will hopefully be able to join the rest of the red pandas soon. "He will get to see, smell and hear other red pandas," Burgdorf said. "He will know he's a red panda.”
According to the San Diego Zoo, red pandas are plagued with high infant mortality rates. In fact, 19 percent of cubs are stillborn or die on the day of their birth. In the wild, cub mortality is exceptionally high, with some estimates reaching 74 percent.
Red pandas are also listed as threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, thanks to habitat loss and poaching. There are fewer than an estimated 10,000 mature adults left in the world, with a significant decrease in population every year.
Thankfully, the Sacramento Zoo’s panda could have a sunny future ahead. He currently weighs 1.6 pounds, which is just right for his age. Zookeepers are hoping that within the next three to six months, he will be able to join the other members of his species at the zoo as long as he continues to progress. At that time, the little guy will finally be given a name.
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Remember when the Atlanta Falcons announced they'd be building a new stadium—using a boatload of public money—that would be crowned with a retractable roof? The architects of the $1.2 billion project recently passed along a new fly-through of the design. And while it's our best look yet at the structure, it also brings up plenty of questions.
The stadium's architect, 360 Architecture, was recently acquired by mega-firm HOK—which sent along their latest renderings of the stadium, currently under construction and planned for a 2017 opening. You'll remember that the first renderings of its unusual roof structure showed a cobweb of wispy metallic struts that seemed to open and close, and the Falcons are going through with the unlikely (and definitely wildly expensive) plan.
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The new fly-through shows a more developed version of the roof—which Deadpsin obviously christened "the Sphincter"—that will open and close like a hexagonal aperture on a camera, as a press release explains:
Inspired by the oculus in the ancient Rome Pantheon, the stadium's unique roof opening will provide tremendous flexibility in hosting a wide variety of events in the stadium. Eight unique roof petals can open in less than eight minutes, creating a "camera lens-like" effect that exposes the inside of the facility to the open air on game and event days. The roof is constructed of ETFE fabric that, when closed, allows for translucent light into the stadium.
Fascinating though it sounds, that's not a terribly detailed description of the defining feature of a building already well underway. The mechanics of the aperture seem fairly simple, but I'm curious about the tracks the eight roofing modules seem to slide on, and what's powering them—not to mention how the movement will affect the rest of the structure, and how it will stand up to high winds. We've reached out to HOK to find out a bit more about the structure, and we'll report back when we do. [Atlanta Falcons]
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The ministers also agreed to push out the €40bn EU bailout loan for another seven years to help spread more evenly repayments of the country’s massive debt.
Department of Finance officials said yesterday it “was one of the better days in our programme” as the finance ministers met in Dublin Castle.
They agreed to urgently move forward the banking union that would see the EU’s rescue fund, the ESM, recapitalise troubled banks and put a system in place to wind up others.
For the first time, EU ministers accepted Ireland’s situation is different to other bailed-out countries, and that the money put into the banks should be recognised, said a senior EU official.
“They wanted to bail in senior bondholders and were not let and now we have done a bail-in for Cyprus — this is tough for them,” said the official, adding the ministers will examine Ireland’s specific circumstances before July.
Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the head of the eurogroup of ministers said: “There is a distinction between legacy and retroactive... We have made progress and there will be a more final discussion in June.”
A Department of Finance official said that getting EU finance ministers to agree to make a difference between retroactive repayments, and legacy assets — which means old debt waiting to be funded by the EU funds, “was a huge win for us”.
This could mean ownership of AIB and Permanent TSB, together with the shares the State owns in Bank of Ireland, moving to the ESM.
Finance Minister Michael Noonan, who is hosting the two-day meeting, welcomed the decision to extend the maturities on the bailout loans by seven years.
“It is particularly important, as it will increase the ability of our banks, semi- states and large companies to raise capital at lower cost on the financial markets and will have a consequent benefit across the whole Irish economy,” he said.
The current average repayment time for the EU bailout funds is 12.5 years.
The new deal will see the schedule pushed out to an average of close to 20 years. While it will also mean a saving for the State, it will reduce pressure on taxpayers and improve the country’s cash flow.
Portugal has won a similar deal — provided it fills a budget gap of €1.5bn over the next month. Portuguese finance minister Vitor Gaspar conceded it would have been better to get a 10-year extension but the troika warned there could be new conditions attached.
While there were some fears that the German parliament might object, Berlin expect to pass this, together with the €10bn bailout for Cyprus in the coming weeks before their general election.
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Note that if you are reading this file from a Subversion checkout or the main LLVM web page, this document applies to the next release, not the current one. To see the release notes for a specific release, please see the releases page .
For more information about LLVM, including information about the latest release, please check out the main LLVM web site . If you have questions or comments, the LLVM Developer's Mailing List is a good place to send them.
This document contains the release notes for the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure, release 3.2. Here we describe the status of LLVM, including major improvements from the previous release, improvements in various sub-projects of LLVM, and some of the current users of the code. All LLVM releases may be downloaded from the LLVM releases web site .
Finally, this release includes many small improvements to scan-build , which can be used to drive the analyzer from the command line or a continuous integration system. This includes a directory-traversal issue, which could cause potential security problems in some cases. We would like to acknowledge Tim Brown of Portcullis Computer Security Ltd for reporting this issue.
In the LLVM 3.2 release, the static analyzer has made significant improvements in many areas, with notable highlights such as:
The Clang Static Analyzer is an advanced source code analysis tool integrated into Clang that performs a deep analysis of code to find potential bugs.
Within the LLVM 3.2 time-frame there were the following highlights:
Polly is an experimental optimizer for data locality and parallelism. It currently provides high-level loop optimizations and automatic parallelization (using the OpenMP run time). Work in the area of automatic SIMD and accelerator code generation was started.
The 3.2 release has the following notable changes:
The VMKit project is an implementation of a Java Virtual Machine (Java VM or JVM) that uses LLVM for static and just-in-time compilation.
Within the LLVM 3.2 time-frame there were the following highlights:
Like compiler_rt, libc++ is now dual licensed under the MIT and UIUC license, allowing it to be used more permissively.
The 3.2 release has the following notable changes:
LLDB is a ground-up implementation of a command line debugger, as well as a debugger API that can be used from other applications. LLDB makes use of the Clang parser to provide high-fidelity expression parsing (particularly for C++) and uses the LLVM JIT for target support.
The 3.2 release has the following notable changes:
The LLVM compiler-rt project is a simple library that provides an implementation of the low-level target-specific hooks required by code generation and other runtime components. For example, when compiling for a 32-bit target, converting a double to a 64-bit unsigned integer is compiled into a runtime call to the __fixunsdfdi function. The compiler-rt library provides highly optimized implementations of this and other low-level routines (some are 3x faster than the equivalent libgcc routines).
The 3.2 release has the following notable changes:
DragonEgg is a gcc plugin that replaces GCC's optimizers and code generators with LLVM's. It works with gcc-4.5 and gcc-4.6 (and partially with gcc-4.7), can target the x86-32/x86-64 and ARM processor families, and has been successfully used on the Darwin, FreeBSD, KFreeBSD, Linux and OpenBSD platforms. It fully supports Ada, C, C++ and Fortran. It has partial support for Go, Java, Obj-C and Obj-C++.
If Clang rejects your code but another compiler accepts it, please take a look at the language compatibility guide to make sure this is not intentional or a known issue.
For more details about the changes to Clang since the 3.1 release, see the Clang 3.2 release notes.
In the LLVM 3.2 time-frame, the Clang team has made many improvements. Highlights include:
Clang is an LLVM front end for the C, C++, and Objective-C languages. Clang aims to provide a better user experience through expressive diagnostics, a high level of conformance to language standards, fast compilation, and low memory use. Like LLVM, Clang provides a modular, library-based architecture that makes it suitable for creating or integrating with other development tools.
The LLVM 3.2 distribution currently consists of production-quality code from the core LLVM repository, which roughly includes the LLVM optimizers, code generators and supporting tools, as well as Clang, DragonEgg and compiler-rt sub-project repositories. In addition to this code, the LLVM Project includes other sub-projects that are in development. Here we include updates on these sub-projects.
TCE uses Clang and LLVM for C/C++ language support, target independent optimizations and also for parts of code generation. It generates new LLVM-based code generators "on the fly" for the designed TTA processors and loads them in to the compiler backend as runtime libraries to avoid per-target recompilation of larger parts of the compiler chain.
TCE is a toolset for designing application-specific processors (ASP) based on the Transport triggered architecture (TTA). The toolset provides a complete co-design flow from C/C++ programs down to synthesizable VHDL/Verilog and parallel program binaries. Processor customization points include the register files, function units, supported operations, and the interconnection network.
Pure version 0.56 has been tested and is known to work with LLVM 3.2 (and continues to work with older LLVM releases >= 2.5).
Pure is an algebraic/functional programming language based on term rewriting. Programs are collections of equations which are used to evaluate expressions in a symbolic fashion. The interpreter uses LLVM as a backend to JIT-compile Pure programs to fast native code. Pure offers dynamic typing, eager and lazy evaluation, lexical closures, a hygienic macro system (also based on term rewriting), built-in list and matrix support (including list and matrix comprehensions) and an easy-to-use interface to C and other programming languages (including the ability to load LLVM bitcode modules, and inline C, C++, Fortran and Faust code in Pure programs if the corresponding LLVM-enabled compilers are installed).
In addition to producing an easily portable open source OpenCL implementation, another major goal of pocl is improving performance portability of OpenCL programs with compiler optimizations, reducing the need for target-dependent manual optimizations. An important part of pocl is a set of LLVM passes used to statically parallelize multiple work-items with the kernel compiler, even in the presence of work-group barriers. This enables static parallelization of the fine-grained static concurrency in the work groups in multiple ways (SIMD, VLIW, superscalar,...).
OSL was developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks for use in its in-house renderer used for feature film animation and visual effects, and is distributed as open source software with the "New BSD" license. It has been used for all the shading on such films as The Amazing Spider-Man, Men in Black III, Hotel Transylvania, and may other films in-progress, and also has been incorporated into several commercial and open source rendering products such as Blender, VRay, and Autodesk Beast.
Open Shading Language (OSL) is a small but rich language for programmable shading in advanced global illumination renderers and other applications, ideal for describing materials, lights, displacement, and pattern generation. It uses LLVM to JIT complex shader networks to x86 code at runtime.
LLVM D Compiler (LDC) is a compiler for the D programming Language. It is based on the DMD frontend and uses LLVM as backend.
Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic language for technical computing. It provides a sophisticated compiler, distributed parallel execution, numerical accuracy, and an extensive mathematical function library. The compiler uses type inference to generate fast code without any type declarations, and uses LLVM's optimization passes and JIT compiler. The Julia Language is designed around multiple dispatch, giving programs a large degree of flexibility. It is ready for use on many kinds of problems.
GHC is an open source compiler and programming suite for Haskell, a lazy functional programming language. It includes an optimizing static compiler generating good code for a variety of platforms, together with an interactive system for convenient, quick development.
FAUST is a compiled language for real-time audio signal processing. The name FAUST stands for Functional AUdio STream. Its programming model combines two approaches: functional programming and block diagram composition. In addition with the C, C++, Java, JavaScript output formats, the Faust compiler can generate LLVM bitcode, and works with LLVM 2.7-3.2.
EmbToolkit provides Linux cross-compiler toolchain/SDK (GCC/binutils/C library (uclibc,eglibc,musl)), a build system for package cross-compilation and optionally various root file systems. It supports ARM and MIPS. There is an ongoing effort to provide a clang+llvm environment for the 3.2 releases,
Crack aims to provide the ease of development of a scripting language with the performance of a compiled language. The language derives concepts from C++, Java and Python, incorporating object-oriented programming, operator overloading and strong typing.
An exciting aspect of LLVM is that it is used as an enabling technology for a lot of other language and tools projects. This section lists some of the projects that have already been updated to work with LLVM 3.2.
This release includes a huge number of bug fixes, performance tweaks and minor improvements. Some of the major improvements and new features are listed in this section.
LLVM 3.2 includes several major changes and big features: Loop Vectorizer.
New implementation of SROA.
New NVPTX back-end (replacing existing PTX back-end) based on NVIDIA sources.
LLVM IR has several new features for better support of new targets and that expose new optimization opportunities: Thread local variables may have a specified TLS model. See the Language Reference Manual.
'TYPE_CODE_FUNCTION_OLD' type code and autoupgrade code for old function attributes format has been removed.
Internal representation of the Attributes class has been converted into a pointer to an opaque object that's uniqued by and stored in the LLVMContext object. The Attributes class then becomes a thin wrapper around this opaque object.
In addition to many minor performance tweaks and bug fixes, this release includes a few major enhancements and additions to the optimizers: Loop Vectorizer - We've added a loop vectorizer and we are now able to vectorize small loops. The loop vectorizer is disabled by default and can be enabled using the -mllvm -vectorize-loops flag. The SIMD vector width can be specified using the flag -mllvm -force-vector-width=4. The default value is 0 which means auto-select.
We can now vectorize this function: unsigned sum_arrays(int *A, int *B, int start, int end) { unsigned sum = 0; for (int i = start; i < end; ++i) sum += A[i] + B[i] + i; return sum; } We vectorize under the following loops: The inner most loops must have a single basic block.
The number of iterations are known before the loop starts to execute.
The loop counter needs to be incremented by one.
The loop trip count can be a variable.
be a variable. Loops do not need to start at zero.
need to start at zero. The induction variable can be used inside the loop.
Loop reductions are supported.
Arrays with affine access pattern do not need to be marked as 'noalias' and are checked at runtime. We vectorize under the following loops: SROA - We’ve re-written SROA to be significantly more powerful and generate code which is much more friendly to the rest of the optimization pipeline. Previously this pass had scaling problems that required it to only operate on relatively small aggregates, and at times it would mistakenly replace a large aggregate with a single very large integer in order to make it a scalar SSA value. The result was a large number of i1024 and i2048 values representing any small stack buffer. These in turn slowed down many subsequent optimization paths. The new SROA pass uses a different algorithm that allows it to only promote to scalars the pieces of the aggregate actively in use. Because of this it doesn’t require any thresholds. It also always deduces the scalar values from the uses of the aggregate rather than the specific LLVM type of the aggregate. These features combine to both optimize more code with the pass but to improve the compile time of many functions dramatically. Branch weight metadata is preserved through more of the optimizer.
The LLVM Machine Code (aka MC) subsystem was created to solve a number of problems in the realm of assembly, disassembly, object file format handling, and a number of other related areas that CPU instruction-set level tools work in. For more information, please see the Intro to the LLVM MC Project Blog Post. Added support for following assembler directives: .ifb , .ifnb , .ifc , .ifnc , .purgem , .rept and .version (ELF) as well as Darwin specific .pushsection , .popsection and .previous .
, , , , , and (ELF) as well as Darwin specific , and . Enhanced handling of .lcomm directive .
. MS style inline assembler: added implementation of the offset and TYPE operators.
Targets can specify minimum supported NOP size for NOP padding.
ELF improvements: added support for generating ELF objects on Windows.
MachO improvements: symbol-difference variables are marked as N_ABS, added direct-to-object attribute for data-in-code markers.
Added support for annotated disassembly output for x86 and arm targets.
Arm support has been improved by adding support for ARM TARGET2 relocation and fixing hadling of ARM-style "$d.*" labels.
Implemented local-exec TLS on PowerPC.
Stack Coloring - We have implemented a new optimization pass to merge stack objects which are used in disjoin areas of the code. This optimization reduces the required stack space significantly, in cases where it is clear to the optimizer that the stack slot is not shared. We use the lifetime markers to tell the codegen that a certain alloca is used within a region. We now merge consecutive loads and stores. We have put a significant amount of work into the code generator infrastructure, which allows us to implement more aggressive algorithms and make it run faster: We added new TableGen infrastructure to support bundling for Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) architectures. TableGen can now automatically generate a deterministic finite automaton from a VLIW target's schedule description which can be queried to determine legal groupings of instructions in a bundle. We have added a new target independent VLIW packetizer based on the DFA infrastructure to group machine instructions into bundles. We have added new TableGen infrastructure to support relationship maps between instructions. This feature enables TableGen to automatically construct a set of relation tables and query functions that can be used to switch between various forms of instructions. For more information, please refer to How To Use Instruction Mappings.
A probability based block placement and code layout algorithm was added to LLVM's code generator. This layout pass supports probabilities derived from static heuristics as well as source code annotations such as __builtin_expect .
New features and major changes in the X86 target include: Small codegen optimizations, especially for AVX2.
New features of the ARM target include: Support and performance tuning for the A6 'Swift' CPU. ARM Integrated Assembler The ARM target now includes a full featured macro assembler, including direct-to-object module support for clang. The assembler is currently enabled by default for Darwin only pending testing and any additional necessary platform specific support for Linux. Full support is included for Thumb1, Thumb2 and ARM modes, along with sub-target and CPU specific extensions for VFP2, VFP3 and NEON. The assembler is Unified Syntax only (see ARM Architecural Reference Manual for details). While there is some, and growing, support for pre-unfied (divided) syntax, there are still significant gaps in that support.
New features and major changes in the MIPS target include: Integrated assembler support: MIPS32 works for both PIC and static, known limitation is the PR14456 where R_MIPS_GPREL16 relocation is generated with the wrong addend. MIPS64 support is incomplete, for example exception handling is not working.
Support for fast calling convention has been added.
Support for Android MIPS toolchain has been added to clang driver.
Added clang driver support for MIPS N32 ABI through "-mabi=n32" option.
MIPS32 and MIPS64 disassembler has been implemented.
Support for compiling programs with large GOTs (exceeding 64kB in size) has been added through llc option "-mxgot".
Added experimental support for MIPS32 DSP intrinsics.
Experimental support for MIPS16 with following limitations: only soft float is supported, C++ exceptions are not supported, large stack frames (> 32000 bytes) are not supported, direct object code emission is not supported only .s .
Standalone assembler (llvm-mc): implementation is in progress and considered experimental.
All classic JIT and MCJIT tests pass on Little and Big Endian MIPS32 platforms.
Inline asm support: all common constraints and operand modifiers have been implemented.
Added tail call optimization support, use llc option "-enable-mips-tail-calls" or clang options "-mllvm -enable-mips-tail-calls"to enable it.
Improved register allocation by removing registers $fp, $gp, $ra and $at from the list of reserved registers.
Long branch expansion pass has been implemented, which expands branch instructions with offsets that do not fit in the 16-bit field.
Cavium Octeon II board is used for testing builds (llvm-mips-linux builder).
Many fixes and changes across LLVM (and Clang) for better compliance with the 64-bit PowerPC ELF Application Binary Interface, interoperability with GCC, and overall 64-bit PowerPC support. Some highlights include: MCJIT support added.
PPC64 relocation support and (small code model) TOC handling added.
Parameter passing and return value fixes (alignment issues, padding, varargs support, proper register usage, odd-sized structure support, float support, extension of return values for i32 return values).
Fixes in spill and reload code for vector registers.
C++ exception handling enabled.
Changes to remediate double-rounding compatibility issues with respect to GCC behavior.
Refactoring to disentangle ppc64-elf-linux ABI from Darwin ppc64 ABI support.
Assorted new test cases and test case fixes (endian and word size issues).
Fixes for big-endian codegen bugs, instruction encodings, and instruction constraints.
Implemented -integrated-as support.
Additional support for Altivec compare operations.
IBM long double support. There have also been code generation improvements for both 32- and 64-bit code. Instruction scheduling support for the Freescale e500mc and e5500 cores has been added.
The PTX back-end has been replaced by the NVPTX back-end, which is based on the LLVM back-end used by NVIDIA in their CUDA (nvcc) and OpenCL compiler. Some highlights include: Compatibility with PTX 3.1 and SM 3.5
Support for NVVM intrinsics as defined in the NVIDIA Compiler SDK
Full compatibility with old PTX back-end, with much greater coverage of LLVM IR Please submit any back-end bugs to the LLVM Bugzilla site.
Added support for custom names for library functions in TargetLibraryInfo.
If you're already an LLVM user or developer with out-of-tree changes based on LLVM 3.2, this section lists some "gotchas" that you may run into upgrading from the previous release. llvm-ld and llvm-stub have been removed, llvm-ld functionality can be partially replaced by llvm-link | opt | {llc | as, llc -filetype=obj} | ld, or fully replaced by Clang.
MCJIT: added support for inline assembly (requires asm parser), added faux remote target execution to lli option '-remote-mcjit'.
In addition, many APIs have changed in this release. Some of the major LLVM API changes are: We've added a new interface for allowing IR-level passes to access target-specific information. A new IR-level pass, called "TargetTransformInfo" provides a number of low-level interfaces. LSR and LowerInvoke already use the new interface. The TargetData structure has been renamed to DataLayout and moved to VMCore to remove a dependency on Target.
In addition, some tools have changed in this release. Some of the changes are: opt: added support for '-mtriple' option.
llvm-mc : - added '-disassemble' support for '-show-inst' and '-show-encoding' options, added '-edis' option to produce annotated disassembly output for X86 and ARM targets.
libprofile: allows the profile data file name to be specified by the LLVMPROF_OUTPUT environment variable.
llvm-objdump: has been changed to display available targets, '-arch' option accepts x86 and x86-64 as valid arch names.
llc and opt: added FMA formation from pairs of FADD + FMUL or FSUB + FMUL enabled by option '-enable-excess-fp-precision' or option '-enable-unsafe-fp-math', option '-fp-contract' controls the creation by optimizations of fused FP by selecting Fast, Standard, or Strict mode.
llc: object file output from llc is no longer considered experimental.
gold plugin: handles Position Independent Executables.
LLVM is generally a production quality compiler, and is used by a broad range of applications and shipping in many products. That said, not every subsystem is as mature as the aggregate, particularly the more obscure targets. If you run into a problem, please check the LLVM bug database and submit a bug if there isn't already one or ask on the LLVMdev list. Known problem areas include: The CellSPU, MSP430, and XCore backends are experimental, and the CellSPU backend will be removed in LLVM 3.3.
The integrated assembler, disassembler, and JIT is not supported by several targets. If an integrated assembler is not supported, then a system assembler is required. For more details, see the Target Features Matrix.
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Unlike Apple, Google and Microsoft, who've had their separate battles with U.S. law enforcement over recent years, BlackBerry hasn't been as strong in its condemnation of potential government overreach in accessing user data. And CEO John Chen today told Forbes the company would comply with court orders asking it to break its encryption and carry out wiretaps on targets specified.
But Chen, speaking at a press Q&A during the BlackBerry Security Summit in London on Tuesday, claimed that it wasn't so simple for BlackBerry to crack its own protections. "Only when the government gives us a court order we will start tracking it. Then the question is: how good is the encryption?
"Today's encryption has got to the point where it's rather difficult, even for ourselves, to break it, to break our own encryption... it's not an easily breakable thing. We will only attempt to do that if we have the right court order. The fact that we will honor the court order doesn't imply we could actually get it done."
That approach appears very different to that of the world's most profitable smartphone company: Apple. It fought the government's attempts to break its security protections, when the FBI demanded it help the agency acquire data from the iPhone of San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook. Many tech giants, including Amazon, Google and Microsoft, signed amicus briefs in support of Apple. BlackBerry did not sign.
Chen also said there were no plans for a transparency report that would reveal more about the company's work with government. "No one has really asked us for it. We don't really have a policy on whether we will do it or not. Just like every major technology company that deals with telecoms, we obviously have quite a number of requests around the world."
The BlackBerry CEO was bullish on his company's operating system security, claiming that not only did the company make the most secure version of Android, but that it was better at protecting user data than Apple and other competitors. The company offers a range of phones running Android, including the KeyOne, DTEK and Priv devices. Chen said the key to the security within its Android devices was its QNX microkernel for Linux, the core of the operating system. "It's highly tested, probably the most secure operating system, both on the approach and the investment that we made in security," the BlackBerry chief added.
The Ontario, Canada-based firm, since a decline in phone sales with the rise of iOS and Android, has looked away from just making phones to focus more on software, security and services. On Tuesday, it announced plans to provide automotive cybersecurity services, providing car manufacturers with additional tools to fight of hackers.
Does BlackBerry have the key?
Whilst Chen's comments would indicate that BlackBerry does not have the keys to access communications flowing through its servers, and would have to create technical measures to circumvent its own security if the law demanded it, the company has faced questions before over what it can provide when orders come in. A Vice investigation last year found evidence Canada's government had obtained "global encryption key" to unlock data on all messages on BlackBerry's BBM platform.
At the time Chen neither confirmed nor denied the claims made in the report, relating to a mafia murder case that lasted from 2010 to 2012. "In the end, the case resulted in a major criminal organization being dismantled. Regarding BlackBerry’s assistance, I can reaffirm that we stood by our lawful access principles," he added, in a broad, non-specific blog post.
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Agency DR Music has announced that the girl group RANIA has recruited a black member named Alexandra to group.
Alexandra, age 21, is a rapper hailing from the U.S. Her father is white and her mother is black. She was born in Kansas and has lived in New York and Texas. She was part of the American record label Def Jam (housing Kanye West, Ludacris, and Justin Beiber, among others currently) starting from when she was 15 years old. Alexandra was preparing to debut with the help of her manager Scott (who formerly managed Rihanna and currently manages Bruno Mars, according to DR Music), when she came to know RANIA and signed on to become an official member.
Alexandra also starred in Jamie Foxx‘s “You Changed Me” music video, and she is said to boast top rapping skills. In regards to her composition skills, she has worked with Alex Dakid,who has worked with Eminem, and JR Rotem, who has worked with Britney Spears.
According to DR Music, Alexandra became interested in K-pop through YouTube and decided to come to Korea and be part of the K-pop scene through this opportunity with RANIA.
Because of visa issues, Alexandra was only able to join the group in Korea last month, but is currently preparing hard to promote with the group and is looking forward to going on TV.
Viewers will be able to start seeing Alexandra performing November 5, through RANIA’s “Demonstrate” comeback on “M!Countdown.”
RANIA has also recruited new members Seulji and Hyemi to the group for its first comeback in about two years.
You can watch RANIA’s latest teaser for “Demonstrate” below.
Source (1)
*While the information released from DR Music states that Alexandra’s mother is white and her father is black, Alexandra’s personal photo states that her mother is black and her father is white.
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To many vegetarians and vegans it’s a mystery: we’re doing our best to be caring and compassionate towards all sentient life, and therefore choose to boycott eating animal products. Isn’t that something commendable? But then why do so many people seem to mock, criticize or even attack vegans and veganism?
Sure, at times we can be a little annoying. We may inconvenience omnivores by making them wait while we inspect labels, or by vetoing their choice of restaurant when we go out for dinner. But this doesn’t really explain the hostility and ridicule that we may encounter at times.
Part of what’s happening here is a phenomenon called do-gooder derogation, or the putting down of morally motivated others.
You may have experienced it yourself as a vegetarian or vegan: without even having said anything at all, meat eaters at the table may get defensive by making fun of you and your “diet”.
Why does this do-gooder derogation happen? The problem is that people will often feel that your behavior (i.e., your eating or being vegan) is an implicit condemnation of theirs (their eating meat). Morally good behavior seems to often come with an implicit moral reproach towards others.
According to researchers who have studied do-gooder derogation, “moral reproach, even implicit, stings because people are particularly sensitive to criticism about their moral standing (…). Because of this concern with retaining a moral identity, morally-motivated minorities may be particularly troubling to the mainstream, and trigger resentment.” The response to this threat to our moral identity, then, is to put down the source of the threat (Minson and Morin).
Merely thinking about how vegetarians see the morality of non-vegetarians can trigger the derogation effect. When meat eaters anticipate moral reproach by vegetarians – i.e., when meat eaters think that vegetarians would morally condemn them – they will tend to increase their derogation.
Now, the biggest problem that should concern us here is not that the ethical consumers (in this case, the vegans) are offended, ridiculed or treated badly, but that the denigrators themselves will be less committed to ethical values in the future. In other words, the negative comparison doesn’t just offend the vegans, but prevents the meat eaters – out of some kind of self protection – from taking steps towards veganism themselves (Zane).
So, to summarize, this is what may happen (worst case scenario).
This is obviously problematic for the spread of vegan values and behavior. So, here are my suggestions to avoid causing non-vegans to feel morally reproached, and thus to derogate vegans and veganism, and thus become more alienated from us and our message.
Don’t “rub it in”. If people often feel guilty already, and experiencing moral reproach alienates them from us and our message, don’t add to their feeling of guilt or moral reproach by further guilt-tripping them. It won’t help (even though sometimes it might be fun or satisfying to us). Don’t only use moral messages and arguments. These can be problematic in the sense that they bring forth more do-gooder derogation than non-moral messages. Non-vegans feel less threatened by people who eat a plant-based diet for health reasons than by ethical vegans. This doesn’t mean you have to stop using ethical arguments; just that also talking about health (or taste) can be strategic and productive. Talk about your own imperfections. We can tell others some of the things we do while we know we shouldn’t. Maybe we talk about how we didn’t change overnight and needed some convincing ourselves. Or we can talk about other domains in which we’re doing less great. It’s important to show others that we’re not different from them, not some kind of alien species with a level of morality or discipline they could never attain. You may want to make explicit the distinction between the act and the person. Choosing to not eat animal products is a morally better choice, but that doesn’t mean that people who are still eating animal products are bad people.
Rather than adding to derogation, alienation and disempowerment, we can do our own part in creating connection and rapport with others.
(Read much more on effective communication in my new book, How to Create a Vegan World).
References
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10 Hottest Upcoming Xbox One Games The Xbox One is finally here. We've got the games you need this holiday season—and beyond. PCMag reviews products independently , but we may earn affiliate commissions from buying links on this page. Terms of use 10
The Xbox One has had one of the most controversial and much-discussed unveilings in the history of videogames. Microsoft's third home video game console was revealed this past spring with an unfortunate focus on sports and television (not the games!), which launched a hellish backlash an a thousand memes. The system was then put through the ringer by journalists and fans alike when its restrictive DRM policies were made public. But Microsoft went on to reverse its policies, so we're all good now, right? Well, we'll see.
Regardless of where you stand on Xbox One, the system is available for purchase this holiday season, thus kicking off yet another console war between Microsoft and Sony (which has a new system of its own, PlayStation 4 ). Fanboys have polluted messageboards and social media venues (even more than usual) with hardware/power debates, but the Xbox One is all about the games. As it should be.
Microsoft and its partners will release several buzz-worthy titles between now and the end of 2014. In fact, many industry observers believe that 2014 is when the Xbox One will find its legs as developers will have had more time with the finalized Microsoft hardware. A weak or ho-hum launch window is typical for video game consoles (only the late, great Sega Dreamcast managed to wow with multiple great titles out of the gate).
If you're looking to pick up an Xbox One console and curious about what's coming down the pipe, take a gander at our slideshow that highlights some of the games that you should keep an eye on post-launch. Many Xbox One launch windows games are multiplatform titles that will appear on PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and Nintendo Wii U, so don't expect a large graphical leap or gameplay leaps between the current generation and the next (that said, the next-gen NBA 2K14 is visually stunning).
Are you planning to pick up any of these Xbox One games? Do you have other titles in mind? Share them with the rest of the class in the comments section below.
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Fans love Bob’s Burgers for its quirkiness, if all of those Tina Belcher memes floating around online are to be believed. But, like, cannibalism quirky? That might be a bit much.
That’s basically what went down when creator Loren Bouchard first brought the idea for the show to Fox executives, as Bouchard explains in The Hollywood Reporter’s new oral history of the show. Bouchard had spent much of his career at Adult Swim—he created both Home Movies and Lucy: The Daughter Of The Devil for the cable sub-network—where that kind of edge was essential. And so he first came to Fox with an idea about a family that owns a burger joint who also dig the long pig:
I originally thought the show should be about a family that runs a restaurant who are cannibals. Very early on, [Fox] said, “Well, do you need the cannibalism?” I had really put it in there because I thought they would want it. I’m coming off of working for Adult Swim, and the darker, more shocking aspect seemed like what you needed in order for an animated idea to cut through the noise.
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In the end, though, Fox executives convinced Bouchard to take the cannibal part out and stick with the family—“I said, ‘Loren, do you want to do 100 episodes’ worth of cannibal jokes?,’” Fox comedy executive Suzanna Makkos says—and the Belchers as we know them today were born. Kind of gives you a different perspective on that Bob’s Burgers cookbook, doesn’t it?
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With the 2015 Rugby World Cup fast approaching, Last Word on Sports looks back at how the participating nations have fared in the previous seven tournaments from the inaugural in 1987 to the most recent in 2011. Today’s focus is Ireland, who have appeared at each of the seven previous Rugby World Cups.
Rugby World Cup History: Ireland
1987
Ireland competed at the first Rugby World Cup as one of the seven International Rugby Football Board members and were drawn in Pool 2 alongside fellow IRFB member Wales and invited nations Canada and Tonga. Ireland did not get off to the best of starts losing 13-6 to Wales, however they bounced back in their second game to see off Canada 46-19. A 32-9 win over Tonga in their final pool game saw the Irish secure qualification to the quarter finals. Facing off against co-host Australia in the quarter finals the Irish were unable to match the Wallabies and were sent crashing out 33-15.
1991
Ireland qualified for the 1991 Rugby World Cup when they reached the quarterfinals in 1987. Drawn in Pool B with Japan, Scotland and Zimbabwe, Ireland got off to a great start winning 55-11 against Zimbabwe. The Irish sealed quarter final qualification in their second game with a win against Japan, leaving them a game against Scotland to determine the pool winner. Ireland were unable to defeat Scotland losing out 24-15 to set up a repeat of the 1987 quarter final against Australia. Ireland put up a gallant effort but in the end the result was the same with the Wallabies running out 19-18 on this occasion.
1995
At the 1995 Rugby World Cup Ireland faced Japan, New Zealand and Wales in Pool C, and had an inauspicious start losing 43-19 to Jonah Lomu and the All Blacks. Ireland bounced back in their second game against Japan running out 50-28 winners, before edging out Wales by a single point to qualify for the quarter finals. Facing France in the quarter finals the Irish were defeated by Les Bleus as the French advanced and the Irish went home.
1999
As only the top three finishers in 1995 automatically qualified for the 1999 World Cup Ireland would need to compete in regional qualifiers to reach the finals. Facing Georgia and Romania, Ireland beat both opponents comfortably to qualify. At the finals Ireland were drawn in Pool 5 with Australia, Romania and USA, and started well defeating the USA 53-8. Facing Australia in their second game Ireland were hoping it would be third time’s a charm having lost both their previous World Cup matches against the Wallabies. Alas it was the same old story as Australia defeated the Irish 23-3. As in qualifying, Ireland defeated Romania, to advance to the quarter final playoff. Facing Argentina for a spot in the quarter finals the Pumas dispatched the Irish 28-24 in a tight game that saw Ireland eliminated.
2003
Ireland defeated Georgia and Russia to qualify for the 2003 World Cup in Australia, and were drawn in Pool A with Argentina, Australia, Namibia and Romania. Ireland started their World Cup well defeating both Romania and Namibia comfortably. Ireland then got revenge on Argentina for their 1999 defeat edging the Pumas 16-15. Facing World Cup nemesis Australia with the winner topping the pool, it was a case of déjà-vu as Ireland lost a close game 17-16. Facing France in a repeat of the 1995 quarter final, Ireland were unable to avenge their defeat from eight years previous as France won 43-21 to advance.
2007
Having qualified by reaching the quarter finals 4 years earlier, Ireland were drawn in Pool D against Argentina, Georgia, France and Namibia. Ireland got off to a good start beating Namibia 32-17, However Georgia gave them a scare taking the lead in the second half before Ireland managed to secure a 14-10 win. Ireland’s campaign then took a turn for the worse as they lost 25-3 to France and then were defeated by Argentina leaving them third in the pool and failing to advance to the knock out stages for the first time.
2011
Despite not making the quarter finals in 2007, third in their pool was good enough for Ireland to qualify for 2011 automatically. Drawn in Pool C with Australia, Italy, Russia and USA, Ireland got off to a good start defeating the Americans 22-10. Ireland then took command of the group and exacted revenge on Australia for four previous World Cup defeats winning 15-6. Comfortable wins against Russia and Italy saw Ireland top the group and advance to the quarter finals. Facing Six Nations rival Wales, Ireland once again found themselves on the wrong side of the score line in a World Cup knock out match, as Wales ran out 22-10 winners.
Ireland have yet to hit top form at a World Cup. Despite advancing from the pool stages in six out of the seven previous World Cups they are yet to win a knockout game. Joe Schmidt’s men will be looking to end that streak at this year’s World Cup, as the Six Nations champions aim to live up to their billing as one of the tournament favourites.
To read more Rugby World Cup History click here
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The United Nations report also criticized Australia’s practice of detaining children, including infants. In 2009, three children under the age of eight were held with their parents at the Villawood facility. The report found that detention had severely impaired the children’s psychological development. The family was finally released last year, after the Australian Security Intelligence Organization revised its assessment.
In making a case for detention, Australia’s immigration department relies on a security assessment of each prisoner, covering everything from espionage to terrorism and people-smuggling. The burden of proof is not high; detention can be upheld even if the A.S.I.O. deems it relatively unlikely that the person under assessment may commit harm. As the organization is not legally required to disclose evidence, little is known about why specific risk designations are upheld. Many detainees do not know the grounds on which they are being held. Because no court or tribunal can independently test the organization’s claims, it is impossible to know whether the detainees are truly dangerous.
The security organization asserts that the Villawood and Maribyrnong prisoners might commit politically motivated acts of violence. In the case of the Tamil detainees, it alleges prior relationships with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the rebel group that carried out attacks and suicide bombings during the Sri Lankan civil war. But few of the detainees fought in that war, and none is alleged to have harmed civilians or committed terrorist acts. Many were nominally associated with the Tigers because they lived in parts of Sri Lanka that fell under Tamil control. One was a civilian lawyer for the Tamils; another dug ditches to shelter civilians. Australia’s immigration department in 2010 and 2011 extraordinarily granted refugee status to all of the detainees; a designation explicitly denied anyone who has committed past acts of terrorism, or who is believed to pose a serious future risk.
Few Australians, it would seem, are troubled by the plight of the detainees. Certainly no sizeable political constituency has expressed concern, perhaps because “boat people” are generally unpopular. But perhaps the larger problem is that, since reporting inside detention centers is restricted, the refugees have largely remained invisible.
Sustained international pressure is therefore essential. Australia cares greatly about its reputation, particularly with democratic peers like Britain, the European Union, Canada, Japan and Indonesia. Even China, Australia’s largest economic partner — and a country whose own human rights record is hardly unblemished — could be a useful lever. During a bilateral human rights dialogue last month, China rebuked Australia’s treatment of the refugees; Australia is sure to come in for even harsher criticism when it appears in July 2015 before the United Nations Human Rights Council.
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Environmental groups are warning that a new European agreement to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by 2030 sets the bar far too low.
The pact — which was reached early Friday in Brussels — makes the European Union the first major bloc of countries to commit to emissions targets ahead of next year’s crucial climate change talks in Paris. At the Paris meeting, world leaders will attempt to hammer out a global agreement that will keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).
The Guardian reports that in addition to their commitment to cut greenhouse emissions by 40 percent, European leaders also agreed to increase the portion of the region’s energy that comes renewable sources to 27 percent by 2030. That provision is legally binding for the E.U. as a whole, but not on a national level, potentially opening the door to disagreements about how to get there. The third notable part of the pact is a plan to increase energy efficiency by 27 percent, but that target is not legally binding.
Oxfam — the global development NGO — slammed the deal as “insufficient,” saying the targets are too low and not enforceable enough. The group’s deputy director of advocacy and campaigns, Natalia Alonso, said in a statement: “Today’s deal must set the floor not the ceiling of European action, and they must arrive in Paris with a more serious offer.” Oxfam called for a much for aggressive policy: 55 percent cuts in emissions.
Greenpeace also criticized the deal, saying the E.U. leaders pulled the “handbrake on clean energy.”
“These targets are too low, slowing down efforts to boost renewable energy and keeping Europe hooked on polluting and expensive fuel,” the group said in a statement.
Greenpeace E.U. Managing Director Mahi Sideridou added, “The global fight against climate change needs radical shock treatment, but what the E.U. is offering is at best a whiff of smelling salts.”
Nevertheless, European leaders hailed the deal as a major breakthrough. “This package is very good news for our fight against climate change,” said Jose Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president.
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, said the pact “will ensure that Europe will be an important player, will be an important party, in future binding commitments of an international climate agreement.”
World Resources Institute, a leading climate policy research group, struck a more conciliatory tone than other environmental groups, while also calling for more aggressive targets. “Despite facing a dismal recession and difficult internal debate, European leaders demonstrated their resolve by staying the course,” said the institute’s director of climate and energy programs, Jennifer Morgan, in a statement. “At the same time, it is clear that all of the targets could have been — and should have been — more ambitious.”
The deal raises the stakes for other countries to get serious about climate commitments ahead of Paris. According to the Guardian, it contains a clause that would trigger a review of the new targets — potentially torpedoing today’s agreement — if other countries don’t come to the table with comparable proposals next year.
It remains unclear precisely what the U.S. government will seek at next year’s negotiations. Early indications suggest the Obama administration is considering a plan that would require countries to limit emissions according to a specific timetable but wouldn’t dictate to individual countries how deep those cuts would be.
This story was produced as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
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Add to that support for instant cloning courtesy of VMFork (previously Project Fargo), and VMware believes its container offerings deliver the best of both worlds: scalability and agility of the cloud native applications, with the security and operational processes that enterprises demand. “It’s all about choice”. As the design partner for caching solutions built on VMware vSphere APIs for IO Filtering, SanDisk collaborated with VMware in the specification and development of this new capability to bring partner technologies into close alignment with vSphere.
“It’s the same vMotion that we have all been familiar with, but now we are able to accelerate, compress and move the VMs live from one location and one domain to another location and domain”, said Raghu Raghuram, VMware’s executive vice president of cloud infrastructure and management. The solution will also empower developers with the flexibility, portability and speed containers deliver. The big feature here is stateful services for containers like storage, as well as integration with software like Docker, Kubernetes, CoreOS Tectonic and Mesosphere Inc.’s Data Center Operating System (DCOS). VMware’s cloud-native technologies will be demonstrated at VMworld (booth #1229).
Photon Platform, meanwhile, is for when you have a critical mass of containerized applications. The Photon OS is for shops that need to run large numbers of containers at scale, with full support for cloud management and elasticity.
