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“The closer,” it turns out, needs extra innings. After a frenetic 48 hours of Oval Office lobbying sessions, closed-door talks in the Cabinet room and shuttle diplomacy on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, President Donald Trump and Speaker Paul Ryan pulled the plug Thursday on a scheduled vote on their health care legislation after falling short of the support needed for passage. Story Continued Below Conservative House hardliners would not budge on their demanded concessions. Moderate Republicans grew skittish of the new proposed changes. And, as the morning turned to afternoon without an accord on final legislative language, Republicans fretted about the optics of jamming the far-reaching bill through in the middle of the night. White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney told GOP lawmakers late Thursday that Trump is demanding a vote Friday in the House on the Republican plan to repeal and replace Obamacare. If the bill fails, Trump is prepared to move on and leave Obamacare in place, Mulvaney warned. Mulvaney made his surprise announcement — with the full support of Ryan and other House GOP leaders — during a closed-door meeting of Republicans Thursday evening in the basement of the Capitol. The White House had earlier pushed aggressively to hold the vote Thursday. Trump, who has staked his reputation as a consummate dealmaker on getting the bill through, was telling reporters "today the House is voting to repeal and replace the disaster known as Obamacare" minutes before House leadership canceled the vote. But it was clear that he was struggling to get his fellow Republicans to yes. "I'm not going to make it too long, because I have to get votes," Trump told a group of truckers who were at the White House Thursday afternoon. "I don't want to spend too much time with you. I'm going to lose by one vote and then I'm going to blame the truckers." The final straw for a Thursday deal was a lengthy White House meeting between Trump, his top lieutenants and the hardliner House Freedom Caucus, a group of conservatives who have pushed to strip requirements that insurance companies provide standard benefits such as maternity care in coverage plans. They couldn’t reach a deal, forcing the White House into a one-by-one effort to turn votes that one senior administration official described as “grinding.” “Member by member, that’s how they're going to vote," said White House spokesman Sean Spicer said on Thursday, a day after describing the president as “the closer.” Most Republicans appeared comfortable with the delay, taking the lumps of a single negative news cycle, so long as the legislation eventually passes. But some worried that if Trump can’t muscle the first major bill he’s backed through a single chamber in a Republican-controlled Congress, it could devastate his agenda and weaken his authority moving forward. “This is a reputational deal,” said Scott Reed, the chief strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “We have a lot riding on this.” “It's a black eye for the speaker and the president if it doesn't pass,” Reed added. Failure would be “buzzkill in terms of moving forward with a real reform agenda to grow the economy.” Negotiations on the bill were expected to continue into the night on Thursday. The Tuesday Group, a bloc of Republican moderates, met with Trump on Thursday evening. While the Tuesday Group is bigger than the Freedom Caucus, most plan to vote for the AHCA, and its members have historically proved far more likely to cast tough votes with the Republican leadership. The Freedom Caucus, a creation of the Obama years, rose almost entirely to block legislation, not pass it. Most of Trump’s senior team, including Vice President Mike Pence, Health and Human Service Secretary Tom Price, Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, chief of staff Reince Priebus, chief strategist Steve Bannon and counselor Kellyanne Conway attended the Freedom Caucus negotiating session. Absent from the proceedings was senior adviser Jared Kushner, who’s vacationing with his wife, Ivanka Trump, and their children in Aspen, Colorado. Trump himself has not been overly invested in the policy particulars of the health care legislation, and he decided to adopt a bill drafted by Ryan as his own. Trump famously described his health plan on the campaign trail as “repeal and replace — with something terrific” but he is now caught in the middle of an ideological tug-of-war within the Republican Party. He spent part of Thursday afternoon outside the White House with trucking officials, climbing behind the wheel of a big-rig, blowing the horn and pretending to drive off. Spicer said there is “a little bit of a balancing act that goes on” and that lawmakers have “disparate desires.” There’s already some finger-pointing as the legislation has stalled. Chris Ruddy, the head of Newsmax and a close friend of Trump’s, said of the legislation crafted by Ryan was flawed from the start. “He got delivered a damaged bill of goods,” Ruddy complained. Some Republicans were complaining that Trump was doing too much to bring along House hardliners, endangering the chances that the final bill could pass in the more moderate Senate; others blamed aides for not doing enough. One GOP aide was frustrated Trump was negotiating directly with the House Freedom Caucus given "they're the ones trying to stop us from getting this passed." And a GOP lawmaker said some in the House were annoyed because Trump couldn't talk specifics on the law -- "and just wanted to talk about the politics." Sign up here for POLITICO Huddle A daily play-by-play of congressional news in your inbox. Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. A senior White House official, meanwhile, said the negotiations were difficult because the Freedom Caucus members are clashing with House leadership, leaving the president and his team — particularly Bannon, who has been closely involved in negotiations—stuck in the middle. By late Thursday, Bannon and members of the Freedom Caucus were all in Ryan's office. At the same time, two Hill Republicans involved in the negotiations complained that Paul Teller, a Trump legislative aide with deep ties to the conservative movement, wasn’t doing enough to move far-right votes. "He's a conservative first," said one. Teller, a former chief of staff to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), has been a key conduit bringing conservatives to the White House. Rep. Mark Meadows, the head of the Freedom Caucus, praised Trump’s willingness to negotiate directly with his members, often by marginalized by the House GOP leaders, and dismissed the planned vote Thursday as an “artificial deadline.” “I would say that, at this point, the president's engagement is unparalleled,” he said. The Freedom Caucus continues to make new demands, said the senior White House official, though the administration isn't planning further changes. "It will make the bill totally unworkable in the Senate," this person said. As it is, many key conservative groups have lined up against the bill, including Heritage Action, the Club for Growth and the political network of the Koch brothers, which has pledged financial support to lawmakers who oppose the legislation. “At the end of the day,” Spicer said, “we can’t make people vote.” Rachael Bade, Kyle Cheney, and Madeline Conway contributed to this report.

New Delhi: Eminent scientist Tapan Misra has been appointed the Chief of ISRO's Space Applications Centre (SAC), Ahmedabad, the space agency today said. Misra, Deputy Director, Microwave Remote Sensing Area in SAC, succeeds A S Kiran Kumar, who was appointed as the Chairman of the ISRO last month. He is also heading the Office of Innovations Management of ISRO at ISRO Headquarters, Bengaluru. An electronics and telecommunication engineering graduate from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, Misra began his career at SAC as digital hardware engineer responsible for the development of 'Quick Look Display System of X-band Side Looking Airborne Radar' in 1984. Later, he became the lead member of the team which designed and developed C-band Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR). He developed an important algorithm for real time processing of SAR data during his tenure as Guest Scientist in German Aerospace Agency (DLR) in 1990. Misra mainly contributed to the system design, simulation, integration, checkout and ground calibration for Multi-frequency Scanning Microwave Radiometer instrument which was carried on-board India's OCEANSAT-1 satellite. Following this, he led the team which developed a special airborne radar system called DMSAR (SAR for Disaster Management) during 2005-2006. He also led the development of scatterometer payload of Oceansat-2, launched in 2009 which provided valuable wind related data to global meteorological community. He was the lead designer for the development of C-band Synthetic Aperture Radar of India's Radar Imaging Satellite-1 (RISAT-1). "Misra has been responsible for system design, planning and development of Microwave Remote Sensing Payloads of ISRO. As Deputy Director responsible for Microwave Remote Sensors Area, he has led the team to develop futuristic remote sensing systems including a variety of advanced radars, millimetre wave sounders and an advanced scatterometer," ISRO said in a statement. He was awarded Hari Om Ashram Prerit Vikram Sarabhai research Award in 2004 and ISRO Merit award in 2008 for his contribution to the development of SAR technology. He was elected as Fellow of Indian National Academy of Engineering in 2007. He was also elected as Corresponding Member of International Academy of Astronautics in 2008. He has 2 granted patents, 6 pending patents, 5 copyrights and many research papers to his credit, the statement added. PTI Firstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button.