The platform is targeted at DevOps teams planning to build out large pools of commodity computing dedicated exclusively to running cloud-native applications, choosing between a range of container frameworks including Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, Mesos and Cloud Foundry that can run on the platform.
Storage could get cheaper as VMware has introduced vCloud Air Object Storage on the Google Cloud Platform.
Supporting Quotes ” Many organizations continue to struggle with making a true transformation to a digital enterprise where differentiation largely occurs in applications and data”, said Matt Eastwood, senior vice president, Enterprise Infrastructure and Datacenter Group, IDC.
“Cloud is an important part of how SAS does business – with our customers and throughout our company”, said Keith Collins, CIO, SAS. The storage-agnostic DataSphere platform features an intelligent policy engine that automatically places data on the right resources across file, block, and object storage to meet evolving application requirements in real time. VMware Photon Controller is expected to be made available as a private beta in Q4 2015. All of our solutions are powered by cloud-based global threat intelligence, the Trend Micro™ Smart Protection Network™ infrastructure, and are supported by over 1,200 threat experts around the globe.
But VMware is one of many proposing ideas in this field. Customers can innovate faster by rapidly developing, automatically delivering and more safely consuming any application. It’s using the capabilities of Project Bonneville to make much of that happen because it’s intended to enable container integrations into VMware vSphere. Will it work? Since VMware uses Linux in ESX and ESXi, it should.
vSphere Integrated Containers enables customers to run traditional and containerised workloads side-by-side on existing infrastructure, according to VMware, and makes use of the lightweight Photon OS, along with Project Bonneville which integrates containers with vSphere.
Plus, VMware is particularly interested in containers, as they represent competition for its flagship vSphere software, or at the very least a trendy technology to run on top of vSphere. Chime in here, and we’ll share the results.
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The man who Germany's foreign intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), listed in its files as Wilhelm Holm belonged to a unique species in the shadowy world of intelligence. The overweight German businessman with the carefully combed dark hair was a so-called "tipper."
Whenever Holm noticed someone during his travels around the world who seemed to have the makings of an agent, he would send a message to BND headquarters in Pullach near Munich. In 1965, for example, after he had spent four weeks in the Bolivian capital La Paz, he raved about a fellow German who had two important virtues: He was apparently a staunch German patriot and a "committed anticommunist" -- something that was practically a badge of honor during the Cold War era.
A few weeks later, the BND hired the new man as an agent. He was given the code name "Adler" (eagle) and the registration number V-43118. "Adler" lived in La Paz under the name Klaus Altmann.
But Altmann wasn't his real name. In reality, he was one of the vilest criminals of the Nazi dictatorship: Klaus Barbie, the notorious "Butcher of Lyon." After the war, French courts sentenced Barbie, the former head of the Gestapo in Lyon, to death in absentia. There are many indications that the BND was aware of all of this when it decided to hire him.
Delight in Torture
Barbie, who was born in 1913, personally tortured men, women and even children on the second floor of the Hotel Terminus in Lyon. The surviving victims remember, most of all, the way Barbie would laugh quietly while he tortured them. The son of a teacher from the town of Bad Godesberg, which is now part of Bonn, Barbie also had his henchman break the arms, legs and several ribs of Jean Moulin, a figurehead of the French Résistance and a confidant of the later French president, Charles de Gaulle. Moulin died soon afterwards. Barbie also ordered the deportation of Jewish children from an orphanage in Izieu near Lyon. The children were shipped to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where they were murdered.
For the last two decades, there have been suspicions that Altmann, alias Barbie, was a spy for Germany's foreign intelligence agency. But those suspicions have only now been confirmed by BND files that SPIEGEL has analyzed in Germany's federal archives in the city of Koblenz. According to the files, Barbie received his first monthly payment, in the amount of 500 deutsche marks, from Pullach in May 1966. He later collected performance bonuses. In most cases, the BND made the payments by wire transfer into an account with the Chartered Bank of London in San Francisco. According to the BND files, Barbie delivered at least 35 reports to the agency.
The arrangement eventually became too dicey for the intelligence agency. There was talk of a "substantial security risk" to the BND, which was apparently increasingly concerned that the East German Stasi or the Soviet KGB could blackmail Barbie by threatening to disclose his Nazi past, as they had already done with a few other BND agents.
His handler, who was code-named Solinger, met with Barbie in Madrid shortly before Christmas in 1966 and told him that, because of the federal government's tight finances, the BND's "budget had been cut significantly." Latin America, Solinger told Barbie, was being abandoned as a "reconnaissance region." Barbie was paid an additional 1,000 deutsche marks in hush money.
Convicted of Crimes against Humanity
For the BND, the "Adler" case was now closed. The spy agency also opted not to notify the German judicial authorities of the whereabouts of Barbie, even though he was a wanted murderer and war criminal.
Barbie's cover wasn't blown until 1972, when he was tracked down by the legendary French Nazi-hunters Beate and Serge Klarsfeld. A diplomatic tug-of-war followed that lasted for years. Bolivia eventually extradited Barbie to France in 1983, where he was convicted of crimes against humanity and imprisoned until his death in 1991.
Today there is no one left at the BND who was responsible for the Barbie case or who could be held responsible. The revelations about the agency's inglorious role in the affair might even come in handy for the current BND president, Ernst Uhrlau. For years, he has wanted to shed more light on the history of the BND in the postwar period, when it employed a number of former Nazis. He is currently negotiating with a historical commission which would be tasked with researching the agency's past and given unprecedented access to its files. Cases like Barbie's reinforce the need for such an initiative.
The Americans declassified extensive intelligence files about Barbie about 30 years ago. The Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), a former intelligence agency within the US Army, hired Barbie after the war and, for a time, protected him from French criminal investigators. In 1951, the Americans even helped Barbie flee to Bolivia. In an unusual turn of events, Washington later issued a formal apology to Paris as a result of these actions.
According to the files, the BND's cooperation with Barbie began with the tip it received from Wilhelm Holm. Of course, some of the former SS men and Gestapo officials who were now with the German intelligence agency must have recognized the new agent from their days in the Third Reich. At least one of them, Emil Augsburg, a former SS expert on Eastern Europe, had worked with Barbie for the CIC. The Gehlen Organization, the precursor to the BND, was also aware of Barbie's address in the Bavarian city of Augsburg until he fled to Bolivia. A BND document dating from 1964 even states that Barbie was "possibly" living in La Paz.
Expanding the Network
At the time the BND, which initially operated only in Europe, was expanding its network of agents around the world and was paying close attention to Bolivia, which was governed by a military junta. The West feared that a revolution against the military leadership could lead to the country becoming part of the Soviet sphere of influence, like Cuba.
Barbie alias Altmann lived with his wife in the Bolivian capital, where he ran a company called La Estrella, which supplied the Boehringer pharmaceutical company in the western German city of Mannheim with cinchona bark, from which the medication quinine was extracted.
In late November 1965, BND tipper Holm paid a visit to Barbie. A mutual acquaintance had set up the meeting. Holm told Barbie that he was looking for an agent for a Hamburg company and asked him whether he would be interested. Barbie apparently trusted his visitor. According to BND documents, the two men became "good friends" within a short period of time. Holm dined with the Barbie family almost every day at their table at the German Club in La Paz.
Of course, the host appears to have concealed his true identity from Holm. "Altmann," the tipper noted, had been with the Waffen SS and had fled from East Germany in 1950. But Holm did not fail to notice the expatriate's political leanings. For example, Barbie alias Altmann told him the story of how Jews had been barred from membership in the German Club. Barbie's wife, who ran the club's library, was "particularly proud" to show Holm its Nazi literature.
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Much in the same way the clones themselves have had to piece together little bits of information to understand the conspiracy that led to their very existence, fans of Orphan Black have been getting some tantalizing teases about season 2 over the past few weeks they can use to piece together what awaits them when the drama returns on April 19 (on BBC America here in the United States, and Space in Canada). First we had that super-rad first look image with Sarah and Rachel doing battle, complete with fresh intel courtesy of show creators Graeme Manson and John Fawcett. Then came word that Suits star (and Orphan Black admirer) Patrick J. Adams would be showing up in a guest spot.
Well, we now have a brand new season 2 Orphan Black teaser to add to the mix. The trailer will air during the big Doctor Who Christmas special on December 25, but we have an early Christmas present for you right here and right now as you can view it in full below! “I’m part of a sisterhood like no other,” says actress extraordinaire Tatiana Maslany in the trailer, while test tubes representing her various clones begin turning into DNA strands. “A piece of a puzzle I can barely comprehend. My life is someone else’s experiment.”
Of course, fans will pore over every second for any hints or clues as to what season 2 has in store, while also counting down the days (not-so) patiently until the show’s return on April 19. In the meantime, take a view for yourself by clicking on the video below. And for more Orphan Black scoop, follow me on Twitter @DaltonRoss.
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Sure, the maze gets boring every so often. And yeah, there's not much variety in the food. But compared to the kill or be killed world of the wild, being a lab rat is a pretty good life. So good, in fact, that researchers at the National Institute on Aging (NIA) believe many lab rats are so overfed they distort research results from experiments intended to help cure everything from cancer to Alzheimer's to, you guessed it, obesity.
According to the NIA, the common practice of allowing lab rats and mice constant access to food, but not exercise, has resulted in some test subjects getting so fat that their health fails as a result. Not only does the high weight of the lab animals compromise any comparisons between the effects of drugs on the animal and the potential effects on a health human, but the animals develop weight-related health problems that researchers mistake for drug side effects or disease symptoms.
To combat this problem, the NIA suggests simple solutions like only feeding the animals every other day or putting a running wheel in the cage with the rats.
Rats and mice are model organisms used as proxies for humans in a wide range of pharmaceutical, behavioral, and genetic experiments. This new finding casts suspicion over an entire body of research. Scientists, doctors, researchers, please, let's get these rodents a personal trainer or something, because I don't want to potentially miss out on a cure for cancer because Micky and Minny didn't want to run some laps.
Nature
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Inappropriate protein aggregation is a key mechanism in the pathogenesis of several neurodegenerative disorders. One of the main strategies by which cells deal with abnormal protein aggregates is autophagy, a degradation pathway for intracellular aggregate-prone proteins. Trehalose, a non-reducing disaccharide which has been utilized extensively in the food industry, has been recently demonstrated to have a number of unique properties that point to its potential utility in preventing neurodegeneration. First, trehalose may act as a potent stabilizer of proteins and is able to preserve protein structural integrity. Second, it is a chaperone and reduces aggregation of pathologically misfolded proteins. Third, it improves the clearance of the mutant proteins which act as autophagy substrates when aberrant protein deposition occurs. Notably, trehalose is an mTOR-independent inducer of autophagy, and in animal models of neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and Huntington's disease, has been shown to decrease the levels of toxic protein aggregates, increase autophagy, and improve clinical symptoms and survival. In summary, mounting experimental evidence suggests that trehalose may prevent neurodegenerative disorders by stabilizing proteins and promoting autophagy. Because of the low toxicity profile that allows for administration for extended periods, human studies of trehalose in preventing neurodegeneration are warranted.
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While trying to figure out what Robin Ventura would bring to the dugout in late March, I wrote a post saying that Ozzie Guillen left him plenty of room to improve on the margins. If Ventura's strategy aligned well, he would be able to clean up a typical Sox game without much help from his players.
Guillen's Sox, especially at the end of his line, became a wasteful enterprise. They ran too much. They bunted too much. They intentionally walked too many batters. They gave up too many steals. When a team freely forfeits that many at-bats, outs and bases in either half-inning, it puts a lot of pressure on the talent. Ventura entered the season running the thinnest White Sox team in years, so he would need to gain advantages elsewhere -- or, at the very least, stop with all the surrendering.
By and large, Ventura has held up his end of the bargain over his first half-season at the helm. He has opted to stay out of the way and let his players win or lose games with their execution at the plate and on the mound. This may not catch anybody off guard, since "low-key" is one of the chief adjectives associated with Ventura.
What's surprising is just how much the players have been able to pitch in. Maybe it's random fluctuation in performance, or maybe it's because Ventura doesn't pay lip service to preseason (and pregame) preparation like his predecessor did, but the Sox aren't undermining themselves nearly as frequently as in seasons past. In some areas, they've made unprecedented and completely unexpected gains.
(For instance, in that March post, I wrote that A.J. Pierzynski was "beyond help" when it comes to slowing down the running game. Well, it turns out you can teach old dogs new tricks.)
Ventura would probably downplay this, since he said his baseball philosophy didn't differ much from Guillen's. That might be true when talking, but it's horsehockey in practice. There are several areas where we can begin to quantify the impact of the strategical shift from Guillen to Ventura, and some stark differences have emerged at the 85-game mark.
Baserunning
2012: 58 steals in 80 attempts (72.5 percent)
58 steals in 80 attempts (72.5 percent) 2011: 33 steals in 65 attempts (50.8 percent)
Thanks to Juan Pierre's overnight transformation into the Little Engine That Couldn't Anymore, Guillen's Sox pulled off a helluva daily double -- they stole the third fewest bases in the first half of 2011, but were thrown out the third-most times. Guillen wanted his Sox to run, regardless of whether they possessed the ability, and they paid for it severely.
This year, the Sox are respectable in all facets of basestealing. They're right around the break-even rate, they're eighth in steals and seventh in efficiency. And they were in even better position before going 4-for-8 over their last 10 games. Perhaps Alex Rios needs to run more, and Alejandro De Aza needs to run less, or maybe it's just a temporary downturn not worthy of specific complaints.
Bunting
2012: 22 sacrifice bunts (t-2nd)
22 sacrifice bunts (t-2nd) 2011: 26 sacrifice bunts (4th)
Coming into the season, I prepared for Ventura to bunt too much. Lots of managers do it, and since he hadn't formed a managerial instinct, he might rely on conventional wisdom. It looked that way early on, especially when the Sox tried bunting six different times in a 14-inning loss to Oakland on April 25. The Sox had six sacrifice bunts over their first 18 games, and it should have been more, but the Sox botched four of them.
Since the bunting binge -- which was so excessive we had to cover it with two posts -- Ventura toned it down. The Sox went from a sac bunt every three games to one every four-plus. At the recent rate, the Sox would be sixth in bunts, not tied for second. That seems fine, especially since bunting is down across the league when compared to 2011.
Still, this seemed like a surprisingly high bunt total for the team itself, as I thought the Sox bunted far less in the first half this year, than they did in 2011. But wait -- sac bunts only count the successful attempts. It doesn't count unsuccessful bunt attempts (ones not put in play, or ones popped up, or simply pulling the bat back and taking a strike, etc.).
Giving it some thought, I figured out one way to take a quick look at how often the Sox are squaring around -- by looking at the number of times the Sox bunted a ball foul with Joe Lefkowitz's Pitch f/x tool. Through 85 games:
2012: 31 foul bunts
31 foul bunts 2011: 81 foul bunts
Theeeeeeeeeeeeere we go. These Sox may drop down sac bunts at a familiar frequency, but they don't make such a spectacle out of it. Hell, Juan Pierre had 30 foul bunts by himself!
Pitching
2012: 10 intentional walks (13th)
10 intentional walks (13th) 2011: 25 intentional walks (1st)
Guillen is an intentional walk addict. Over his eight years with the Sox, they led the league in this category four times, including his last two seasons.
Given that Guillen is an outlier in this category, I didn't think that Ventura would come particularly close to matching him. However, I didn't think that he would take the strategy in the opposite direction. Ventura is surprisingly stingy with calling for four wide, especially considering all those rookie pitchers might cause a manager to be conservative.
Then again, most IBBs are issued by relievers, and the Sox have thrown the fewest relief innings in the AL. Plus, Ventura has leaned heavily on veterans in tight spots (Matt Thornton is on pace for 79 appearances), so perhaps the pitchers he has further minimize any urges.
Defense
This one's in two parts.
2012: .723 DER (third)
.723 DER (third) 2011: .703 DER* (10th)
Last year, the Sox finished with the second-worst defensive efficiency (batted balls converted into outs) in baseball. This year, they're fourth, and a thousandth of a point from being tied for second in the AL. Either way, the defense the Sox deploy is a whole lot better at making outs, and it's easy to see why. The outfield defense is vastly improved with De Aza in center and Rios in right, and Dayan Viciedo's reliable defense is a revelation, too.
(*Because defensive efficiency isn't sortable by halves, I did the simple calculation -- 1.000 minus BABIP allowed -- which gets you almost all the way there.)
2012: 24-for-66 (second-fewest steals allowed)
24-for-66 (second-fewest steals allowed) 2011: 18-for-90 (third-most)
And this one we know very well. Pierzynski is throwing out 31 percent of basestealers, which is his best success rate since his first full season back in 2001. Tyler Flowers has been an even bigger surprise, gunning down eight of 15. And with both catchers, a fair portion of the successful steals have been directly attributed to the pitcher.
Out of all the ways a new manager could have affected the Sox, this one seemed like it was out of his hands. But the Sox did emphasize it during spring training after years of apparent neglect, which is a physical representation of Ventura's philosophy over his first 85 games. He's putting players in a position to succeed, and then getting the hell out of the way.
Of course, the hands-off game strategy works best when guys on the field deliver. Looking at these numbers and a few others (their league-leading .303 batting average with runners in scoring position), and it's evident the players are doing a great job of not forcing his hand. There might be some situations in the second half that require Ventura's intervention, but at the moment, this low-maintenance lifestyle suits everybody just fine.
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A New York Conservative Party lawmaker has been sanctioned for conducting a sexual relationship with a staffer and then retaliating against him when he broke off the affair and accused her of sexual harassment.
A bipartisan ethics panel sent a letter of admonishment to Angela Wozniak, a Cheektowaga conservative, and banned her from employing interns at the conclusion of an investigation that began in July, reported The Buffalo News.
The legislative panel also named an independent investigator to survey employees in Wozniak’s office every six months.
Wozniak, who turns 29 on Friday, was elected in 2011 to succeed former Assemblyman Dennis Gabryszak in the wake of the Democratic lawmaker’s own sexual harassment scandal.
“She ran on a platform of family values based on the conduct of her predecessor,” said Monica Wallace, a Democrat who hopes to face Wozniak in the November election. “I hope to restore voters’ confidence in their government and be a leader they can be proud of.”
The affair between Wozniak, a married mother of one, and her legislative director Elias Farah began as a consensual relationship in early June, the panel found.
She continued to pursue a relationship with Farah after the staffer ended the affair later that month, and Wozniak then confessed to her husband.
The ethics committee learned of sexual harassment allegations July 2 and instructed an outside investigative firm to launch a probe.
The committee warned Wozniak in August not to retaliate against Farah or potential witnesses in the probe, but investigators said she barred her former lover from working in her Cheektowaga office or attending community events.
The panel also found that Wozniak had made false statements about his job performance to someone who had recommended him for another position.
Wozniak’s lawyer later released the accuser’s name to the media and threatened legal action “against anyone who maliciously defamed her.”
Investigators were unable to prove “quid quo pro” or “hostile work environment” sexual harassment, but the panel unanimously agreed Wozniak showed “incredibly poor judgment” by conducting the affair and then trying to damage Farah’s reputation.
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Kotaku East East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond. Tune in every morning from 4am to 8am.
Yes, it's come to this. Sega is no longer making home consoles, but it's now making an anime starring girly personifications of its game hardware.
Previously, Kotaku reported that Sega released a set of character cards called "Segakko" (セガっ子) or "Sega Girls" for its free-to-play PS Vita game Samurai & Dragons.
No word as to when the anime will be shown. As noted on Radio Kaikan, Sega only announced that it was making a Segakko anime.
But can you guess which anime girl is what Sega hardware?
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【新たに10人のボイスキャストも発表】SEGAのゲームハードを美少女に擬人化した『セガ・ハード・ガールズ』アニメ化決定！[Radio Kaikan]
To contact the author of this post, write to bashcraftATkotaku.com or find him on Twitter @Brian_Ashcraft.
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SEATTLE -- The idea was simple enough; one of giving back during the holiday season. Nineteen-year-old college student, Danni Messina, planned to do just that, with one simple tweet, pledging money to St. Jude Children’s Hospital; based on how many favorites and retweets she collected.
What she wasn’t counting on was the power of social media and how one simple pledge can turn into an endless allegiance of kindness.
“It just kept going up and up and, yea, I really did have that moment of omigosh what do I do,” says Messina.
Messina says she had no idea a simple tweet would go so viral so fast.
Messina says she was inspired to raise the money after a friend spent Thanksgiving in the hospital with a family member.
“I realized that is a reality for a lot of people and for a lot of families. These kids are in this amazing place. They are at St. Jude’s, but also they are there for a holiday),” says Messina.
Feeling inspired, she took to Twitter and announced to her then, 600 followers, that she would donate 25 cents per favorite and 50 cents per retweet.
“It was just friends retweeting and then their friends retweeting and then their friends retweeting,” says Messina.
Suddenly, those favorites and retweets really started to add up; hundreds of thousands of them. And a slew of a thousand new Twitter followers, too, translating to roughly over $200,000 -- far exceeding this college student's expectations and $1,000 budget.
“They kept on sharing and I think that was the craziest part of it, like whoa, this many thousands of people saw this tweet and it went viral,” says Messina.
A little overwhelmed by the response, but staying true to her promise, Danni created a Gofundme page. She set a goal for $50,000 and surpassed that number within three days thanks to the generosity of over 800 people.
“It’s like it doesn’t even seem real to me like how it all happened. Hitting the goal today, I called my mom and we both started crying,” says Messina.
Her new goal is to reach that $200,000 mark by Christmas.
“My dad used to say good karma always comes back around, so I’m sticking to that for sure,” says Messina.
St. Jude shared this message from Richard Shadyac Jr., president and CEO of American Lebanese Syrian Associated Charities (ALSAC),with Q13 News:
At St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital we sincerely appreciate the awareness that Danni Messina and her Twitter campaign effort have brought to our mission: Finding cures. Saving children.® Danni’s intentions are pure – and while she has learned a lesson on how quickly a moment can become viral, she also reminds us of the power and importance of helping others and how contagious that spirit is in this season of giving thanks. With our long-standing partners such as Kmart, Tri Delta and others, who over the years have demonstrated extraordinary commitment and generosity, we are working to enable Danni to fulfill her beautiful intentions to help the kids at St. Jude. On this #GivingTuesday, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is grateful for the giving spirit demonstrated by millions of big-hearted people like Danni who help make it a reality that no family will ever receive a bill from St. Jude for treatment, travel, housing, or food. As our founder Danny Thomas stated, “I'd rather have a million people give me a dollar than one give me a million. That way you've got a million people involved.”
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On November 9, 1993, a fully formed collective of outer-borough underground rappers calling themselves the Wu-Tang Clan released their debut record, Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). Loaded with an array of gritty beats, kung-fu film snippets, and masterful flows that alternate between over-the-top hilarious and soul-achingly dark, it changed perceptions of what rap even was and how it could be done. It managed to bridge the gaps between commercial success, cultural viability, and critical acclaim, and stands as a milestone record in the genre. For almost any other group, the next logical step after that kind of success would have been to hit the road, then come back together to try and do it all over again. But not the Wu; they had different designs in mind.
There is hardly a more maligned phenomena in popular music than the solo record: They’re frequently received with reluctance, if not outright scorn, by the public, and approached with a great deal of skepticism. Most listeners don’t want a solo record from an individual member of their favorite band—they want all the members to get back in a room together and make the kind of music that they first fell in love with.
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The history of the solo album is littered with controversial and questionable decisions. Paul McCartney used his eponymous solo debut as a way to announce the breakup of the Beatles. In 1978, all four members of KISS released their own solo efforts, a move that went a long way in causing half the band to quit within a few years. And has anyone even listened to Roger Daltrey’s 1973 solo record? Of course not—even though it has Jimmy Page on it. But for all the solo record’s negative connotations, the Wu-Tang Clan, and their nominal leader, RZA, viewed it as a tool to further their progress toward total music-industry domination.
In 1992, the Clan’s first single, “Protect Ya Neck,” started making its way around the underground circuit before landing in the hands of Loud Records executive Steve Rifkind. As soon as he heard it, he started leaving regular voicemails on RZA’s answering machine to try to bring the group to the label. When RZA finally showed up at his office, the two worked out a totally new kind of deal, whereby the Wu-Tang Clan itself would be signed to Loud, but all nine individual members were free to sign to other labels for whatever independent projects they might like to do.
“What made [the Wu] different from everyone else was that they had RZA, and he was so much smarter than everybody else,” Rifkind later said. For RZA, the reasoning behind the deal was clear as day, and more business-savvy than anyone might have given him credit for. With full confidence in his own abilities as a producer and beat-maker, he spread the unique talents of each member of the Clan around the music industry, snagging as much record advance money and drumming up as much publicity as he could along the way. “When Def Jam wanted to sign Method Man, they wanted to sign Method Man and Old Dirty,” RZA told NPR. “But if I had Old Dirty and Method Man on Def Jam, that’s two key pieces going in the same direction. Whereas there’s the other labels that needed to be infiltrated.”
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RZA surely had a vision, and the success of Enter The Wu-Tang allowed him to put it into action. The first artist up was Method Man, who many believed had the potential to be the Clan’s biggest breakout star. The M-E-T-H-O-D Man received the greatest share of exposure early on by way of his eponymous track, which served as the B-side to “Protect Ya Neck” and was included on the group’s debut; he also voiced the now-iconic refrain “Cash rules everything around me / Cream / Get the money / Dollar dollar bill y’all,” on one of rap’s all-time greatest songs, “C.R.E.A.M.” The fact that he also appeared as the only guest on the Notorious B.I.G.’s debut album, Ready To Die, didn’t hurt, either.
After dipping away for a minute to put out 6 Feet Deep with his side project, horrorcore trio Gravediggaz, RZA got down to work with Method Man on what would be the latter’s solo debut, Tical. For this release, RZA utilized the same gritty sound and dark aesthetic that worked so well on Enter The Wu-Tang. It was a creative well he would return to again and again over the next four years. For his part, Method Man claimed to have remained blissfully unconcerned with outside industry pressures. “I was having fun,” he later said. “I didn’t care about the things that people normally care about like radio play and who’s gonna like this song, who’s gonna like that song.”
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While he may have downplayed his attention to the album’s reception, when Tical dropped in November 1994, it was a far greater success than any of them could have hoped, topping the rap album charts and climbing all the way to No. 4 on the Billboard 200. Audiences continued to go crazy for the cinematic flourishes, grimy soul samples, and harshly authentic but humorous worldview that the members of the Clan cooked up. And if it was humor that listeners wanted, they were about to get more than they bargained for.
No one, either before or since, has ever rapped quite like Ol’ Dirty Bastard. It didn’t matter that RZA and GZA supposedly wrote a good deal of his verses; with ODB, it was all about the delivery. Dirty had lived a rough life. He’d been shot, incarcerated, pilloried by the establishment for swinging by the welfare office to pick up his monthly check in a limousine, and would ultimately die young as a result of a drug overdose. Even as he dealt with legal and drug issues, ODB always maintained his unique style and spit unpredictable verses. In a group featuring nine dynamic personalities, his often loomed largest.
His solo record, Return To The 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version, doesn’t receive the same kind of acclaim that many of the other early Wu-Tang records get, but it’s vintage Dirty all the way through. He was the cousin of RZA and GZA, who shepherded him through the album’s creation, with RZA producing nearly every track and GZA even lending his lyrical support. “Dirty took all their shit and made it his own and GZA ain’t say shit,” Method Man once revealed. “Most of [Dirty’s verses] was GZA’s shit. I remember GZA and ODB got in an argument one night and GZA was like, ‘Nigga most of that shit you say on your fucking album is mines anyway!’”
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Once again, RZA brought his trademark production to the record, his steadying hand giving Dirty all the room he needed to just be himself. His almost singsong delivery was wholly unique and unparalleled at the time, especially in the hardcore realm of rap. The record’s hit single, second track “Shimmy Shimmy Ya,” is the best example of this dynamic. There’s a rhythm and a lyricism to his voice and style that was and remains entirely original.
Return To The 36 Chambers, which hit shelves in March 1995, was a moderate commercial success and a critical darling, though it would end up losing the inaugural Best Rap Album Grammy to Naughty By Nature’s Poverty’s Paradise. While Method Man and Ol’ Dirty Bastard had done a lot in just four months to help develop the cultural visibility of the Wu-Tang Clan, the next two projects would help solidify its legacy as the greatest rap outfit of all time.
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Ask anyone what the best Wu-Tang solo record is, and chances are the answer will be either Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… or GZA’s Liquid Swords, with a smaller contrarian group championing Ghostface Killah’s Supreme Clientele. Proponents of Cuban Linx… cite its sprawling nature and the audible chemistry between Raekwon and Tony Starks, a.k.a. Ghostface Killah, while those who herald Liquid Swords point to the tightness of its production and the matchless rhymes of GZA at the height of his powers.
Cuban Linx… came first, in August 1995, and was styled, like the other solo albums, in such a way as to attract a particular demographic. “The way we had it planned, Meth was first, Dirty was second, then Rae and GZA,” RZA explained. “At that time, it was all my word on how it would go. We attracted the children and the women with Meth; attracted the wild, crazy people not really into philosophy with ODB. Then the real street niggas, the niggas we all were shying away from, we needed to hit them.”
To attain this goal, RZA, Raekwon, and Ghostface tapped into a vast Mafioso lexicon, bringing to their work a whole new slang-infused vocabulary in order to create an image of two gangbangers looking to make one final score. “The theme of the album is two guys that had enough of the negative life and was ready to move on, but had one more sting to pull off,” said RZA. “They’re tired of doing what they doing, but they’re trying to make this last quarter million.”
For Liquid Swords, RZA had a different audience in mind. “I recall telling GZA, you’ll get the college crowd,” he said. At the time, it was universally acknowledged that the GZA, a.k.a. the Genius, was the best, most thoughtful rapper in the Clan. Indeed, one recent study found that he has the second-largest vocabulary in hip-hop history, trailing only Aesop Rock.
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GZA always took a more methodical approach to writing than the rest of the Clan, which shows through on Liquid Swords. “Raekwon and Ghostface can step in and record a song in about 45 minutes,” GZA later commented. “I, on the other hand, would often go back and finish rhymes that I started. I would say I pieced things together [more] slowly then. Songs generally take me two to three days to write. Sometimes I take different sentences and put them together.”
Liquid Swords, while not exactly a concept record, does adhere to a common thread. His songs punctuated by excerpts from the 1980 film Shogun Assassin, the story of a Samurai decapitator who ultimately gets revenge on his former Shogun master, GZA sprinkles in elements of adversarial confrontation, violence, and an attitude of doing what needs to be done. Ever the master wordsmith, GZA adopts the general cadence and framework of “The Night Before Christmas” on the album’s most celebrated track, “Cold World,” to describe what life is like living in the ghetto.
Both albums did well on the charts, with Cuban Linx… debuting at No. 4 on the Billboard 200 and Liquid Swords peaking at No. 9. Both albums would eventually reach gold status, and are still widely considered to be two of the greatest rap records of all time. And perhaps a few more Wu-Tang albums would have reached the same lofty heights of those releases, if not for an act of God.
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In 1994, a massive storm hit the island of Shaolin, a.k.a Staten Island, and rising water flooded RZA’s basement. “I lost 300 beats in the flood,” he said in a 1996 interview with Vibe Magazine. “When the first Wu album came out, we had all the other albums ready. I had the shit with everybody’s names on it, and everybody had at least 15 beats in their section. All that got washed up.” Method Man, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Raekwon, and GZA had all managed to release albums with beats from before the flood, but making the next member’s record would mean starting over.
Ghostface Killah was already well known for his work on Enter The Wu-Tang and as Raekwon’s sidekick on Cuban Linx…, but now it was his turn in the spotlight. His solo debut looked to be a major departure from the finely planned pre-flood releases, however—even down to the way Ghostface’s voice sounded, thanks to the flood wiping away the specific settings on microphone pre-amps that RZA had marked off for each member.
In spite of the challenges, Ghostface, with assists from Raekwon and new-to-the-Wu rapper Cappadonna, came through with a legitimately solid record, Ironman, released in October 1996. RZA again returned to the well of soul music that had brought them success in the past, marrying elements of Al Green, Otis Redding, and Sam Cooke to Ghostface’s stream-of-consciousness rap style. Along with Supreme Clientele and Fishscale, Ironman stands as one of the best albums in Ghostface’s solo career, while also sadly marking the end of the Clan’s unmatched initial run.
After the release of Ironman, the Clan formed like Voltron once again for the double-disc album Wu-Tang Forever, but through a combination of big egos and the residual effects of the flood, the single-minded focus and gritty sonic aesthetic that they’d employed to such great effect over the previous four years evaporated soon thereafter. Members of the Clan began making records outside of the direction of RZA, who made some head-scratching moves of his own with his Bobby Digital series of releases. While the popularity of the Wu-Tang Clan would endure and even increase in the years to come, they would never again reach the sort of critical and commercial heights that they did in those heady years in the mid-’90s.
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By taking a maligned format and making it work in their favor, the Wu-Tang Clan revolutionized rap and paved the way for many of the rap outfits and collectives that would follow in their wake. Acts like G-Unit, A$AP Mob, and Black Hippy, while sonically divergent, all owe a small debt of gratitude to the Clan’s groundbreaking business model. As for the Wu-Tang Clan members themselves, they’ve now graduated to the level of rap emissaries, and while some of their latter-day moves—like the single-copy 2015 release Once Upon A Time In Shaolin and 2014’s A Better Tomorrow—may confound or disappoint, they will forever be loved and respected for their initial run.
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AMC giveth, and it taketh away. With the confirmation that The Walking Dead had been granted a fourth season arrived news that Glen Mazzara, whose incumbency as showrunner coincided with a marked increase in fan satisfaction, was to leave. Mazzara will see out the remaining half of the current season, but owing to a reported "difference of opinion" about how best to approach the fourth season, that'll be his lot.
You won't need reminding that going toe to toe with showrunners is fast becoming AMC's speciality, after the inauspicious removal of TWD's original creative boss, Frank Darabont, halfway through season two, and the network's extended 'negotiations' with Mad Men's Matthew Weiner which led to an eighteen-month hiatus between seasons four and five.
Picking up the mantle for Mazzara on The Walking Dead season four will be supervising producer Scott Gimple, who currently has five episode writing credits to his name: season two's Save The Last One, Pretty Much Dead Already and 18 Miles Out (the latter co-written with Mazzara), in addition to season three's Hounded and forthcoming penultimate instalment This Sorrowful Life. Gimple also provided the screenplay for 2011's Nic Cage extravaganza, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance.
The Walking Dead season three returns to AMC on Sunday the 10th of February with episode nine, The Suicide King.
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Twilight: "Luna and Celestia, you kind of forgot something...."Luna: "Ah, Twilight Sparkle! We request your assistance in dominating our Sister in a War of Wits!"Celestia: "That would indeed SLIGHTLY increase your chances of winning, Luna."Twilight and Luna: "!!!!!!"---------------------------------------Hours later in the depth of "combat"---------------------------------------Luna: "I have been meaning to ask what brought you here to begin with, Twilight Sparkle?"Twilight: "Can't remember, uhhh, CHECK AND MATE!"Celestia: "Indeed it is, Twilight. Excellent!......ooops."Celestia and Luna: *Looks at Eclipse*Twilight: "Oh yeah, THAT."Hello guys how have you been!I thought you might like somethign slightly different, so I added motion to this comic.What do you think?As for the comic, is there any games you've played that have caused you to lose track of time?Mine's Elder Scrolls : OblivionMy Little Pony : Friendship is Magic copyright Hasbro and its AWESOME writers
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GamerGate and the New Misogyny
Jay Allen Blocked Unblock Follow Following Nov 15, 2014
GamerGate is a movement with more different aims than it has members. As a disorganized, headless mass, everyone has their own reasons for participating. These reasons range from proclaiming the diversity of video game players to somehow dealing with supposed radical feminists and “professional victims.” While dealing with supposed corruption in video game journalism is the most popular stated goal, this goal and the people who genuinely believe in it are a smokescreen. GamerGate contains within it the latest incarnation of the same anti-woman hate mob which has been terrorizing women in the game industry for years. Each time, the same participants refine their tactics.
GamerGate started with a different name: Quinnspiracy. Eron Gjoni ended a relationship with game developer Zoe Quinn. This relationship did not end harmoniously. Gjoni wrote a novel-length diatribe about Quinn’s supposed infidelity during their relationship on August 16. This “Zoe Post” warned people to never trust her again, and included baseless accusations that she slept with both coworkers and video game journalists to improve her career. Despite the length, it was packaged to spread easily: Gjoni accused Quinn of cheating on him with five different men, so Gjoni adds the little rhyme of “Five guys?” and “Burgers and Fries,” along with the logo of the Five Guys franchise hamburger chain. Gjoni encapsulated his anger with Quinn in a neatly portable meme, and all he needed was a pulpit and an audience.
He found an audience on the 4chan image board, particularly the board dedicated to video games and the /pol/ politics board. (Despite the name, the latter is mostly given over to open white supremacists.) From there, he connected with anti-feminist YouTubers like MundaneMatt and Internet Aristocrat, with the first videos posted August 18. They launched into action to smear Quinn with these “Quinnspiracy” accusations, with the thin pretext of investigating his baseless accusations. Gjoni found an angry mob willing to help him get revenge on Quinn. A week and a half later, actor Adam Baldwin would link to one of these Quinnspiracy YouTube videos and tag it with “#GamerGate”, giving this angry mob a name.
However, that mob already existed. The pulpit was anti-feminist YouTube. They were already hard at work targeting Anita Sarkeesian, creator of Feminist Frequency, a video series criticizing depictions of women in film and video games. Two YouTubers best known for attacking Sarkeesian, MundaneMatt and Internet Aristocrat, posted videos early on accusing Quinn of being at the heart of a conspiracy to cover up corruption in video game journalism. These accusations spread among their circle of of anti-feminist video bloggers. These bloggers, including others like thunderf00t, Sargon of Akkad, and Jordan Owen, had been attacking Sarkeesian for somehow conspiring to censor video games ever since she funded her “Tropes versus Women in Video Games” series on Kickstarter in May 2012. In anti-feminist YouTube, the cause of “video game corruption” was married to “feminist censorship of video games”. This proto-GamerGate theme of fighting “corruption” in video games, where corruption means the involvement of women or feminists in any way, lasts to this day.
On 4chan, in IRC chat, and on their Github documentation page, GamerGate was intentionally organized into a disorganized mob. Even before it had a name, it was inoculated against becoming anything productive. Anyone who opposed GamerGate is a “SJW” or “Social Justice Warrior,” a derogatory term originally used on Tumblr to refer to aggressive, fight-seeking social justice advocates. GamerGaters were instructed to call out anyone who suggested splitting or reorganizing as shills working for the “SJWs”. They were not to accept any form of negotiation or compromise, as those were SJW tricks to weaken the movement. Above all else, they were taught that the main victory is being as loud as possible for as long as possible, shouting down any opposition. They were directed to use the #gamergate hashtag as often as possible, especially when replying to anyone they disagreed with, to call for help and make contrarians feel isolated and outnumbered. This tactic is taken directly from #tcot, or Top Conservatives on Twitter, a hashtag mostly given over to American Tea Party right-wing political voices.
From very early on, GamerGate was protected against responsibility. 4chan users are long used to changing sides against their own unpopular opinions, and accusing anyone with an unpopular opinion of disingenuously stating their unpopular opinions just to get a rise out of people. This translates directly into GamerGate’s ideas of “false flags”. Any supposed GamerGater who does harass or threaten someone isn’t a true Scotsman, but rather a false flag effort by one of GamerGate’s various enemies or an unspecified third party. This goes so far that GamerGaters regularly accuse Quinn, Sarkeesian, and other people harassed by GamerGaters to be lying, regardless of the evidence presented. GamerGaters protest that they oppose harassment, and cheerfully mob anyone who complains of harassment with accusations of lying and fraud.
Because 4chan users are anonymous and IRC chat is pseudonymous, it’s difficult to tell who was responsible for what. As the mob grew on Twitter, more and more people used well-established Twitter accounts. While most accounts were registered specifically for GamerGate, the few that weren’t are revealing. Various low-profile GamerGaters with years-old accounts also harassed women going back as far as February 2012, including Bioware writer Jennifer Hepler, game critic Samantha Allen, and random users of the #1reasonwhy effort to highlight sexism in video game development. In particular, long-time Sarkeesian harasser Ben “Bendilin” Spurr has been a vocal GamerGate participant. Spurr was the creator of Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian, a game allowing players to batter and bruise Sarkeesian’s face, in August 2012. Despite this, he has proclaimed that “GamerGate does not tolerate harassment”.
Another older anti-feminist effort melded into GamerGate. In June, 4chan’s /pol/ messageboard organized a “culture jamming op,” called Operation Lollipop. They made a number of Twitter accounts pretending to be minorities, particularly black women, to push #endfathersday and #whitescantberaped, to embarass feminists and anti-racists by association. While they were caught and called out, the accounts remained, and participated on both “sides” of GamerGate, both encouraging destructive behavior and antagonizing GamerGaters to make them feel righteous. In this iteration, they have been much more successful, alienating and radicalizing GamerGaters by giving them caricatures of hostile, irrational feminists to hate.
Anti-feminist YouTube attracted a whole new crowd to this mob. Video blogger Jordan Owen teamed up with neoreactionary Davis Aurini to make Sarkeesian Effect, an as-of-yet incomplete documentary about “the progressive infiltration [of the video game industry] by disingenuous ‘Social Justice Warriors’”. Neoreaction is a loose cluster of white supremacist, anti-progressive bloggers who long for a return to monarchy and pre-Enlightenment ideas. Aurini brought with him other Neoreaction bloggers, such as Michael Anissimov of Moreright, as well as an audience of strident reactionaries.
The video bloggers also spread GamerGate to the “manosphere”, misogynist reactionary bloggers. Flagship anti-feminist Men’s Rights publication A Voice For Men has voiced support for GamerGate, and its editor Dean Esmay has been outspoken in support of GamerGate. Self-described pick-up artist Daryush “Roosh V” Valizadeh has also expressed his support of GamerGate, and recently announced that he’s interested in hiring a dedicated GamerGate correspondent for his website, Return of Kings. Conservative voices closer to the mainstream, such as Breitbart columnist Milo Yiannopoulous and self-described “equity feminist” author Christina Hoff Sommers, came along later. While they brought along conservative anti-feminist audiences of their own, by that point GamerGate was already well-formed; they brought legitimacy and fresh outrages.
GamerGate is not a new phenomenon. It’s a hideous, legitimized manifestation of the mobs which have been targeting women in the video game tech world for years now. While it would be easy to write off as a faceless mob, the same organizers and participants recur again and again. GamerGate will eventually end, as the participants lose interest. However, the misogynist movement underlying it isn’t going anywhere. This is the new misogyny, and it’s getting better at what they do every time.
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The Twenty-sixth Amendment (Amendment XXVI) to the United States Constitution prohibits the states and the federal government from using age as a reason for denying the right to vote to citizens of the United States who are at least eighteen years old. It was proposed by Congress on March 23, 1971, and ratified on July 1, 1971, the quickest ratification of an amendment in history.
Various public officials had supported lowering the voting age during the mid-20th century, but were unable to gain the legislative momentum necessary for passing a constitutional amendment. The drive to lower the voting age from 21 to 18 grew across the country during the 1960s, driven in large part by the military draft held during the Vietnam War, as well as the student activism movement. The draft conscripted young men between the ages of 18 and 21 into the armed forces, primarily the U.S. Army, to serve in or support military combat operations in Vietnam.[1] A common slogan of proponents of lowering the voting age was "old enough to fight, old enough to vote."
Congress lowered the national voting age to 18 in a 1970 bill that extended the Voting Rights Act, but the Supreme Court subsequently held in the case of Oregon v. Mitchell that Congress could not lower the voting age for state and local elections. Shortly after that ruling, Congress proposed and the states ratified the Twenty-sixth Amendment, which constitutionally enshrined voting rights for individuals between 18 and 21 years old.
Text [ edit ]
Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age. Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.[2]
Background [ edit ]
Prior legislation [ edit ]
Senator Harley Kilgore began advocating for a lowered voting age in 1941 in the 77th Congress.[3] Despite the support of fellow senators, representatives, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Congress failed to pass any national change. However, public interest in lowering the vote became a topic of interest at the local level. In 1943 and 1955 respectively, the Georgia and Kentucky legislatures passed measures to lower the voting age to 18.[4]
President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his 1954 State of the Union address, became the first president to publicly support prohibiting age-based denials of suffrage for those 18 and older.[5] During the 1960s, both Congress and the state legislatures came under increasing pressure to lower the minimum voting age from 21 to 18. This was in large part due to the Vietnam War, in which many young men who were ineligible to vote were conscripted to fight in the war, thus lacking any means to influence the people sending them off to risk their lives. "Old enough to fight, old enough to vote" was a common slogan used by proponents of lowering the voting age. The slogan traced its roots to World War II, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt lowered the military draft age to eighteen.
In 1963, the President's Commission on Registration and Voting Participation, in its report to President Johnson, further encouraged considering lowering the voting age. Historian Thomas H. Neale argues that the move to lower the voting age followed a historical pattern similar to other extensions of the franchise; with the escalation of the war in Vietnam, constituents were mobilized and eventually a constitutional amendment passed.[6]
In 1970, Senator Ted Kennedy proposed amending the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to lower the voting age nationally.[7] On June 22, 1970, President Richard Nixon signed an extension of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that required the voting age to be 18 in all federal, state, and local elections.[8] In his statement on signing the extension, Nixon said:
Despite my misgivings about the constitutionality of this one provision, I have signed the bill. I have directed the Attorney General to cooperate fully in expediting a swift court test of the constitutionality of the 18-year-old provision.[9]
Subsequently, Oregon and Texas challenged the law in court, and the case came before the Supreme Court in 1970 as Oregon v. Mitchell.[10] By this time, four states had a minimum voting age below 21: Georgia, Kentucky, Alaska and Hawaii.[11][12]
Oregon v. Mitchell [ edit ]
During debate of the 1970 extension of the Voting Rights Act, Senator Ted Kennedy argued that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment allowed Congress to pass national legislation lowering the voting age. In the 1966 decision of Katzenbach v. Morgan, the Supreme Court had ruled that "if Congress acts to enforce the 14th Amendment by passing a law declaring that a type of state law discriminates against a certain class of persons, the Supreme Court will let the law stand if the justices can 'perceive a basis' for Congress's actions".[13]
President Nixon disagreed with Kennedy. In a letter to the Speaker of the House and the House minority and majority leaders, he asserted that the issue is not whether the voting age should be lowered, but how; in his own interpretation of the Katzenbach case, Nixon argued that to include age as something discriminatory would be too big a stretch and voiced concerns that the damage of a Supreme Court decision to overturn the Voting Rights Act could be disastrous.[14]
In Oregon v. Mitchell (1970), the Supreme Court considered whether the voting-age provisions Congress added to the Voting Rights Act in 1970 were constitutional. The Court struck down the provisions that established 18 as the voting age in state and local elections. However, the Court upheld the provision establishing the voting age as 18 in federal elections. The Court was deeply divided in this case, and a majority of justices did not agree on a rationale for the holding.[15][16]
The decision resulted in states being able to maintain 21 as the voting age in state and local elections, but being required to establish separate voter rolls so that voters between 18 and 20 years old could vote in federal elections.[17]
Opposition [ edit ]
Although the Twenty-sixth Amendment passed faster than any other constitutional amendment, about 17 states refused to pass measures to lower their minimum voting ages after Nixon signed the 1970 extension to the Voting Rights Act.[3] Opponents to extending the vote to youths questioned the maturity and responsibility of people at the age of 18. Professor William G. Carleton wondered why the vote was proposed for youth at a time when the period of adolescence had grown so substantially rather than in the past when people had more responsibilities at earlier ages.[18] Carleton further criticized the move to lower the vote citing American preoccupations with youth in general, exaggerated reliance on higher education, and equating technological savvy with responsibility and intelligence.[19] He denounced the military service argument as well, calling it a "cliche".[20] Considering the ages of soldiers in the Civil War, he asserted that literacy and education were not the grounds for limiting voting; rather, common sense and the capacity to understand the political system grounded voting age restrictions.[21]
James J. Kilpatrick, a political columnist, asserted that the states were "extorted into ratifying the Twenty-sixth Amendment".[22] In his article, he claims that by passing the 1970 extension to the Voting Rights Act, Congress effectively forced the States to ratify the amendment lest they be forced to financially and bureaucratically cope with maintaining two voting registers. George Gallup also mentions the cost of registration in his article showing percentages favoring or opposing the amendment, and he draws particular attention to the lower rates of support among adults aged 30–49 and over 50 (57% and 52% respectively) as opposed to those aged 18–20 and 21–29 (84% and 73% respectively).[23]
Proposal and ratification [ edit ]
Passage by Congress [ edit ]
On March 10, 1971, the Senate voted 94–0 in favor of proposing a Constitutional amendment to guarantee that the minimum voting age could not be higher than 18.[24] On March 23, 1971, the House of Representatives voted 401–19 in favor of the proposed amendment.[25]
Ratification by the states [ edit ]
Having been passed by the 92nd United States Congress, the proposed Twenty-sixth Amendment was sent to the state legislatures for their consideration. Ratification was completed on July 1, 1971, after the amendment had been ratified by the following thirty-eight states:[26]
Connecticut: March 23, 1971 Delaware: March 23, 1971 Minnesota: March 23, 1971 Tennessee: March 23, 1971 Washington: March 23, 1971 Hawaii: March 24, 1971 Massachusetts: March 24, 1971 Montana: March 29, 1971 Arkansas: March 30, 1971 Idaho: March 30, 1971 Iowa: March 30, 1971 Nebraska: April 2, 1971 New Jersey: April 3, 1971 Kansas: April 7, 1971 Michigan: April 7, 1971 Alaska: April 8, 1971 Maryland: April 8, 1971 Indiana: April 8, 1971 Maine: April 9, 1971 Vermont: April 16, 1971 Louisiana: April 17, 1971 California: April 19, 1971 Colorado: April 27, 1971 Pennsylvania: April 27, 1971 Texas: April 27, 1971 South Carolina: April 28, 1971 West Virginia: April 28, 1971 New Hampshire: May 13, 1971 Arizona: May 14, 1971 Rhode Island: May 27, 1971 New York: June 2, 1971 Oregon: June 4, 1971 Missouri: June 14, 1971 Wisconsin: June 22, 1971 Illinois: June 29, 1971 Alabama: June 30, 1971 Ohio: June 30, 1971 North Carolina: July 1, 1971
Having been ratified by three-fourths of the States (38), the Twenty-sixth Amendment became part of the Constitution. On July 5, 1971, the Administrator of General Services, Robert Kunzig, certified its adoption. President Nixon and Julianne Jones, Joseph W. Loyd Jr., and Paul S. Larimer of the "Young Americans in Concert" also signed the certificate as witnesses. During the signing ceremony, held in the East Room of the White House, Nixon talked about his confidence in the youth of America.
As I meet with this group today, I sense that we can have confidence that America's new voters, America's young generation, will provide what America needs as we approach our 200th birthday, not just strength and not just wealth but the 'Spirit of '76' a spirit of moral courage, a spirit of high idealism in which we believe in the American dream, but in which we realize that the American dream can never be fulfilled until every American has an equal chance to fulfill it in their own life.[27]
The amendment was subsequently ratified by the following states, bringing the total number of ratifying states to forty-three:[26]
39. Oklahoma: July 1, 1971 40. Virginia: July 8, 1971 41. Wyoming: July 8, 1971 42. Georgia: October 4, 1971 43. South Dakota: March 4, 2014[28]
No action has been taken on the amendment by the states of Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, or Utah.
See also [ edit ]
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This article is over 2 years old
Socceroos coach Ange Postecoglou has demanded A-League expansion – and soon – to cater for what he sees as incredible growth in the sport.
Postecoglou has used his soon-to-be published book, ‘Changing the Game’, to challenge the sport’s decision-makers, issuing a call to arms to grow the league.
Those decision-makers, Football Federation Australia, are also his employers as national team boss.
Postecoglou: some European leagues 'very poor' compared to A-League Read more
But the Asian Cup-winning coach hasn’t cut the governing body any slack in comments that are likely to help hurry the pace of A-League expansion on the eve of the new season.
“Consolidating at a time of growth seems counterintuitive to me. We should be right in the middle of an investment boom,” he writes.
“The A-League is a great product but it can’t be what Australia needs it to be with just ten teams.
“It may be enough for a financial model in a boardroom but it’s out of whack with the reality of the opportunity.”
Postecoglou details his ideal Australian competition – with 15 or 16 teams, derbies in each state, running from August or September to May including finals.
“I’d be getting there as fast as I could. I’d be breaking doors down to make it happen,” he writes.
“Football seems to be in an introspective mode at the moment. We’re head down, dealing with today’s problems.
“What are we waiting for? Let’s get it done.”
Postecoglou does not address a possible two-tier system, with promotion and relegation, which is impossible until 2034 at the earliest given the licenses of A-League clubs.
Speaking ahead of the book’s launch on October 3, Postecoglou said he was eager to remove a cap on talent and enthusiasm.
“My push comes from a pretty simple, basic premise. More and more people are loving the game and playing the game,” he told AAP.
“The one thing you don’t want to do is deny young boys and girls, people that want to play the game and support the game, the opportunity to do so because of limited spots.”
Changing the Game, written with Andy Harper, details Postecoglou’s rise – and setbacks – on the road to becoming Socceroos coach.
But he isn’t shy of offering an opinion on the state of the sport.
Postecoglou also savaged his employers for their money-grabbing approach to staging the 2015 FFA Cup final.
The competition decider, won by Melbourne Victory over Perth Glory, was witnessed by a half-empty AAMI Park with just 15,098 people last November.
The Socceroos coach called it “a classic example” of the sport’s decision-makers putting profit before sense.
“What’s more important, money in the bank or the opportunity to sell out the stadium and make a statement?” he writes.
“Deciding in favour of the balance sheet is consolidation, not a growth strategy.”
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The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has announced that it is soliciting proposals for research into whether living "predatory" bacteria could be used to treat humans or animals infected with biological agents such as plague, Q fever or tularemia.
As DARPA explains:
This approach would represent a significant departure from conventional antibacterial therapies that rely on small molecule antibiotics. While antibiotics have been remarkably effective in the past, their widespread use has led to the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections that are difficult or impossible to treat. In vitro studies have shown that predators such as Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus and Micavibrio aeruginosavorus can prey upon more than one hundred different human pathogens and will also prey on multi-drug resistant bacteria.
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The idea of using "living antiobiotics" has been discussed in scientific literature for years, but there are significant practical obstacles to overcome. As the DARPA solicitation makes clear, researchers will have to address three key questions:
Are predators toxic to recipient (host) organisms? Against what pathogens (prey) are predators effective? Can pathogens develop resistance to predation?
You can read a complete description of the DARPA project, "Pathogen Predators" at the Federal Business Opportunities website.
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[Image: The predatory bacterium Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus, via the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology]
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A man in Sandy Springs was arrested after police said he held eight women against their will in a nearly $1 million home.
Just before 8 a.m. Tuesday, officers responded to a 911 call from a woman who asked for help leaving a residence in the 100 block of Strauss Lane, Sgt. Sam Worsham said Wednesday.
When they got to the 6,806-square-foot home, officers assisted the women in leaving the residence, Worsham said. It was not immediately clear how long they had been in the house.
“I’m in a very bad situation, and I need to get help,” the caller told the police dispatcher.
The FBI and Sandy Springs investigators arrested 33-year-old Kenndric Roberts on Wednesday on charges of false imprisonment and trafficking of persons for labor, Worsham said.
Roberts is in the Fulton County jail, police said. His first appearance in court will be at 11 a.m. Thursday in Fulton, according to Tracy Flanagan of the sheriff’s office.
The woman who called police said she met Roberts through the website seekingarrangement.com.
None of the women required medical attention, Channel 2 Action News reported.
Kenndric Roberts (Credit: Fulton County Sheriff's Office)
According to Fulton County property records, the $976,300 residence has five bedrooms and five-and-a-half bathrooms.
The house was rented, according to Mark Feinberg, president of the homeowners association.
Home association president Mark Feinberg talks about home where police say eight women were held against their will. Video by John Spink / AJC
“They (the house’s owners) were out of town when this broke, and I haven’t spoken to them directly,” he said.
Feinberg said the association has had “a number of complaints” from homeowners about “the number of cars coming in and out” of the house.
“It’s a sad state of affairs. It’s 2017, and these types of things are still going on.”
The same house was the scene of a property retrieval in a domestic dispute in July, police confirmed.
In other news:
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There are a number of ways that an NBA player knows that he’s become a star. He could get voted to an All-Star. He could help his team win a championship. Or, he could land some major endorsements. But, the true testament of a basketball player’s popularity is if he receives a signature pair of kicks.
Over the years, you can probably tell which players have become legends because of their shoes. Some, like Michael Jordan, are not only known for their skills on the court, but also the shoes that were named after them.
There are lots of players to choose from, but here are 20 NBA Players Who Have Shoes Named After Them.
20. Stephon Marbury
In 2006, Stephon Marbury of the New York Knicks teamed up with Steve & Barry’s for a lineup of $14.98 basketball shoes to compete with higher-priced products endorsed by celebrity athletes. Both parties claimed that the shoes were of the same quality as expensive counterparts.
19. Yao Ming
After the Houston Rockets signed the 7-ft. 5 Yao, Reebok was quick to cash in on the number one overall pick in the 2002 Draft. The Chinese native wore his first shoe during his rookie season, but the Yao Ming Reebok Hexride featuring a red and gold dragon for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing might be our favorite.
18. Dikembe Mutombo
The 7-ft. 2 native of Zaire, now Congo, received his own shoes while with the Denver Nuggets during the 1992/93 NBA season. Released by adidas, the Mutombos were a retro high-top with TPU lace tabs and a funky Cross-Colours motif that reflected his homeland.
17. Kevin Garnett
KG was given his first shoe, the Nike Air Garnett in 1998 in Minnesota Timberwolves colors. After three signature shoes, Nike used KG to push the Flightposite line and its sleek design and futuristic technology. In 2008, Garnett left The Swoosh for adidas.
For NIKE Latest Clothing Line Collection – Press Here !!
16. Scottie Pippen
Despite being overshadowed by MJ, Scottie Pippen held his own in the shoe department. After the Bulls star rocked the Nike Air Flight Lite during the 1990 / 91 season, Pippen was rewarded with his own the Nike Air Pippen 1, which has become a favorite amongst collectors.
15. Tracy McGrady
While playing with the Orlando Magic in 2002, T-Mac received his first shoe. The adidas T-Mac 1 debuted later that year and was so popular that it helped adidas compete with rivals Nike and Reebok.
14. Kevin Durant
The OKC Thunder superstar was rewarded by a seven-year deal with Nike with his own signature shoe line. The line has since become a favorite amongst sneakerheads and is already on the Nike Zoom KD VI.
13. Dwight Howard
After being drafted by the Orlando Magic in 2004, the high-school sensation quickly got his own shoes, the a3 Superstar Ultra II by adidas. These high tops are remembered for the “D12H” embroidery near the forefoot.
12. Dwyane Wade
When Dwyane Wade entered the NBA in 2003, he was endorsed by Converse. After six years with the brand, Wade switched to Converse’s brother label, Jordan. Wade debuted a couple iterations of the iconic Air Jordan shoes before joining Li-Ning in 2012. The partnership will allow the Heat star to start his own brand of shoes.
11. Chris Paul
While he was still with New Orleans, the Jordan Brand dropped Chris Paul’s first signature shoe in February of 2008. Since then, Jordan continues to release the CP line. Paul even rocked the Air Jordan XX3 Player Edition, which was made specifically for him.
See also NBA Stars With the Greatest Signature Shoes
10. Vince Carter
The Puma Vinsanity was unleashed during the 1998 / 99 season, but that was only a one-time deal. Carter spent the next season with his only adidas shoe, And1 Tai Chi, before sticking with The Swoosh. His first Nike release was the Nike Shox BB4.
9. Derrick Rose
Rose signed with adidas after being drafted by the Bulls in 2008, but he didn’t get his first signature shoe until 2010 with the adidas adiZero Rose. The black/red/white colorway shoe was just the first of many for the brand’s main roster member.
8. Carmelo Anthony
Melo has been a member of the Jordan Brand since he was drafted by Denver in 2003. Air Melo Line has since become one of the best-selling shoes of the brand and has released nine different versions. His first official signature, the Melo 1.5, is celebrating its 10th Anniversary, which means it’s time for a retro.
7. Charles Barkley
Sir Charles signed with The Swoosh back in 1984, which also resulted in classics ads like the “I Am Not a Role Model” spot. During his career with the Sixers and Suns, Barkley released several signature shoes, like the Nike Air Max. In 2013, Nike unveiled the Barkley Posite Max.
6. Shaquille O’Neal
Reebok signed the 7-ft. 1 in Shaq and began releasing his signature shoes in 1992. The Shaq Attaqs may have launched O’Neal’s entry into the sneaker world, but the Reebok Shaqnosis, originally released in 1995, made his shoes legendary. Reebok Classic is now re-releasing Shaq’s signature kicks.
For REEBOK Latest Clothing Line Collection – Press Here !!
5. Allen Iverson
The former 76er teamed up with Reebok in 1996 for the iconic Question. AI’s first signature became a favorite amongst fans and is one of the best-selling basketball shoes of all time. The Question was followed by The Answer and both shoes have had plenty of re-releases.
4. Julius Erving
Soon after the ABA/NBA merger in 1976, Dr. J inked an endorsement deal with Converse, which made him the first pro basketball player to officially endorse a sneaker. His signature was featured on the revolutionary Pro Leather, also known as “The Dr. J,” which remains one of the brand’s most popular silhouettes. Erving sported Converse throughout the remainder of his career, including the Sixers Championship in 1983.
3. Kobe Bryant
During his rookie year in 1997, Kobe rocked the adidas EQT Elevation. The following season, he had his first signature shoe, the KB8. In 2004, Kobe joined The Swoosh and was wearing the Nike Air Zoom Huarache 2K4. In 2006, the Nike Zoom Kobe I dropped, and the rest is history.
2. LeBron James
LBJ was already making waves before he was drafted by the Cavs in 2003, which is why Nike signed him to a $90-million endorsement deal before he even set foot in the NBA. Nike gave the King his own signature line of kicks, the Nike Air Zoom Generations, during his rookie season. Today, LeBron is one of the three signature athletes that represent Nike Basketball and who is already up to releasing the LeBron XI.
1. Michael Jordan
His Airness had his first signature shoe, the Air Jordan, released in 1985. Today, the Air Jordan is one of the most popular and iconic shoes of all time. It’s so large now that Nike had to expand Air Jordan into its own separate brand.
See also The History of the First Air Jordan Shoe.
NBA stars’ photos via Image Collect
Just a typical guy that wants an ice-cold PBR with some pizza and wings to go with football on a Sunday. Since venturing into the blogosphere many years ago to discuss his favorite tunes, Al has now moved onto online publications by Alpha Brand Media such as SoJones and AMOG to blab about anything and everything else that matters.
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Mike Dubke will leave his post as White House communications director after three months in the job, amid frustration from President Trump over his administration's communication operation. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)
Mike Dubke has resigned as White House communications director in the first of what could be a series of changes to President Trump's senior staff amid the growing Russia scandal.
Dubke, who served in the post for three months, tendered his resignation May 18. He offered to stay on to help manage communications in Washington during Trump's foreign trip, and the president accepted.
Dubke's last day on the job has not been determined. But it could be as early as Tuesday, when he was expected to meet with his staff at the White House, said a senior administration official, who required anonymity to discuss a personnel move that has not yet been formally announced.
Dubke's resignation was first reported by Mike Allen of Axios in his Tuesday morning newsletter.
In an email to friends and associates on Tuesday morning, Dubke wrote: “It has been my great honor to serve President Trump and this administration. It has also been my distinct pleasure to work side-by-side, day-by-day with the staff of the communications and press departments.”
White House chief of staff Reince Priebus said in a statement: “I want to thank Mike Dubke for his service to President Trump and this administration. We appreciate Mike and are very grateful for his service to President Trump and our country. Mike tendered his resignation just before the president's historic international trip and offered to remain on board until a transition is concluded. Mike will assist with the transition and be a strong advocate for the president and the president's policies moving forward.”
Dubke, 47, who has worked closely with White House press secretary Sean Spicer, served as a behind-the-scenes player helping manage communications strategy and responses to crises such as the firing of James B. Comey as FBI director, as well as rollout plans for policy and other initiatives.
The communications operation — and Dubke and Spicer specifically — have come under sharp criticism from Trump and many senior officials in the West Wing, who believe the president has been poorly served by his staff, in particular in the aftermath of the Comey firing.
Mike Dubke, right, then-White House communications director, at a news conference in the East Room of the White House in April. Also pictured are White House press secretary Sean Spicer, left, and assistant to the president and director of White House social media Dan Scavino. (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
[Trump hires Mike Dubke as White House communications director]
Dubke was the rare Trump newcomer in a White House in which personal relationships and proximity to the president are the currency. He arrived in mid-February, a few weeks into Trump's term, and struggled to build alliances with some colleagues on the senior staff, not having worked on Trump's campaign or his transition team.
Jason Miller, the Trump campaign's senior communications adviser, was slated to serve as communications director in the White House, but he stepped aside a few weeks before Inauguration Day, saying he wanted to spend more time with his family.
During the first few weeks of the presidency, Spicer held the dual roles of press secretary and communications director, but it became too much for him. Dubke was then hired to fulfill the communications director responsibilities.
Dubke previously was a Republican strategist who founded Crossroads Media and had long ties to party establishment figures, including strategist Karl Rove.
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The official website of the Aria the Avvenire (Aria the Arrived) anime project began streaming a teaser video for the anime on Sunday. The video reveals that the main cast of previous Aria anime projects will return. The video also previews music from the group Choro Club feat. Senoo, who composed some of the music from previous Aria anime.
Girl and Text: Now, let us experience our futures together.
Original creator: Kozue Amano
Director: Junichi Sato
Text: A healing story about the future.
Text: A completely new animation.
Girl: Aria the Avvenire.
Girl and Text: Premiering September 26.
Girl and Text: To that beautiful curtain call...
The returning main cast includes:
Erino Hazuki as Akari Mizunashi
Chiwa Saito as Aika S. Granzchesta
Ryou Hirohashi as Alice Carroll
Sayaka Ohara as Alicia Florence
Chinami Nishimura as President Aria
Junko Minagawa as Akira E. Ferrari
Kaori Mizuhashi as Ai
Late voice actress Tomoko Kawakami as Athena Glory
The anime will premiere in a special screening event on September 26.
Mag Garden first revealed Aria the Avvenire in February via a new website, although the company removed the website soon afterward. Junichi Sato (Kaleido Star, Pretear, Sailor Moon) is again directing the anime at the studio TYO Animations. Sato is also in charge of series composition. The anime will also feature the return of Reiko Yoshida (Tokyo Mew Mew, Bakuman.), who will handle scripts. Masayuki Onji is designing the characters. Amano is designing some new characters that will appear in the anime. The staff will announce more information about the new characters at a later date.
Shochiku is producing the anime as part of the larger "Ao no Curtain Call" (Blue Curtain Call) project, which celebrates 10 years since the broadcast of the first Aria anime. The new animation's format has not been specified. The official website for the anime also previously revealed that "all Aria television series" will also receive a Blu-ray Box release in Japan as part of the same project.
Animation studio Hal Film maker produced the first anime series Aria the Animation , and the series inspired two more television series in 2006 and 2008, as well as an original video anime in 2007. All three television series and the OVA starred Erino Hazuki as the protagonist Akari, Junko Minagawa as Alice, Kaori Mizuhashi as Ai, and Chiwa Saito as Aika, among others.
Right Stuf has licensed the three television series as well as the OVA in North America. ADV Manga released the first three of 12 total volumes of the original Aria manga series in North America, then Tokyopop released the first six volumes. Tokyopop also released the two-volume Aqua prequel manga in North America.
Images © 2015 Kozue Amano / MAG Garden・ARIA Company
Source: Comic Natalie
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TIMES WATCHDOG | An analysis by investigative journalists at ProPublica, with cooperation from The Seattle Times, finds that half of top doctors in Washington accept payments from the medical industry, and those who do are twice as likely to prescribe brand-name medications at high rates.
About half of doctors in top specialties in Washington state accept payments from pharmaceutical firms and medical-device makers, far less than their peers nationwide. But those who take the cash are nearly twice as likely as those who don’t to prescribe brand-name drugs at high rates.
That’s according to an analysis from the investigative journalism organization ProPublica, with cooperation from The Seattle Times, which provides evidence for the first time that doctors who accept payments prescribe drugs differently on average than those who don’t.
Doctors have long rejected the idea that the money they receive from pharmaceutical firms has any relationship to the way they prescribe drugs.
In Seattle, HIV expert Dr. Peter Shalit, 62, said there’s little link between the nearly $189,000 he received from the industry in 2014, mostly in consulting and speaking fees, and his very high rate of prescriptions for brand-name drugs.
Yes, about 55 percent of his scripts were for name brands in 2014, more than twice that of his peers in internal medicine. But they’re mostly for his patients with HIV/AIDS, who have few generic alternatives, he said.
Shalit also lends his prescribing authority to chain stores such as Walgreens and Fred Meyer to allow them to dispense vaccines, adding thousands of doses of brand-name Tdap and shingles shots to his tally.
“It’s a very crude analysis because it doesn’t show the full picture,” he said. “I’m an outlier. I’ve been dropped from insurance plans for that.”
The examination by ProPublica, and a review by The Seattle Times, finds there is, overall, a relationship between payments to doctors and prescribing practices.
Doctors in the U.S. and in Washington state who received payments from the medical industry prescribed a higher percentage of drugs overall than those who didn’t. And the more money they received, the more name-brand medications they tended to prescribe, the analysis showed.
ProPublica matched records of payments from pharmaceutical firms and medical-device makers in 2014 with corresponding data on doctors’ medication claims in Medicare’s prescription-drug program. (Read their methodology here.)
They looked at doctors in the five top specialties — family medicine, internal medicine, cardiology, psychiatry and ophthalmology — who wrote more than 1,000 prescriptions for Medicare Part D patients in 2014.
Nationwide, about three-quarters of those doctors accepted payments, including speaking and consulting fees, travel, meals and gifts, ProPublica found.
And those who received the funds were two to three times as likely to have high or very high rates of brand-name prescribing as those who didn’t accept payments.
In Washington, 51 percent of the 3,286 doctors in the analysis received industry payments — and they were nearly twice as likely to prescribe brand-name drugs at high rates as those who did not receive payments.
Those 1,668 doctors accepted industry funds that totaled more than $2.1 million. Amounts ranged from as low as $4 to as much as $466,244, with an average payment of $1,296.
The doctor who received the most in payments, Dr. Robert M. Bersin, 61, an interventional cardiologist at Seattle’s Swedish Medical Center, did not prescribe high rates of brand-name drugs, the analysis found.
The payments Bersin receives — primarily from medical-device makers — are fees for consulting, speaking and training doctors in advanced techniques, such as cardiac stenting, that they require to stay current in their work, he said.
Industry payments do have the potential to influence prescribing habits, Bersin said.
“I can see that there could be an issue,” he said. “But it’s not really relevant to what I do.”
ProPublica’s analysis doesn’t prove that industry payments induce doctors to prescribe particular drugs, or even a particular company’s drugs. But it does show a larger pattern in which payments are associated with prescribing habits that bolster the drug companies’ bottom line.
Such a pattern makes it hard to know if the patients’ best interests are the doctors’ priority, said Dr. Howard Brody, a medical ethicist and professor at the Institute for Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.
“If there’s a clear tie with the pharma industry, can we always assume it’s good for the patient?” said Brody, who has written extensively about the issue. “It’s going to be sometimes and not at other times.”
Best for the patient?
Of Washington doctors who accepted no payments, brand-name drugs accounted for 17.8 percent of their prescriptions.
Among those who accepted payments of any size, the percentage of name-brand drugs prescribed rose to 19.8 percent. And among those who received at least $5,000, that figure jumped to 27.2 percent.
Overall, among Washington doctors who received no payments, 2.5 percent were high or very high prescribers of brand-name drugs. For those who got money, the figure jumped to 4.7 percent — nearly double — the analysis showed.
That’s important information for consumers, said Dr. David Evans, a University of Washington professor of rural health who has studied the impact of industry payments on medical practice.
“Minimizing the unnecessary use of branded prescriptions is a worthy goal,” he said. “Brand-name drugs are more expensive than generics. Often, they’re less safe and usually not any better than the generics that are already out there.”
Concern about industry influence on prescribing has been a worry for years, even decades. The Washington State Medical Association (WSMA) first issued guidelines in 1993 cautioning members about accepting gifts and payments from industry representatives, said Tierney Edwards, the association’s director of legal and federal affairs.
“There has been growing concern in the medical industry that certain gifts and payments are not consistent with medical ethics,” she said.
Wide variation
It’s not clear why half of Washington doctors accept payments — and half don’t. Nationwide, there’s wide variation in the proportion of doctors who take money, from a high of 90 percent in Nevada to a low of 23 percent in Vermont, the data show.
Washington is in line with other states in the West. Only half of doctors in Oregon and Alaska accept payments, too, which could be one explanation, Brody said.
“If only 50 percent of my fellow doctors are accepting payments, I might not either. It does become a culture,” he said.
Many Washington doctors also work for hospitals and health systems that prohibit gifts, payments, samples and meals from industry vendors, noted Evans of the UW.
“I can’t imagine that doctors are any more virtuous or less virtuous here than anywhere else,” he said.
But the Washington doctors who received the highest payments and prescribed high or very high rates of brand-name drugs defended the practice — and their ethics.
Everett psychiatrist Dr. Larry Bornstein, 63, received 247 general payments totaling more than $142,000 in 2014, according to the government database known as Open Payments. It was formed under provisions of the Affordable Care Act to track such spending.
Bornstein is regarded as a high brand-name prescriber compared with his peers, but he said patient need, not money, drives his practice. For instance, some medications that keep patients with severe schizophrenia functional have no good generic equivalents, he said.
Like other doctors, Bornstein regularly accepts speaking fees of $2,400 to more than $4,000, plus travel expenses, to stay abreast of the latest treatments in his field — and to communicate those advances to others, he said.
“When industry is exploring new medicines, I think it’s valuable for me to be aware of that and to share what I know,” he said.
Dr. Gary Oppenheim, 60, a Bellevue interventional cardiologist, said the 30 payments totaling more than $12,000 he accepted in 2014 were from talks for three new drugs that accounted for his very high prescribing rates.
“They are more expensive, but I do not prescribe them because I have speakers’ fees from talks given for the companies that make them,” he said.
Rather, he approached the firms before the drugs he considered promising were approved, asking to learn about them so he could teach other doctors appropriate use.
Such arguments are often valid, said Evans, the UW professor. But new evidence of a link between payments and prescribing should inspire more doctors to consider industry influence — even if they believe they’re too smart to be affected.
“Time after time, when these things are looked at objectively, we’re not too smart for that,” Evans said. “I don’t think the drug companies would be pouring millions and millions of dollars into this if we were.”
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Special By By Stella Paul May 31, 2012 in Environment Chifeng - As the threat of desertification grows higher, a nomadic tribesman in Inner Mongolia is leading his community in their fight against the menace Born and raised in a desert village where lives depend on the resources of the farms, Yongxin has been feverishly fighting that peril for nearly two decades, and is now recognized as a warrior against desertification. As nomads, Yongxin’s family lived off raising cattle and subsistence farming, growing wheat and corn. While the family owned enough land to meet their need, there was one problem: the sand, blown in by the frequent dust storms from the advancing deserts, was continuously piling up in their farms, as well as at their homes. In the early nineties, the storms got very severe and as a result, farming became almost impossible. Also, the dust deposit kept getting higher each season. As a result, the family was forced to abandon their home and move into a new house. “In the past 17 years, we have changed our home three years.” says Bao. Things then came to a point where the farmer had but two choices: abandon their village altogether and migrate to the nearby city, or do something to stop the menace of desertification. He chose the latter. Recalls Bao the incident that led to this decision: “It was the year of 1993. That year, the sand storms and wind had been stronger and more frequent than ever before. One night, it rained very heavily. The wind was so strong that it blew away the roof of my house. It was painful to see my wife with my infant children suffering, yet I could do nothing to help them. I felt very helpless. That night I decided that I had to start fighting the desert.” The next morning, Bao went to meet the officials at local forestry department. The department had, by then, decided to start an aforestation program to check rapid desertification in all of Inner Mongolia. So, it provided Bao free saplings to plant and also an economic package to get by with a changed lifestyle. The changes included a complete halt of cultivation in his farm which was already degraded soil by then. In addition, the department advised Bao to stop open grazing and instead, raise his cattle in a fenced area, so they won’t chomp on the grass and saplings all over the village. The result was amazing: in a single season Bao planted seven thousand saplings – a record for an individual anywhere in the county. Since then the farmer planted tens of thousands of trees over nearly 20 thousand ha of land. In Inner Mongolia, locals have joined hands with the forestry department to create green cover on sand dunes Stella Paul For this exemplary effort, he was honored by Wen Jiabao, the prime minister of China, in 2007. In his speech, Jiabao described Yongxin as ‘a model combatant of desertification.’ Bao says that the task was not easy, but there was an urgency to do it. “The sand was rapidly shifting, covering new areas of our village and the farm. So, we had to begin by ensuring that the sand didn’t move. So, we started building ‘check posts’ with straw,” he recalls. The method Bao adopted is a mix of two techniques: sand dune checks and the mulch. In the first one, tiny squares are made with in the sand with dry straw planted around them. Once the square of check is created, a sapling – usually a drought-resistant variety - is planted in the middle of it. Bao Yongxin has planted at least 3 varieties of them: ‘Caragana’, ‘Yellow willow’ and ‘Artimesia’. The last one – Artemesia – is known as the ‘pioneer grass’ as it dies after about a year, allowing other plants to grow. The second technique is known as the Mulch in which tiny beds of straw are laid on the sand using as a covering. According to Mansour N’Diaye, Chief of Cabinet, United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), both these techniques are used to retain moisture in the soil, suppress weeds and keep the sand cool. Organic mulches also help improve the soil’s fertility, as they decompose, and help increase the growth of the sapling planted. The techniques are now also being used by desert dwellers in Iran and in Namib and Kalahari deserts in Africa. “It is extremely important to combat the desertification and save the land that is our main basket of bread,’”says N’Diaye. Sand dune fixation underway in Inner Mongolia, China Stella Paul The plantation is done on the onset of Monsoon, so the saplings will be rain-fed and will not need to be watered. However, Bao says that the growth of the plants and very slow and needs constant checks – a reason why Bao must stay close to the desert areas. The result, however, has been rewarding; stabilized sand and the cover of green have led to the improved quality of the top soil. As a result, Bao is cultivating the farm again and is reaping better harvest. “The production has grown by 70%”, says the farmer who grows fruits such as apple and melon in his farm, besides corn. The increased production has also improved his lifestyle. So Bao and the fellow farmers in his village now have tiled roof houses with solar power. “I also have a mobile phone,” says Bao who has two sons whom he named ‘Saudi’ and ‘Arabia’. ‘They were born when there was sand all over my house and my farm. So these are the only names I could think of. I have heard that ‘Saudi Arabia’ is also full of sand.” says Bao with a smile. Bao Yongxin, the farmer who has made fighting desertification the mission of his life. Stella Paul As a father, Bao is proud of the fact that his children will not face the danger of being homeless as he did because the sand is more stabilized now. But he also says that one must keep up creating the green cover. “Desertification is a real danger to our livelihood as it threatens to take away everything we have and leave us with nothing. But it is possible to fight it. We may have to make some small changes and small sacrifices. I had to stop farming for some years during which I treated the soil. But finally, I got back my land. I also had to stop grazing my cattle in the open and instead raise them in a fenced area. But it all pays off at the end,” says the sand fighter, happiness gleaming in his eyes. Bao Yongxin is a driven man. The 43-year old farmer in Aohan of Inner Mongolia wants one thing above anything else, and that is to contribute to helping the desert county and it’s half a million plus population to prosper. But prosperity will never come unless his community can repel the biggest peril snapping at their land: the advancing desert.Born and raised in a desert village where lives depend on the resources of the farms, Yongxin has been feverishly fighting that peril for nearly two decades, and is now recognized as a warrior against desertification.As nomads, Yongxin’s family lived off raising cattle and subsistence farming, growing wheat and corn. While the family owned enough land to meet their need, there was one problem: the sand, blown in by the frequent dust storms from the advancing deserts, was continuously piling up in their farms, as well as at their homes. In the early nineties, the storms got very severe and as a result, farming became almost impossible. Also, the dust deposit kept getting higher each season. As a result, the family was forced to abandon their home and move into a new house. “In the past 17 years, we have changed our home three years.” says Bao.Things then came to a point where the farmer had but two choices: abandon their village altogether and migrate to the nearby city, or do something to stop the menace of desertification.He chose the latter.Recalls Bao the incident that led to this decision: “It was the year of 1993. That year, the sand storms and wind had been stronger and more frequent than ever before. One night, it rained very heavily. The wind was so strong that it blew away the roof of my house. It was painful to see my wife with my infant children suffering, yet I could do nothing to help them. I felt very helpless. That night I decided that I had to start fighting the desert.”The next morning, Bao went to meet the officials at local forestry department. The department had, by then, decided to start an aforestation program to check rapid desertification in all of Inner Mongolia. So, it provided Bao free saplings to plant and also an economic package to get by with a changed lifestyle. The changes included a complete halt of cultivation in his farm which was already degraded soil by then. In addition, the department advised Bao to stop open grazing and instead, raise his cattle in a fenced area, so they won’t chomp on the grass and saplings all over the village.The result was amazing: in a single season Bao planted seven thousand saplings – a record for an individual anywhere in the county. Since then the farmer planted tens of thousands of trees over nearly 20 thousand ha of land.For this exemplary effort, he was honored by Wen Jiabao, the prime minister of China, in 2007. In his speech, Jiabao described Yongxin as ‘a model combatant of desertification.’Bao says that the task was not easy, but there was an urgency to do it. “The sand was rapidly shifting, covering new areas of our village and the farm. So, we had to begin by ensuring that the sand didn’t move. So, we started building ‘check posts’ with straw,” he recalls.The method Bao adopted is a mix of two techniques: sand dune checks and the mulch. In the first one, tiny squares are made with in the sand with dry straw planted around them. Once the square of check is created, a sapling – usually a drought-resistant variety - is planted in the middle of it. Bao Yongxin has planted at least 3 varieties of them: ‘Caragana’, ‘Yellow willow’ and ‘Artimesia’. The last one – Artemesia – is known as the ‘pioneer grass’ as it dies after about a year, allowing other plants to grow.The second technique is known as the Mulch in which tiny beds of straw are laid on the sand using as a covering.According to Mansour N’Diaye, Chief of Cabinet, United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), both these techniques are used to retain moisture in the soil, suppress weeds and keep the sand cool. Organic mulches also help improve the soil’s fertility, as they decompose, and help increase the growth of the sapling planted. The techniques are now also being used by desert dwellers in Iran and in Namib and Kalahari deserts in Africa. “It is extremely important to combat the desertification and save the land that is our main basket of bread,’”says N’Diaye.The plantation is done on the onset of Monsoon, so the saplings will be rain-fed and will not need to be watered. However, Bao says that the growth of the plants and very slow and needs constant checks – a reason why Bao must stay close to the desert areas. The result, however, has been rewarding; stabilized sand and the cover of green have led to the improved quality of the top soil. As a result, Bao is cultivating the farm again and is reaping better harvest. “The production has grown by 70%”, says the farmer who grows fruits such as apple and melon in his farm, besides corn.The increased production has also improved his lifestyle. So Bao and the fellow farmers in his village now have tiled roof houses with solar power. “I also have a mobile phone,” says Bao who has two sons whom he named ‘Saudi’ and ‘Arabia’. ‘They were born when there was sand all over my house and my farm. So these are the only names I could think of. I have heard that ‘Saudi Arabia’ is also full of sand.” says Bao with a smile.As a father, Bao is proud of the fact that his children will not face the danger of being homeless as he did because the sand is more stabilized now. But he also says that one must keep up creating the green cover. “Desertification is a real danger to our livelihood as it threatens to take away everything we have and leave us with nothing. But it is possible to fight it. We may have to make some small changes and small sacrifices. I had to stop farming for some years during which I treated the soil. But finally, I got back my land. I also had to stop grazing my cattle in the open and instead raise them in a fenced area. But it all pays off at the end,” says the sand fighter, happiness gleaming in his eyes. More about Mongolia, China, Desertification, drought crisis, land degradation More news from Mongolia China Desertification drought crisis land degradation Food production Nomadic Tribe UNCCD Chifeng Forestry droughtresistant pla... Aforestation sand storm yellow dust Food security food inssecurity
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Samsung and Sony are cutting $1,000 or more from the prices of their latest 4K TV sets, sending their prices down toward something a bit more affordable. Both companies are cutting about $1,000 from their 55-inch models, bringing Samsung's UN55F9000 down to $4,499.99 and Sony's XBR-55X900A down to $3,999.99. Even more is coming off of their 65-inch sets — about $1,500 — bringing Samsung's UN65F9000 down to $5,999.99 and Sony's XBR-65X900A down to $5499.99. According to Twice, which first reported the price cuts, Samsung's changes went into effect on Sunday, matching cuts announced by Sony about two weeks prior.