The Ultimate Fuel For Gamers A Speculator’s Perspective Simon Kertonegoro Blocked Unblock Follow Following Nov 27, 2017 To a lot of us, gaming can be like a second life. Our aliases are our alter egos and our games take us to other worlds. Some Gamers hide their passion for gaming, wary of society’s judgements. Many of us hold no apologies for the satisfaction we discover at the edge of imagination. Nearly all of us wish that the void separating the gaming world from our normal lives, didn’t exist. Therefore, the true question becomes… How do we blur the lines? Enter stage right, Enjin Coin. What is Enjin Coin? Enjin Coin is a utility token which harnesses the power of blockchain technology to connect gaming communities through virtual items. It changes the way we view virtual items by giving them intrinsic financial value, allowing us to truly consider them as digital assets. By creating an interconnected universe of digital assets Enjin is hoping to bond people together and allow them to recreate those bonds to suit their needs. Enjin Coin has the potential to fundamentally change our real lives and our gaming lives by bringing them closer together. So, how can Enjin Coin change gaming? 1) It Will Profoundly Expand the Gaming Universe The gaming world is like an archipelago, speckled by hundreds of thousands of islands. Connected by identity, separated by culture. Some players hop from island to island looking for different experiences but they come to each new place bearing no gifts from the last, and usually leaving without any souvenirs. With no direct trade routes and no lines of communication, lonely islands tend to see each other as a threat, thus building walls around themselves to keep their citizens in — not realising that these walls are just as effective at keeping their citizens out. It’s time for gaming communities to build the bridges needed to create a greater gaming society as a whole. Enjin Coin gives Game Developers who want to unite their communities an easy way to work together and grow in tandem, while creating a radical change in the user experience. Using Enjin Coin’s blockchain technology, players could take digital assets from game to game whilst giving Game Developers the ability to utilize information stored in those assets to redefine gameplay. In this way, Enjin Coin is not just a way to mint valuable assets for users to gain, keep and trade… It’s a language that will help gaming realms to speak to one another. Roadmap Update: The first wave of Enjin Coin gaming integration is set to be rolled out into Minecraft servers Q1 of 2018. 2) The Enjin Smart Wallet Today, more and more of our assets are becoming digital. For those of us who play a lot of games and trade cryptocurrencies, much of our net worth seems to be floating around the net. More convenient management of digital assets is already a necessity. Potential storage of virtual items can even extend to software licenses and access keys to books, music and movies. Even ownership of physical items can be tracked digitally using the blockchain ledger. I’m not saying Enjin will add the ability to hold, trade and mint all of these types of assets. I’m just saying that they absolutely could if they wanted to, and they will if we give them a reason to. The complete list of what can be gamified, stored and traded on-chain is yet to be imagined. To provide us peace of mind the Enjin Coin Smart Wallet will boast the highest levels of encryption security and impregnable cryptography standards to guarantee safe storage of our digital assets. It will also provide an unassailable trading functionality using smart escrow contracts to safeguard our buying, selling and swapping of assets. Enjin will provide free storage and ultra low transaction fees, which are used to fund the blockchain that’s processing our data. With the ability for micro-transactions and subscription based payments, there are countless ways Enjin Coin can revolutionize how we do business through gaming. Roadmap Update: Beta testing of core functions for the Enjin Coin Smart Wallet is expected to begin next month (Dec, 2017), only two months after the completion of the ICO. 3) Enjin Coin Will Change Our Gaming Lives Why does gaming need to be another life? Why can’t it just be life? The first reason is that gaming doesn’t pay the bills. The second reason is that life isn’t a game. Neither of these reasons need to be true. Enjin Coin provides a unique opportunity for more people to make a living from gaming, by making it easier to generate a return from our digital assets. Enjin Coin will naturally encourage more Gamers to invest more cash into virtual items, because they’re simply worth more and we can get more out of them. With more money circulating through gaming economies, entrepreneurial Gamers will be able to create trading opportunities by minting items, farming resources or winning rewards and trading them for other digital assets. This encourages experienced Gamers to stick around because there’s more at stake, bolstering the community talent pool and increasing engagement on all levels. Roadmap Update: Enjin Coin are set to complete their Java SDK, C# SDK and Unity SDK (Software Development Kits) in Q1 of 2018. This will allow Game Developers to start implementing Enjin Coin backed digital assets into their games with far less work than creating their own economic systems from scratch. 