None of those price tags can strictly be read as affordable, but prices on 4K sets are starting to plummet into regions that more people can finally consider. But while all four sets are likely to have some of the best looking TV displays out there, actually finding 4K content to watch on them could still prove difficult. Owners of one of Sony's sets may have the best option: the company's 4K Ultra HD media player allows for buying and renting 4K films, though the box costs a pricey $699.99. It only works on Sony TVs, but with such limited options out there, it could still be one of the best ways to go.
Update: Sony tells us that its price cuts also went into effect on Sunday, which matches the timing from Samsung.
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Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images
Purchase your cheese grinders.
As we all anticipate the NFL's schedule release this Tuesday at 4 p.m., there have been rumblings suggesting that the San Francisco 49ers will be traveling to Lambeau Field.
Chris Myers of Fox Sports tweeted that the 2010 World Champions could be hosting the 49ers on opening night, September 4th.
#NFLexpected to release regular season schedule this week...possibility the fox big game kickoff weekend will be 49ers at packers.. — Chris Myers(@The_ChrisMyers) April 16, 2012
If true, this will be an exciting Sunday night game, televised on none other than Fox.
Though mere speculation at the moment, one has to render the source highly credible. In addition, defensive lineman Ricky Jean Francois posted on his personal Twitter account that the Pack would host the 49ers on opening night.
I for one, could not choose a better game to open the season with. What better way to start the season off than with an away victory over the "unstoppable" Green Bay Packers?
Be sure to tune into NFL Network's 2012 NFL Schedule Release show at 7 p.m. EST to find out for sure.
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It may sound like a sci-fi vision, but Japan's space agency is dead serious: by 2030 it wants to collect solar power in space and zap it down to Earth, using laser beams or microwaves.
The government has just picked a group of companies and a team of researchers tasked with turning the ambitious, multi-billion-dollar dream of unlimited clean energy into reality in coming decades.
With few energy resources of its own and heavily reliant on oil imports, Japan has long been a leader in solar and other renewable energies and this year set ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets.
But Japan's boldest plan to date is the Space Solar Power System (SSPS), in which arrays of photovoltaic dishes several square kilometres (square miles) in size would hover in geostationary orbit outside the Earth's atmosphere.
"Since solar power is a clean and inexhaustible energy source, we believe that this system will be able to help solve the problems of energy shortage and global warming," researchers at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, one of the project participants, wrote in a report.
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Two popular Progressive reporters have started battling online, and anyone who’s just jumping on social media and seeing their angry tweets and videos might be a little confused as to exactly what is going on. H.A. Goodman and Jordan Chariton of The Young Turks both grew in popularity during the 2016 Presidential campaign. Goodman has been an avid supporter of Bernie Sanders, calling out the Democratic party when he saw signs of dishonesty. Chariton has been a popular reporter on Progressive topics, even when Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks lost some followers when he supported Hillary Clinton after Sanders endorsed her. (Note: Chariton once interviewed this reporter during the primaries about voter fraud, and this reporter has quoted both Chariton and Goodman in previous stories.)
In the last 24 hours, these two reporters have been battling over the definition of Progressivism and other accusations. Niko House and Tim Black have also joined the discussion, since they were both mentioned in Chariton’s video too.
So what exactly is happening and how did this all get started? We’ll walk you through it step by step and let you draw your own conclusions about who is right and who is wrong (or if both sides are.) Leave your comments at the end of this story and let us know what you think.
The Battle Began When Chariton Went Live on TYT Politics’ Facebook Page, Saying that Goodman And Others Were Acting Unreasonably
The battle began yesterday, with a live video from Chariton. He had a message that he really wanted to share, about concerns he had that certain Progressives were acting unreasonably. He shared the video live and even waited to start his message because he wanted as many people to hear it as possible. The message is 30 minutes long and you can watch it below.
Chariton started out by saying that he felt some Progressives were trying to build audiences fraudulently. He said that early in his career, he worked for Fox News and learned “how successfully media and individuals can be when they prey on people’s anger… economic insecurity… (and) worst instincts.” He said people can build a huge following that way.
“Being Progressive is supposed to mean progress, not censorship, not ‘if you disagree, you’re a sellout.’ Not ‘if you say something and you’re not as angry as me, I’m boycotting you.'”
He went on to talk about how some people viewed The Young Turks that way, because after the primary, they pivoted to supporting Hillary Clinton following Bernie Sanders’ endorsement.
But the part that was most controversial and started the online battle you’ve been seeing was when he spoke about specific members of the media. In particular, he called out H.A. Goodman, saying that he reported “a lot of things that were not factual” and after the primary “came up with half-baked theories about how Bernie was still going to win.” Chariton went on to say that he believed Goodman was doing this “because he was getting clicks.” He added: “There was a very large, angry following of Bernie Sanders supporters that were susceptible to people like him… And he’s not the only one. But this is a Fox News method…”
At one point Chariton called out Tim Black in his video too, but later said that was a mistake and got his name mixed up with someone else.
“I don’t have a problem with H.A. Goodman… with Niko. I think the more independent media the better. But what I do have a problem with is … Because a segment was done and some things were said that you don’t agree with, you are essentially calling for people to not watch TYT. To basically boycott it because the two hosts…aren’t true believers. … I’m not going to do a channel where I have to cater to people who only want to see the world in one way. … I believe there’s a real enemy… [it’s] Chuck Schumer … Nancy Pelosi … the Clintons … Mitch McConnell … Paul Ryan… big oil… big pharma… corporate media…”
Here’s the original video that Goodman made about the DNC lawsuit, which Chariton referenced in his video above and that Goodman later referenced in his response to Chariton:
And here’s The Young Turks panel about the DNC lawsuit that Goodman was addressing (and that Tim Black talks about in a video shown in a section later in this article):
H.A. Goodman Shared an Angry Video Response Saying That Chariton Was Wrong And He Had Never Reported Anything Not Factual
When Goodman found out about Chariton’s video, he shared his own angry video response, refuting some of the things Chariton had said about him. You can watch the video below. (Note: There is some foul language in the video):
Goodman responded first by listing his credentials and saying he had built all his subscribers on his own, without anyone’s help. He started out by addressing Chariton and said he respected Chariton greatly, and said that he thought Cenk had Chariton say those things.
Goodman said, in part: “I never said anyone’s a sellout. Go to that YouTube segment… did I ever say that anyone was a sellout? … The Young Turks is a neoliberal machine. You’re not Jordan, you do amazing work … But you called me out because your boss told you to… He’s viewed as a sellout by millions of people. Sorry, that’s just the way people view him. So don’t come at me.”
Goodman then went on to reiterate that he doesn’t manipulate people or post things that are fabricated. “I never silence anyone. … You said that I reported on things that weren’t factual. Why don’t you list them and I will tear them apart? They will published in places that don’t publish things that aren’t factual… After he [Bernie] endorsed Clinton, I never said he was going to win.”
Goodman went on to say that he was suspicious about TYT. “You are an amazing journalist Jordan… but at the same time there’s a philosophical dilemma… If you continually point out Democratic corruption…and then suddenly embrace the establishment pick, it’s the same recipe for a Trump win. If it’s not Bernie Sanders or Nina Turner or Tulsi Gabbard in 2020, Trump will win…”
Goodman concluded by saying that he planned to write more about The Young Turks in the future and he believed TYT was a “neoliberal powerhouse.”
“Maybe I’ll write articles that go viral,” Goodman said. “Bottom line is, you talk about fearmongering and silencing and not even debating, how about debating me?”
Since the First Two Videos, There Have Been Many Exchanges on Social Media
Since the video, Goodman has been on a tweet storm with response after response. Here are a few of his tweets about the whole thing:
TYT is so deathly afraid people will find out they're full of crap. They "report" and "investigate" and at the end of the day, embrace #DNC — H. A. Goodman (@HAGOODMANAUTHOR) May 5, 2017
So did this help your brand Jordan? Went up over 200 subs since last night after your ridiculous diatribe against me. That what you wanted? — H. A. Goodman (@HAGOODMANAUTHOR) May 5, 2017
The pathetic thing is I critiqued OTHER PEOPLE not Jordan frickin Chariton, but he goes on FB for 30 min spewing hatred against me? It's on. — H. A. Goodman (@HAGOODMANAUTHOR) May 5, 2017
Wow, I'm tired. They started it. Every day. TYT Diss video. Every. Single. Day. Don't worry Cenk, nobody reads my work or watches my videos — H. A. Goodman (@HAGOODMANAUTHOR) May 5, 2017
In his original video, Goodman said he had never called anyone a sellout, but had reported that other people were doing so. After Chariton’s video, he decided to start calling Cenk a sellout:
Jordan attacked me in the most despicable manner. All because his boss Cenk actually is a SELLOUT. I explain here… https://t.co/rOJzithrIL — H. A. Goodman (@HAGOODMANAUTHOR) May 5, 2017
Must do about 1 vid a day now, just stating how much I despise @TYTNetwork… but don't worry @JordanChariton and @cenkuygur no anger… — H. A. Goodman (@HAGOODMANAUTHOR) May 5, 2017
Although Chariton initially said he wasn’t going to say anything else about the topic after his first video, he has made some responses online since then too. First, he disputed Goodman’s video and said that Cenk had no idea what he was going to talk about and had not instructed him to make the video about Goodman and other Progressives:
Cenk doesn't even know I did video. I speak 4 myself & myself only. Feel free to create video spinning it that way https://t.co/y02iwsMPfp — Jordan (@JordanChariton) May 5, 2017
He also had some other responses about the whole thing:
Meant don't know personally-later said in video I interviewed him b4, which HA knows I said, but as usual, left out https://t.co/U0T8OncQlE — Jordan (@JordanChariton) May 5, 2017
Chariton wrote a longer note about the whole thing on Facebook. You can read it here. Then on Saturday morning, he shared another note addressing Goodman and House (but not Black.) Here are a few things he wrote, since the note itself cannot be embedded due to technical issues. First, Chariton wrote that he felt Goodman has left out important points in his video addressing a segment on TYT about the DNC lawsuit (you can see Goodman’s video earlier in this story.) Chariton wrote that he felt Goodman should have included a clip of John Iadarola criticizing the DNC lawyer’s tone deaf comments, and Michael Shure’s later apology on Twitter.
Chariton continued, noting that he also did his video because of a video Niko House had made about TYT fundraising money. He wrote: “Niko did a conspiracy video with the angle, ‘where is the fundraiser money people gave to TYT going,’ acting like it’s a mystery and suggesting TYT is doing something shady with people’s money. That is a VERY serious accusation to make against an individual or corporation…” He went on, writing that House hadn’t contacted TYT about the story. “Believe it or not, I like Niko,” Chariton wrote. “He is a hard worker and wants to expose a lot of the same injustices I want to. Benefit of the doubt to him–this was probably just a sloppy error (I have made plenty in my career).” Chariton then went on to talk about House’s work with Truth Against the Machine (Chariton’s new independent news network) and that he let House go when they had to downsize.
Chariton continued on his Facebook note. “I have worked my ass off for 13 years to get to where I am-unpaid internships, unpaid jobs, SLEEPING IN MY CAR, having no personal life, and sacrificing my health…. On the campaign trail and Standing Rock I was hobbling around with 2 herniated discs in my back and a heavy heart as my relationship I thought was going to lead to marriage ended (because of how dedicated I am to my work). … I SUPPORT independent media. I hope HA, Niko, and all the rest thrive. But if they mislead their audience, and I have the time to point it out, I will. If you don’t like that–too bad.”
You can watch House’s video response and a later response on Facebook in this next section, after Tim Black’s responses.
Tim Black and Niko House Have Spoken Out Passionately About Chariton’s Video
Tim Black and Niko House, who were also mentioned in Chariton’s video, have also spoken out. Chariton later said that he misspoke when he accidentally included Tim Black in his video. Black, meanwhile, has said on Twitter that he doesn’t really believe it was an accident.
That's because you looked at the evidence. Jordan spoke specifically about me to 300K ppl. This is the 3rd time TYT has done this. No More! https://t.co/1oYS2ypl3h — Tim Black ™ (@RealTimBlack) May 5, 2017
Black reached out to Heavy and confirmed that he doesn’t believe his name was in Chariton’s video by accident.
“I’m 100 percent sure my name was not accidentally mentioned because HA and I do a show every Monday called No Sell Outs,” he said. “Jordan Chariton knows me well, in fact he’s been on my Tim Black At Night Show.”
He continued, telling Heavy how disappointed he was in the video and what has transpired:
“This is not over. This was the third time TYT has smeared HA Goodman and I… I have a huge problem with Jordan smearing me, launching the video, keeping it released, backpedaling later to say he mistaked me for another a random black man. Unacceptable.”
Black also shared a Facebook video addressing Chariton’s message. His original video, that was cut off, is here. This is his second video, with more details: (During his live stream below, he found out that Chariton had retracted his statement about Black. However, you can see from Black’s tweet above that he’s not sure if he believes the apology.)
Black started out in his video by sharing a bit about his background. Then he addressed Chariton’s video.
“You said that I’m click bait. You said that I’m…just spewing hate and I’m trying to build a base and a bunch of followers… He says he doesn’t want drama, but then he proceeds to do a 36-minute rant about people with a different opinion, but then he says Progressives should have different opinions…”
Black continued.
“I didn’t start talking about politics until I had 50,000 subscribers, with no network.” He said he didn’t start talking about politics until some millennials on his channel asked him to check out Bernie Sanders. He said he then made 100 videos promoting Bernie because he believed in Sanders and Progressivism. “Every step of the way, every stop, I was talking to people, telling them don’t give up, let’s keep fighting. Telling them don’t quick. That’s how I built a reputation. I didn’t build it on click bait… I didn’t build it on TYT… No one would know who you are without TYT. Build something from nothing. Build it with no names… Then tell me who uses what to get what.”
He then added: “You didn’t just make this about ideology, you said I’m fraudulent… I don’t care if you apologize, that cannot stand… We could have talked about it… That’s not how men roll. If you have an issue, you address me.”
“Do you think TYT helps independent media that’s not under its umbrella? … We’re out here struggling, can’t even get monetized, and you guys won’t even mention independent media. … You don’t mention all of us who are out here and have been speaking truth to power. … I’m not Bill O’Reilly, I’m not trying to stage a coup, I’m just trying to speak truth to power as I see it, based on the data … based on what I can confirm.”
Black then said about The Young Turks’ coverage of the DNC lawsuit:
“The DNC lawsuit is very important to us… This is the next biggest thing since the election of Trump… We believe that if this DNC lawsuit is successful, it will alter how the DNC has to conduct its primary. That’s huge… For you to say it’s just a different opinion… The biggest independent media network disses the DNC fraud lawsuit. … You should bash us if we didn’t bash it. … I would bash anyone…who mischaracterized the DNC fraud lawsuit.”
After his video was cut off, Black shared a second video on YouTube, explaining more about his reaction to Chariton, their background, how many times TYT has said something about Black before, and what happened:
Niko House also responded to being mentioned in Chariton’s video. Here is Niko House’s response to Chariton’s video:
He started out with complete transparency, saying that Chariton reached out to him this morning to amend things. But, House said, once you question someone’s integrity, that’s another thing entirely, because his integrity is most important to him. He went on to share a passionate video about his background, his recent struggles, and his response to Chariton’s video.
House addressed his own passion for journalism and honest reporting. He said, in part:
You report on Flint… But I know how they got there. I know why they can’t leave. … I appreciate you bringing light to that. … But I can predict what’s going to happen because I lived it… And I’ve been fortunate enough to receive both types of education… the white man’s education and I’ve lived my life as a black male. And I’ve lived my life as a political analyst and a debater. And I’ve seen my share of fights. And I’ve stopped my share of fights. … Don’t ever presume that you’re holier than thou because you can do some coverage… Don’t act like you know something because you got paid to be somewhere. God knows what I could do with the type of money you get to go places.”
House then added that this is about the Progressive movement, not ego, and even if someone isn’t doing something for the right reasons, they may still be helping.
He also addressed the struggles he’s gone through as an independent reporter.
“You get to get up, travel the country … and people listen. People don’t question whether you’re the media when you walk into the room. … When I went to Standing Rock…I went through hell to try to get a press pass.”
He ended the video with a heartfelt message.
“Why did you want to take me down? What inside you made you feel so defensive? I’m assuming you’re going through something personal, because what inside you made you so defensive? … I don’t care about it hurting you, I care about it hurting the movement… It’s the same story every time… What angers me … is that this is damaging to the movement. … At the end of the day, I don’t want the movement to be hurt, but I’m also going to tell the truth and I’m holding people accountable…as I do for myself.”
The video above is about 90 minutes long, so you’ll need to watch the whole thing to get the complete story.
On Saturday, House addressed a question about why he wasn’t working for Truth Against the Machine, and how he felt that he was being misrepresented. You can read his full note on Facebook here. Because the note can’t be embedded due to technical issues, we’ll share some quotes from what he wrote. He wrote that one of the administrators had claimed he was let go because he wouldn’t leave his apartment, but he was actually homeless at the time. He wrote, in part, “You wanted to knock me down right? … I was never going to call you out…Because the only thing it would do at best was cause an unnecessary rift in the movement. So you win. I was at my lowest financially. I was lucky if I even got to pull $100 for the week… I could only shower every other day. And I was delivering food hoping and praying that the order would be cancelled so I could eat for free that night and may afford a place to stay… Sorry I wasn’t dependable enough for you man…”
Now Some Progressives Are Taking Sides
Unfortunately, this disagreement is furthering the divide that Progressives were already experiencing. After the election, a number of different groups emerged trying to be the Progressive leader for the next elections. Our Revolution, Justice Democrats, Draft Bernie, and several other groups wanted to “rally the troops” and take over Congress. But so far, many of these groups haven’t been pooling resources and working together. Meanwhile, other Progressives split off from the Democratic Party entirely and moved to the Green Party. Some of them really want to continue working with non-establishment Democrats, even as they run campaigns of their own. But others want nothing to do with Democrats ever again, establishment or not.
Now, some Progressives are taking sides in the Chariton vs. Goodman debate. Here are a few responses online. First, here are some comments supporting Chariton:
@JordanChariton Since HA thinks the lawsuit has so much merit, will he be refunding anyone who donated to him based on his assurances of an HRC indictment? — Brett (@tweets4twits) May 5, 2017
So I don't want to get into it, but @JordanChariton is a fantastic journalist who gets on the ground and does real journalism — Bryan (@basedbryank) May 6, 2017
@JordanChariton Exellent friggin journalism Jordan. Keep on doing what you're doing. Love, a Canadian, eh. — TwitChic (@Swoozie123) May 6, 2017
And here are people supporting Goodman:
@realgrace31 @HAGOODMANAUTHOR @JordanChariton @RealTimBlack All credibility lost on Jordan's part, im very disappointed with such high words from HA and in return outright lies. — Anthony Schmidt (@OnePhysicist) May 5, 2017
Meanwhile, others are concerned that the online battles between Goodman and Chariton may divide Progressives even more.
.@JordanChariton @HAGOODMANAUTHOR @RealTimBlack No more of this shit from either's audience shitting others. Just apologize for where you ALL acted immature and talk to each other. — Andrew (@GodEmperorLeto) May 5, 2017
@HAGOODMANAUTHOR @JordanChariton @RealTimBlack @nick_brana I know and appreciate your DB support! I still love & support you. And I believe that Jordan insulted you. Please try to let it go and (1/2) — Melinda McCracken (@grameezprgrsive) May 5, 2017
@JordanChariton @HAGOODMANAUTHOR Twitter spats between lefty journalists only serve to annoy fans of both sides. Talk it out like adults. — A Sword In Darkness (@jwsingleton80) May 5, 2017
@JordanChariton @BernieSanders WTH is going on with you and Goodman, can we stop eating our own, ffs Very disturbing b'c us Progressive rely on ur news instead of the MSM😠 — Warrior Lemming (@WarriorLemming) May 5, 2017
@HAGOODMANAUTHOR @JordanChariton I'm a big fan of both of your journalism and worry about the broader implications that this might have. — Kobi (@Elements11997) May 6, 2017
What do you think? Do you agree with Chariton or Goodman? Are you concerned this will divide Progressives more than they already are? Let us know in the comments below.
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LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (KTHV) - State senators Greg Standridge (R-Russellville) and Gary Stubblefield (R-Branch) have introduced a bill in the Arkansas Senate that would create an act regarding gender identity and bathroom privileges.
As of right now, Senate Bill 346, is only a shell bill which are generally introduced early in a legislative session with no language. According to the Oklahoma Policy Institute, they are used as a "placeholder for legislative proposals to be filled in later."
In 2016, North Carolina put into law the Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act which requires a person to only use the restroom that corresponds to the sex identified on their birth certificates. The "bathroom bill" has caused a lot controversy for the state including several states issuing travel bans for government employees in response to the bill. The NBA also moved the 2017 All-Star Game after the state refused to change the law and the NCAA removed seven tournament games of the 2017 NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Tournament.
A federal judge in August 2016 said the University of North Carolina would not have to enforce the bill.
Back in January, Governor Asa Hutchinson said he doesn't see a need to introduce a "bathroom bill" during the legislative session.
It remains to be seen what language Standridge and Stubblefield will put into the bill.
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The essay — America the Third World Nation in Just 4 Easy Steps, (Truthout, 10 Nov 2012) — describes how our political addiction to the free-trade ideology of neoliberal economics has helped to de-industrialize America and thereby impoverish much of the American middle class. My 24 Sept essay in Counterpunch describing decline of manufacturing employment gives you a sense of the mind-boggling magnitude of what has happened. While “4 Easy Steps” makes passing references to the increasing dependence of the manufacturing sector on military spending, as well as the financialization of economy (but not the latter’s siamese-twin ‘managerialism’), the authors did not develop these points. Without implying any criticism of their excellent essay, my aim today is to tweak your interest in these omissions, particularly America’s defense dependency.
The late Professor Seymour Melman (Columbia Univ.) wrote a prescient book, Profits Without Production (Knopf, 1983) that explained how the militarization and managerialization of our economy were becoming the central causes of the decline in America’s manufacturing competitiveness. This decline started in the 1970s, but Melman showed how it grew out of seeds planted by the permanent military mobilization of a huge defense industry in the 1950s.
The permanent war economy was born on 30 September 1950. On that day, President Truman officially signed NSC-68, a document that became the blueprint for the containment strategy for waging the Cold War. Central to this strategy was the establishment of a large, permanently mobilized defense manufacturing sector. The authors of NSC-68 justified the permanent mobilization, in part, with an economic rationalization reflecting their contention that the WWII production miracle proved the multiplier effects of Military Keynesianism. They suggested these benefits were likely to repeat themselves. In their words: “the economic effects of the [NSC-68] program might be to increase the gross national product by more than the amount being absorbed for additional military and foreign assistance purposes.”
The post WWII economic boom in the US (note: our competitive performance was aided in part by the lingering effects of the WWII damage to the US’s other major industrial competitors) hid the adverse economic effects of the economic diversion attending to the permanent war economy unleashed by NSC-68. Nevertheless, by early 1961, the accumulating economic and political damage caused by the diversion concerned some insiders: President Eisenhower famously warned the nation about the rise of misplaced power posed by the rise of a large permanent standing arms industry, which he said pointedly was new in our national experience.
The accumulating damage wrought by the permanent war economy started to accelerate in the 1970s, and by 1980, the cancer metastasized: militarization and managerialization began to openly thrive and grow at the expense of the traditional high-wage manufacturing sector, in effect, siphoning off money flows via a combination of government handouts and favorable tax treatment that in effect rewarded both the looting of the tax base and the draining of competitiveness and ingenuity from the civilian manufacturing sector (via the increased defense subsidy, leveraged buyouts, offshoring of jobs, emphasizing short-term focus to pump stock prices, etc.) The combined results of the growing defense dependency, managerialization, and financialization was a decreasing international competitiveness in the manufacturing sector. At the same time, our global competitors were increasing their competitiveness. The net effect can be seen in the US merchandize trade deficit; it went into free fall after 1980.
Those who believe that subsidized defense technologies spill over into the commercial sector to improve international competitiveness might want to consider the obvious fact that the huge increases in the defense spending between 1977 and 1987 and 1998 and 2012 clearly did nothing to ameliorate the free fall.
In America, this political-economic evolution has created a weird political situation where a peculiar political darwinism (taking the form of a corporatist alliance of big business and the federal government) co-exists with the neo-liberal ideology of social darwinism. The former stresses mutual dependency and government subsidies for survival while the latter stresses individuality and survival of the fittest in a Hobbesian Universe. Yet the contradiction between the two modes of belief does not impede the ideologues from promoting both simultaneously, and in so doing, continue the looting and draining operations.
That cognitive dissonance is now poised to grow much worse in the next few months, if as is likely, the threat of a budget sequester induces the government to impose neoliberal austerity economics on the middle class, while government becomes more imbedded with and protects the banksters, the defense contractors, and its other corporatist allies. That is because the only way to practice America’s peculiar mix of social and political darwinism at the same time is to fling what is left of the middle class off the fiscal cliff by defunding social security, medicare, infrastructure modernization, education, etc.
Much has been written on the economic distortions created by the financialization of the economy, but aside from Melman’s pioneering work, little has been written on economic distortions created by the increasing dependency of the manufacturing sector on military spending — which is really a huge government subsidy — and the rise of managerialism, financialization’s deadly siamese twin. Both sets of distortions exist side by side with, but in sharp contrast to, the ideological neoliberal fantasies of a free market.
The attached graphic provides a hint — but only a hint — of how the hidden distortions that have been insensibly creeping into the economy: the graphic illustrates how rates of growth in the industrial shipments of military durable goods increased at a much faster rate than shipments of nonmilitary durable goods since 2000.
This difference in growth rates reflects the accumulating effects of the huge increases in the defense budget that began in 1998. These differences have worked to increase the disproportionate large share of the de-industrializing manufacturing economy that has been soaked up by the defense industry over time. For example, defense spending (base budget + war costs) in 2011-12 amounted to about 4.4% of the GDP. About one-quarter of this spending was applied to the salaries of military and civil servants. That implies the other three-quarters or about 3.3 percent of GDP was spent on defense goods and services in the private sector. Yet this 3.3 percent of GDP spent on defense goods and services soaked up 11 to 12 percent of America’s total capital goods shipments over the last two years.
There are other indicators of the economic distortion caused by the defense dependency: For example, fifty-five percent of the federal R&D budget is now allocated to defense-related activities. In the early to mid 1990s, nationwide employment of scientists and engineers in the defense sector soaked up about 30 percent of the total scientific and engineering talent (public and private sectors). Given the rapid growth in the defense budget and the decline in the manufacturing share of GDP since then, the ratio is likely to be even higher today. Unfortunately, there is little current academic research aimed at understanding the size and meaning of these hugely important preemptions of resources, production capabilities, and human skills.
Indeed, most contemporary economists, like the authors of NSC-68, still think of military spending in Keynesian terms as being a general economic stimulus and job creator. But Military Keynesianism, if it ever worked, is certainly not working in the 21st Century.
To wit: the largest sustained increases in the defense budget since the end of WWII began in 1998, but this spending binge was accompanied by (1) a sluggish recovery from the March-November 2001 recession to the onset of the Great Recession that began in late 2008 and its even more sluggish recovery; (2) an acceleration in the rate of decline of employment in the manufacturing sector after 1998 (see Figure 2 here); and (3) the unprecedented plummeting of the merchandise trade balance (discussed earlier). There is also academic research suggesting defense spending is one of the least effective way to create jobs via the ‘Keynesian multipliers’ flowing out of government expenditures (see this Univ. Mass study, for example).
Nevertheless, lest you think the NSC-68’s faith in Military Keynesianism is forgotten ancient history, President Bush was still spouting its soothing nostrums as recently as February 2008, when he told NBC’s Ann Curry, “I think actually, the spending on the war might help with jobs. … because we’re buying equipment, and people are working. I think this economy is down because we built too many houses.”
Defense companies now make up a very substantial part of America’s much diminished industrial base — and these giant defense companies are hooked on the narcotic of defense spending.
That is to say, defense manufacturers cannot survive without the defense subsidy. Since the end of the Viet Nam War, many have tried to convert some of their efforts to competitive production of non-defense goods, and most have failed. One of the most spectacular flops being Grumman’s attempted diversification into hi-tech flexible buses for New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The buses had to be withdrawn from service after only three years, because they broke down repeatedly. As Melman explained in the early 1980s, defense companies simply do not have the marketing, managing, engineering, and manufacturing skills to compete successfully in global commercial markets; and when their business practices spill over into the private sector, they often hurt competitiveness and productivity.*
By 1990, even the industrial leaders in the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex (MICC) fully understood Melman’s point. No less an authority than William Anders, CEO of General Dynamics publicly admitted to the truth of Melman’s argument in 1991, when he explained the reasons for the high failure rate in excursions into competitive commercial markets. Anders said (pg. 13),
“This isn’t surprising. Defense industry management teams generally have little commercial experience and market savvy. Most have been ‘cost plus’ and ‘mil spec’ trained. In short, most don’t bring a competitive advantage to non-defense businesses. Frankly, sword makers don’t make good and affordable plowshares.”
That, in a nutshell, is why Grumman could not make reliable and affordable buses. That is why the private sector made the internet affordable, reliable, and easy to use, not the DoD which invented it. For interested reader, the essay Why Boeing is Imploding provides a stunning example of how the defense-related engineering and production practices (in this case, political engineering or the practice spreading subcontracts around to build political support for a program) have spilled over to infect Boeing’s civilian production practices.
One thing Anders did not mention is that the defense industry is very skilled in lobbying the federal government to increase the public subsidy for making its increasingly unaffordable weapons. Nor did he mention that you buy what you subsidize. In a ‘cost-plus,’ ‘mil-spec’ed,’ single-buyer economy, you subsidize cost growth, so you ‘buy’ costs — the cost overruns in the hugely expensive F-35 Joint Strike Fighter being an outstanding current example (here is just one example in the F-35’s ever growing shop of horrors).
Anders made his amazing admission in the 1991 keynote address to the twelfth annual conference sponsored by Defense Week, then a very influential newsletter in the MICC. His intent was to explain why, at the end of the Cold War, General Dynamics had chosen not to diversify its business into the non-defense sector — i.e., why GD was not interested in converting swords into plowshares. Instead, Anders proposed to undertake a takeover strategy to increase its market share in a (temporarily, as it turned out) shrinking defense market.
Anders was not alone in thinking along these lines. In fact, his speech was a precursor to the industry-wide, government-subsidized “Pac-Man” consolidation strategy. This strategy was promoted by President Bill Clinton’s then deputy secretary of defense, William Perry, at a 1993 meeting with the defense titans, a meeting dubbed the “Last Supper.” Perry’s strategy led to a rash of industry-wide mergers beginning in the mid-1990s.
Significantly, when the defense budget began to grow rapidly after 1998, there has been no undoing of the consolidations, even though rising defense budgets eventually grew to levels exceeding the highest budgets of the Cold War, even after removing the effects of inflation.
Today, the defense industry is dominated by three giant all-purpose weapons manufacturers—two of which now have their headquarters in the Washington, DC, area, and the third (Boeing) with a major government relations office in the DC area as well—to more closely supervise their most important corporate activity: the lobbying efforts that influence the money flow out of the Pentagon, Congress, and the White House.
Together with the banksters, these immensely powerful companies, their smaller brethren, and the huge supporting cast of gucci-shoed K Street lobbyists, pro-defense think tanks, and the defense trade press are poised to pounce on President Obama and Congress to protect their fiscal honey pot, while the rest of country is heaved over the fiscal cliff.
If you want to learn more about the important but little examined subject of the economic distortions caused by the defense dependency, and by extension, learn more about why America is becoming a third world nation, the best introduction is still Melman’s** elegantly argued eleven-page prologue to Profits Without Production, aptly titled “How the Yankees Lost Their Know-how.”
If that essay does not peak your interest in this hugely important subject, nothing will. Unfortunately, you will have to go a used bookseller to find it.
Franklin “Chuck” Spinney is a former military analyst for the Pentagon and a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. He be reached at chuck_spinney@mac.com
* At this point, I should note that Melman believed it was possible to convert defense manufacturers to civilian production on a large scale, but such a massive conversion program would require large scale government sponsored industrial planning. This kind of planning is a highly toxic subject to believers in free-market capitalism. So, it should not be surprising that military conversion — i.e. turning swords into plowshares — is not only an exceedingly complex but also a highly controversial subject. The possibility or impossibility of conversion is not at issue in this essay. My focus is on the short term response of any grand bargain to dodge the effects of the looming budget sequester: namely how in the next few months the defense dependency may induce the politicians, who have been captured by it, to fling the middle class off the fiscal cliff (i.e., by cutting back expenditures for Social Security, Medicare, Medicade, infrastructure modernization, education, etc.)
** Caveat emptor: Melman was my friend and I made some minuscule contributions to the research in this book.
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The southern Russian city of Stalingrad, later renamed Volgograd, witnessed one of the bloodiest battles in the history of warfare. The heavy losses incurred by the German army broke the initiative they had in the East, making the Battle of Stalingrad arguably the most strategically decisive battle of World War II, and a decisive turning point in the war. Particularly merciless was the fighting on and around Mamayev Kurgan, a prominent hill above the city.
When forces of the German Sixth Army launched their attack against the city center of Stalingrad on 13 September 1942, a fierce battle for control took place over Mamayev Kurgan between the German attackers and the defending soldiers of the Soviet 62nd Army. To defend it, the Soviets had built strong defensive lines on the slopes of the hill, composed of trenches, barbed-wire and minefields. The Germans pushed forward against the hill, taking heavy casualties. They finally captured the hill and subsequently the railway station on 14 September 1942.
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Two days later, the Soviet 13th Guards Rifle Division wrested the hill out of German hands and continued fighting for the railway station. By the end of the following day, 10,000 men of the Soviet army had perished.
The hill changed hands several times. By 27 September, the Germans again captured half of Mamayev Kurgan, while the Soviets held their own positions on the slopes of the hill. The defenders held out until 26 January 1943, when the counterattacking Soviet forces relieved them. The battle of the city ended one week later with an utter German defeat.
When the battle ended, the soil on the hill had been thoroughly churned by shellfire and mixed with metal fragments: between 500 and 1,250 splinters of metal were found per square meter. The earth on the hill had remained black in the winter, as the snow kept melting in the many fires and explosions. In the following spring the hill would still remain black, as no grass grew on its scorched soil. The hill´s formerly steep slopes had been flattened in months of intense shelling and bombardment. Even today, it is possible to find fragments of bone and metal still buried deep throughout the hill.
Twenty-four years after the battle, in October 1967, a colossal monument, “The Motherland Calls”, was erected on Mamayev Kurgan. The monument, designed by Yevgeny Vuchetich, consists of a concrete sculpture 52 meters tall, and 82 meters from the feet to the tip of a stainless steel sword, dominating the skyline of the city of Volgograd. At the time of its construction, it was the tallest sculpture in the world. The statue forms part of a War memorial complex that includes ruined walls deliberately left the way they were after the battle. The Grain Silo, as well as Pavlov's House, the apartment building whose defenders eventually held out for two months until they were relieved, can still be visited.
Mamayev Kurgan is now the communal grave of more than 35,000 civilians who died in the Battle of Stalingrad, and more than 15,000 soldiers who died defending this position. Vasily Chuikov, who led Soviet forces at Stalingrad, lies buried at Mamayev Kurgan, the first Marshal of the Soviet Union to be buried outside Moscow. Soviet sniper Vasily Zaytsev, who has 225 confirmed kills to his name, was also reburied there in 2006.
Today, more than 2 million visitors from all over the world come here to remember those who fought and lost their lives over 65 years ago.
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One of Thailand’s most prestigious universities apologised Monday after students created a large mural depicting Adolf Hitler among a host of comic book superheroes during graduation celebrations.
Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University expressed its “deep regret” over the painting, which appeared last week and featured Superman, Batman and the Incredible Hulk as well as the genocidal Nazi leader.
In a letter to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which had complained about the poster, the university said the students who created it were “unaware of its significance” and had received a verbal warning.
A picture posted on the Simon Wiesenthal Center website shows a young woman in a graduation gown giving a Nazi salute in front of the giant mural, which reads “Congratulation”.
“Hitler as a superhero?” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Jewish human rights and Holocaust memorial organisation, in comments on the website.
He questioned whether “a genocidal hate monger” was an appropriate role model for Thai young people.
“The Simon Wiesenthal Center is outraged and disgusted by this public display at Thailand’s leading school of higher education,” he said, adding that the mural had been displayed for days near the university’s history faculty.
Chulalongkorn, whose alumni include academics, politicians and other public figures, posted apologies in Thai and English on its Facebook page and vowed to make sure such incidents never occur again.
“I will explain to the students involved and this will be a lesson for others that this man caused tragedy in the world,” said Suppakorn Disatapundhu, dean of the faculty of fine arts, where the painting was produced.
The Nazi swastika, Hitler and other images apparently glorifying the World War II regime have caused controversy in Thailand on several occasions in the past and have been blamed on a lack of historical understanding.
In 2011 a Catholic school apologised after students dressed up in Nazi uniform for a sports day parade, some with swastikas painted on their faces.
The incident mirrored a similar parade held by another school in 2007.
In 2009, the Louis Tussaud’s Waxworks museum took down its giant poster of Hitler giving a Nazi salute with the Thai-language slogan “Hitler is not dead” after the Israeli and German embassies lodged complaints.
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Pantone® colors are invaluable tools in most graphics related fields. However, when it comes to screen printing on dark t-shirts and other textiles, some Pantone® colors don’t print precisely like the chip or fan book. The following is a list of 5 colors to avoid if at all possible because you may not get what you expect.
1. Royal Blue 286 C is one of the most frequently requested colors around.
It really lightens up when printing on an under base. Instead of 286 C, we recommend printing a special formula called Super Opaque Royal. While 286 C prints up to 2 shades lighter with uneven coverage, Super Opaque Royal holds a steady tone in between 285 C and 286 C in your Pantone® book.
2. Reflex Blue C is another hugely popular royal color.
In cases where Reflex Blue C is called out, but not part of brand identity, we recommend printing a shade up - Blue 280 C. The 280 C ink will lighten up a little getting closer to Reflex Blue C than the actual Reflex formula on a white under base.
3. Process colors are cyan, magenta, yellow and black.
These inks were developed to print photographic images on t-shirts just like an office or home printer, prints on paper. The 4 color process for printing relies on blending colors, so these inks were developed to be highly transparent. Substitute these inks for another color in your Pantone® book that a higher percentage of trans white. For example, Yellow 102 C is 50 percent trans white. While it is a little lighter than process yellow, it is a more reliable print option. Instead of magenta, you may want to consider Rubine Red C. We’ve developed an process cyan for under base printing because of demand. It’s not exactly the same shade as cyan in the book, but a great alternative.
4. Fluorescent inks (801 C - 814 C) are entirely transparent.
Super bright colors, in general, are near impossible to translate from a design to a screen printed t-shirt. For the most reliable printing, consider a white shirt or create the design using bright colors that have over 50% trans white in the formula listing. A good example of this is Green 381 C.
5. Red 186 C is a nice true red, but it also tends to lighten up on an under base.
You may want to bump up your selection of reds in this area so the darker shade will print lighter getting you closer to your desired Pantone® color. For 185 C, print 186 C. For 186 C, print 187 C
If exact Pantone® color matching is a must, be sure to consult with a screen print insider or artist. They can help trouble shoot colors that may pose a problem and come up with solutions.
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Nothing to report yet on the Rangers front in free agency, but the stunner of the early proceedings is Jaromir Jagr agreeing to return to the NHL and return to the state of Pennsylvania – only with the Philadelphia Flyers, not the Pittsburgh Penguins.
Jagr's old team publicly withdrew its offer to Jagr early in the day, as did the Detroit Red Wings, whom the Daily News had reported this morning were "going hard" after the 39-year-old. Nobody went so hard as the Flyers, who gave the former Rangers captain a one-year, $3.3 million contract -- quite frankly, an outrageous amount of money for a player that old who has spent the last three years playing in the KHL, where the seasons are shorter and the competition level so much lower. No matter that Jagr is a shoo-in for the Hall of Fame, it's not going to be easy to validate that contract.
Just add another layer of intrigue to the Winter Classic (even if there has been no formal announcement that it's Rangers-Flyers on Jan. 2). Jagr's return to the Garden will be November 26, though the Rangers and Flyers are expected to face off in a preseason game before the Blueshirts head to Europe.
The Flyers also have added defenseman Andreas Lilja, and it appears that they may wind up losing Ville Leino, despite chairman Ed Snider's proclamation that Philadelphia wanted to bring the winger back.
The Panthers have been the busiest team in the early going, splashing the cash to sign Ed Jovanovski, Scottie Upshall, Jose Theodore and Marcel Goc. Those moves follow Florida's previous additions of Tomas Kopecky and Brian Campbell. This may be what John Tortorella was talking about when he said that you don't want "add for the sake of adding."
UPDATE, 2:32 P.M.: The Flyers have also signed Max Talbot, a move sure to further infuriate the people of Pittsburgh. If anyone ever thought that Philadelphia was really in the mix for Brad Richards, there would seem to be no way to make that happen now, barring multiple cap-clearing trades.
Get news from the Rangers beat as it happens by following @NYDNRangers on Twitter!
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Toyota Gazoo Racing Team Director Rob Leupen admits that the team’s performance in the FIA WEC season-ending Six Hours of Bahrain did not live up to expectations, as the No. 6 Toyota TS050 Hybrid slipped to third in the final standings.
Mike Conway, Stephane Sarrazin and Kamui Kobayashi were the closest challengers to the championship-leading No. 2 Porsche 919 Hybrid before the race, but were unable to take advantage of a puncture which dropped the Porsche off the lead lap and eventually finished fifth.
That meant sixth was enough for Neel Jani, Marc Lieb and Romain Dumas to take the World Endurance Drivers’ Championship, while victory for the No. 8 Audi R18 on its final appearance in the WEC meant Toyota also missed out on second.
Leupen conceded that Audi’s performance had been a surprise after they had struggled in China, and expressed disappointment that Toyota could not capitalize on Porsche’s dramas.
“We had some tire issues, so the car wasn’t as quick as we expected and we couldn’t make it stronger,” Leupen told Sportscar365.
“I think it was temperature. The drivers complained about a lot of understeer and when we moved to the J-tire, we had oversteer. We didn’t get the tires to work here and that’s one of the main reasons, that’s it.
“We haven’t matched our own expectations. Audi was extremely strong, so we needed a win or a second place and be there where they are today.
“They were dominant with both cars; we didn’t expect that here. We were on par in China and apparently they made a big step forward, but all we can say is congratulations to them and congratulations to Porsche with a second world championship this year.”
Despite the sub-par finish to the year, victory in Fuji and a further six podium visits represented a vast improvement on 2015, giving Leupen cause for optimism heading into next season.
“For us, it has not been too bad a season, we are content,” he said.
“We would say proud if we achieved a bit more this year, but the guys in car No. 6 did a great fight and they have shown especially in Fuji but also in Le Mans that they were on the pace.
“They fought back in Mexico and Austin with podium places, so they deserved to be here and challenging [Porsche] at the last race.
“In the second half of the season, they were in front of the Porsche No. 2, so we will stay in front of both Porsches next year and then everything will come okay.
“This year was a good return if you compare it to 2015, with of course two races which we will never forget at Spa and Le Mans.
“Now we are looking forward to next year, unfortunately without Audi, but for sure with a better car than this year and challenge Porsche significantly more than we have done this year.”
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Black people in Lima, from the poorest citizens to religious and business leaders, complain that rogue police officers regularly stop them without cause, point guns in their faces, curse them and physically abuse them. They say the shooting of Ms. Wilson is only the latest example of a long-running pattern of a few white police officers treating African-Americans as people to be feared.
“There is an evil in this town,” said C. M. Manley, 68, pastor of New Morning Star Missionary Baptist Church. “The police harass me. They harass my family. But they know that if something happens to me, people will burn down this town.”
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Internal investigations have uncovered no evidence of police misconduct, Chief Garlock said. Still, local officials recognize that the perception of systemic racism has opened a wide chasm.
“The situation is very tense,” Mayor David J. Berger said. “Serious threats have been made. People are starting to carry weapons to protect themselves.”
Surrounded by farm country known for its German Catholic roots and conservative politics, Lima is the only city in the immediate area with a significant African-American population. Black families, including Mr. Manley’s, came to Lima in the 1940s and ’50s for jobs at what is now the Husky Energy Lima Refinery and other factories along the city’s southern border. Blacks make up 27 percent of the city’s 38,000 people, Mr. Berger said.
Many blacks still live downwind from the refinery. Many whites on the police force commute from nearby farm towns, where a black face is about as common as a twisty road. Of Lima’s 77 police officers, two are African-American.
“If I have any frustration when I retire, it’ll be that I wasn’t able to bring more racial balance to the police force,” said Chief Garlock, who joined the force in 1971 and has been chief for 11 years.
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Tarika Wilson had six children, ages 8 to 1. They were fathered by five men, all of whom dealt drugs, said Darla Jennings, Ms. Wilson’s mother. But Ms. Wilson never took drugs nor allowed them to be sold from her house, said Tania Wilson, her sister.
“She took great care of those kids, without much help from the fathers, and the community respected her for that,” said Ms. Wilson’s uncle, John Austin.
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Tarika Wilson’s companion, Mr. Terry, was the subject of a long-term drug investigation, Chief Garlock said, but Ms. Wilson was never a suspect.
During the raid, Ms. Wilson’s youngest son, Sincere, was shot in the left shoulder and hand. Three weeks after the shooting, he remains in fair condition, said a spokeswoman at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus.
Within minutes of the shooting, at around 8 p.m., 50 people gathered outside Ms. Wilson’s home and shouted obscenities at the police, neighbors said. The next day, 300 people gathered at the house and marched two miles to City Hall.
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Many protesters believe they saw snipers atop police headquarters. The men on the roof were actually photographers, Chief Garlock said.
“The police can say whatever they want,” Tania Wilson said. “Even before they shot my sister, I didn’t trust them.”
Smaller marches have continued every week since the shooting. The N.A.A.C.P. will hold a public meeting on Saturday to air complaints about police brutality. The group will soon request that the Department of Justice investigate the police department and the Allen County prosecutor’s office, Mr. Upthegrove said.
Junior Cook was a neighbor of Tarika Wilson. He says that he watched from his front porch as the SWAT team raced across his front yard, and that seconds later he watched a police officer run from Ms. Wilson’s house carrying a bleeding baby in a blanket.
“The cops in Lima, they is racist like no tomorrow,” said Mr. Cook, 56. “Why else would you shoot a mother with a baby in her arms?”
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XRP is a digital asset for payments. Ripple has been built for enterprise use and is primarily used by banks.
Check out the official Ripple site to learn more about Ripple, and learn how to buy Ripple with this guide!
This step-by-step guide was created to help you learn how to buy Ripple and avoid large transaction fees that some exchanges charge.
We’ll start off by setting up all of the accounts we will need to start buying Ripple:
Prerequisite: Create a Coinbase account.
Coinbase is recommended as it supports many countries and is all FDIC-insured.
Use the link above and we’ll both receive an extra $10 worth of Bitcoin if you fund your account with $100 or more.
Go through the guided steps to setup your account.
Prerequisite: Create a Binance account.
Binance will be used later to buy Ripple (XRP).
Use the link above and go through the guided steps to setup your account (no verification of identity required).
How to Buy Ripple + Avoid Fees
Follow these steps to begin buying Ripple.
Purchase Coins from Coinbase
From within Coinbase, purchase desired amount of Bitcoin (BTC) or Ethereum (ETH). You will need Bitcoin or Ethereum to exchange for Ripple!
Pro-tip: If you connect your bank account, your purchase fee will be the lowest.
Go to GDAX.com
COMMON QUESTION: “Why do I go through GDAX; can’t I just transfer straight from Coinbase to Binance?”
ANSWER: If you transfer funds straight from Coinbase to Binance, you will pay a large fee for the transfer. When you use GDAX to transfer funds to Binance, the transfer is free. The extra step is worth it!
Transfer your purchased coins to GDAX. Under BTC (or ETH), go to “Deposit” -> “Coinbase Account” and type in the amount of Bitcoins (or Ethereum) you’d like to transfer over (this will be the amount of BTC/ETH you’ll use to buy Ripple).
Go to Binance
Go to Binance -> “Funds” -> “Deposits”
Find BTC or ETH (whichever you bought), and copy the BTC or ETH deposit address
Go back to GDAX
Under BTC/ETH, go to “Withdraw” -> “BTC/ETH Address”
Paste the address you had copied from Binance into the field
Type in the amount of BTC/ETH you would like to transfer to your Binance account
Go Back to Binance
Go to “Exchange” -> “Basic” or “Advanced” (just depends on your preference).
On the right-hand column, click XRP/BTC or XRP/ETH
BUY YOUR Ripple! (Remember, you’re trading BTC or ETH for Ripple)
Type in the price of BTC/ETH you would like to purchase Ripple at. Binance makes it easy by giving you options (25%, 50%, 75%, 100%) of the amount you’d like to buy.
Optional Step – Check Your Transaction on a Block Explorer
*Contributed by SingleGhost on Reddit
You Can use a block explorer to check the status of your currency transactions
Go to a block explorer
For BTC: https://blockchain.info/
For ETH: https://etherscan.io/
Alternatively, Google “bitcoin block explorer” or “ethereum block explorer” to find alternatives if these two are down
Search your Binance deposit address in the block explorer
Locate the incoming transaction from Coinbase
Wait for the transaction to be confirmed by the network
[currencyprice currency1=”xrp” currency2=”usd” feature=”prices”]
This content uses referral links. Read our disclaimer for more info.
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NEW YORK (Reuters) - Brent oil prices settled steady on Tuesday after the deadly blasts in Brussels while U.S. crude futures fell, then extended losses in post-settlement trade on industry data showing bigger than expected builds in domestic inventory.
A worker grabs a nozzle at a petrol station in Tehran, Iran January 25, 2016. REUTERS/Raheb Homavandi/TIMA
Oil prices fell early as investors fled risk after the attacks in Belgium that killed at least 30 people. [MKTS/GLOB] Brent erased losses and settled a little higher as equity markets reversed losses and safe-havens such as gold and government bonds pulled back from their highs.
U.S. crude, however, settled lower, then extended losses after the American Petroleum Institute (API), an industry group, said in a report after the oil’s market settlement that U.S. crude stockpiles rose almost 9 million barrels last week to reach a record high of nearly 532 million.
The stockpile growth reported by the API was nearly 6 million barrels above estimates from analysts polled by Reuters. Official crude inventory data from the U.S. government will be released on Wednesday.
The front-month contract in U.S. crude futures CLc1 was down 30 cents at $41.22 a barrel by 5:05 p.m. EST (2105 GMT), after the API report. It had ended the session just 7 cents down at $41.45, after hitting a 2016 high of $41.90 earlier.
Brent crude LCOc1 was up 6 cents at $41.60 a barrel in post-settlement trade, after finishing the session 25 cents higher at $41.79.
“It’s a remarkable crude build reported by the API, which will definitely create some worry in tomorrow’s trade for oil bulls,” said John Kilduff, partner at New York energy hedge fund Again Capital.
“But there are also signs that we’ve had a larger-than-expected gasoline draw, so some of that bearish sentiment in crude may be ironed out.”
API reported a gasoline drawdown of 4.3 million barrels, versus the 1.5 million-barrel decline forecast in the Reuters poll.
Some traders and analysts have warned of potential profit-taking in oil after crude prices gained more than 50 percent over the past six weeks despite marginal improvements in supply-demand. Much of the rally has been driven by plans engineered by OPEC and other major oil producers to freeze output at January levels.
“I wouldn’t be surprised to see some market participants ... saying the price increase that we’ve had has been enough,” Commerzbank strategist Eugen Weinberg said.
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PARIS — A day after Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras visited Jerusalem, his foreign minister Nikos Kotzias sent a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, informing him of the opposition by Athens to the EU guidelines, The Times of Israel has learned.
According to guidelines published earlier this month by the European Commission, goods manufactured over the pre-1967 lines may not state that they were “Made in Israel.” Rather, they should be labeled with a formulation such as “Product from the West Bank (Israeli settlements),” the Commission suggested.
“The European Commission expects all member states to comply with EU legislation,” an official in the union’s delegation to Israel told The Times of Israel last week.
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Another European country, however, has already declared its intention to defy Brussels’s instructions on labeling.
“We do not support that decision,” Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó declared earlier this month at an event of the Israel Council on Foreign Relations. “It is an inefficient instrument. It is irrational and does not contribute to a solution [to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict], but causes damage.”
Earlier this month, the Bundestag faction of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU party rejected the EU labeling initiative as “wrong,” also arguing that it would likely be misused by Israel’s enemies and did not promote Israeli-Palesti nian reconciliation. However, Berlin has so far not announced whether it will implement or disregard the union’s directives.
On Sunday, Netanyahu announced Jerusalem was suspending ties with the EU vis-à-vis efforts to broker a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians in response to the new labeling guidelines.
The Foreign Ministry said the suspension of ties on peace talks would remain in place “until the reassessment is completed.” While relations with individual European countries will continue, dialogue with EU organizations on the peace process is off-limits.
Despite Israel’s announcement, however, an EU diplomatic spokesperson insisted the EU “would continue to work on the Middle East Peace Process, in the Quartet, with its Arab partners, and with both parties, as peace in the Middle East was an issue of interest to the entire international community and also to all Europeans.”
The spokesperson said that “EU-Israel relations are good, broad and deep, and this will continue.”
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The list makes you wince.
Jake Arrieta is the reigning National League Cy Young Award winner. Eduardo Rodriguez is part of the Red Sox’s rotation, Zach Davies part of the Brewers’. Josh Hader, also with the Brewers, is the game’s 54th-best prospect, according to MLBPipeline.com.
The Orioles have traded all of those pitchers since 2013, and also sacrificed Pedro Strop in the Arrieta deal. All of the players who arrived in those deals are now gone, and outfielder Mark Trumbo is the only remnant from the acquisitions of Scott Feldman, Andrew Miller, Gerardo Parra and Bud Norris — Trumbo arrived in a deal for catcher Steve Clevenger, who was part of the return for Arrieta and Strop.
Article continues below ...
Yet, Orioles general manager Dan Duquette does not look back with regret — the O’s are the winningest team in the AL since 2012. In fact, Duquette is likely to make the same kind of deal for a starting pitcher again in the coming weeks, prospects be damned.
The Orioles are 41-30, the surprising leader in the AL East by 1.5 games. Their deficiency is painfully obvious — they rank 13th in the AL in rotation ERA, ahead of only the Athletics and Twins. Oh, and by the way, all of their starters are right-handed.
Buck Showalter and Dan Duquette (G Fiume/Getty Images)
So, here they are again.
Let other teams hold onto prospects as if they are precious gems. Let Baseball America rate the Orioles’ farm system as the fourth-worst in baseball. Duquette’s philosophy is to go for it, and if he occasionally loses an Arrieta for a Feldman or a Hader for a Norris, so be it. Miller helped the Orioles to the 2014 ALCS, didn’t he?
“You have to have some good depth in your minor-league system so when you have a chance to make a trade, you can make a trade,” Duquette said. “Sometimes, it propels a team over the top.
“I think you have to take a shot. The way I look at it, it’s investing in your present — you take some of the future to invest in your present, make it better, make it stronger, especially for your fans.
“I don’t spend a lot of time watching how players do after we trade them. We do whatever we can to win the pennant, have a good team. Most of our fans want the same thing. We’ve been pretty consistent with that.”
The question this season, as it has been in the past, is how the Orioles will even pull off such a deal, given the weakness of their farm system. Duquette all but scoffs at such talk, saying, “I’m sure we have the wherewithal to add to our club.”
Dylan Bundy
Pirates left-hander Francisco Liriano and Padres lefty Drew Pomeranz are two pitchers in whom the O’s have interest, according to Jon Paul Morosi of FOX Sports and MLB Network. The Pirates, though, currently have no intention of selling and the price for Pomeranz figures to be exorbitant, given that he is earning $1.35 million this season and under club control through 2018.
Rockies lefty Jorge De La Rosa, a pitcher whom the O’s have liked in the past, might be a more realistic target — he is a potential free agent with a $12.5 million salary, and the Rockies have younger pitchers whom they might prefer to use in their rotation.
The truth, though, is that the Orioles are in the same position as the Red Sox, Rangers and every other team looking for starting pitching — they’ve got plenty of mid-rotation and back-end types. Ideally, they want a top-of-the-rotation starter to pair with righty Chris Tillman. That pitcher isn’t out there, and the O’s likely would get outbid for him by teams with deeper farm systems if he were.
Which raises the question: How far would the Orioles go to upgrade? Would they trade right-hander Dylan Bundy, whom they drafted fourth overall in 2011 and who is finally healthy and contributing as a reliever after missing most of the previous three seasons with injuries?
Bundy, 23, could be part of the 2017 rotation. The Orioles probably would move him only if they could acquire a starter under multi-year control in return. At least that should be their approach.
Drew Pomeranz (Andy Hayt/San Diego Padres/Getty Images)
“We like Dylan Bundy for the long-term,” Duquette said. “He’s doing a good job on this year’s club. It seems like he pitches better the more innings he gets. We like him to help our ballclub this year, help us accomplish what we want to accomplish, and help us a little more next year.”
Another top pitching prospect, right-hander Hunter Harvey, missed all of last season with elbow issues and is working his way back from hernia surgery. The Orioles, though, recently used 27 of their 41 draft picks on pitchers, and they are fairly deep at catcher, starting with Chance Sisco at Double A.
Sisco ranks second in the Eastern League in batting but 18th in OPS due to his lack of power. Some scouts also question whether he will need to change positions, making him perhaps an unlikely successor to Matt Wieters, a potential free agent. Not to worry — three of the Orioles’ Class A catchers recently were named All-Stars in their respective leagues.
The team’s pitching prospects include Double-A left-hander Chris Lee, who is on the disabled list with a shoulder issue, and Class-A left-hander Tanner Scott, a reliever who touches 100 mph. Two other names that could be in play — third baseman Jomar Reyes, who is struggling at High A at age 19; and Carl Yastrzemski’s grandson, Triple-A outfielder Mike Yastrzemski, whom most project as an extra outfielder but is a favorite of some scouts.
Orioles fans should not grow too attached to any of those players, but at a time when some teams are rebuilding and others stubbornly holding onto prospects, at least the O’s are trying. They’re resourceful, too — their roster often includes three former Rule 5 selections (lefty T.J. McFarland, infielder Ryan Flaherty and outfielder Joey Rickard) and manager Buck Showalter must protect Bundy the way he would protect a Rule 5 pick while trying to keep him healthy.
Duquette and Showalter are not always on the same page. Duquette and owner Peter Angelos had a memorable standoff when the GM wanted to leave and become president and CEO of the Blue Jays. All three, however, share a passion for winning. Somehow, they make it work.
Sure, the Orioles blew it on Arrieta, sacrificed Davies for an ineffective Parra, perhaps gave up too much for one good year of Norris. But they are headed for their fifth straight non-losing record, including a .500 mark last season. If the season ended today, they would be in the postseason for the third time in those five years.
They’re doing something right, huh?
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When most cities announce they want to increase the number of people taking transit and biking and walking, they tend to do so with little action or funding to actually accomplish that goal. Dublin, on the other hand, is poised to take a major step to ease congestion and encourage use of alternative transportation: Ban personal cars in sections of the downtown core.
The Dublin City Council and the National Transport Authority’s proposed vehicle restriction is part of a broader, €150 million transit, cycling and pedestrian improvement plan. Outlined in the Dublin City Centre Transport Study, officials write they want to, “ensure that Dublin develops into a more livable city, where the impact of traffic is minimized.” The proposed changes would occur on several major routes in the city center east of City Hall, west of Trinity College, north of St. Stephen’s Green and south of River Liffey.
“The objective behind the proposals is to encourage more people onto more sustainable means of transport, in order to cater for the additional 42,000 morning-peak trips into the city centre that are anticipated by 2023,” the NTA’s Sara Morris tells me by email. She also explains that the changes will make room for a new tram line through the neighborhood that will begin operations in 2017.
As is nearly standard in modern cities, congestion is a major problem in Dublin — in its 2014 ranking of global congestion, GPS maker TomTom put Dublin at 10th worst in the world. It’s unlikely that will get better on its own, given the Central Statistics Office’s prediction that upwards of 400,000 new residents will move to the greater Dublin in the next 16 years.
“The city centre can only continue to function effectively if we offer those working and living in Dublin, as well as visitors, more choices in how they access and move around the capital,” Owen Keegan, Dublin City Council chief executive told The Journal.
According to NTA’s 2014 cordon count of people traveling in the city center, 48.4 percent use public transportation, 33.3 percent drive, 10.2 percent walk and 5.4 percent ride bikes. The city wants to shift that mode share to 55 percent public transportation, 20 percent private car, 10 percent walking and 15 percent cycling in just two years.
The Transport Study recognizes that, “the private car will continue to be an important choice of mode for people traveling to the City Centre … However, it is essential that the current pattern of vehicular movement both through and within the City Centre is examined to ensure that road space is utilized efficiently.”
The plan is open for public comment until July 16th when the council will make their final decision. Public comment has only been open for a few days, but Morris says the “response to date has been largely supportive.”
It is difficult to imagine city councilors in a major U.S. city pushing for private car bans on any scale and even harder to imagine public support for the proposals. But, Paul White, executive director of New York City nonprofit Transportation Alternatives, says he can imagine it at some point in lower Manhattan’s future.
“It’s probably a few years off, but I think it can absolutely work in New York where we have so much more in common with European cities. We have narrow, historic streets, security concerns and checkpoints and good transit, walkability and bikeablity,” says White. (Paris announced car-free goals similar to Dublin’s last year.)
He says the proliferation of services such as car-share, bike-share and Uber is also increasing the feasibility of private car restrictions. “There are just so many mobility options other than the private car. It’s easier to answer the question of, ‘what are people going to do?’”
If car bans do catch on in the U.S., White thinks they’ll be driven by the private sector more than city councils.
“In lower Manhattan … there are developers and real estate people who want to see the area more attractive to millennials and commercial tenants who in this day and age are more concerned about walking and biking. There’s such a demand for livable streets. When you’ve got high density, limited street space, you’ve got to maximize.”
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Sleater Kinney and Opinions on Death Cab for Cutie Riot grrrl pioneers Sleater-Kinney have reunited after a decade-long hiatus to release a blistering new album. They stop by the studio for a performance and a career-spanning interview. Subscribe via iTunesDownload This Episode
Music News The original manuscript to Don McLean 's 1971 hit " American Pie " sold to an anonymous bidder at Christie's for $1.2 million – enough cash to buy a new Chevy and maybe even finally saturate that levee. McLean has always been cryptic about what his lyrics mean, but the 16-page document may offer some clues. Greg reads the song as a crash course in rock ‘n’ roll history of the years between Buddy Holly 's death and the writing of the song. There's still another chance to bid on some pop memorabilia, however: the estate of Davy Jones is putting several items belonging to the late Monkees singer on the auction block in May. If you're lucky, you might be able to snag some of his gold records, guitars, or costumes. But Jim is most excited about the tambourine for sale – after Linda McCartney of Wings , Jones may be the most famous tambourine player in rock . ShareTweet
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interview Sleater-Kinney Carrie Brownstein , Corrin Tucker and Janet Weiss of Sleater-Kinney had released their most critically lauded album to date, The Woods , in 2005 when they decided to put the band on indefinite“hiatus.”Now, 10 years later, they have returned with a critically acclaimed new album, No Cities to Love , and sold out shows across the United States . Greg sat down with Carrie, Corin and Janet earlier this year and talked about the Riotgrrl origins of the band, why exactly they decided to go on hiatus and why it was important to them to make such a high energy new album. Greg and Carrie Brownstein also talked about her new found fame as 1/2 of the comedic duo with Fred Armisen in Portlandia . More interviewsShareTweet
review Kintsugi available on iTunes Death Cab for Cutie Kintsugi Alternative rock mainstay Death Cab for Cutie has been going through some tough times lately and it's reflected in their latest record. Kintsugi is all about lead singer Ben Gibbard 's divorce from actress Zooey Deschanel . Plus founding member, guitarist and producer Chris Walla announced he would be departing from the band in 2014. Greg thinks that the turmoil within the band makes this feel like a solo record and the new producer didn‘t make much of an impact. While the album had the potential to be melodramatic, it luckily wasn’t. The band just needed to get this record out of its system and Greg gives it a Try It . Jim enjoys Kintsugi more than Greg, and likes how the band has brought in more electronic sound and keyboards . He finds it to be another fine collection of songs and gives it a Buy It . Jim Greg More reviewsShareTweet
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When many people think of the men’s rights movement, the image that springs to mind is lonely men lurking in chat rooms and railing against women. But in recent years, a group of brash, witty female activists has taken up the cause. It may seem counterintuitive that women would be helping drive the conversation about a movement that’s fighting anti-male discrimination and campaigning fiercely against feminism. But according to Dean Esmay of the men’s rights organization A Voice for Men, the fact that they shatter expectations is what makes them such good emissaries. “People want to believe we’re a bunch of sad, pathetic losers who can’t get laid and are just bitter because our wives left us,” Esmay explains. “The very presence of women in the movement creates cognitive dissonance.” Often, he adds, this dissonance makes people more receptive than they otherwise would be.
Who are these women men’s rights activists? And why do they embrace a movement that some see as blatantly misogynistic? Below is a rundown of key players. A few of them, including Janet Bloomfield, who was the focus of a recent in Vice News article, have been in the spotlight recently. Others are virtually unknown to the mainstream, but within the movement they’re seen as luminaries.
Karen Straughan: The YouTube Sensation
In late 2011, Straughan, a foul-mouthed fortysomething Canadian waitress and mother of three, sat down at her kitchen table and began ruminating about the sexes: “I keep hearing from the feminist camp that femaleness has always been undervalued. But I’ve always contended that it’s the exact opposite…If it comes down to a man and a woman in a burning building and you can only save one, the expectation is that you choose the woman every single time. So honestly, whose humanity are we placing above whose?” She then posted a video of her talk on YouTube, where it has racked up more than a million views.
Straughan, who has a brazen air and a taste for ribbed tank tops (a.k.a. “wife beaters”), has since become one of the most visible faces of the men’s rights movement. She has nearly 70,000 YouTube subscribers. And she gets emails from men around the world who stumble on her videos and spend hours on end binge watching. Straughan, who wrote erotic fiction as a sideline before getting involved in men’s rights, also helped launch the Honey Badger Brigade, a ragtag group of female men’s rights activists. This summer, when protesters threatened to shut down A Voice for Men’s first conference in Detroit, the Honey Badgers collected more than $8,000 in donations and flew to Motor City to act as “human shields.” The Honey Badgers also produce an online radio show, covering men’s issues and geek culture. Recent topics include false rape allegations, the treatment of military veterans, and “the shit feminists say.”
Helen Smith: The Renegade Psychologist
According to Smith, a forensic psychologist from Knoxville, Tennessee, who is married to conservative blogger Glenn Reynolds, men have had it with women and society in general. Last year, Smith published a book called Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream—and Why It Matters, which argues that the decks are stacked against men in every sphere, from the home and workplace to the justice system (the result of sexual harassment policies and gender bias in schools and family courts). In response, many men are following John Galt’s lead and opting out of high-paid work and family life. Smith, who previously worked with violent children, also blogs about men’s issues for the conservative news and opinion website PJ Media. In a post earlier this year, she argued that “feminists and their supporters who block funding and education going to boys’ and men’s issues” may have been “to blame” for Elliot Rodger’s deadly shooting rampage in Santa Barbara last March.
Erin Pizzey: Feminism’s Bête Noire
Pizzey, a 75-year-old British author and anti-domestic-violence advocate, traces her interest in men’s rights back to her own childhood and years of brutal beatings from her mother. She later went on to found England’s first shelter for battered women. Pizzey maintains that most of the victims who sought refuge there were themselves violent. She came to believe that women deserved a share of the blame for domestic abuse and that the fledgling feminist movement unfairly demonized men by casting them as the sole aggressors. “This huge edifice of radical feminism made this about ‘patriarchy’ rather that human relationships,” she says. “In the process, it pulled the whole discussion away from the needs of people in violent families.”
Pizzey eventually began offering shelter to battered men while crusading against feminism, which she dubs “the Evil Empire.” After a bomb scare and a string of death threats, in 1979 she fled to the United States, where she helped set up domestic-violence shelters in 21 cities. She also worked with lawyers to defend men claiming they had been falsely accused of rape and domestic violence—an endeavor she funded by writing adventure novels. Pizzey later embraced nonfiction, and wrote frequently for British newspapers, such as the Daily Mail (sample headline: “Why I loathe feminism…and believe it will ultimately destroy the family“). She also traveled the world speaking to battered men’s groups. Today, she is editor-at-large of A Voice for Men, and a hero of the men’s rights movement. She feels very much in her element. “For many years, I was this lone voice, and I was hated for it,” she explains. “Now, you just don’t feel quite so lonely.”
Janet Bloomfield: The Social-Media Provocateur
Bloomfield has landed in the spotlight recently as a driving force behind Women Against Feminism, a social-media campaign featuring photos of women with scraps of paper listing their reasons for rejecting feminism. Since the week before last, when the campaign went viral, Bloomfield—a thirtysomething homemaker and doctoral candidate—has been making the network rounds, with interviews on ABC, the BBC, and NBC’s Today Show.
Bloomfield, who lives somewhere in Canada (she keeps her location and the names of her three children secret to shield them from harassment), is an unlikely champion for men’s rights. In college, she studied film theory, and learned to view the world through a feminist lens. But after giving birth to her first child, she decided to stay home and was shocked by the reaction from other women. “It wasn’t so much the disdain for my choice or the idea that I wasted my education,” she says. “It was that they treated me like I was crazy to rely on my husband—as if somewhere lurking inside of him was a sex-starved monster who would toss me out like trash.” Bloomfield began trading letters with her friend, Pixie, who was camped out in the hospital after giving birth to a critically ill baby boy and believed the intensive care staff was treating the sick baby girls more tenderly. Their letters soon morphed into grumbling about the lot of boys and the treatment of stay-at-home moms.
After immersing themselves in the men’s rights blogosphere, in 2012, the pair launched the in-your-face blog, JudgyBitch.com. Bloomfield’s anti-feminist screeds, piled with obscenities and inflammatory theories about rape and domestic violence, made a splash in the men’s rights circles, and the following year she began writing for A Voice for Men, where she now manages social media. She’s also broken into mainstream news and opinion sites, including Thought Catalog, which recently published Bloomfield’s essay, “I’m an Anti-Sexist, Liberal Doctoral Student, Wife, and Mother Who Supports the Men’s Rights Movement Over Feminism, Here’s Why.”
In reality, while Bloomfield takes a progressive stand on some issues—she supports gay marriage and a women’s right to choose, for example—many of the ideas she flogs are anything but. She calls single mothers “bona fide idiots” who don’t “give a shit” about their children’s well-being and pens blog posts with titles like “Why Don’t We Have a Dumb Fucking Whore Registry? Now That Would Be Justice.” She also dismisses concept of “rape culture,” as “a giant rape fantasy—one in which all women can imagine all men desire them with such force and such passion that they’re willing to commit a crime.”
Suzanne Venker: The Traditionalist
For much of her career, Venker followed the path blazed by her aunt, the anti-feminist crusader Phyllis Schlafly. In 2011, the pair even cowrote a book, The Flipside of Feminism, arguing that freedom and power have only made women unhappy. But their paths began to diverge the following year when Venker, who in addition to authoring books is a frequent Fox News commentator, published a column on FoxNews.com called “The War on Men.” It made the case that men were opting out of marriage because career-minded women had lost their womanly qualities and become angry and competitive. And it urged women to “surrender to their nature—their femininity” if they wanted to find husbands. Predictably, the piece went viral, stirring up a whirlwind of criticism. But Venker was also flooded with grateful emails from male readers. “Men were writing to say, ‘Thank you, thank you!'” she recalls. “‘Finally, somebody gets it!'” Inspired by the outpouring, Venker launch the men’s rights blog Women for Men and shifted the focus of her own commentary to men’s issues. In her recent FoxNews.com columns, Venker argues that white men face oppression “unlike anything American women have faced,” and claims that men’s “success in fields such as medicine, engineering and technology have done more to liberate women from the constraints of their former lives than a busload of feminists could ever hope to do.” She also maintains that surrendering to male power is an “aphrodisiac” that “grants women access to the deepest parts of a man’s soul.”
Anne Cools: The Parliamentarian
In 1969, Cools took part in a supposedly peaceful sit-in to protest racism at a Montreal university. It ended up exploding into one of the most violent student riots in Canada’s history, with protesters setting fires and tossing computers out of windows. Cools, who was sentenced to four months in prison but later pardoned, went on to found one of Canada’s first shelters for battered women. Then, in 1984, the Barbados native became the first black person ever to serve in the Canadian Senate.
According to the Globe and Mail, “Women’s groups applauded the addition of a minority firebrand to the chamber of dozy old white men.” Her belief that domestic violence was a two-way street later put her at odds with the feminist movement, but many Canadians embraced her ideas. In 1995, when Cools told an International Women’s Day gathering that “behind every abusing husband is an abusing mother,” she was inundated with grateful handwritten letters. Many of them were from people who had been abused by their mothers or men claiming they had been falsely accused of domestic violence during divorce proceedings.
Galvanized, Cools—a Liberal Party member turned independent—helped launch a parliamentary committee that traveled the country holding emotional standing-room-only hearings on child custody laws. Critics branded it the “politically incorrect committee” because it heard testimony from hundreds of men, grandparents, and second wives, who spoke tearfully about being cut off from children by a legal system that they alleged favored mothers. For Cools, who lost two siblings to childhood illness, their stories hit close to home. “I understood very early in life what it meant for parents to lose a child,” she told the National Post in the late 1990s. “I’ve always known a parent cannot recover from that. And this is why I will not tolerate the thought of any parent taking a child away from another parent.”
The committee’s final report recommended rewriting custody laws to ensure both parents access to the children and making false domestic violence allegations a crime. Despite overwhelming public support, a decade and a half later, Cools is still fighting to bring these proposals to fruition. Her dogged struggle has won her adoration in men’s rights circles—so much so that A Voice for Men invited the regal, silver-haired septuagenarian to deliver the first speech at its inaugural conference. “The cause that before you and the things that you fight for are valid and just,” Cools told the gathering. “I am on the home stretch of my public career, so you and younger soldiers must come. I encourage soldiers to arm themselves, and to put on battle gear, because it is a fight.”
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PITTSBURGH, Pa. - The Pittsburgh Penguins are heading into a critical game without their workhorse star defenceman.
Kris Letang, who played upwards of 400 minutes more than the next closest Penguins defender during the regular season, was suspended one game on Tuesday for his elbow to the head of Capitals winger Marcus Johansson in Game 3 of a second-round Stanley Cup playoff series.
He'll sit out Game 4 on Wednesday evening at Pittsburgh's Consol Energy Center.
His absence to the Penguins, even for a game, can't be understated, especially since promising 21-year-old defenceman Olli Maatta seems likely to remain out with an upper body injury.
"If we lose him it's going to be a big loss," Pittsburgh winger Conor Sheary said before news of the suspension was announced.
Letang played nearly 28 minutes Monday in the Penguins' 3-2 win, a nervous victory that required a heroic 47-save effort from 21-year-old goaltender Matt Murray. A 29-year-old Montreal native, Letang was third among NHL defencemen with 67 points during the regular season and has seven points in eight playoff games this spring.
He's averaging more than 29 minutes in the post-season, nearly seven minutes more than the next closest Pittsburgh defender, 32-year-old Trevor Daley.
Letang does everything for the Penguins.
He eats up minutes against the imposing Washington top line of Alex Ovechkin, T.J. Oshie and Nicklas Backstrom, kills penalties and stands as the lone defenceman on Pittsburgh's top power-play unit.
His absence creates another vacancy on a top defensive pairing already missing Maatta, who was injured by Capitals defenceman Brooks Orpik in Game 2.
Orpik received a three-game suspension for the hit. The Capitals believed a similar punishment was owed Letang.
"It's late, it's at the head and he leaves his feet," Oshie said of the hit after Game 3. "It's up to (the league), though. Whatever they decide or what they don't decide doesn't matter to us. We're playing the same way."
Johansson didn't practice for Washington on Tuesday morning and his status for Game 4 is unclear. He returned to the game after the hit from Letang, evidently passing concussion tests in the Capitals dressing room.
With Maatta sidelined, the Penguins turned to rookie Derrick Pouliot for Game 3. The 21-year-old Weyburn, Sask., native played about 12 minutes in his first ever NHL playoff game, though saw little ice during the Capitals furious third-period comeback. Pouliot felt rusty early, better as the game wore on.
"I think I got the first one out of the way so I won't be as nervous coming into the next one," said Pouliot, who hadn't played since April 9 prior to Game 3. "I've got another level of my game. You didn't see my best (Monday) night. Hopefully I'll get better as the series goes on."
Pouliot could be joined in Game 4 by Justin Schultz, who has one career NHL playoff game under his belt, which came in Game 1 of a first round series against New York. The 25-year-old former Edmonton Oiler hasn't suited up since, not quite finding a fit after a mid-season trade to Pittsburgh.
Penguins coach Mike Sullivan described Schultz as someone who could help move the puck and be an option, potentially, on the team's power play.
His entry into the lineup would leave the Penguins with two rusty and inexperienced defencemen in Game 4 opposite one of the highest powered offences in the league. Heavier minutes are all but a certainty for Daley and 24-year-old Brian Dumoulin, among others.
A better performance is required of Pittsburgh regardless.
Even with Letang, the Penguins still surrendered 49 shots on Monday night, a substantial decline from a Game 2 in which they gave up only 24 shots.
"I think we were the better team in the first two games; I think Washington was the better team in Game 3," Sullivan said on Tuesday. "We have to make sure we understand how we have to play and what's brought us success and we've got to get back to that."
Pittsburgh leads the best of seven series 2-1.
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When I saw this on Facebook I knew I had to share it with all of you. When you love someone so much, and they are no longer on this planet with you, of course you will grieve – and when the one you loved and lost is your child the pain is unmeasurable, and so it is with the grief – the grief felt when you lose your child is indescribable.
Grief is expressed differently by all of us, just as humans, we are all different…but that doesn’t mean the pain is any less. A sudden loss by a traumatic event is a life-shattering event – one that you may never recover from. I wish people would try to understand that there is no “getting over it.” There is no closure. Parents need to be able to speak about their child, cry over the loss of their child and have loving, caring friends and relatives that will listen and not judge, so those parents can push forward into a new phase of life, a life without their child…and that life can never be the same as it was for them before their loss – how could it be?
Being able to share the life of their child, all the memories and thoughts they have will give parents a way to lighten the pain…it doesn’t increase the pain, as some think, it actually helps with the grief process. Their child mattered. Their child is still loved. Just imagine trying to hold in all those thoughts and memories and never shed a tear? All those bottled up emotions can just eat away at your soul – so please, if you know anyone who has lost a child, please don’t try to change the subject and act cheery, thinking it will help – quite the contrary, the best thing you can do is sit and listen to the parents, just be there for them, they will feel your healing love, and it will be the best gift you can give them.
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This article is from the archive of our partner .
Following Facebook's IPO we declared a bubble burst and now we're seeing that hit the start-up ecosystem as investor money becomes harder to find. "The frothy bubble is over," an analyst told The Wall Street Journal's Pui Wing Tam and Amir Efrati. And that defrothing has happened in large part because of Facebook's performance over the last three months. It's not just the social network's stock that has failed to boom in the months following its public offering, fledgling tech companies are now having a hard time raising money, as a result. Rather than just fork over the bucks to an up-and-coming app, investors have a new found curiosity in potential profitability and revenue. See: investors want to put money into companies that will bring mega riches. Before, users were enough to feed those fantasies. But Facebook's wimpy stock has since crushed that dream, making it harder for these other social media start-ups, to convince investors to buy in.
Until now, these nascent companies could attract dollars based on their popularity, rather than profitability, as we discussed a few months ago. Facebook was the shining exemplar of that model. That is, before its public days. The company brings in lots in ad revenue ($992 million at last count), but it got such a big ($100 billion) valuation based on its large, engaged user base. Those people not only were eyes for standard web-ads, but Facebook also promised a better, more personalized form of advertising. The social network has yet to prove it can deliver on that—engagement is falling, likes don't always work, and the company has yet to really show its advertising works better than a regular website. This has ultimately hurt its bottom line, causing its stock to stall around the $20 mark for the past month of so and leading to slashed projections for ad revenue in the next year.
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A 93-year-old Hungarian man who was in Toronto to visit family was slapped with a $920 ambulance bill despite refusing service from paramedics, raising questions about a patient's right to decline treatment.
Istvan Vago was shopping in a Richmond Hill dollar store with his son on Wednesday when he began clutching his stomach and sank to his knees.
But Vago simply needed to use the washroom, his daughter-in-law, Milla Vago, told CBC Toronto.
"There was a customer, who was also a nurse, who witnessed the whole thing," Vago said.
The nurse insisted on calling an ambulance, she said.
Vago's husband tried to tell the nurse that Istvan only needed rest and water.
He kept repeating, 'We do not need an ambulance.' She said it's up to her, and that she knew what she was doing," Vago said.
Milla Vago says her father-in-law was shaken by the ordeal, and plans to dispute the ambulance and hospital bill. (Mehrdad Nazarahari/CBC News)
When her father-in-law emerged from the washroom, Vago said, paramedics were waiting for him.
"They put him on the stretcher and started checking for different symptoms," she said.
Vago alleges that the paramedics checked her father-in-law's blood pressure, but even though it was normal, they transported him to the hospital anyway.
Legal right to deny medical attention
Medical law expert Bernard Dickens said the case seems to be a violation of Istvan Vago's legal right to refuse medical service.
"If people choose not to be patients, they're entitled to that," Dickens said.
But there's an exception, he said. When a person's life is imperilled, anybody can attempt to rescue them, legally speaking.
In this case, Dickens said, the Vago family's claims that Istvan didn't need help were "vindicated" by his normal blood pressure and vital signs.
"He had no contractual obligation to the ambulance service to pay a bill" for a service that wasn't needed, Dickens said.
Iain Park, deputy chief of York Region Paramedic Services, said in a statement to CBC Toronto that paramedics follow standard protocol when assessing patients.
When a patient refuses transport to a hospital, it must be determined that they have the "capacity to understand they are refusing medical transport."
Vago said her father-in-law does not speak much English, and repeatedly told paramedics "drink" and "water," trying to convey that he was simply dehydrated.
'It didn't sink in at first'
According to his daughter-in-law, Vago was asked if he was covered by the province's health-care plan on the way to the hospital. Once there, he was placed in a hallway where staff took his information and asked to run tests.
He refused, and the family tried to leave, but were told they first needed to pay their bill, which totalled $920 for the ambulance, emergency visit and doctor's fees.
"I was in shock. It didn't sink in at first," Vago said.
The Vago family was told they had to pay the bill before the 93-year-old could leave the hospital. (Mehrdad Nazarahari/CBC News)
Vago said the family wasn't informed of the cost of the three-kilometre ride to the hospital.
"If they had told us it's not an emergency, which they obviously knew it wasn't … we could have driven him," she said. "We were not given any other options."
When her father-in-law was released, Vago said, "he was fine physically, but emotionally scarred," thinking the paramedics had caught on to some illness he wasn't aware of.
"He's still badly shaken," Vago said.
Vago said the family has sought legal help and will dispute the charges. Istvan Vago had out-of-country medical insurance, but it will not cover the hospital visit as it was not medically necessary, his family said.
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David Austin pointed me to this article by Leah Jager and Jeffrey Leek. The title is funny but the article is serious:
The accuracy of published medical research is critical both for scientists, physicians and patients who rely on these results. But the fundamental belief in the medical literature was called into serious question by a paper suggesting most published medical research is false. Here we adapt estimation methods from the genomics community to the problem of estimating the rate of false positives in the medical literature using reported P‐values as the data. We then collect P‐values from the abstracts of all 77,430 papers published in The Lancet, The Journal of the American Medical Association, The New England Journal of Medicine, The British Medical Journal, and The American Journal of Epidemiology between 2000 and 2010. We estimate that the overall rate of false positives among reported results is 14% (s.d. 1%), contrary to previous claims. We also find there is not a significant increase in the estimated rate of reported false positive results over time (0.5% more FP per year, P = 0.18) or with respect to journal submissions (0.1% more FP per 100 submissions, P = 0.48). Statistical analysis must allow for false positives in order to make claims on the basis of noisy data. But our analysis suggests that the medical literature remains a reliable record of scientific progress.
Jager and Leek may well be correct in their larger point, that the medical literature is broadly correct. But I don’t think the statistical framework they are using is appropriate for the questions they are asking. My biggest problem is the identification of scientific hypotheses and statistical “hypotheses” of the “theta = 0” variety.
Here’s what I think is going on. Medical researchers are mostly studying real effects (certain wacky examples aside). But there’s a lot of variation. A new treatment will help in some cases and hurt in others. Also, studies are not perfect, there are various sorts of measurement error and selection bias that creep in, hence even the occasionally truly zero effect will not be zero in statistical expectation (i.e., with a large enough study, effects will be found). Nonetheless, there is such a thing as an error. It’s not a type 1 or type 2 error in the classical sense (and as considered by Jager and Leek), rather there are Type S errors (someone says an effect is positive when it’s actually negative) and Type M errors (someone says an effect is large when it’s actually small, or vice versa). For example, the notorious study of beauty and sex ratios was a Type M error: the claim was an 8 percentage point difference in the probability of a girl (comparing the children of beautiful and non-beautiful parents), but I’m pretty sure any actual difference is 0.3 percentage points or less, it could go in either direction, and there’s no reason to suppose it persists over time. The point in that example is not that the true effect is or is not zero (thus making the original claim “false” or “true”) but rather that the study is noninformative. If it got the sign right it’s by luck, and in any case it’s overestimating the magnitude of any difference by more than an order of magnitude.
Yes, I recognize that my own impressions may be too strongly influenced by my own experiences (very non-statistical of me); nonetheless, I see this whole false-positive, true-positive framework as a dead end.
Now to the details of the paper. Based on the word “empirical” title, I thought the authors were going to look at a large number of papers with p-values and then follow up and see if the claims were replicated. But no, they don’t follow up on the studies at all! What they seem to be doing is collecting a set of published p-values and then fitting a mixture model to this distribution, a mixture of a uniform distribution (for null effects) and a beta distribution (for non-null effects). Since only statistically significant p-values are typically reported, they fit their model restricted to p-values less than 0.05. But this all assumes that the p-values have this stated distribution. You don’t have to be Uri Simonsohn to know that there’s a lot of p-hacking going on. Also, as noted above, the problem isn’t really effects that are exactly zero, the problem is that a lot of effects are lots in the noise and are essentially undetectable given the way they are studied.
Jager and Leek write that their model is commonly used to study hypotheses in genetics and imaging. I could see how this model could make sense in those fields: First, at least in genetics I could imagine a very sharp division between a small number of nonzero effects and a large number of effects that are essentially null. Second, in these fields, a researcher is analyzing a big data dump and gets to see all the estimates and all the p-values at once, so at that initial stage there is no p-hacking or selection bias. But I don’t see this model applying to published medical research, for two reasons. First, as noted above, I don’t think there would be a sharp division between null and non-null effects; and, second, there’s just too much selection going on for me to believe that the conditional distributions of the p-values would be anything like the theoretical distributions suggested by Neyman-Pearson theory.
So, no, I don’t at all believe Jager and Leek when they write, “we are able to empirically estimate the rate of false positives in the medical literature and trends in false positive rates over time.” They’re doing this by basically assuming the model that is being questioned, the textbook model in which effects are pure and in which there is no p-hacking.
I hate to be so negative—they have a clever idea and I think they mean well. But I think this sort of analysis reveals little more than the problems arise when you take statistical jargon such as “hypothesis” too seriously.
P.S. Jager and Leek note that they’ve put all their data online so that others can do their own analyses. Also see Leek’s reply in comments.
P.P.S. More from Leek. To respond briefly to Leek’s comments: (1) No, my point about Type 1 errors is not primarily “semantics” or “philosophy.” I agree with Leek that his framework is clear—my problem is that I don’t think it applies well to reality. As noted above, I don’t think his statistical model of hypotheses corresponds to actual scientific hypotheses in general. (2) When I remarked that Jager and Leek did not follow up the published studies to see which were true (however “true” is defined), I was criticizing their claim to be “empirical.” They write, “we are able to empirically estimate the rate of false positives in the medical literature and trends in false positive rates over time”—but I don’t see this as an empirical estimate at all, I see it as almost entirely model-based. To me, an empirical estimate of the rate of false positives would use empirical data on positives and negatives. (3) Leek does some new simulation studies. That seems like a good direction to pursue.
P.P.P.S. Just to clarify: I think what Jager and Leek are trying to do is hopeless. So it’s not a matter of them doing it wrong, I just don’t think it’s possible to analyze a collection of published p-values and, from that alone, infer anything interesting about the distribution of true effects. It’s just too assumption-driven. You’re basically trying to learn things from the shape of the distribution, and to get anywhere you have to make really strong, inherently implausible assumptions. These estimates just can’t be “empirical” in any real sense of the word. It’s fine to do some simulations and see what pops up, but I think it’s silly to claim that this has any direct bearing on claims of scientific truth or progress.
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NEW YORK (Reuters) - The S&P 500 and Dow U.S. stock indexes ended at fresh record highs on Wednesday even as a rally in U.S. and European shares lost much of its steam on a plunge in oil prices and caution ahead of corporate results.
The S&P 500 ended at 2,152.43, a hair above Tuesday’s close of 2.142.14, to notch its third consecutive record close. The Dow ended at 18,372.12, topping Tuesday’s close of 18,347.67 to mark its second straight record close.
In percentage terms, the S&P 500 ended nearly flat and the Dow was only slightly higher after a more than 4 percent plunge in oil prices hurt energy shares and investors awaited second-quarter corporate earnings. European shares dipped after four straight days of gains.
The S&P energy index .SPNY ended down 0.71 percent and the STOXX Europe 600 Oil & Gas index .SXEP ended 1 percent lower. The U.S. government stunned the market with bearish oil inventory data that added to renewed concerns over a global glut.
The benchmark S&P 500 hit 2,156.45 earlier on Wednesday, topping Tuesday’s intraday record of 2,155.40, while the Dow hit 18,390.16 to top Tuesday’s record intraday peak, the third straight day of such peaks for the S&P and the second for the Dow.
Shares have advanced partly on the view that the U.S. economy is on solid footing and on the expectation that central banks in most developed economies will continue to keep interest rates at rock-bottom levels. Reduced political uncertainty in Britain and Japan have also buoyed shares.
“Investors would rather see some concrete news as far as earnings and results before putting their money in at these levels,” said Alan Lancz, president of investment advisory firm Alan B. Lancz & Associates Inc in Toledo, Ohio.
MSCI’s all-country world equity index .MIWD00000PUS was last up 0.91 point, or 0.22 percent, at 409.3.
The Dow Jones industrial average .DJI ended up 24.45 points, or 0.13 percent, at 18,372.12. The S&P 500 .SPX closed up 0.29 point, or 0.01 percent, at 2,152.43. The Nasdaq Composite .IXIC ended down 17.09 points, or 0.34 percent, at 5,005.73.
Europe's broad FTSEurofirst 300 index .FTEU3 closed 0.31 percent lower at 1,326.30.
Brent crude LCOc1 settled down $2.21, or 4.56 percent, at $46.26 a barrel. U.S. crude CLc1 settled down $2.05, or 4.38 percent, at $44.75.
Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City, U.S., July 13, 2016. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
“A surprising build in gasoline in the peak of the U.S. driving season and a very large build in heating oil will set the tone for lower prices,” said Tariq Zahir, a trader in crude oil spreads at Tyche Capital Advisors in New York.
Safe-haven assets such as U.S. Treasuries, gold, and the Japanese yen rebounded after falling Tuesday. Benchmark 10-year Treasury yields US10YT=RR were last at 1.473 percent after hitting a 1-1/2-week high of 1.531 percent on Tuesday as higher yields attracted buyers.
The dollar was last down 0.27 percent at 104.41 yen JPY=, while spot gold XAU= recovered slightly from its lowest in nearly two weeks.
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Former Liverpool midfielder Danny Murphy says Jose Mourinho was devastated when he was overlooked for the manager’s job at Anfield back in 2004.
Current Manchester United boss Mourinho, who at the time was in charge of FC Porto, wanted to be Gerard Houllier’s successor but the Reds’ hierarchy opted to appoint Rafa Benitez instead. Mourinho went on to take over at Chelsea instead.
Murphy told talkSPORT: “When Benitez was appointed at Liverpool, it was between him and Mourinho. I know that for a fact. Mourinho wanted the Liverpool job massively.
“But Liverpool basically went with Benitez, because he’d just won the Spanish league title and UEFA Cup with Valencia and they thought that was more solid an appointment than someone who had only done it in Portugal.
"I know Mourinho was massively disappointed.”
Steven Gerrard tells Clare Balding of his respect for Jose Mourinho
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Murphy made 249 appearances for Liverpool between 1997 and 2004. He was sold to Charlton Athletic soon after Benitez’s arrival.
“I’m gutted too because Benitez came in and didn’t want me,” he joked.
“I’m just gutted it wasn’t Mourinho because he might have wanted me to stay!”
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"How to make an UV LAVA lamp with ReveaLED"
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ReveaLED is the world's first synchronized UV LED flash light for smartphones and tablets. ReveaLED fits to the audio jack of your device for discovering UV light photography under dark. It has a built-in rechargeable lithium-ion battery that means you can also use ReveaLED freely without connecting it to your device.
There are many natural objects and substances fluoresce under ultraviolet, however not all the "UV" LED lights capable of showing the details of the glowing items. We developed a new generation UV LED light that reveals all possible details of the glowing objects and substances under dark. Using ReveaLED is an amazing experience to discover photography under dark.
ReveaLED smart phone light is specially designed to reveal every detail on glowing items that's including rocks and minerals, animals, many household items and much more to discover.
Let's glow Energy Drinks with ReveaLED
It is a great tool to reveal and picture the amazing glowing colors and fluorescent materials that can not be seen without UV lights. Simply, plug ReveaLED into your smartphone or tablet and start taking amazing pictures of glowing items under dark.
With ReveaLED, you can discover hidden watermarks on passports, money and other documents. Be the first one to photograph very rare pictures to amaze your friends and family.
Photographing UV-induced visible fluorescence requires a powerful source of ultraviolet light signals, because fluorescence of many substances is often low and may otherwise require intolerably long exposures. it is very important to ensure that UV-light directly reaches at the object, and that only the fluorescence is recorded by the camera. The difference of ReveaLED UV light is, sending the UV light signals directly on the object other than lighting up all the area with blue lights as regular UV lights in the market. The Source of ultraviolet signals must not produce any visible light, that will contaminate the output.
Fluorescent molecules tend to have rigid structures and delocalized electrons. Here are the some of the examples: hidden watermarks(money and checks), minerals, tonic water, some vitamins and drugs ,scorpions, toothpaste, antifreeze, fluorescent gems and minerals, body fluids, bank notes, laundry detergent, some animals, plants, fungi (especially marine life),highlighter pens, and much more.
We are a small team at our working studio with big dreams of how to create new products that amazes everyone. Since 2009, we have been designing LED light products that have never seen before. Creativity is our passion and we specialized on LED technology. There are some examples of "UV" LED lights in the market and we tested almost all. Unfortunately, most of the products are Blue color led lights under the title of "UV or black light". The true UV, black light's glowing effect is much different than regular blue light effect. Basically UV light allows to reveal only the glowing items rather than lighting up all the area with blue light.
How Black Light Glows Scorpions (BBC-Earth)
Leaking Antifreeze Detection
After the years of our experience and right development stages, we finalized the true UV LED light chips with our researching partner company who's located in Taiwan the main point is to improve internal quantum efficiency and optical efficiency.
The built-in rechargeable battery, will not consume power of the smart phone. With a single charge, ReveaLED lights non-stop up to 2 hours. With our iOS and Android apps, you don't have to keep the ReveaLED on all the time. ReveaLED will light up whenever you take pictures so battery will last very long time.
Finally we are ready to launch "ReveaLED" on Kickstarter. Our goal is to raise $5000. The fundings will go towards fabricating the best quality machinery with our design, premium quality packaging, logistics and an accelerated production run for The ReveaLED UV flash light.
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TfL and Cubic agree licence for use of London's contactless ticketing system worldwide
"Contactless payments have completely transformed the way people pay for travel in London and this deal will allow other world cities to benefit from the hard work we put into making the system work for our customers"
Deal worth up to £15m is a first for TfL and allows other cities around the world to benefit from London's contactless ticketing technology
Transport for London (TfL) has announced its world-class contactless ticketing system is set to be used by other major cities across the globe as part of a deal worth up to £15m, which will be used to help deliver a fares freeze that the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan has announced across TfL services for the next four years.
TfL signed a deal today (13 July 2016) with Cubic Transportation Systems (CTS), a business unit of Cubic Corporation (NYSE:CUB), allowing them to adapt the capital's contactless ticketing system worldwide. It is the first of a number of planned agreements to sell TfL's expertise both at home and abroad - a key manifesto commitment for the Mayor.
The licence will grant CTS access to London's contactless system, allowing it to be specifically tailored for other world cities' transport systems.
The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said:
'I made a firm commitment to sell Transport for London's expertise around the globe. We will use the income from those deals for further investment in new infrastructure and to freeze TfL fares.'
TfL and CTS have a long-running partnership, having worked together to introduce the Oyster card system in 2003 as well as working together with the UK card industry to make TfL the first public transport provider in the world to accept contactless payment cards. The contactless payment system was first launched on London's buses in December 2012 and expanded to cover Tube and rail services in London in September 2014.
Since then, more than 500 million journeys have been made by more than 12 million unique credit and debit cards from 90 different countries, as well as using contactless-enabled mobile devices. Around one in 10 contactless transactions in the UK are made on TfL's network, making it one of the largest contactless merchants worldwide.
Outside London, CTS also provides smartcard ticketing technology to a number of world cities, including Sydney, Brisbane, Vancouver and Chicago. This new non-exclusive agreement will also enable them to combine the best features from the London and other Cubic systems and make them available to other cities across the globe.
Shashi Verma, Chief Technology Officer and Director of Customer Experience at TfL said:
'We're delighted to have agreed this licensing deal with Cubic Transportation Systems to introduce our contactless payment system to other world cities. Contactless payments have completely transformed the way people pay for travel in London and this deal will allow other world cities to benefit from the hard work we put into making the system work for our customers.'
Matthew Cole, president of Cubic Transportation Systems, said:
'The challenges of mobility in 21st century cities - including access for all, inclusion, environmental concerns and the pressure of ever-growing populations - can only be met through cooperation and partnership. No single entity has all the answers and this agreement between Cubic and TfL sets a new standard in public/private partnerships for addressing these issues, and acknowledges the success of account-based payment for transit for which there is clear interest from many cities across the world.'
Notes to Editors:
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Four Danish nationals booked under blasphemy law
Four Danish nationals booked under blasphemy law
JHANG: Four Danish nationals have been booked under the blasphemy law in Jhang. According to the FIR No 133, logged with the Kotwali police station, Zahid Saeed Bhutta Advocate filed a petition in the court of Jhang District and Sessions Judge for registration of a case against four Danish citizens.
He alleged that they published blasphemous material in Denmark and uploaded on the Internet, that could be accessed and read all-over Pakistan, including his city Jhang. The judge ordered the police to registrar a case under Section 295/C against the accused, and the police complied with the court orders.
Additional SP Jhang Abdul Qadir Qamar confirmed registration of the case and said such cases were investigated by a senior police officer.
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Los Angeles based rapper The Game pictured here not tweeting to his 580,000 followers.
Criminal charges are pending today against a rapper called "The Game" because he caused hundreds of phone calls to flood the Compton sheriff's station, compromising public safety in what officials called a "telephone flashmob."
A sheriff's captain said today his agency has complied enough evidence to recommend that the District Attorney charge the rapper with causing annoying or harassing phone calls to be made, and for delaying or obstructing police officers in doing their duty.
Calls started pouring in at 5:23 p.m. Friday after the rapper -- whose real name is Jayceon Terrell Taylor -- told his nearly 580,000 Twitter followers to call the number for an internship, said sheriff's Lt. Suzan Young of the Compton Station.
"These needless phone calls interfered with the ability of sheriff's desk personnel to answer the business line phones and 9-1-1 calls, and for dispatchers to send help to people who really needed it," said Captain Mike Parker of the Sheriff's Headquarters Bureau. "We don't know how many people needed help but couldn't get through the overwhelmed phone lines."
Initially, deputies thought all the phone hang-ups were a result of a phone malfunction.
"There were so many phone calls that all of the many phone lines were overwhelmed," Parker said. "For hours, as soon as sheriff's deputies and dispatchers hung up phone lines, they rang again with new callers.''
Parker said many emergency calls were received between the hang-ups and music internship questions in the two hours following the tweet, but there were delays in providing help with a missing person, a spousal assault, two robberies and a stolen car, among others.
Around 7 p.m. Parker used his own Twitter account asking the rapper to remove his post, as it resulted in a "telephone flashmob" and was compromising public safety.
"By about 8 p.m., the calls tapered off to the point that desk deputies and dispatchers could handle the call volume without impeding public safety," Parker said.
Taylor, who also goes by Charles Louboutin, denied responsibility for the phone calls, telling the Los Angeles Times in a tweet that "it wasn't me." He suggested his account had been hacked.
Taylor, who grew up in the area but now lives in Glendale, also tweeted:"Yall can track down a tweet but can't solve murders! Dat was an accident but maybe now yall can do yall job!"
Copyright City News Service / NBC Southern California
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Tens of thousands of Mazda BT-50s (L) and Ford Rangers were issued with safety recalls this month.
A farmer in western Victoria says a fire started by his new ute, a model recently recalled by the manufacturers, could have cost him millions of dollars in damage.
More than 70,000 current-model Ford Ranger PXIIs and 20,000 Mazda BT-50s are affected in the official safety recall, some of which are still being sold to customers.
The recall began in late December due to a fire risk caused by a diesel particulate filter operating at very high temperatures in the undercarriage.
Natimuk grain farmer Michael Sudholz said the safety warning has come too late for many farmers, as the recall did not reach him until his Ford Ranger started spot fires on his farm.
"My wife was picking up my son from the mother bin, proceeding across the paddock, and unbeknownst to her she started three spot fires with the ute," Mr Sudholz said.
"We lost probably 150 acres of crop and stubble, and within that was about 100 acres of standing wheat.
"We had about $2 million of equipment in the paddock and six people so it was very lucky we got out of it so lightly.
"My son [who was driving the header at the time] was slightly injured on the arm, but we were very lucky there weren't more serious things that happened.
"It makes my heart sink. I've actually got two of these utes and bought them to be safer in the paddock — they're modern utes and we've practically just bought two firelighters."
Share Western Victoria farmer Michael Sudholz claims a grass fire was sparked from his vehicle, now under a recall notice.
Vehicles recalled amid incidents
A statement from Ford Australia said the affected Ranger line of vehicles — the XL, XL Plus, XLS, XLT and Wildtrak — are the current models built after July 2016.
It said the vehicles "are at risk of underbody fire when driven over long grass or tall vegetation which may accumulate in an underbody area adjacent to the exhaust system".
The statement said:
The vehicle emissions system can generate very high temperatures during Diesel Particulate Filter (DPF) regeneration and if sufficient grass or vegetation accumulates near the DPF, it could create a risk of fire. Customers should avoid driving over long grass and have their vehicle inspected or inspect their vehicle themselves for grass accumulation until parts are available to reduce the possibility of this occurring.
Ford said that it was contacting customers to alert them of the risk, and they would be contacted again as parts were available to address this concern.
Mark Uebergang, a CFA volunteer and neighbour who attended the fire on Mr Sudholz's property, said he had heard of other instances from a local mechanic.
"These guys [the mechanics] are aware of it and they take precautions, but for the people who aren't aware of it … they have a potential of lighting a fire and they aren't being warned about it," Mr Uebergang said.
"Some vehicles I don't think are appropriate. The farmer didn't even know that there was a potential problem.
Mr Sudholz said his family was totally unaware of the issue or the recall.
"It took a while to figure out what started it as we have all modern machinery in the paddock, but we tracked that down as the cause," he said.
"I rang Ford first thing after they were back at work [after Christmas] and they recognise they have a problem, but they have no fix for it at this stage.
"I'm waiting on a phone call back from Ford, I've had a phone call from the engineers and they've identified the vehicle and realised they do have a problem and said they're working on a solution."
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thanks to the greater openness of the environment and the resulting different possibilities of approach. the landscape offers numerous strategies to face the enemy, accerchiandolo, sticking his head down or quietly, with stealth killings calibrated to the millimeter. the innovations introduced here thus refer the detection-system AI enemy and Nate's ability to act through stealth movements, favored by the natural shape of the location. the battle can be divided into two simple stages: the first consists in the approach to the target, with the possibility of mark the enemies from a distance, by pushing the buttons L2 and L3; mechanical performance rather trivial in the application because of a too wide range that allows the player to activate profusely markers on enemies are not in visual range. The second, however, is the classic phase of engagement, already present in other earlier chapters, in which the user can decide how to proceed in the clash: the level design of Uncharted 4: End of a Thief in fact allows all types d ' action, emphasizing stealth attack in favor of a boarding without rules. Naughty Dog has provided in this chapter carto the slaughter of unsuspecting enemies of the presence of Drake and, in the vicinity of some contextual areas - such as evergreen shrubs borrowed from a long line of previous games, the body can be automatically hidden from view. Often the latter technique is necessary to eliminate the large number of soldiers present: their projectiles causing high damage to Nathan and throw himself openly in the battle is only recommended for experienced players. This constant urge towards a silent approach has led the Californian software house to design a detection system consisting of the three states "ignorant", "alarm" and "fighter", each determined by a specific color and by a device placed over the roar opponent's head. The system is surprisingly responsive and the look of the sentries is natural and well designed, without encountering thus casus belli generated by X-rays of a friendly guard armed named Clark Kent. Last but not least it is inevitable to mention the grappling hook, already known after the introduction trailer released in the previous months; it can be used not only to solve puzzles related to the environment but also in battle, to rappel from above on unsuspecting enemies or to move quickly on the pitch.
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BEN Nevis will awake and wreak terrible vengeance on England if Irn Bru is taxed, geologists have confirmed.
The mountain, which has grown a metre since Wednesday’s budget, is expected to draw itself up to its full 6,000m height and stagger south to London if any further threats are made to Scotland’s lifeblood.
Geologist Roy Hobbs said: “Ben Nevis is not dead, only sleeping, and has promised to awaken if Scotland’s heritage is ever menaced.
“Oddly, that’s not happened with various massacres or the last three centuries of subjugation to English rule, but will trigger if there’s an 8p-per-can tax on Irn Bru.
“Current theories are that the mountain is sleeping off a tectonic hangover and wants to be sure there’s plenty of rusty orange restorative for when it wakes up, but nobody knows for sure.”
He added: “Just in case, I’d advise the Chancellor away from any tax on Tunnock’s Teacakes, Tennant’s Super obviously, shortbread or the Glaswegian ‘munchy box’.”
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PYONGYANG, North Korea (CNN) -- North Korea on Friday destroyed a water cooling tower at a facility where officials acknowledge they extracted plutonium to build nuclear weapons, CNN's Chief International Correspondent Christiane Amanpour reported from the scene.
The cooling tower is demolished at the Yongbyon nuclear complex near Pyongyang, North Korea.
The massive implosion, which came at about 5pm local time Friday at the Yongbyon facility, was intended to be a powerful public symbol of a move to end nuclear activities by the Communist nation once branded a member of an "axis of evil" by U.S. President George W. Bush.
The destruction of the highly visible symbol of North Korea's long-secret nuclear program came just a day after the country released details of its program.
"They fired a warning flare and then in three minutes the whole thing came tumbling down in a massive cloud of smoke," Amanpour said. Watch Amanpour's report from the scene. »
"There was a moment of stunned silence as the magnitude of what had happened sunk in," Amanpour said.
U.S. State Department officials and observers from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) watched from a reviewing stand on a ridge about 1,000 yards away, she said.
"This is a very significant disablement step," the U.S. envoy to North Korea, Sung Kim, said.
Nuclear experts say that the plant's destroyed central water-cooling tower would take a year or longer to rebuild if North Korea were to try using the plant again.
"This is a critical piece of equipment for the nuclear reactor," said analyst John Wolfsthal, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who has been following North Korea since the 1980s. "Without this facility, the reactor can't operate and can't produce more plutonium for weapons." Watch the tower being demolished »
North Korea has been dismantling other parts of the facility under the watchful eyes of representatives of the five other nations, including the U.S., that have been involved in six-party talks aimed at ending Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program.
On Thursday, North Korean officials turned over to China a 60-page declaration, written in English, that details several rounds of plutonium production at the Yongbyon plant dating back to 1986. Watch President Bush claim progress over the N. Korea nuclear issue »
In it, North Korea acknowledges producing roughly 40 kilograms of enriched plutonium -- enough for about seven nuclear bombs, according to the U.S. State Department.
In response, Bush said he would lift some U.S. sanctions against North Korea and remove the country from the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism.
But he made clear that other sanctions remained in place on North Korea -- which has been on the terrorism list since its alleged involvement in the 1987 bombing of a South Korean airliner which killed 115 people.
"The United States has no illusions about the regime in Pyongyang," Bush said. "We remain deeply concerned about North Korea's human rights abuses, uranium enrichment activities, nuclear testing and proliferation, ballistic missile programs and the threat it continues to pose to South Korea and its neighbors."
U.S. analysts will pore over the document to resolve Washington's outstanding concerns, which include questions about the extent of North Korea's proliferation of nuclear technology and the status of any uranium enrichment program. Watch what's still unknown after Pyongyang's declaration »
Friday's event at the nuclear plant marked at least an effort by North Korea -- dubbed "The Hermit Kingdom" in the international community for its isolationist tendencies -- to show the world a good-faith effort to end its nuclear weapons program.
Media outlets from the five other nations involved in the talks were invited to view the tower's implosion, a rare move in North Korea. CNN was among the media outlets present.
But there appeared to be no mention of the declaration or planned implosion at Yongbyon on the Web site of North Korea's state-run news agency on Thursday. And an article Wednesday noted the 58th anniversary of the Korean war, calling it "a war of aggression started by the U.S. imperialists in an attempt to occupy the whole of Korea."
CNN's Chief International Correspondent Christiane Amanpour contributed to this story from Pyongyang.
All About North Korea • Nuclear Proliferation
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Pigs in a Blanket
6 Mettwurst sausages (other sausages will work as well)
1 pkg Uncured Bacon
Mustard (I used dijon)
METHOD:
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Take a cookie sheet and spread your sausages out equally. Open the bacon package and wrap slices of bacon around the sausages. With these sized sausages I used 2 bacon slices per sausage. Place them in the oven for 15 minutes. After 15 minutes take out of the oven and flip them over. Then spread mustard on the top and sides. Place back into the oven and cook for another 15-25 minutes or until bacon is well done. Enjoy!
For all those meat lovers out there this dish is a must! It would be good as an appetizer, part of a breakfast, side of a dinner, lunch, or heck just about anything really! It requires virtually no prep-time and little attention while cooking. As long as you have some good sausage, some good bacon, and some good mustard then are set!The only way this recipe probably would have gone a bit smoother was if I had some wooden toothpicks to hold the bacon onto the sausage. Honestly though, I didn't have too much trouble with it falling off. Only the one time when I had to flip them did it want to unravel a bit.Besides the wonderful meaty juicy taste, the best part of this recipe is the down time. I love when I can just stick something in the oven and do some cleaning up of the kitchen, rest of the house, or just have some down time for watching TV with Adam. :) Well I think this is enough rambling about this recipe so with out further ado here it is...INGREDIENTS:
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Jurgen Klopp has a message for Liverpool supporters – stop singing his name during matches!
Anfield was in celebratory mood as the Reds marked the opening of the new Main Stand by thrashing Premier League champions Leicester City 4-1.
Klopp, though, was visibly agitated the Kop began singing his name midway through the second half with the score at 3-1, mere seconds before only a fine save by Simon Mignolet prevented Jamie Vardy reducing the arrears.
The Reds boss was all smiles at the final whistle and made a point of waving to fans enjoying the victory.
But afterwards he said: “I have to say, because I don't know how else I can say this, please don't sing my name before the game is decided!
“Immediately when the Kop started signing 'Jurgen Klopp la la la' they were clear on Simon Mignolet.
“It's like celebrating a penalty before you have scored!
“I don't play! It's nice, I like all the players, but please don't sing my name before the game is decided.
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“It was the same against Arsenal. It's nice, but it's not necessary. It would be really nice if you could stop please!
“I wanted to say this, because (at the time) nobody could understand me. I know it doesn't sound too smart, but sorry. That's me. It's very nice, thank you very much. But I've heard it often now!”
Two-goal Roberto Firmino and Sadio Mane, who netted on his Anfield debut, were the star performers of a thrilling attacking display.
Klopp, though, refused to single out individuals.
“I love these players,” said the Reds boss. “What about Lallana? What about Matip? We should go through all the players.
“I'm really on the side of the player, I really am. I'm responsible for bad performances, they are responsible for the good ones. It's quite an easy deal.
“Everybody could see were were good and we celebrated like something special happened, and what happened is what I expect.
“We need to show it more often. Why should we think about negative things this league is so unbelievably strong and competitive and you have to be there every day, and today we were good.”
Klopp added: “Phil (Coutinho) didn't start. Divock Origi didn't come in. We have a few players injured. So it's still a good team.
“We need to have atmospheres like this, not just against the champions when scoring four goals. “What we have to do this season is to create our own atmosphere for us and nobody else."
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"Every time, I think I'm going to wake up back in the jungle. While I was here, I wanted to be there and while I was there, all I could think of was getting back in the jungle."- Captain Benjamin L. Willard, Apocalypse Now.
He's no Colonel Kurtz—or Kurtz at all. In fact, Marc Ellenby couldn't be farther from the enigmatic fictional characters found in Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness, both of whom go into the jungle bearing the burden of Western civilization. Instead Ellenby, a long-time tropical fruit farmer whose LNB Groves is one of the most progressive farms in the Homestead, Florida area, has gone deep into the jungle—of Belize—to preserve it and to learn its lessons.
Ellenby is a scholarly botanist and a long-time practitioner of Transcendental Meditation who has spent several decades overseeing more than 150 acres of tropical fruits in South Florida. There he grows longans, sapodilla, mamey, sapote, black sapote, jackfruit, dragon fruit, and more along with his wife Kiki and several of their now-grown four children. He also has a 15-acre organic home farm in Homestead.
But Ellenby is spending more and more time in the heart of the dark jungle of late, having recently purchased 800 hectares (around 1,978 acres) of land in central Belize. There he is on a mission that has nothing to do with that of generations of ivory traders, poachers, and colonists who have left the comforts of Western civilization for the wilds of the third world. Instead, in Belize, Ellenby hopes to show that it is possible to create a sustainable jungle—and to live gently there, off the grid. And in the meantime, he's using drones to map the unchartered territory, developing products using farm-grown bamboo and medicinal plants, and clearly loving every minute of his Central American adventure. We just had to sit down with him and learn more.
The grove where jackfruit is grown.
MUNCHIES: LNB Groves is arguably one the most well-known and successful small-scale tropical fruit growers in south Florida. How did you even start out in the tropical fruit farming business? Marc Ellenby: After college, my wife, Kiki, and I had a big garden in Indiana, on the east side of Lake Michigan, and we thought, This is really fun. So we decided to go to school all over again and study agriculture and horticulture. Then I went to work for Brooks Tropicals [in Homestead, Florida] in the summer of 1978. I was really intrigued by tropical fruits. And then Mr. Brooks, who's been a mentor to me, gave me the opportunity to get my own farm. I planted my first trees in 1980.
Going back to your pioneering years in tropical fruits, you were sort of catering to ethnic minorities, weren't you? And how do you see the exotic fruit market today? Are they now mainstream? I'm not sure that our fruits have made it into the mainstream. I think our fruits still are restricted to the broad-based multiethnic marketplace. So the fruits that I grow that appeal to more than one ethnicity are my best fruits. An example would be sapodilla—it has a Hispanic market, a broad-based Asian market of good depth, an Indian market, people from the Caribbean, and people from Central America. The one fruit that we tell Americans they should be eating is star fruit, which everybody knows from tropical vacations. I'd say Florida avocadoes have entered the mainstream. But I don't think longan has. Lychee has to a degree—but most lychee really comes from offshore, it's not grown much in Miami-Dade County anymore because of climate change. Our winters haven't been cool enough.
What led you to Belize? I'm sure the ecosystem is spectacular—but why go all the way there from Florida, which isn't exactly a barren landscape? Well, Belize is actually pretty close—it's only two hours from Miami, and then I'm in a different universe. We found a gorgeous piece of land. It's pristine with no industry to speak of. So we're just trying to see if we can live off the grid. We capture rainwater, we have rainwater showers, we have a nursery, big gardens with cassava and cocoa, greens like chaya and amaranth. We have chickens, ponds for our milk cows. We have lamb. My wife thinks I'm insane, but I'm not. We have ducks on a duck pond. We have solar power. We run LED lights. We make solar rainwater ice with a DC freezer that runs on three 50-watt panels. To make ice on the edge of the jungle is thrilling! The jungle is huge and we're having a lot of fun out there. It just suits me.
Are you growing any cash crops there? I really wanted to grow bamboo so this Belize bamboo project started a decade ago and we're just now introducing ourselves to the world at the Fairchild Tropical Gardens' Ramble in Miami this month, where we're bringing some of our bamboo furniture and cutting boards. We never cut down a tree ever; it's just tree fall. Big trees fall, really big. We make furniture, cutting boards. Bamboo is completely renewable and sustainable.
Edible palm fruit
So have you run into any kind of road blocks in Belize? I heard you got dengue fever on one of your trips down there. Yeah, that was challenging. It's been a steep learning curve. The forestry people are great; the agriculture people are great. It's a small country so you know the ministers. I haven't run into roadblocks. I've had good support from the local people. People are anxious to do work. It's challenging but I can run my farm in Belize for a week for what it costs me to run my farm in Homestead for a day. It's been really fun. I just want that farm to run itself and we're very close.
I've heard you started mapping portions of Belize with drones. How did that start? The forest is just vast. And there's only so much you can do with a compass and mapping so I got a DJI Phantom 3 with an integrated camera. My son is the pilot on the ground. We're capturing screen shots and just beginning the mapping process. We're identifying open areas, then I'm ground truthing it by hiking in. We're going to develop a whole GIS map of the whole forest. We're hoping to develop a conservation plan that will make sense and then maybe the forestry department will say, "Hey, we're going to start using this because Belize has a tremendous conservation agenda." These are wildlife corridors, and that's what Belize has going for it. We have actual pictures of jaguars, pumas, ocelot, which are all coming right through our land. It's wonderful. We also have red brocket and white tail deer. Belize should hold on to this, right? We're still working out the logistics, but in the next 12 to 18 months, we'll have everything photographed. Then we need to start analyzing the data.
What are your long-term goals for your Belize property? What I want to do is to not upset the ecosystem. I want to make the forest better, but not introduce something that is an exotic or that is invasive and use what is already there. There's so many things we can do. It's not about making money but about making the forest more sustainable. Did you know that something like 75 or 80 percent of the people on this planet still use plants as medicines? They don't use pills out of jars. In Belize, there are still healers that go out into the bush. You have teas and tinctures, formulations, barks, saps, waxes. I think all the answers are in plants.
Do you still teach TM and do you think being a meditator has affected your tropical farming, in any way? Yes, I do teach. My wife Kiki is the head of the Miami TM program. I'm like her assistant. I clean up well, come off the farms, and might teach every four to six weeks because I enjoy it. It's good for my own personal evolution. I think when you're in touch with the environment, both by standing on the ground and by tapping your inner resources, then you're in touch with all of the laws of nature, and then nature comes up to support your desires. We've had the support of nature for our entire careers, so I think TM has been a very, very positive thing. I'm very thankful to have this practice.
Thanks for speaking with us, Marc.
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Park(ing) Day spaces in Silver Spring, Dupont Circle and Downtown DC all temporarily claimed a few more square feet for parkland in busy parts of our region today.
In front of the Wilson Building in DC, Tommy Wells and David Catania’s space drew groups of children, Councilmember Yvette Alexander, and more.
Photos by Anne Phelps and Tommy Wells.
In Silver Spring, the Montgomery County Planning Department, the DC chapter of the Congress for New Urbanism, the Green Commuter, Pyramid Atlantic, and Growing Soul all created spaces in a row. The planners used one space for a three-dimensional display about complete streets. Two other spaces have become temporary extensions of Veterans’ Plaza, and 3 spaces contain displays on cycling, sustainability, and art.
Photos by Matt Johnson.
In Dupont Circle, Casey Trees set up the Park(ing) Day display with mock trees and some information about the value of the tree canopy in the city.
Photos by Casey Trees.
Finally, Arlington’s Car-Free Diet folks created a video showing one way to use Park(ing) Day space: Arm wrestling.
However it’s used, Park(ing) Day installations show how green space can further improve an urban area. Downtown Silver Spring, for example, is an extremely walkable place, but over 82 acres of ground is devoted to parking.
That’s almost 22% of the land area of the CBD. And that number does not include on-street parking. In comparison, parks, plazas, and privately-owned open spaces make up only 21 acres — a little under 6% of the land area.
Today, public open spaces in downtown Silver Spring, Arlington, Dupont Circle, and Pennsylvania Avenue got a little larger, at least for the day.
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The German chancellor announced last Saturday (7 June) a high profile conference dedicated to the Western Balkans’ integration in the European Union in sign of support to the ‘forgotten’ EU enlargement process.
“Germany will invite all Balkan states to a conference in the end of August to make it clear that we want to support each other and look to the future together. This is also why we have a strong presence in the region,” Angela Merkel said in an interview posted on her website announcing the event.
The gathering will take place “at the highest level” on 28 August, Deutsche Welle has learned, “from governmental sources”, adding that it received confirmation from the German ministry for foreign affairs that “invitations will be sent to their counterparts in the Western Balkans, including EU member states Croatia and Slovenia, as well as representatives from the EU institutions in Brussels”. EURACTIV has not been able to confirm this information with the German foreign ministry so far but details should be made public in the beginning of July.
A firm commitment to these countries’ EU accession was given in Thessaloniki in 2003 during the Greek presidency’s EU-Western Balkans summit.
Since then, Montenegro and Serbia have received a green light to start accession negotiations, Macedonia is a candidate country, and Albania is expecting to get the same status. Bosnia and Herzegovina is the country that lags behind the most, while Kosovo’s unresolved international status is still a cause for headaches in the Union.
However, in the last 11 years, progress has been uneven, and countries such as Macedonia or Bosnia have been stuck on their path towards the EU.
While Bosnia and Herzegovina is dealing with important domestic challenges, Greece has prevented Macedonia from starting accession negotiations for the past six years, despite a clear recommendation from the EU executive, a blockade which has fueled a deterioration of democratic standards in the country.
For Corina Stratulat, senior policy analyst at the European Policy Centre (EPC) in Brussels, “the organisation of this conference is consistent with the pressing need to deal with the unfinished business in the Balkans”.
“New life for EU enlargement policy”
“Although peace has taken hold of the region, Balkan countries are still not all in [the EU] and certainly they are not all transformed as we had envisioned, and the policy is stuck for the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Bosnia for example, says Stratulat. “So. from this point of view it’s useful to organise this kind of conference and have a serious and strategic discussion and give a new life to a policy that is struggling to demonstrate its added value.”
EU enlargement policy has indeed been pushed into the background by most EU member states since the accession of the Eastern block in the mid-2000s, and the accession of Croatia in 2013 received very little media attention and publicity.
But for countries such as Bosnia and Macedonia, the lack of progress towards EU membership carries a number of stability risks, which Merkel is likely aware of.
“It is useful to make enlargement a political issue rather than sweeping it under the carpet, hoping it will deal with itself, especially for some of these countries. The situation has gotten worse for some countries and there are huge risks associated with Bosnia or Macedonia,” Stratulat told EURACTIV.
Russia-Serbia
However, the Russian offensive in Ukraine might also be another reason that Germany and the EU are renewing their interest in the Balkans, where Moscow is also lurking.
“I wouldn’t say it’s the main reason but I think it’s in the mind of Germany and other member states. Relations between Russia and some of the Balkan countries precede the Ukrainian crisis and Russia is a strategic partner. I don’t think the EU is opposed to it, but of course, given the flexing of muscles Russia has been doing lately, these kind of relations are treated with more consideration than in the past,” Stratulat commented.
Serbia, the largest country in the region, and the most strategic partner of the EU, is also known to have very close ties to Moscow, which has put Belgrade in a tight spot on issues such as sanctions against Russia, and the construction of South Stream.
Although the European Commission has made it clear that the EU considers the South Stream agreements with Russia illegal, Serbia has nonetheless decided to go on with it despite European reluctance, and asked for “more patience and more comprehension”.
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A Dell representative said via Twitter on Thursday that the computer manufacturer is "reviewing concerns" that the company has not satisfied the terms of the GPL license in releasing the source code underlying the Dell Streak.
The Dell Streak tablet, which began shipping this month in the U.S., was first released in the United Kingdom in June.
The problem, according to a small but vocal group of developers and enthusiasts online, is that the Streak uses code licensed under the GNU General Public License, which allows third parties to both use and modify the code, provided that the company or person publishes the object code, either as part of a shipping device, on a physical medium, or publicly available via a server.
The problem is that the license does not define when such code must be released, although most believe that it should be provided as soon as the device that incorporates it is published.
A user named "Smokku" described her own frustration on Android@MoDaCo.com:
I've just spent few hours trying to build android-msm-2.6.32 Linux kernel for Dell Streak," Smokku wrote. "It turns out that it is impossible, without device specific board files. These files are in the Linux kernel source tree Dell used to build kernel for Streak and Dell is obliged under the terms of GPL, to give this source to any owner of Streak requesting it."
Smokku urged others to sign an an online petition, which had only amassed 183 signatures at press time.
But that was enough to gain the attention of Dell blogger Lionel Menchaca, who tweeted: "We're reviewing concerns re: the #dellstreak source code. We intend to comply with all applicable requirements. More details soon."
Dell may be reacting to fears that it will be the latest target of a suit by the Free Software Foundation, which sued Cisco in Dec. 2008 over allegedly modifying GNU-licensed software, then refusing to publish the modified code. In May 2009, Cisco settled with the FSF. The terms included the appointment of a Free Software Director at Linksys, a subsidiary of Cisco, who would report to the FSF on a periodic basis.
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Phytonides have recently decided to change tactics in a serious effort to gain a foothold on Aelion. With their latest incursion, they have managed to arrange nurseries for what could currently be considered “peaceful” lifeforms. If left to their own devices, the Phytonides will spread out of control. It is necessary to eradicate this threat as soon as possible before they can inevitably multiply.
From February 24 to March 9th, every hero can send their loyal adepts to help the xenobiologists. This is a wonderful opportunity to bring glory to your order and earn fabulous rewards!
Rules
Any immortal that has reached 2050 prestige, founded an order (L key) and completed a series of tutorials can take part in this event.
Adepts will need herbicides. You can obtain these in PVE adventures as trophies from bosses, find them in sets with equipment from PvP battles, buy them in the market in the Special Offers section, or receive them as a random reward for participation in the event.
Once the event begins, herbicides will become part of the rewards for completing adventures in the first tactical situation update.
Your character's order must also have at least one free adept that can be sent in to a mission.
As soon as a herbicide is received, you can send an adept on a mission, using the special interface (9 key).
The mission must be completed within 8 hours, but it can be instantly ended for argents.
Adept stats will not affect their performance.
Adepts will complete missions alone. As soon as it has ended, you can immediately send them on to their next mission.
Rewards
There are two types of rewards for participating in this promotion: guaranteed and extra.
Guaranteed Rewards
Each completed mission increases your progress on the guaranteed reward scale.
After achieving a certain level on the scale, you will receive a reward. Guaranteed prizes include unusual outfits, premium time and a large number of victor's medals. You can use these to purchase bionic equipment boosters, which are 30% more effective than the regular kind.
In addition, a resonance booster will be added to the list of prizes. You can use this to automatically complete several tasks when performing an Ether Resonator task and receive a reward.
When you achieve the maximum on the first scale for guaranteed rewards, you will gain access to the next scale, which offers different rewards: holy texts, enhancement stones, spark replicators, resonance boosters, and premium time.
Extra Rewards
Extra rewards are given upon completion of each mission.
You will receive different prizes once missions are completed, including:
combat consumables,
ammo and supplies,
spark replicators,
special equipment enhancement stones,
herbicides,
holy texts,
premium time,
resonance boosters,
extra progress points on the guaranteed reward scale.
If an adept manages to crush a really dangerous enemy, you can expect one of the following rewards:
1000000 credits,
12000 argents and 100 herbicides,
500 progress points on the guaranteed reward scale.
Note
1. Special enhancement stones are the same as the regular ones, but with two exceptions:
when combining you cannot mix the different types of stones (special or regular);
the sale price of special stones is fixed.
2. You cannot receive more than 135 herbicides when participating in PvE and PvP activities.
3. Once the promotion has ended any unused containers with herbicides will automatically be converted back into credits at the purchase rate. Your character must spend 30 minutes outside the game world for the credits to be added.
Additional Information
Nymphea Trophy Transport stats
increases the character's movement speed by 85%,
Nymphea can soar over any obstacles and slowly descend from any height,
Stamina and Regeneration stats depend on your character's current Prestige.
The event will end on March 9th, 12:00 CET.
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Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority in Wednesday’s McCutcheon decision, noted that he sees no need for government to place restraints on individuals’ campaign spending because such information can be found “almost immediately” after they are filed.
“With modern technology, disclosure now offers a particularly effective means of arming the voting public with information,” the Chief Justice wrote. “Reports and databases are available on the FEC’s Web site almost immediately after they are filed, supplemented by private entities such as OpenSecrets.org and FollowTheMoney.org.”
The problem with Robert’s observation is that it’s not true (unless your definition of “almost immediately” is several months or possibly never). According to the Sunlight Foundation, one of the good government groups that work to make campaign finance data available to the public, there are several major problems with getting data up in a timely matter. These include: the fact that senators aren’t required to file their campaign finance reports electronically, resulting in delays; members of the House only have to disclose their donors every few months; and some campaign committees game the system to delay disclosure. For these reasons, groups such as Sunlight and Rootstrikers are calling on Congress to pass legislation mandating disclosure for donations over $1,000 within 48 hours.
To understand why knowing who’s bankrolling our politicians is so important to our democracy, consider what investigative journalists Kim Barker and Andy Kroll recently told Bill about why corporations go to great lengths to keep their political donations secret.
“Bad publicity,” Kroll said.
Barker and Kroll explain in this video clip how a political donation made by big box retailer Target shortly after the Citizens United decision resulted in a high-profile boycott and became “the shot heard around corporate America.”
Watch the two-minute clip:
In the 2010 elections, Target gave $150,000 to MN Forward, a big-business group trying to elect the GOP gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer, who was against gay marriage. When Target’s contribution became public, the company was severely criticized over social media by gay rights groups and the LGBT community. As Kroll puts it:
You had the LGBT community and marriage equality advocates go ballistic, especially because Target had always portrayed itself as a sort of forward-thinking, hip, progressive organization. And yet, their money ended up supporting someone who was against gay marriage. And that scared a lot of people.
Barker called the incident “the canary in the coal mine,” adding that no corporation “wants that to happen again.” After the floodgates to campaign cash were opened following Citizens United, large companies like Target were able to buy as much influence as they could afford. But when corporate America saw how Target’s disclosed donation blew up in its face, it turned to social welfare organizations that are able to use funds to pay for election messaging without having to disclose where the money came from.
Watch the full episode with Kroll and Barker to learn more about dark money and the importance of disclosure »
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October has never been the time to discuss international football too intensely. The collective football world is either coming off a major tournament or slightly too far away from another. There’s still lots of time for development throughout the season which, carrying an inevitable recency bias, will matter more than right now. We should treat Roy Hodgson’s latest squad like an in-law, pleasant nods while suppressing more honest opinions in our own heads. — ‘Ryan Mason? Haha, yes of course!’ Internally tuts. — This new edition of ‘Hodgson selects an in-form player’ will be mildly intriguing with Jonjo Shelvey looking to fill a hole in midfield. Hodgson in all his tenure has never employed the same side in the same formation. It suggests there is opportunity for everyone within the squad to stake their claim. Even Jamie Vardy. Unfortunately the only meaningful game is against Switzerland, negating the chance to see how everyone performs against credible opposition.
One of the most fascinating facets of Hodgson’s prospective decision-making will be in the centre back department. John Stones’ inclusion in this discussion is impressive given he only truly broke into Everton’s side in the second half of last season. Half a season of football was enough for Raheem Sterling to start in a major tournament so why can’t Stones after this season? Everton under Roberto Martinez are not quite porous, but certainly have an air of permeability that Stones’ insertion into the side has, understandably, failed to fix alone. His actual defending is decent — it’s rare to find a truly great centre half now, even less so at Stones’ age — but the ability on the ball he has showcased is arguably the best of any centre back in the Premier League. This is even more of an asset to England who have long struggled to keep possession against quality opposition. Stones can amend this with his willingness to play the ball out from the back, compared to someone like Cahill who often appears flustered for England. Stones’ chances of starting increase with each game he plays. There’s the small bonus of being able to fill out at right back if needed, but England have a multitude of players to do. Stones represents a decision that shows what Hodgson values in his side, if he recognises the issue of ball retention then Stones is a crucial pick to set England on the right track.
Chris Smalling briefly looked like he’d created a cocoon in May, locked himself in, then emerged a dominant central defender. His physicality was never an issue but it now seemed matched by his concentration during the game, leading to 3 clean sheets in 4 games. Yet, as with many things at the start of the season, not all is as it seems. Playing behind Carrick and especially Schneiderlin creates the safest of havens for Smalling. In the defeat to Swansea, when United’s midfield was bypassed frequently, the same defence appeared from the mist of last year. United will quite possibly lead the league in clean sheets this year if they persist with this midfield, but the role that Smalling has to play is reduced enough to flatter him. This context is important to consider if having to decide between Stones and Smalling. Toss in the deficiencies Smalling has with the ball and it should be an easy decision.
One man who might stop this decision from having to be made is Gary Cahill. He’s been a certainty in the team since his move to Chelsea. However with Zouma lurking and the possibility of Stones’ arrival, Cahill has a serious chance of losing his spot for club and country. He provides an acceptable medium of Stones’ technique and Smalling’s physicality without excelling in either area. The experience of playing previously for Hodgson and with Joe Hart will also surely count for something. Tactically this trio of central defenders gives Hodgson the chance to play a higher line no matter who he selects. With the fullback slots likely to be manned by Nathaniel Clyne and Luke Shaw, England will have respectable speed right across the back line for the first time in many years.
Without Jordan Henderson, Hodgson can try out some new looks in the centre. Carrick should start given his unparalleled ability to take care of the ball and protect a defence. As mentioned before, England’s main issue lies with attacks stagnating in midfield. This could be put down to numerous games against lesser sides in qualifying who have sat deep making England create in front of them. Jonjo Shelvey isn’t the player to fix this, in fact his inclusion would more likely exacerbate the issue but Hodgson will no doubt experiment with him. James Milner and Fabian Delph cannot deal with this either, but both provide increased defensive effort which leaves Shelvey’s prospects looking dim. A possible solution is placing Oxlade-Chamberlain in midfield, someone who will drive forwards with the ball breaking the monotonous and often lateral nature of England’s advances. Hodgson has never really shown an experimental side in regard to unconventional lineups though. There are few other noteworthy developments in midfield, unless you’re an optimist on Ryan Mason’s career.
Wayne Rooney’s stuttering form to start the season has led to the biggest questioning of his ability he’s ever faced which is a testament to his consistency. Over the last 18 months Rooney, now stripped of his speed and agility, has looked to transition himself into a wily finisher who can facilitate for other attackers around him. While his own goals dried up, many praised his passing, work rate and leadership. While this was all deserved for the most part, there was always the nagging sense that you could put Rooney into a Tyne-Wear derby and not really notice him. His first touch has long deserted him and the work-rate that was so often the reliable base of any Rooney performance is no longer there to be counter on. The England goalscoring record could provide a welcome distraction from his glaring inadequacies right now. The moral of this ongoing story? Be the captain of every side you play in.
Yet there are more discussions outside of the swirling debate that orbits Rooney eternally. Harry Kane looks off-colour or is returning to his normal abilities, depending on which way you’d like to look at it. It’s probable that Kane simply needs a rest. Danny Welbeck’s injury will hurt England, given his quality performances on the international stage that contrast with his time at Arsenal so far. Danny Ings, Daniel Sturridge and Saido Berahino will need some games to show they should be in contention. Don’t rule out Callum Wilson getting a call-up for the November games, if he prolongs the purple patch he’s in right now.
So, Jamie Vardy, eh? As a relatively rational Leicester fan, I feel well positioned to discuss him and his second call-up to the national squad. Many raised their eyebrows seeing him picked again. He is neither a prolific goalscorer (yet) nor a consistent starter at a top team, leaving him dangerously outside of the accepted venn diagram of ‘Prestige players’ and ‘Rampant goalscorers’ which comprises of all England players ever. This leaves his selection to be ridiculed by the numerous doubters of the England squad. On top of this, he’s disliked for generally being a horrible player for your team to play against. He is rather like having a sneaky swig of someone’s gin at a house party: quick, reckless and only produces the sensation of vomit tunneling up your trachea, if his hardened face and busy elbows are up against your club that week. But like your Dad will say with the gin, “You get a bottle yourself when you’re older, more experienced and you’ll love it son.”. The same will occur with Vardy. Once those three lions are on his chest, you may find your one-way feud with him thawing somewhat, the burning sensation in your throat fading away.
I’m not here to tell you he’ll revolutionise England’s side or even make a palpably positive contribution. His first touch is questionable and his vision is clearly the most unrefined aspect of his game, often overlooking easy passes in favour of head-down-racist-in-a-casino type charging. However there is one thing to be said of his ability. Vardy is elite, possibly unmatched, in his harrying of defenders. Now this in itself is likely to be scoffed at, “Strikers are for scoring goals, what use is this ‘harrying’ you speak of?”, a particularly obnoxious friend might exclaim. Yet if Vardy’s relentless pressing in combination with his pace has led to several goals in the Premier League (just watch the 5-3 win for Leicester against Manchester United), then why not for England? Without Danny Welbeck to do the dirty work up front, Hodgson will go looking for a replacement. Harry Kane’s heavily fatigued, Theo Walcott’s a little out of sorts, Vardy might even start.
Now that really is a reason to discuss international football in October.
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Network Rail and its partners have begun work to create a prototype battery-powered train, part of an industry study into the feasibility of using electric trains on parts of the network which have not been electrified.
This could see trains running on battery power over non-electrified lines, before charging at terminal stations, or using their batteries to run over diesel lines in otherwise electrified parts of the railway.
Electric trains are quicker, quieter, and more efficient - making them better for passengers and the environment. The potential to spread those benefits while not having to put up miles of wiring would be cost-effective and sustainable.
Network Rail’s director of network strategy and planning, Richard Eccles, said: “We see this project as an important element of our strategy of increasing the electrification of the rail network, delivering improved sustainability whilst reducing the burden on the taxpayer. If we can create an energy storage capability for trains, electric traction can be introduced to more parts of the network without the need to necessarily extend the electrification infrastructure.
“As the principle funder and delivery manager, we have done a great deal of feasibility work before reaching this stage, both to define the outputs we seek from the trial and to build confidence in the project across the industry. We are working with our partners to drive this innovation forward.”
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Funding is coming from Network Rail, the Enabling Innovation Team (hosted by the Rail Safety and Standards Board) and the Department for Transport.
David Clarke, Director, Enabling Innovation Team at RSSB said, “Energy storage on trains is a typical example of a development that’s good for passengers, taxpayers and the long term future of the railway but where it is difficult for individual businesses to make the business case to invest in the technology. To help prove the business case we are funding up to 30% of the technology demonstration.
“We see the IPEMU project as a good example of something that will work according to the R&D but no one will invest in without seeing a full scale demonstrator. By supporting this programme we are helping to take innovation out of the lab and de-risk its potential introduction onto the railway.”
Working closely with Derby-based train manufacturer Bombardier and operator Greater Anglia, the project will use one of the operator’s Class 379s as a test-bed to determine future battery requirements and what kind of train might be needed.
This train will be adapted by Bombardier and fitted with two different forms of batteries: lithium (iron magnesium) phosphate and hot sodium nickel salt. The batteries will undergo many lab tests before being fitted to the train.
Bombardier said: “We are very enthusiastic to be collaborating in this ground breaking project with Network Rail. This project is an innovative development to provide an integrated battery system as a power source for the well proven Electrostar train. Bombardier recognises the potential benefits that this technology could bring to the rail industry and the travelling public”
The modified 379 will then undergo a variety of tests ‘off network’, including the facility at Old Dalby. Should those tests prove successful, the train will then run on an electrified branch line on the Anglia route, yet to be chosen, with its pantograph down. This is so that if there is a problem, it can raise its pantograph, and collect power again. This running will be both in – and out of – passenger service.
Once the programme is complete, by the end of 2014, the unit will be returned to its former state and will run as a normal unit again in service.
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Post Politics
Kasich on Brussels: Talk of alliances but not Islam
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Republican front-runner Donald Trump calls Brussels "a disaster," the morning after deadly blasts rocked the Belgian capital. Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton urges the U.S. to "reaffirm our solidarity with your European friends." (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post)
Gov. John Kasich (R-Ohio) responded quickly to the terrorist attack in Brussels, expressing "solidarity with the people of Belgium" but pointedly not mentioning or blaming Islam.
"Along with every American, I am sickened by the pictures of the carnage, by the injuries and by the loss of life," said Kasich in a statement sent to reporters. "The wave of terror that has been unleashed in Europe and elsewhere around the world are attacks against our very way of life and against the democratic values upon which our political systems have been built. We and our allies must rededicate ourselves to these values of freedom and human rights. We must utterly reject the use of deadly acts of terror. We must also redouble our efforts with our allies to identify, root out and destroy the perpetrators of such acts of evil. We must strengthen our alliances as our way of life and the international system that has been built on our common values since the end of the Second World War comes under challenge from these and other actors of evil."
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Is Being a Stay at Home Parent a Job?
I’m so sick of this argument. Valenti’s book has a whole chapter devoted to convince the reader that parenting isn’t a job, but everyone knows the old saying “being a mom is the hardest job in the world.” Yesterday I read Being a Stay at Home Mother is Not a Job. Why are we even having this debate at all?
Being an involved parent is hard work; there are few days off, its 24/7 and especially when they are small it’s very very demanding. Being a stay at home parent may include walks in the park, but even those are rarely a walk in the park if you know what I’m saying?
Participating in the argument at all is admitting that employment is the most desirable activity for a citizen to be involved. In order to care for children or anyone, you give up or take a break from your career. Imagine if we lived in matriarchy instead? Maybe it would be a sad story indeed to have no one to look after and have to get a job. Of course no one could know what that would look like but I do know that this expectation that everyone get a job is a more dangerous version of patriarchy than it was when women stayed home.
Whoa! Hold on a minute, indeed I wasn’t there and indeed I would have absolutely hated being forced into a situation I didn’t want. I’m immeasurably grateful for the progress toward giving everyone the choice to work, but the pendulum has swung too far. Now, depending on your social circles, the woman who chooses to stay at home and raise her children is the one who is going against the grain and rebelling social norms. The only acceptable activity is paid, and anyone who isn’t paid is considered a sponger.
How horrible, to be dependent. We are all taught we need to be independent, lone wolves, dependent on no one. Well I have news for you. Every sane person in the world is dependent on other people for their physical needs, their mental health and their emotional well being. Every. Single. One. Why do you think the crazy cat lady is crazy? Or the recluse who built a log house in the mountains? Perhaps they were mentally unstable before they isolated themselves, but if not they were always going to end up that way.
Have you read the piece in the Huffington Post about the new research on the likely cause of addiction? I highly recommend it. Seriously, go read it. I’ll wait.
So what do you think? Groundbreaking isn’t it? The idea that humans need strong, warm connections with other people or else they latch onto something else, like drugs, alcohol, or gambling. We’re all interdependent, not independent. I’ve often wondered if my two girls never latched onto any blankie or stuffed animal because we’ve always bedshared and they’ve always had a parent to cuddle. I may be wrong and I’m certainly not accusing anyone whose kids have a blankie of being neglectful because all kids are different, but the idea is something to consider.
If we can shed our aversion to the idea of dependency then maybe we can accept that some people will have well paid jobs, others will have caring responsibilities, some will have lower paid but important jobs and some will do something completely different. It’s all ok, and it’s all valid.
Secondly, lets stop pretending that being a stay at home parent is essentially selfish. “Getting to do nothing but raise a person you opted to bring into the world is a privilege, and calling it anything else is ignorant and condescending,” says Liz Pardue-Shultz in the piece linked to above. So what does she do that’s so much more selfless and useful to the world? She’s a freelance writer. This is just another case of a privileged white person who has a great job telling everyone else that having a great job is more important than anything else. This is how she has validated her decision. Good for her, but in reality 70% of people hate their jobs, so who’s ignorant and condescending now?
Some of us don’t want to send the message to our kids that career and money is more important than they are. I know there are stay at home mothers who stay home because they were latch key kids and they remember how it feels; lonely. It is indeed not something everyone can do, those who do it are mostly grateful, even when they are complaining and venting to people who they think will understand. Saying it’s “not a job” reveals more about yourself than anyone else; namely that you are entrenched in patriarchy. Good job.
Featured image courtesy Donnie Nunley
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A photo of the University of Montana's University Hall may soon be the feature photo in a Time Magazine cover story, but it may not be the type of attention Missoula wants.
Already posted on Time.com, an article titled The Sexual Assault Crisis on American Campuses is scheduled to be published in print on May 26 and currently carries a shot of University Hall draped in shadow with a lead reading:
"The college town of Missoula, Montana, saw at least 80 reported rapes over three years, earning it the name “America’s Rape Capital.” But the nickname has it wrong. Missoula isn’t special; it is fairly average."
@elizalgray reinforcing the fact that her article will indeed be the cover story.
This is not Gray's first time covering the issue of sexual assault on college campuses. In April 2014, her article " White House Releases Plan to Curb Campus Sexual Assault ," discusses a White House task force publication titled " Not Alone: The First Report of the White House Task Force to Protect Students From Sexual Assault ," a document that also has an interesting connection to Missoula because it was forged during the Department of Justice investigation into the University of Montana and describes the survey processes that the University was required to adopt in it's settlement.
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When the Shaw Bijou opened in November, co-owner Kelly Gorsuch told Washingtonian that the restaurant would also operate as a 24-hour private club—a kind of “social experiment” for select entrepreneurs and creatives. The wait-list was purportedly almost 1,000 people long, even as it drew ridicule on social media.
“The dues won’t be much—just enough to keep frat boys out. It’s more about curating the people,” said Gorsuch.
Now the team has decided to forgo the members-only plan, and open the full second-floor bar and lounge of the converted row house to the public. The 40-seat space is slightly larger than the first-floor tasting room, which continues to serve a $240 prix-fixe (inclusive of tax and tip, but not beverages). A release from the restaurant notes the change in plans was made so that “guests who may not be able to get reservations for the full tasting menu” could try chef Kwame Onwuachi’s food, though online reservation platform Tock shows abundant availability for two through January. Onwuachi was unavailable for further comment.
The a la carte menu for the upstairs bar currently contains dishes that mimic those in the prix-fixe, including seared foie gras with lobster and charred pineapple as well as roasted lamb head with ahi amarillo. King crab has been a star of the tasting so far, and you’ll find it here in a grouper stew with toasted pepitas. Portions will be larger than those downstairs, while prices are smaller; dishes range from $14 to $34. Cocktails from barman Ben Long are generally $14 to $17, though guests can splurge on vintage spirits or wines—a recent glass of ’99 Château Montrose went for $25.
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Create your own bot for GitHub: basics
Mickaël Andrieu Blocked Unblock Follow Following Oct 3, 2016
Years ago, I worked for SensioLabs, the company behind the so famous PHP framework Symfony. During the Symfony Live, Fabien Potencier introduced fabbot.io to the community.
Fabbot.io is a tool to track the most common errors done by contributors that block the contribution for mostly nothing. To be honest, I was really amazed how useful this tool can be, even if I wanted this tool to do much more.
Features provided by fabbot.io
Sadly Fabien does not plan to open source it, yet.
When you think about a contribution on GitHub, regardless this is an open source or proprietary project, the process from the first line of code to the release is the same.
If you want to ease the process, you need to identify every step that can block the contribution (and/or the contributor itself) to be accepted, merged and released to the community.
So I wanted to do my own tool to help both maintainers and contributors, but I didn’t know how to do it. Years passed and I managed to make my own bot, I even made several. I have to say that in fact it’s really easy and I feel ashamed of not have been able to do it a few years ago!
GitHub is both a social network for developers and a hosting platform for git projects. Every time an action is done on your project, GitHub creates a dedicated event and allow you to listen to theses events.
For instance, let’s say someone made an issue on your repository to ask for a bug fix, how can you get the information?
This is really simple, thanks to the web hooks!
A web hook catches events dispatched by GitHub, the Payload URL is the very first endpoint of your bot to listen events.
Webhook from GitHub, pull request was labeled
Every event is very well documented by GitHub and will be pushed as a POST JSON response to the provided Payload url (this url must be accessible from the outside).
The first step to make a bot is to be able to get these events and retrieve human-readable information about what happens in your project.
To convert the JSON object returned and simplify treatment of the information, you can use the GitHub event parser library I have created for:
Minimal GitHub bot implementation
With this “bot”, every time an action is done on your GitHub project a POST response is sent to your script. The resolver is able to return human-readable information that you can store in the database for instance.
This first article is now done, thanks for reading!
In the next article, I’ll explain how to interact with GitHub using the REST API. We will learn how to create comments, how to establish labeling an issue or even close a pull request!
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Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush — or just “Jeb!” as he’s called in his campaign signs — probably won’t win the endorsement of the Electronic Frontier Foundation given his positions on tech policy. In fact, we can’t imagine many Silicon Valley types are pleased with Jeb’s latest declarations this week that as president he’ll kill net neutrality rules while at the same time bulking up the data collection powers of the National Security Agency.
MUST READ: Huge iOS 9 security flaw lets anyone see your photos and contacts without a PIN – here’s how to stop it
Let’s start with the NSA, which earlier this year had its powers to collect cell phone metadata without a warrant curbed. Naked Security has looked over Jeb’s tech-related proposals and has found that giving the NSA more power to sweep up information has a prominent spot on the agenda.
“The National Security Agency and Cyber Command are on the front lines of defending the United States against cyberthreats,” Jeb! states in outlining his policies. “We must stop demonizing these quiet intelligence professionals and start giving them the tools they need. The Federal Bureau of Investigation also needs more resources to fight back against the onslaught of cybercrime.”
Jeb has also bashed companies such as Apple, Google and Microsoft for supporting encryption on their software platforms because “if you create encryption, it makes it harder for the American government to do its job – while protecting civil liberties – to make sure that evildoers aren’t in our midst.”
But increasing NSA powers and killing encryption aren’t the only goodies that Jeb is leaving under Silicon Valley’s tree — he also wants to gut net neutrality protections and leave Netflix and its users at the mercy of Comcast, Time Warner Cable and other little-loved ISPs. Additionally, he wants ISPs to have the right to charge tech companies more money in exchange for delivering their traffic.
“Rather than enhancing consumer welfare, these rules prohibit one group of companies (ISPs) from charging another group of companies (content companies) the full cost for using their services,” Bush’s campaign writes.
Gutting net neutrality and allowing for pay-for-priority Internet “fast lanes” would, of course, undermine the structure of the open Internet and would make ISPs the gatekeepers for the applications and services we use.
At any rate, Jeb had better hope that telecom companies reward him with big, fat donations from these proposals, because we can’t see many tech companies enthusiastically signing on.
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Over the course of his six-month tenure as president, Donald Trump has already fired an FBI director, an acting attorney general, and dozens of federal prosecutors, all while lashing out repeatedly at federal courts who’ve dared to rule against him. Trump has not, in other words, demonstrated a real commitment to the rule of law.
Close video Trump, feeling heat, attacks Justice Department independence Matthew Miller, former spokesman for the Department of Justice, talks with Rachel Maddow about Donald Trump’s distorted view that the Justice Department, including the FBI, should be in his loyal service. share tweet email save Embed
But in the president’s interview with the New York Times yesterday, the broader story took a more sinister turn. Consider Trump’s latest enemies list:
* Attorney General Jeff Sessions: By recusing himself from the investigation into the Trump-Russia scandal, Sessions isn’t in a position to steer the probe in a way the White House likes. This, in Trump’s mind, is an outrage.
* Special Counsel Robert Mueller: Trump accused Mueller of leading a team filled with conflicts of interest, and added that if the special counsel examines Trump’s finances, the president may fire him.
* Former FBI Director James Comey: Trump suggested at one point that Comey may have been effectively trying to blackmail him, accused Comey of lying about their interactions, and insisted that the former director “illegally” leaked information. None of this is to be taken seriously.
* Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein: Trump suggested the deputy A.G. is not to be trusted because he may not be a loyal Republican. “Rod Rosenstein, who is from Baltimore,” the president said. “There are very few Republicans in Baltimore, if any. So, he’s from Baltimore.” (Rosenstein is not actually from Baltimore, though he served as a Bush-appointed U.S. attorney in Maryland.)
* Acting FBI director Andrew McCabe: Trump, probably taking his cues from conservative media outlets, thinks McCabe is suspect because his wife was a Democratic candidate in Virginia.
Putting aside questions about personality – Trump came across in the interview as someone preoccupied with a sense of grievance and paranoia – this is an inordinate number of enemies for a president to have at the Department of Justice.
And all of this seems to extend from Trump’s apparent belief that federal law enforcement is there to serve his, not the nation’s, interests. It’s one of the awkward consequences of electing an inexperienced president who sees himself as the nation’s CEO: Trump seems to assume everyone in the executive branch is part of his team, and the idea of independence between the Justice Department and the White House is an inconvenient fiction, better left ignored.
This is likely to get worse. Consider Trump’s comments to the Times about his view of the FBI director’s responsibilities:
“And nothing was changed other than Richard Nixon came along. And when Nixon came along [inaudible] was pretty brutal, and out of courtesy, the F.B.I. started reporting to the Department of Justice. But there was nothing official, there was nothing from Congress. There was nothing – anything. But the F.B.I. person really reports directly to the president of the United States, which is interesting. You know, which is interesting. And I think we’re going to have a great new F.B.I. director.”
His description of Nixon-era events is just factually wrong, but more alarming is Trump’s belief that the FBI director will report “directly” to him.
Christopher Wray, the president’s nominee to lead the bureau, told the Senate Judiciary Committee he believes the FBI must be independent of the White House. If Wray was telling the truth, Trump’s Justice Department enemies list may soon have a new member.
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REUTERS/Mark Kauzlarich Despite the overwhelming response to "Pokémon GO" over the last month, many people have been worried about the game's developer, Niantic Labs, and its reputation for not communicating with fans or listening to their requests.
Unfortunately, those fears have been coming true, as of late.
Niantic Labs released a new update for "Pokémon GO" on Saturday night. It includes many changes, but the biggest change is the removal of one of the game's core (albeit broken) features: a three-step tracker, which shows you all the Pokémon currently nearby. The feature worked for the first few days after the app launched, but hasn't worked properly since then.
But, instead of fixing the feature on Saturday, Niantic removed it entirely.
This is especially frustrating for fans since Niantic has also been busy sending cease-and-desist letters to popular third-party sites that help you track Pokémon (which, in fairness, were created because the three-step tracker stopped working).
So, without an in-game tracker or any third-party trackers, many "Pokémon GO" players feel like they're playing in the dark.
Many people have theories why Niantic made these changes — some think the game's three-step tracker had a negative impact on the "Pokémon GO" servers, so they shut down the feature until they could fix the problem — but most people are frustrated not just because this crucial feature was removed, but because Niantic hasn't given any kind of official explanation, and has done nothing to calm worried fans.
Some people on the "Pokémon GO" subreddit pointed out these issues with Niantic awhile ago, highlighting similar communication issues around the company's previous game, called "Ingress."
Reddit
We've reached out to Niantic about why the company has been silent about these changes. We will update this piece if we hear back.
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Paul O’Connell has been identified as the latest addition to Toulon’s list of galacticos and to that end has been targeted as a signing for next season by the club’s multi-millionaire president Mourad Boudjellal.
The 101-times Irish capped lock has been interesting a number of Top 14 clubs, with newly promoted Pau (where former Munster assistant coach Simon Mannix has been joined by James Coughlan) and Grenoble (where former Munster scrum-half Mike Prendergast is assistant to Bernard Jackman) amongst his suitors, but according to French sources Toulon have emerged at the head of the posse, with Boudjellal putting together a two-year contract for O’Connell.
Boudjellal and Bernard Laporte, who will still be acting in an advisory capacity next season after stepping down as head coach at the end of this season, have identified O’Connell as the kind of iconic rugby figure best suited to replacing Jonny Wilkinson in that role.
Although O’Connell is 35, age has rarely been a barrier to Toulon, whose six southern hemisphere forwards in the pack that started their European Champions Cup semi-final against Leinster had an average age of 34.
Set to leave
Their two locks, Bakkies Botha and Ali Williams, are set to leave at the end of the season.
O’Connell himself has not spoken to any of his prospective French suitors, and he has repeatedly wondered aloud as to whether he will retire at the end of the World Cup or see out the last year of his contract with Munster and Ireland until the end of next season. It would therefore seem highly unlikely that he will finish his career in France.
Admittedly, a change in the tax relief law for Irish sportspeople over the 10 most remunerative years does not oblige them to finish their careers in Ireland. The Irish and former Lions captain is in his 14th season with his native province, and while there is a precedent for them releasing a player with a year left on his contract to facilitate an end-of-career sojourn in France (as with Coughlan), it’s hard to envisage a similar scenario in this case.
Amongst the crowd on Sunday as a guest of Toulon was Quade Cooper, who is set to join the reigning European and French champions next season, along with Ma’a Nonu, Clermont winger Napolioni Nalaga, Springbok and Stormers number eight Duane Vermeulen and Northampton number eight Samu Manoa.
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Bernie Sanders, the longtime Vermont senator and current presidential hopeful, has been labeled many things in his career, including a socialist, and while he has attempted to push back against that label by advocating for what he describes as democratic socialism, the term still evokes images of '70s college sit-ins, bell-bottom pants, and bongs. Although no one can know for certain what Sanders would do if he were to win the presidency, his recent comments and actions suggest he could become the most pro-pot president in history.
Gaining momentum
After delivering important political wins in Alaska and Oregon in 2014, the pro-marijuana movement is picking up steam ahead of the 2016 elections. Legal marijuana legislation could be on the ballot in 10 states in November.
California is the biggest state that could take up the issue this fall, but voters could also turn marijuana laws on their ear in other notable states including Nevada, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Florida (where medical marijuana laws will likely be on the agenda).
The chance for success in those states may be better than ever because the majority of Americans have favored the concept of marijuana legalization for three consecutive years, according to Gallup. In October, 58% of respondents to Gallup's poll said marijuana should be legal, up from just 23% in the mid '80s, and that ties for the largest percentage in favor yet.
Given growing support among average Americans, subtle support from a future commander in chief could push the ball over the goal line and usher in an era in which marijuana is made, sold, and taxed similarly to alcohol and tobacco.
Sanders' stance
Sanders' home state of Vermont could soon join the ranks of states with pro-marijuana laws on the books. The state's laws require that legal marijuana legislation goes through legislature, rather than voters, and its state government is currently considering a pro-pot bill that industry watchers think will pass.
Optimism for passage stems from the fact that medical marijuana has been allowed in Vermont for over a decade, marijuana possession decriminalization laws were passed there in 2013, and Vermont's governor and speaker of the House both voiced support for pro-marijuana laws last year.
Vermont's legislature may also follow Sanders' lead.
In November, Sanders introduced legislation that would end the federal ban on marijuana, effectively removing marijuana from the DEA's list of "most dangerous" drugs that lumps marijuana in with heroin. The bill proposed by Sanders would also remove marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act, which in turn, could give states more freedom to make their own decisions on the plant.
That bill follows various pro-marijuana statements made by Sanders on the campaign trail that would seem to support more widespread marijuana legalization.
In October, Sanders said at a George Mason University gathering that "we have 2.2 million people in jail today, more than any other country. And we're spending $80 billion a year to lock people up. We need major changes in our criminal justice system -- including changes in drug laws."
Sanders offered up tacit support of legal marijuana at the first Democratic presidential debate, too. In that debate, when he was asked if he would vote in favor of proposed recreational marijuana in Nevada, he responded "yes,"
Pot profits
As legal marijuana spreads to more states and time goes by, it's becoming increasingly difficult to argue against the potential benefit of taxing cannabis.
For example, Colorado legalized marijuana in 2012 and the state levies a 10% marijuana special tax, 15% excise tax, and a 2.9% sales tax on it. The state also charges a variety of fees and combined, state revenue from taxes and fees grew 64% year over year in December to $12.2 million.
In Oregon, legal sales of marijuana began last fall and applications for retail dispensaries are being filed this year with the goal of retail stores replacing medical marijuana dispensaries as the source of recreational marijuana by 2017. Beginning this year, Oregonians will pay a 25% sales tax on recreational marijuana and prior to marijuana legalization, estimates pegged the annual contribution to the state from marijuana taxes at north of $40 million.
Looking ahead
The influential Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) gives Sanders an "A" rating for his policy stance on marijuana, and his comments and actions suggest that if elected, he could prove to be a big supporter of the pro-marijuana movement. If so, it wouldn't be surprising if a Sanders win leads to even more states taking up pro-marijuana legislation in 2018.
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President Obama will meet with Afghan President Hamid Karzai this Friday to discuss ongoing negotiations over the U.S.'s post-2014 role in Afghanistan, but the White House says not to expect any final decision about how many U.S. troops -- if any -- will stay in Afghanistan after the war's official drawdown at the end of next year.
In a conference call this afternoon, the Obama administration's Ben Rhodes told reporters that "they're not going to finalize that decision" in this discussion, but rather attempt to "reach a common understanding of how we can achieve" mutual objectives for the post-2014 relationship. Then, he says, negotiators in Washington "will be able to take that guidance and be able to finalize an agreement."
Among the topics up for discussion include the impending transition for the 2014 drawdown, as well as the plan for U.S. support in Afghanistan beyond that date. According to the White House, any continued U.S. troop presence will be guided by a few key goals: Assuring the continued progress of ongoing counterterrorism efforts and training and equipping the national Afghan security forces, while also guaranteeing full Afghan sovereignty.
"That's what guides us and that's what causes us to look for different potential troop numbers, or not having potential troops in the country," said Rhodes. "With the Afghans we'll be discussing how best to achieve those missions."
In that vein, Rhodes says the White House is not ruling out the possibility of withdrawing all troops from Afghanistan post-2014.
"That would be an option that we would consider. Because again, the president does not view these negotiations as having a goal of keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan," he said. "He views these negotiations as in service of these two missions" of counterterrorism and training and equipping Afghan forces.
"There are of course many different ways of accomplishing those objectives -- some of which might involve US troops, some of which might not," Rhodes said.
Despite speculation about the White House's plans for U.S. troops in Afghanistan after the war, Doug Lute, Deputy Assistant to the President and Coordinator for South Asia, told reporters that he would not "lend any credibility" to the "wide range of numbers that have been available publicly" with regard to post-2014 U.S. troop presence.
Those numbers, he said, are predicated upon certain variables that are still up in the air.
At present, Lute says, Mr. Obama and Karzai will be more focused on what post-2014 missions might require U.S. troops in Afghanistan and what authorities the U.S. would need to implement those missions rather than exactly how many troops they'd require.
"They're going to be talking about missions and authorities -- not numbers," he said.
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Last week we talked briefly about the US Chamber of Commerce planning to spy on lefties. The more we learn about this, the uglier it gets. What the chamber has planned goes way beyond mere political espionage. It’s outright, highly illegal, cyber-warfare.
Last Thursday, ThinkProgress revealed that lawyers representing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, one of the most powerful trade associations for large corporations like ExxonMobil and CitiGroup, had solicited a proposal from a set of military contractors to develop a surreptitious campaign to attack the Chamber’s political opponents, including ThinkProgress, the Change to Win labor coalition, SEIU, StopTheChamber.com, MoveOn.org, U.S. Chamber Watch and others. The lawyers from the Chamber’s longtime law firm Hunton and Williams had been compiling their own data set on some of these targets. However, the lawyers sought the military contractors for assistance.
As ThinkProgress has reported, the proposals — created by military contractors Palantir, Berico Technologies, and HBGary Federal, collectively known as “Team Themis” — were discussed at length with the Chamber’s lawyers over the course of several months starting in October of 2010. The core proposals called for snooping on the families of progressive activists, creating phony identities to penetrate progressive organizations, creating bots to “scrape” social media for information, and submitting fake documents to Chamber opponents as a false flag trick to discredit progressive organizations.
In addition to the Team Themis plans that ThinkProgress and other outlets have reported on, a closer look at the proposals show that the firms had planned to use exploits to steal information from the Chamber’s opponents, or worse. On November 2, HBGary Federal executive Aaron Barr sent John Woods, a lawyer at Hunton and Williams representing the Chamber, two documents discussing tactics for assisting the Chamber (view the e-mail here). One presentation (click here to download) boasted of HBGary Federal’s capabilities in “Information Operations,” a military contractor term for offensive data extraction techniques typically reserved for use against terrorist groups. The slide includes sections on “ Vulnerability Research/Exploit Development ” and “ Malware Analysis and Reverse Engineering .” View a screenshot below:
HBGary, the parent company of HBGary Federal, specializes in analyzing “malware,” computer viruses that are used to maliciously steal data from computers or networks. In other presentations, Barr makes clear that his expertise in “Information Operations” covers forms of hacking like a “computer network attack,” “custom malware development,” and “persistent software implants.” The presentation shows Barr boasting that he had knowledge of using “zero day” attacks to exploit vulnerabilities in Flash, Java, Windows 2000 and other programs to steal data from a target’s computer… [emphasis added]
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Well, knock me over with a feather. I’m shocked, I tell you. Shocked.
Washington Post:
A solemn group stood in the shadow of the statehouse in Columbus, Ohio, forming a circle on the snow-caked sidewalk. MarShawn McCarrel, 23, a well-known Black Lives Matter activist, had taken his own life on the statehouse steps. Now his friends had come together in his memory.
As evening turned to night last week, protest organizer Rashida Davidson, 25, recounted the personal toll of two years of activism: Trouble sleeping. Bouts of anxiety. Feelings of despair.
“This is really getting to us,” Davidson said. “And if MarShawn’s death does not show that… I don’t know what else we need to tell or show to say that this is really going on.”
Since he died early last week, news of McCarrel’s suicide has rocked the national police protest movement, forcing a round of introspection about a reality that predates the seminal 2014 shooting of a black teenager in Ferguson, Mo.: Some of the most prominent activists and organizers are battling not only the system, but depression.
In Oakland, Calif., a prominent activist posted the phone number for a suicide prevention hotline on her Facebook page. In Cleveland, a lead organizer confessed on Facebook that he, too, had tried to take his own life. Dozens of others have shared stories of their battles with depression, anxiety and insecurity on Twitter.
“In the movement you’re just constantly engaging in black death, seeing the communal impact,” said Jonathan Butler, the University of Missouri graduate student whose hunger strike last fall led to the resignation of the school’s president. “You’re being faced with the reality that I’m more likely to be killed by the police, that I’m being discriminated against. You start to see all of the micro-aggressions.”
Like many prominent activists, Butler said he has long struggled with depression, beginning with the death of his grandfather in 2011. His involvement with the protest movement at times has worsened his mental health, he said, not only because of the emotional strain of a single-minded focus on racism, but also because of more mundane stresses, such as media scrutiny and infighting among allies.
“So many people glamorize the visibility that comes with being in these spotlights,” Butler said. “And they’re not seeing the pressures.”
…Studies have found that black Americans are more susceptible to depression and anxiety — a disparity that health experts believe stems from social stigma and a lack of access to mental health resources in black communities, as well as a reluctance to take advantage of those resources when they are available.
“It’s really tough in the black community because we’re going uphill trying to fight all of these negative stereotypes about us, and the last thing a lot of black people want to do is give people one more reason to look down on us,” said Monnica Williams, director of the Center for Mental Health Disparities at the University of Louisville. “I think a lot of African Americans are walking around depressed, coping from day to day, and not really living.”
A study by the federal Office of Minority Health found that African Americans are 20 percent more likely to experience serious mental health problems than the general population. And for an activist, Williams said, depression can be especially dangerous. Much of the conversation about race and justice occurs online, where harsh and threatening messages are abundant…
“There are so many folks in this movement that have serious mental health issues,” said Alexis Templeton, who is among the most prominent organizers in St. Louis. “There are so many folks who are on the brink of killing themselves.”
When she first joined the protests in 2014, Templeton was one of those people. A year earlier, she had been a passenger in a deadly car crash that killed her father, uncle and partner. Her guilt about surviving was often hard to bear, she said, and there were many days when she sat in her room with a loaded gun to her head.
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Eddie Jones tells Will Greenwood his England Rugby World Cup squad is already 80 per cent complete Eddie Jones tells Will Greenwood his England Rugby World Cup squad is already 80 per cent complete
England head coach Eddie Jones has said his 2019 World Cup squad is 80 per cent complete, while his first choice XV is nearly 60 per cent done in his mind.
The next Rugby World Cup kicks off in Japan in September 2019, and speaking exclusively to Will Greenwood for Sky Sports, Jones confirmed he has 24 of his prospective 30-man squad already pencilled in.
Jones spoke to Sky Sports exclusively ahead of his third year in charge
When asked how close he was to nailing down a potential "World Cup final XV" by Greenwood, Jones added he had nine names in mind who are currently well placed.
Greenwood asked: "A World Cup squad is 30, how many are you happy with? And a World Cup final is XV, how many have you got ready to play in a World Cup final tomorrow? Two numbers, squad and team:
Jones replied: "I think about 80 per cent and 60 per cent, so we're tracking pretty well.
"We've got 24 out of the 30 approximately and nine of the 15. There's a couple out there who have raw potential and if they can turn that into consistent performances then they're there.
"Bolters are more likely to be in the outside backs and back row, the other positions tend to be coupled with experience."
England endured a calamitous 2015 World Cup on home soil, suffering a group stage exit
In a wide-ranging interview, Jones also revealed there is no age limit to success and places in his 2019 Rugby World Cup squad will not come down to a player's age.
Instead, the 57-year-old former Australia and Japan boss says a player's ability and worth to his plans will come down to their "desire to improve" as opposed to being excluded on the grounds of being in their teens or 30s.
Jones said he doesn't think about a players age regarding selection
Jones, who has only lost one Test match since taking the helm at Twickenham in November 2015, referenced Real Madrid and Portugal football star Cristiano Ronaldo as an example of how age is no barrier in sport.
"It's more about growth," Jones responded when asked if he had an age preference. "It's more about how much desire they've got to get better.
Jones added player ages will not be a consideration for his World Cup squad selections Jones added player ages will not be a consideration for his World Cup squad selections
"If you're an older player you can always get better. You know I just saw [Cristiano] Ronaldo won the best soccer player in the world at 32.
"He looks fitter than he did at 26, so it's all about that desire to get better and as you get older you have to put in different types of sacrifices, and if you're prepared to do that there's no age limit.
Cristiano Ronaldo's continued success at the age of 32 was referenced by Jones
"Similarly with the young guys, if you're prepared to learn about the game, if you're prepared to come out here like George Ford and Owen Farrell, and Jonny Wilkinson before that, and do the hours and practice and be the best you can be at that age then there's no age limit at the bottom end."
England host Argentina, Australia and Samoa this autumn in the Old Mutual Wealth Series, and Jones added everything his squad do now is concentrated on the next World Cup in Japan.
Jones has a wonderful record since taking charge as England head coach, losing just once
"Everything we do now is about developing towards the World Cup," he said. "Improving every game, improving the depth of the squad, getting selection difficulties.
"Everybody wants selection to be difficult, not easy. So that's at the head of the list.
"We're gradually becoming more tactically adaptable and that's going to be super important for the World Cup. I think the players are starting to take responsibility on the field.
Jones said he was proud of the way his young England side adapted on the field to beat Argentina in the summer
"You look at that second Test against Argentina. We started off with a philosophy of kicking for touch, trying to keep the game as tight as possible. We weren't getting any pay from the lineout so we went to a more open game, tried to split the game up and it worked well for us.
"The players' ability to change from one to the other really impressed me and it was a young team."
Tune in to watch Eddie Jones' full interview with Sky Sports at 10.30pm on Wednesday on Sky Sports Action.
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Image: iStock
About 6 trillion cigarette butts are produced every year worldwide, leading to more than 1.2 million tonnes of cigarette butt waste. This is set to increase by more than 50 per cent by 2025, mainly due to an increase in world population.
Now an Australian research team is developing a way for cigarette butts can be turned into footpaths, bricks and other building materials - that have the added bonus of cooling our cities.
A team at RMIT University - led by Dr Abbas Mohajerani - has shown that an that asphalt/cigarette butts mixed material can both handle heavy traffic and also reduce thermal conductivity. This means the product could not only solve a huge waste problem but would also be useful in reducing the "urban heat island" effect common in cities.
Mohajerani, a senior lecturer in RMIT's School of Engineering, said he was keen to find solutions to mounting cigarette butt waste.
"I have been trying for many years to find sustainable and practical methods for solving the problem of cigarette butt pollution," Mohajerani said. "In this research, we encapsulated the cigarette butts with bitumen and paraffin wax to lock in the chemicals and prevent any leaching from the asphalt concrete. The encapsulated cigarettes butts were mixed with hot asphalt mix for making samples"
Mohajerani says the encapsulated cigarette butts developed in this research will be a new construction material which can be used in different applications and lightweight composite products.
"This research shows that you can create a new construction material while ridding the environment of a huge waste problem."
Cigarette filters are designed to trap hundreds of toxic chemicals and the only ways to control these chemicals are either by effective encapsulation for the production of new lightweight materials, or by the incorporation in fired clay bricks, according to Mohajerani.
Mohajerani became a world-renowned researcher in 2016 for his research in recycling cigarette butts in bricks. This project is the result of five years of research.
[Source]
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Conclusions. Interventions to reduce eating disorders and obesity that are appropriate for LGB youths of diverse ethnicities are urgently needed.
Results. Lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) identity was associated with substantially elevated odds of purging and diet pill use in both girls and boys (odds ratios [OR] range = 1.9–6.8). Bisexual girls and boys were also at elevated odds of obesity compared to same-gender heterosexuals (OR = 2.3 and 2.1, respectively).
Methods. Anonymous survey data were analyzed from 24 591 high school students of diverse ethnicities in the federal Youth Risk Behavioral Surveillance System Survey in 2005 and 2007. Self-reported data were gathered on gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation identity, height, weight, and purging and diet pill use in the past 30 days. We used multivariable logistic regression to estimate odds of purging, diet pill use, and obesity associated with sexual orientation identity in gender-stratified models and examined for the presence of interactions between ethnicity and sexual orientation.
Objectives. We examined purging for weight control, diet pill use, and obesity across sexual orientation identity and ethnicity groups.
The prevalence of childhood obesity has markedly increased in the past few decades, more than tripling in the last 30 years.1 Obesity in adolescence is especially concerning because of the high risk of immediate- and long-term problems associated with the condition. Obese adolescents are at an elevated risk for high cholesterol, hypertension, prediabetes, bone and joint problems, and sleep apnea.2−5 They are 20 times more likely to become obese adults,6 increasing the odds of long-term health consequences secondary to obesity, such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, cancer, and osteoarthritis.7 Eating disorders and disordered weight-control behaviors, such as purging and diet pill use, represent the third most common chronic childhood illnesses, after obesity and asthma,8 and are associated with a range of serious comorbidities, including disorders of the cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, and endocrine systems.9 In addition, children and adolescents who are obese have been found to be at increased risk of eating disorder symptoms.10−12
These health problems affect individuals during crucial physiological and psychological developmental periods and disproportionately affect marginalized subgroups of youths. Numerous studies have highlighted disparities based on ethnicity,13−17 sexual orientation,18−22 and gender.23−26 However, little is known about how these disparities intersect and the ways in which individuals who are members of multiple minority subgroups may be affected.
Minority stress theory posits that members of marginalized social populations are subject to health consequences as a result of experiences of stigma and discrimination associated with possessing a minority identity.27 These stressors may have direct health consequences through chronic perturbations of biological systems or may cause psychological distress, influencing health behaviors (substance use, weight-control behaviors, sexual risk behaviors, etc.) and health care utilization. Multiple minority stress theory focuses on the intersection of ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation and proposes that lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) people of color are exposed to multiple stressors that may create an additive health disadvantage.28,29 Several population-based studies have supported the additive hypothesis, demonstrating increased prevalence of health risks among LGB people of color compared with their White LGB counterparts, including disparities in mental health disorders,30,31 chronic health conditions,32 adolescent suicide,33 and obesity.34
The additive hypothesis of minority stress theory, however, has been scrutinized because it has not been consistently borne out. For example, other studies35,36 found that ethnicity did not modify sexual orientation–related health disparities, and 1 study29 found that being a member of a ethnic minority group had some protective effect on mental health among LGB individuals, specifically for adolescent girls.
We found a limited number of studies that addressed health disparities affecting LGB people of color and an even smaller number of studies that addressed adolescents and young adults.29,33,35−37 In addition, no studies, to our knowledge, specifically examined the issue of disordered weight-control behaviors. We were aware of only 1 study that examined the prevalence of obesity among sexual minorities as associated with ethnicity; this study found that Asian Pacific Islanders had lower body mass index (BMI) and African Americans had higher BMI in a sample of lesbian and bisexual women compared with White women.34 The aim of the present study examined how gender and ethnicity were associated with sexual orientation identity disparities in obesity and disordered weight-control behaviors in youths using data from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS), a biennial survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in US high schools. This study was unique in its focus on disordered weight-control behaviors and obesity, 2 important adolescent health issues in LGB ethnic minority youths, who are an understudied population.
METHODS Section: Choose Top of page Abstract METHODS << RESULTS DISCUSSION References CITING ARTICLES For the present study, we pooled anonymous data gathered from US high school students in 2005 and 2007 as part of the YRBSS. Four cities (Boston, Massachusetts; Chicago, Illinois; New York City, New York; and San Francisco, California) and 5 states (Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Rhode Island) administered an item on sexual orientation identity; therefore, for the present study, we analyzed data from these jurisdictions. More details about the pooling methods used and the characteristics of jurisdictions included in analyses can be found elsewhere.38 Measures Students in participating high schools completed self-report surveys assessing sexual orientation identity, demographic characteristics, and health-related behaviors and exposures. An item assessing sexual orientation identity asked students to indicate which identity best described them from the options heterosexual, bisexual, lesbian or gay, or unsure. Outcomes included purging for weight control, use of diet pills, and obesity. The YRBSS survey includes 1 item asking whether respondents engaged in self-induced vomiting or used laxatives (i.e., purging) in the past 30 days and another item asking whether they used diet pills without a doctor’s orders to lose or maintain weight.39 Each item was treated as binary. Students were asked to report their height and weight, which was then used to calculate age- and sex-specific BMI (defined as weight in kilograms divided by the square of height in meters) percentiles based on CDC guidelines; biologically implausible BMI values were also identified and set to missing per CDC guidelines.40 Youths were then categorized as obese if their BMI was at or above the 95th percentile for their age and gender. It was shown that self-reported BMI had moderate validity in adolescents.41 Statistical Analysis All descriptive analyses were carried out with SPSS (version 20; SPSS Inc, Chicago, IL), and multilevel software HLM (version 7; Scientific Software International, Lincolnwood, IL) was used to fit final multivariable models. Gender-stratified multivariable logistic regression models were used to estimate the odds of each of the 3 outcome variables (purging, diet pill use, and obesity) associated with sexual orientation identity and ethnicity, controlling for age, region, and data collection wave. Heterosexual youths served as the referent group for sexual orientation group comparisons, and White youths for ethnicity group comparisons. In additional multivariable models, we examined whether ethnicity modified associations between sexual orientation identity and the 3 outcomes by entering interaction terms into the models. The YRBSS complex sampling design was accounted for by adjusting the relative weights and altering the effective sample size for each jurisdiction (i.e., city or state). Because data were clustered, hierarchical linear modeling was done with jurisdiction assigned at level 2 in each model. See Mustanski et al.38 for additional information about methods used to calculate design effects and to account for intracluster correlation. Surveys received from 28 887 youths were combined across the 9 jurisdictions and 2 waves of collection. Students were excluded if they did not provide important information for analyses (i.e., were missing covariates or outcome variables), leading to a final analytic sample of 24 591 youths (85.1% of original sample).
RESULTS Section: Choose Top of page Abstract METHODS RESULTS << DISCUSSION References CITING ARTICLES Table 1 presents selected sociodemographic characteristics of the ethnically diverse youths included in analyses. Among girls, those identifying as a sexual minority made up more than 8% of the analytic sample, and among boys, sexual minorities made up almost 5% of the analytic sample. Mean age was 15.9 years (SD = 1.3; range = 13–18 years). TABLE 1— Sample Characteristics of US High School Students: Youth Risk Behavioral Surveillance System Survey, 2005 and 2007 Characteristics No. (%) Girls (n = 12 132) Ethnicity Asian-American 1357 (11.2) African-American 3218 (26.5) Latina 2222 (18.3) Other ethnicityb 1114 (9.2) White (Ref) 4221 (34.8) Sexual orientation identity Lesbian 137 (1.1) Bisexual 628 (5.2) Unsure 303 (2.5) Heterosexual (Ref) 11 064 (91.2) Boys (n = 12 459) Ethnicity Asian-American 1714 (13.8) African-American 2906 (23.3) Latino 2220 (17.8) Other ethnicitya 1046 (8.4) White (Ref) 4573 (36.7) Sexual orientation identity Gay 149 (1.2) Bisexual 221 (1.8) Unsure 268 (2.2) Heterosexual (Ref) 11 821 (94.9) The percentage of youths engaging in purging and diet pill use are presented in Table 2 for each gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation identity group. In general, a higher percentage of sexual minorities within each ethnicity group reported purging and use of diet pills than did heterosexuals among both girls and boys. Within some groups, as much as a one quarter to more than one third of sexual minorities reported purging or diet pill use to control weight in the past 30 days, compared with a mean of approximately 8% of heterosexual girls and 5% of heterosexual boys across ethnicity groups. Table 2 also presents the percentages of obesity for each gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation identity group. Among girls who were not Asian American, the percentage of obesity in heterosexuals ranged from 6% to 12% across ethnicity groups, whereas this percentage in sexual minorities ranged widely from 4% to 27%. Among boys, the percentage of obesity in bisexuals was especially elevated, ranging from 20% to 50% in Latinos, Whites, and other ethnicity groups compared with a mean of approximately 15% among heterosexuals in these groups. Asian Americans had a lower percentage of obesity compared with other ethnicity groups among both girls and boys. TABLE 2— Prevalence of Purging (Vomiting or Laxatives), Diet Pill Use, and Obesity in US High School Students: Youth Risk Behavioral Surveillance System Survey, 2005 and 2007 Characteristics Total, No. (%) Purge,a % Diet Pills,a % Obese,b % Girls (n = 12 132) Asian-American Lesbian 12 (0.9) …c …c 0 Bisexual 33 (2.4) 13.9 11.8 0 Unsure 52 (3.8) 5.7 8.9 0 Heterosexual 1260 (92.9) 3.0 1.9 2.3 African-American Lesbian 52 (1.6) 15.2 1.4 19.2 Bisexual 156 (4.8) 6.3 6.7 26.9 Unsure 62 (1.9) 24.2 8.5 12.9 Heterosexual 2948 (91.6) 3.5 2.8 12.2 Latina Lesbian 22 (1.0) 26.7 44.7 4.5 Bisexual 124 (5.6) 15.1 9.1 16.9 Unsure 46 (2.2) 8.2 10.1 15.2 Heterosexual 2030 (91.5) 6.4 4.0 9.1 Other ethnicityd Lesbian 28 (2.5) 18.8 0 16.7 Bisexual 88 (7.9) 13.4 11.5 11.4 Unsure 50 (4.5) 22.2 3.3 14.0 Heterosexual 948 (85.1) 6.1 4.9 11.2 White Lesbian 23 (0.5) 15.2 18.4 13.0 Bisexual 227 (5.4) 18.6 14.2 14.5 Unsure 93 (2.2) 8.3 6.9 9.7 Heterosexual 3878 (91.9) 6.1 5.1 5.6 Boys (n = 12 459) Asian-American Gay 14 (0.8) …c …c 7.1 Bisexual 29 (1.7) 18.9 21.1 10.3 Unsure 89 (5.2) 9.1 1.4 5.6 Heterosexual 1582 (92.3) 2.1 2.9 9.3 African-American Gay 39 (1.3) 14.6 17.7 5.1 Bisexual 51 (1.8) 35.3 41.9 15.7 Unsure 52 (1.8) 7.2 6.5 13.5 Heterosexual 2764 (95.1) 4.8 3.5 14.8 Latino Gay 32 (1.4) 12.4 6.5 21.9 Bisexual 36 (1.6) 7.8 5.8 50.0 Unsure 24 (1.1) 17.8 29.6 25.0 Heterosexual 2128 (95.9) 2.8 4.1 18.1 Other ethnicityd Gay 21 (2.0) 22.2 23.1 23.8 Bisexual 29 (2.8) 30.4 20.0 48.3 Unsure 30 (2.9) 10.3 30.4 16.7 Heterosexual 966 (92.4) 3.7 4.2 16.6 White Gay 43 (0.9) 16.2 12.8 11.6 Bisexual 76 (1.7) 13.6 11.4 19.7 Unsure 73 (1.6) 11.1 9.0 22.9 Heterosexual 4381 (95.8) 2.1 2.9 13.7 Multivariable models were fit to examine main effects for sexual orientation identity and ethnicity on eating disorder symptoms and obesity and to examine for possible interaction effects. Ethnicity did not modify sexual orientation identity associations with outcomes; therefore, results of main effects models are presented in the following and in Table 3. Sizable sexual orientation disparities in eating disorder symptoms in both girls and boys were observed. Sexual minority girls had 2 to 4 times the odds of purging and diet pill use compared with heterosexual peers, and sexual minority boys had 3 to approximately 7 times the odds of these behaviors compared with heterosexual peers. Compared with White same-gender peers, Asian American and African American girls had lower odds of purging and diet pill use, whereas African American boys had higher odds of purging, and other ethnicity boys had higher odds of both purging and diet pill use. TABLE 3— Odds of Purging, Diet Pill Use, and Obesity Associated With Ethnicity and Sexual Orientation Identity in US High School Students: Youth Risk Behavioral Surveillance System Survey, 2005 and 2007 Purging,a OR (95% CI) Diet Pill Use,a OR (95% CI) Obese,b OR (95% CI) Girls Age, y 1.02 (0.96, 1.10) 1.16* (1.07, 1.26) 0.99 (0.93, 1.05) Ethnicity Asian-American 0.42* (0.27, 0.65) 0.46* (0.27, 0.79) 0.45* (0.29, 0.68) African-American 0.59* (0.45, 0.77) 0.58* (0.43, 0.80) 2.59* (2.14, 3.14) Latina 0.92 (0.79, 1.20) 0.89 (0.65, 1.22) 1.90* (1.51, 2.41) Other ethnicityc 0.93 (0.72, 1.21) 0.94 (0.67, 1.32) 2.16* (1.73, 2.70) White (Ref) 1.0 1.0 1.0 Sexual orientation identity Lesbian 3.95* (2.26, 6.89) 4.00* (2.11, 7.58) 1.50 (0.81, 2.76) Bisexual 3.23* (2.52, 4.16) 3.06* (2.29, 4.11) 2.25* (1.75, 2.88) Unsure 2.55* (1.77, 3.73) 1.91* (1.09, 3.35) 1.41 (0.88, 2.24) Heterosexual (Ref) 1.0 1.0 1.0 Boys Age, y 1.04 (0.97, 1.11) 1.15 (1.05, 1.27) 0.97 (0.93, 1.01) Ethnicity Asian-American 0.77 (0.52, 1.14) 0.84 (0.51, 1.39) 0.66* (0.53, 0.83) African-American 1.60* (1.26, 2.03) 1.16 (0.84, 1.61) 1.16 (0.98, 1.36) Latino 1.28 (0.96, 1.70) 1.21 (0.84, 1.75) 1.61* (1.35, 1.91) Other ethnicityc 1.54* (1.19, 2.01) 1.49* (1.06, 2.09) 1.41* (1.18, 1.68) White (Ref) 1.0 1.0 1.0 Sexual orientation identity Gay 5.21* (3.47, 7.82) 4.33* (2.72, 6.91) 0.87 (0.53, 1.41) Bisexual 6.16* (4.09, 9.26) 6.77* (4.20,10.91) 2.10* (1.43, 3.07) Unsure 3.76* (2.51, 5.65) 3.00* (1.71, 5.29) 1.21 (0.84, 1.74) Heterosexual (Ref) 1.0 1.0 1.0 Sexual orientation identity disparities were also observed for obesity. Bisexual girls and boys had higher odds of obesity compared with same-gender heterosexual peers. Although Asian Americans had lower odds of obesity compared with White youths, all other youths of color, with the exception of African American boys, had higher odds of obesity than their same-gender White peers.
DISCUSSION Section: Choose Top of page Abstract METHODS RESULTS DISCUSSION << References CITING ARTICLES Obesity and eating disorders in adolescence put young people at risk for a myriad of immediate- and long-term health problems associated with significant morbidity, disability, medical costs, and increased risk of premature death.9,42−45 Identifying groups at elevated risk is essential to informing an effective and appropriately targeted public health response to the health burden posed by these conditions. Findings from our study of US high school students of diverse ethnicities indicated that both female and male sexual minorities of all ethnic groups were at substantially elevated risk of disordered weight-control behaviors, in some cases as much as a 7-fold increased risk. Across ethnicity groups, as many as 1 in 3 lesbian and bisexual girls engaged in these behaviors in the past month compared with fewer than 1 in 10 heterosexual girls. Similarly, across ethnicity groups, 1 in 5 gay and bisexual boys reported disordered weight-control behaviors in the past month compared with 1 in 20 heterosexual boys. Rates of obesity were elevated in female and male bisexuals compared with their same-gender heterosexual peers. Our findings of elevated rates of disordered weight-control behaviors among sexual minority adolescents were consistent with those from previous research.19,21,22 Previous statewide surveys in Massachusetts and Minnesota found gay and bisexual adolescent boys had high rates of these behaviors46,47 compared with heterosexual boys, as was also found in the Growing Up Today Study, a nationwide cohort of predominantly White youths.19 The present study added to the literature by documenting patterns of elevated risk in sexual minority boys of diverse ethnicities living across the United States. In addition, the present study added to previous studies on adolescent girls,19,22 by providing clear evidence that purging for weight control and diet pill use were highly prevalent among sexual minority girls of diverse ethnicities. In relation to ethnicity, our study suggested that African American female adolescents might have some protection against engaging in vomiting or abuse of laxatives or diet pills to control weight. Previous studies showed mixed results on this point, with some finding a similar protective effect,17,48 whereas others did not find reduced risk.15,21,49 Our study also suggested that Asian American girls might be at decreased risk for disordered weight-control behaviors compared with Whites, consistent with previous findings from the National Latino and Asian American Study.50 Among ethnic minority boys, our findings were consistent with previous research that showed Latino and African American boys had higher rates of disordered weight-control behaviors compared with White boys.16,49 This trend was not found among Asian American boys, which was consistent with previous literature.50 Few studies have examined associations of sexual orientation with obesity in adolescents. One previous study with youths participating in the Growing Up Today Study, a cohort made up predominantly of White youths, demonstrated that sexual orientation minority girls had a higher BMI than heterosexual girls, whereas among boys the reverse was found, with heterosexual boys having higher BMI than gay boys.18 For girls, the present findings differed from the previous study, in that elevated odds of obesity were found only for bisexuals and not lesbians. For boys, results from the present study also differed from previous findings, in that gay boys did not differ from heterosexuals, whereas bisexual boys had 2 times the odds of obesity compared with heterosexual peers. A number of studies have shown elevated rates of obesity among ethnic minority adolescents,13−17 especially in African American and Latina girls compared with their White same-gender peers. Our findings were consistent with these studies, demonstrating an increased notable risk of obesity among African American and Latina girls. Our results were also consistent with those of previous research, which found Asian Americans youths were at lower risk of obesity compared with White youths.14,51 The present study did not find support for the additive hypothesis of multiple minority stress theory, as sexual orientation-by-ethnicity interactions were not found to be significant in multivariable regression models. This null finding might have been because of insufficient statistical power; however, prevalence estimates for outcomes presented in Table 2 did not suggest any consistent patterns of additivity. Contemporary approaches to intersectionality research recommend studying the risk associated with the unique experiences of being LGB people of color (e.g., the experience of being Asian American, bisexual, and female), rather than assuming that the experience was merely the sum of the risk of being a sexual minority in addition to an ethnic minority.52−54 Such research requires collecting data on the processes and contexts that generate unique risks and protections for individuals with LGB people of color identities. For example, a few studies found that gay and bisexual males who were an ethnic minority, especially Latino, might be at particularly elevated risk for mental health problems because of family rejection.28,37,55 Limitations Our study had several limitations that should be considered. Although our analytic sample was very large, we still might not have had sufficient statistical power to detect sexual-orientation-by-ethnicity interactions or to detect a possible modest increased odds of obesity for lesbians compared with heterosexual peers. Generalizability of findings was limited to the jurisdictions across the country that provided data. Our findings relied on self-reported height and weight. Studies showed that although self-reported height and weight are highly correlated with measured height and weight, adolescents tend to overreport their height and underreport their weight. In particular, some studies found that males and non-Hispanic Whites were more likely to overreport height and females were more likely to underreport weight.39,56,57 Importantly, another study of adolescents and young adults found no evidence that sexual orientation modified bias in self-reported BMI among females, although gay males were found to underreport BMI to a greater degree than were heterosexual males.58 The YRBSS provided little information on important factors that might help to explain disparities in disordered weight-control behaviors and obesity, such as socioeconomic status, harassment and violence victimization, respondents’ family and social environment, and psychological health.8,59,60 The use of identity to classify sexual orientation hindered our ability to examine the subset of sexual minorities who had same- or both-gender attractions or sexual partners but did not identify as bisexual, gay, or lesbian. The YRBSS did not assess several important indicators of eating disorders, such as fasting and psychological symptoms; therefore, our analyses likely underestimated the prevalence of eating disorder symptoms in the population. Our dichotomous measures of any purging and diet pill use in the past 30 days did not allow us to examine symptom severity, which also might differ by sexual orientation identity and ethnicity. Conclusions Eating disorders and obesity are serious conditions with short- and long-term implications for comorbid disease risk, medical and psychiatric treatment costs, quality of life, and longevity.9,42−45 In the present study, sizable disparities in disordered weight control behaviors adversely affecting all sexual minority groups of both genders were found for self-induced vomiting and abuse of laxatives and diet pills. Because of minimal regulation on the sale of laxatives and diet pills in the United States,61 vulnerable and marginalized youths, such as sexual minorities and others, have largely unfettered access to purchase these products, which are then too often abused in dangerous attempts to control weight. As done with regard to other abused substances, such as alcohol and tobacco, public health professionals and policymakers need to step up efforts to protect minors from industries that currently profit from the abuse of their products by vulnerable youths.61 The findings of the present study also highlighted the serious issue of obesity in female and male bisexual youths. Obesity in adolescence is strongly associated with a myriad immediate- and long-term adverse consequences.6,7 Health and other professionals working with sexual minority youths need to establish mechanisms to screen for symptoms of eating disorders so that affected youths can be referred for treatment and need to develop programs to promote healthful weight-control behaviors in sexual minorities of all ethnicities and in both girls and boys. In addition, interventions that are appropriate for sexual orientation minority youths of diverse ethnicities are urgently needed to eliminate stressors and other factors contributing to these disparities.
Acknowledgments This project was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (Award Number R21HD051178) and by the IMPACT LGBT Health and Development Program at Northwestern University. Assistance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Division of Adolescent and School Health and the work of the state and local health and education departments who conduct the Youth Risk Behavior Surveys made the project possible. S. B. Austin is supported by the Leadership Education in Adolescent Health project, Maternal and Child Health Bureau (HRSA grant 6T71-MC00009). J. P. Calzo is supported by National Research Service Award F32HD066792, and B. Everett is supported by grant R03 HD062597, both from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The authors would like to thank Annabel Chang for her help with preparing the article, and the thousands of students and school staff across the country who made this study possible. Note. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health, the CDC, or any agencies involved in collecting the data.
Human Participant Protection Protocol approval was not necessary because de-identified data were obtained from secondary sources. Data use agreements were obtained from Vermont Department of Health and the Rhode Island Department of Health, which were the only 2 state departments of health that required these agreements for access to Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System data.
References Section: Choose Top of page Abstract METHODS RESULTS DISCUSSION References << CITING ARTICLES
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In iOS 9 Apple introduces a new UIStackView, a new class that leverages the power of Auto Layout. UIStackView allows you to lay out a collection of views in either a column or a row without having to add layout constraints to each view.
In this tutorial, I will show you here how to create animations with stack views. In this post on Auto Layout and Core Animation, I have already demonstrated how to animate views that have layout constraints. Remember, when using Auto Layout you are not allowed to modify the view frame. Please, notice that Xcode 6 has a bug that Xcode 7 current build seems to solve. Indeed, if you are using Xcode 6 and try to modify the frame of a view that has layout constraints, the frame changes without a problem (but this should not be possible). In Xcode 7 (as it was previously in Xcode 5), the frame is not modified. This is the correct behavior.
Stack views should behave in the same way. If a view is contained in a stack view and you try to modify the view frame, it should not change. So, how do you animate the frame of a view within a stack view?
When you use a stack view, you are responsible for the layout (position and size) of the stack view in the container. Then, the stack view manages the layout and size of its content. Views contained in the stack view are called arranged views.
Let\'s build an example. Launch Xcode 7 and create a Single View Application. Open the Main storyboard and add 2 views to the view controller\'s view. Set the size of one of them to 100x100 and the size of the other one to 200x100. Center them vertically in the viewcontroller\'s view and make their edges touch as shown in the following picture.
Add a button at the bottom of the view controller\'s view and add auto layout to the button so that it remains horizontally centered and 20 points from the bottom edge of the container.
To keep the two views in the position shown in the previous picture, we should add constraints to each of them. But instead, select the 2 views and choose in the Xcode menu Editor -> Embed In -> Stack View. Alternatively, you can also press the new button Stack at the bottom of the Storyboard, as highlighted in this figure.
When adding the stack view, Xcode 7 recognizes that the 2 views are organized horizontally and therefore adds a horizontal stack view. Now, since we are responsible for the position and size of the stack view in the container view, we need to add auto layout to it. So select the stack view in the view hierarchy of the storyboard as shown here.
Now, add the width and height constraints to the stack view (see next figure).
Additionally, add two constraints in order to center the stack view horizontally and vertically in the container (see next figure).
Now, that we have everything in place, I want to create an animation that changes the width of the two views. Since they are in a stack view and the stack view distribution is set to fill, I can generate this animation by simply animating the width of one of the two views. As I mentioned previously, we cannot change the width of the view, because that would be equivalent of changing the view frame. If you try to do so, you will see no animation.
So instead, let\'s add the width constraint to the view with size 100x100 (the left view). Then, add the following outlet to the ViewController class.
1 @ IBOutlet var widthConstraint : NSLayoutConstraint !
Let\'s also add another property that we will use later for the animation:
1 var compressed : Bool = true
Finally, add the following method to view controller and connect it to the button:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 @ IBAction func animateConstraint ( ) { UIView . animateWithDuration ( 3.0 , delay : 0.0 , usingSpringWithDamping : 0.3 , initialSpringVelocity : 10 . 0 , options : . CurveLinear , animations : { ( ) -> Void in self . widthConstraint . constant = ( self . compressed == false ) ? 100 . 0 : 200 . 0 self . compressed = ! self . compressed self . view . layoutIfNeeded ( ) } , completion : nil ) }
Connect the outlet with the width constraint and the previous action to the button. Run the project and you should see something like this.
Conclusion
In this Xcode tutorial on Core Animation, I showed you how to create an animation with stack views. If you’re interested in learning more about how to use the Core Animation framework to create innovative iOS apps, take a look at our other Core Animation tutorials or attend one of our Advanced iOS trainings (http://training.invasivecode.com).
Keep innovating,
Geppy
Geppy Parziale (@geppyp) is cofounder of InvasiveCode (@invasivecode). He has developed iOS applications and taught iOS development since 2008. He worked at Apple as iOS and OS X Engineer in the Core Recognition team. He has developed several iOS and OS X apps and frameworks for Apple, and many of his development projects are top-grossing iOS apps that are featured in the App Store.
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This is a magic mod about Totem Poles, nature and the power of music.
The main focus lies on Totem Poles. They can give passive boons to players nearby, but more importantly, they are the central piece of Ceremonies: Dancing around a Totem Pole and playing various musical instruments to invoke strong effects and manipulate the world.
To get started exploring the mod's content, craft yourself a Totempedia with this recipe:
(with any kind of wood)
Modpacks:
You are free to include the mod in a modpack.
Credits:
Sunconure11 for textures, models and many ideas
Dylan Kaizer for creating lots of textures for the mod
Nefilto for the Totem Pole models
Kerri Lake for the Flute sounds, slightly changed in pitch and cut from overblow.mp3, used under CC BY 3.0.
Kirindave, Wayoftime, Joshie and Emoniph helped with code and ideas back in the day
Poppycocks for the whittling knife texture
Vazkii for most of the Totempedia code, based on Botania
wiiv for the tipi model
BigBadChris for the logo
CyanideX for the wind chime model
We have a discord channel! Join us at this link: https://discord.gg/4dZFZrE
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Lucian Wintrich, a writer for The Gateway Pundit who mocks "serious journalists," admits: "Half of what I do is f—ing with people."
Lucian Wintrich paced in front of the White House, a cellphone pinned to his ear. On the line was his boss, Jim Hoft, founder of The Gateway Pundit, a right wing blog that dabbles in conspiracy theories for the site's 5 million monthly readers. "This makes me look like a pussy," he muttered, "like I didn't want to go in today." Moments earlier, the White House had denied Wintrich access to a daily briefing with White House press secretary Sean Spicer. Wintrich, 28, suggested that Hoft pull some strings and "get in touch with Hicks or Bannon … maybe Hicks?" He was referring to President Trump's director of strategic communications, Hope Hicks, and chief strategist, Steve Bannon, who is openly contemptuous of the mainstream media.
Since Wintrich had been named the site's first White House correspondent, he had struggled with the newness of Washington. Gay and nominally Jewish, he felt more at home in New York, where he had worked as a "creative" at a prominent ad agency and a club promoter. He dated a creative-writing student and model from Colombia and took filter-heavy pictures of scantily clad teen boys. But Wintrich was no liberal. He had grown disillusioned with progressive politics during college, and his contrarian stances sharpened during the election. At the Republican National Convention, he had gathered his pictures into an exhibit called "Twinks for Trump," in which boys sported "Make America Great Again" caps. He parlayed his transformation from a college progressive to a Milo Yiannopoulos disciple, and then, with nearly no training in journalism, befriended Hoft, who helped him grab a powerful seat in the elite world of Washington media. He's one of a few dozen people who have a badge and an invite to the James S. Brady briefing room and consistent access to many of Trump's most senior advisers. In recent weeks, he's written about North Korea, Russia and Trump's relationship with the media.
Now Wintrich was wondering aloud whether his exclusion was part of a liberal media conspiracy. He turned to tell an interviewer from WeAreChange.com that a "nefarious plot" had been hatched by the White House Correspondents' Association.
To an observer, the display felt like a temper tantrum, and by design, it probably was. It also felt in keeping with the media circus that has emerged out of Trump's arrival in Washington, where a penumbra of reality television seems to hang over everything. Trump's late-night tweet storms and his bashing of reputable media outlets as "fake news" have fostered relentless, high-octane drama. The turmoil has blown open space for exploitation by outlets long considered fringe or disreputable. This is where Wintrich, who proudly proclaims himself a media troll, lives. "Like, obviously I'll take the occasional jab at media," he said. "Because I hate them all."
The distaste is mutual. "You can't call what he does reporting," says one longtime White House correspondent for a top U.S. newsweekly. "It's just offensive and meant to be provocative."
Later that night, Wintrich was having drinks at Larry's Lounge, a popular D.C. gay bar. Across from him was Andrew Feinberg, who writes for Sputnik, a news outlet established by the Russian government. Sipping a cocktail, Feinberg said he was distressed that more of his White House colleagues hadn't befriended Wintrich. "I work for an outlet that has been publicly accused of being Russian propaganda many times, and yet people have been completely civil to me," he said.
Wintrich's phone rang, and he jumped up. A source was calling. Moments later he was back, with news — a tip about a teacher who allegedly had forced students to give him oral sex but was being protected by teachers' unions. "I'm going to tie that f—ing back into Trump's education policies," he said, "because teaching unions need to be f—ing broken up."
Wintrich sees himself as having two jobs: writing about "dry policy stuff" and trolling the media. "It's a mixture of the two," he said. He knows he has ascended in large part for his performative abilities. "To get younger audiences interested in the actual news, you have to play that up," he told me. "Half of what I do — well, on social media specifically — is f—ing with people."
If Trump's arrival advances the destruction of the wall between serious news and entertainment, Wintrich is on board. "I think jumping into social media and being like, 'Yeah, I have a 10-inch dick flaccid while writing about actual policy,' right there is a certain humor to it that has been lacking for a while," he said.
Feinberg, who wears a three-piece suit and a kind of jubilant hang-doggedness with equal gravity, stared glumly into his drink. "He doesn't listen to a word I say," he said. Wintrich describes Feinberg mockingly as a "serious journalist." Both were drunk by now. They descended into an argument about the controversial dossier detailing Trump's alleged misdeeds in Russia, who leaked what to whom and what it all amounted to.
"Well, you know," said Wintrich, pointing a lazy finger at Feinberg, "fake news."
Two nights later, Wintrich and his boyfriend, Brian, were intertwined in a booth at Shelly's, another popular D.C. hangout. They had ordered burgers, and when the food arrived, both exclaimed on its cuteness.
Wintrich's turn toward conservatism began at Bard College, where he said a dean chastised him for singing along to a rap song while hosting a radio show. "She said that music was written by black people for black people, and it wasn't meant for me," he said. "It didn't make sense. It's music." He feels that his coming out as a Trump supporter was largely provoked by ardent left wing critics. "All of a sudden they're saying that I'm a Nazi for supporting Trump. At first, I just said Trump's the best option, which I'll hold to. And I tend to double down. And so after that, I was like, 'OK, now I'm saying Trump is the savior, the God-Emperor of America.'"
Despite his political transitions, Wintrich considers himself a gay advocate. "Parents of gay people in very conservative states have reached out to me and said how they were disgusted by their gay child until [they] started reading [my] work and have had a change of heart," he said.
A server brought more drinks. Wintrich plucked at a fry, waving it languorously like a tiny wand. A tide of woe issued forth: Refugees were "flooding" the U.S., threatening social stability; welfare was out of control; Europe was succumbing to never-before-seen waves of terrorism. Like Trump and Yiannopoulos, Wintrich trades in declarations of certainty. The truth, of course, is more complex — and for a media troll, perhaps less interesting.
I asked if he lost any friends due to his support for Trump. "All the shitty ones," he said. "The faggots in New York who stopped talking to me, whom I knew from the club scene, I didn't care about them," he said. "But if somebody actually knows me and my character and beliefs, that does affect me."
I suggested that some of the antagonism was self-generated.
"No, not at all. I believe in small government. I believe in more individual and fiscal freedom for Americans. I think Trump will deliver that to us. And if he doesn't, I'll write about it. And if he does, I'll write about it."
Wintrich's father is Jewish. The Nazis killed much of his dad's family, but his grandfather, a leader in the Polish resistance who once swam across a freezing lake to save a woman in need, made it out and wrote a book. Another side of his family had been aristocrats, but he wasn't quite sure what they had done during the war. "I don't like talking about it," said Wintrich, growing pensive.
I asked him if there was something grotesque about a descendant of refugees advocating a ban on people in similar situations. He said that his ancestors had been professionals who had contributed to society.
The same was true, I pointed out, of most Syrian refugees.
"Some of the specific cases where educators are pulled or when people who are absolutely providing benefit to society, as we all should be. It's … I don't know. To be honest, I'd agree with that. It's frustrating."
He and Brian left. Earlier that day, someone had tweeted about Wintrich's "disgusting" homosexuality. Wintrich responded that he and Brian were going to "smash extra hard" that night in defiant response.
A few minutes later, I got a text: "The refugee line was solid. … It's an interesting counter-perspective."
In the weeks since then, Wintrich has been active. He has penned a few salacious articles on The Gateway Pundit. Mostly he has been trolling hard on Twitter. In late March, he was back in New York. An art curator was interested in showing his "Twinks for Trump" series, but gallery owners were balking. "They researched you and have had a panic attack," the dealer told Wintrich, who dutifully reported it on Twitter.
Wintrich recently returned to Washington and finally found a place to live, and he's attending Spicer's daily briefing. But he was still waiting to get his first question answered.
This story first appeared in the April 26 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
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