4) The Enjin Smart Wallet Can Gamify Society ‘Life ain’t a game’ is a cliche we hear all too often when we’re being told to grow up, settle down, to get a job we don’t like, to fit into the pigeon holes society has set for us. I think we should be allowed to ask why. Why can’t life be a game? Games are fun, games encourage us to improve, to succeed, to work together and to win! Enjin Coin’s digital asset wallet is a one of a kind piece of tech that will allow all users to receive and hold valuable digital assets, but here’s the kicker — it will even allow us to create our own! So whether you’re a game developer, a webmaster, a shopkeeper, a teacher, or a social media star you will be able to create assets and offer them to your community and gamify anything you want. The only limit is imagination, and there’s a hell of a lot of it out there. Roadmap Update: Advanced features such as minting of custom digital assets through Enjin Coins’ Smart Wallet will roll out in Q1 of 2018. 5) Enjin Coin Can Help Spark Limitless Vertically Integrated Gamified Economies With Enjin Coin, the potential of creating holistic eco-systems around each and every game is enormous. The ability for any developer to easily integrate their games with their online stores and community forums through digital assets will result in far more engaged players. As a user, being able to win assets in a game’s community forum, trade them in its marketplace and use them in the game is very exciting. Enjin is delighted to be working within many gaming communities to make this a sweeping reality. By developing every necessary APP, SDK, API and CMS needed for Game Developers to build these expanded communities with ease, the only question becomes, how else can Developers advance this system to further increase the scope of their community? The potential doesn’t stop there though. Enjin Coin can further economize gaming, but it can also gamify everything else. Any institution or individual will have the ability to use this technology to rally their community in a playful and profitable way. Most of the supporting software being coded is open source so any developer can add their vision to the dreamscape. Enjin Coins’ blockchain technology is decentralized by nature so it can’t be controlled by gatekeepers, not even themselves. This encourages the participation of international development communities, making Enjin Coin a potent fuel for innovation. Roadmap Update: All software needed to develop vertically integrated gaming economies set to be complete by Q4 2018. 6) It’s Being Made for the Right Reasons I don’t need to back up this point, this message has been repeated incessantly throughout the last thousand-plus words so I’ll just take this opportunity to speak frankly with you. I’m extremely excited about Enjin Coin. That’s why I contacted the team and asked if I could write this article. They’ve created and maintained a successful business, with a complex structure, over the course of 9 years and built it to the point their community consists of nearly as many people as Australia! I’ve heard the rebuttals, the doubt and the shade. In the thin mist of FUD I’ve heard some valid concerns raised, and I’ve seen the solutions presented by the Enjin team — in cold-hard-code. I’ve seen them in action. They are executors on a mission to make a critical aspect of gaming infinitely better. With the help of the wider gaming community this could be a breakthrough step up for the perceived value of gaming as a lifestyle. Enjin Coin is the blood that’s pumping through the veins of a sleeping giant. It’s poised to ignite the gaming community and light a fire in the hearts of its players. This isn’t a minor change in the way we buy virtual items, Enjin Coin has been designed to fundamentally reform how we act as a community and you can find the proof in every level of its DNA. It’s the bridge we need to bring Gamers together, and it’s the fuel we need to drive us forward. So in future, when someone asks you what Enjin Coin is, tell them it’s fuel for gamers. Simon Kertonegoro

Living in a concrete box with hot water pouring from the tap, a refrigerator cooling our food and wi-fi connecting us to the rest of the world, we can barely imagine a day in a life of, say, Tsaatan people. They move 5 to 10 times per year, building huts when the temperature is -40 and herding reindeer for transportation, clothing and food. “Before They Pass Away,” a long-term project by photographer Jimmy Nelson, gives us the unique opportunity to discover more than 30 secluded and slowly vanishing tribes from all over the world. Spending 2 weeks in each tribe, Jimmy became acquainted with their time-honoured traditions, joined their rituals and captured it all in a very appealing way. His detailed photographs showcase unique jewellery, hairstyles and clothing, not to forget the surroundings and cultural elements most important to each tribe, like horses for Gauchos. According to Nelson, his mission was to assure that the world never forgets how things used to be: “Most importantly, I wanted to create an ambitious aesthetic photographic document that would stand the test of time. A body of work that would be an irreplaceable ethnographic record of a fast disappearing world.” All of his snapshots now lie in a massive book and will be extended by a film (you can see a short introduction video below). So embark on a journey to the most remote corners and meet the witnesses of a disappearing world. Would you give up your smartphone, internet and TV to live free like them? Source: beforethey.com Book: Amazon.com Kazakh, Mongolia Himba, Namibia Huli, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea Asaro, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea Kalam, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea Goroka, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea Chukchi, Russia Maori, New Zealand Gauchos, Argentina Tsaatan, Mongolia Samburu, Kenya Rabari, India Mursi, Ethiopia Ladakhi, India Vanuatu, Vanuatu Islands Drokpa, India Dassanech, Ethiopia Karo, Ethiopia Banna, Ethiopia Dani, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea Maasai, Tanzania Nenets, Russia Book available on Amazon.com.

Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE holds slim leads in Ohio and Illinois and trails slightly in Missouri ahead of voting Tuesday, according to newly released surveys from the left-leaning Public Policy Polling (PPP). ADVERTISEMENT Clinton, meanwhile, holds double-digit leads over Democratic presidential rival Bernie Sanders Bernard (Bernie) SandersPush to end U.S. support for Saudi war hits Senate setback Sanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' MORE in Florida and North Carolina, which also vote on Tuesday. Clinton tops Sanders by 5 points, 46 to 41 percent, in Ohio; 3 points, 48 to 45 percent, in Illinois; and trails by 1 point, 47 to 46 percent, in Missouri, according to the PPP polling of the open primary states. The former secretary of State holds a much bigger lead in Southern states, besting the Independent Vermont senator by 25 points, 57 to 32 percent, in Florida, and by 19 points, 56 to 37 percent, in North Carolina. Surveys in most states were conducted March 11 and 12, while those in North Carolina were conducted March 11-13. Clinton and Sanders faced off in a televised town hall debate Sunday night. Other polling released Monday from Quinnipiac University found nearly identical results in Florida and Ohio, with Clinton leading by 26 points in Florida, 60 to 34 percent, and by 5 points in Ohio, 51 to 46 percent. PPP conducted 627 interviews in Florida with a margin of error of 3.9 percent, 597 in Illinois with a margin of error of 4 percent, 839 in Missouri with a margin of error of 3.4 percent, 747 in North Carolina with a margin of error of 3.6 percent, and 502 in Ohio with a margin of error of 4.4 percent.

As treaties are ratified and hopes rise for a sustainable solution to energy poverty, NGOs question who stands to benefit From Cape Town to Kinshasa: could the Great Inga dam power half of Africa? At the end of August the South African cabinet ratified a signed treaty on the Grand Inga hydropower project with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Jeff Radebe, minister for planning, monitoring and evaluation, made the announcement at a media briefing signalling progress between the two countries. If successful, this would be the world’s biggest hydropower project with the potential to power half of Africa. But as boardroom deals are made, questions continue to linger on the viability of the project. Who stands to benefit most from it? Is it sustainable? 54 years after the ground was first broken (pdf) for project, can Kinshasa guarantee that the new phase will not become a financial burden? The site for the project is in Bas Congo, a province at the extreme south-west of DRC. It is hoped that the potential 40,000MW output will power Africa’s industrial economic development. “The Inga project capacity is almost double China’s Three Gorges dam – currently the world’s largest hydroelectric project producing 22,500 MW,” said Isaac Kalua, founder of Nairobi based environmental group Green Africa Foundation. However, the dam is not without its critics. There are questions about its financing and what’s in it for the bankrollers. The World Bank and several other financial institutions like the African Development Bank, are funding the project to completion through grants and loans. “The project will strengthen DRC’s institutional capability by establishing an autonomous and transparent Inga Development Authority. The project will also finance technical, environmental, and social studies to develop the Inga III and selected mid-size hydropower projects sustainably,” said the World Bank in a press release earlier this year. South Africa will also finance part of the project. In 2013 it was reported that R200bn has been set aside and state owned power company, Eskom, will receive 2,500MW of the 4,800MW produced by Inga III, the project’s first phase. “The project will primarily benefit SA and mines in Katanga. Only 1000MW will be sold to national power company Société Nationale d’Electricité (Snel) for consumers in Kinshasa and surrounding areas,” said Ange Asanzi, Africa programme assistant for environmental lobby group International Rivers. DRC’s prime minister Matata Ponyo Mapon has said the Grand Inga will provide the country’s blue print for a better future. But on the world’s poorest continent, where natural wealth has largely failed to catalyse development, can projects like these lift people over the energy poverty line? “[The dams] will not solve the issue of energy poverty. Africa’s poorest live in rural areas. It is not cost effective to supply grid electricity to rural populations. Grid electricity is only cost effective in areas with a population density of at least 50 people per square meter,” Asanzi said. The International Energy Agency estimates that globally over 1.3 billion people cannot access electricity and 2.6 billion people are without clean cooking facilities. More than 95% of these people are either in sub-Saharan African or developing Asia and 84% are in rural areas. Rather than cut poverty, Asanzi argues that the project could potentially have a negative effect on communities. “People affected by Inga I and Inga II have never been compensated. Most of them will again be affected by Inga III. The resettlement action plan cites only five villages to be subjected to relocation, excluding many others.” The livelihoods of local communities are also at risk as the river is a major source of income for them. Kalua suggests this fear could morph into something bigger: “Huge volumes of water will be diverted. Drying rivers can lead to political unrest, since communities living downstream face the brunt of the reduction in volumes.” But the real elephant in the room is corruption. Inga I and Inga II were put up at a time of impunity among DRC’s political elite where there was little accountability regarding state expenditure. “Many politicians in DRC are still as driven by personal interests as they were 50 years ago,” says Asanzi. In a climate of mistrust and hope, Africa’s search for solutions to its energy deficit trudges on. Kenya and Ethiopia are betting on wind energy, while Ghana is banking on solar. South Africa is looking more and more towards importation. The need is great but experts remain cautious of the means employed to achieve a sustainable energy end. “As a continent we need to interrogate all these approaches that will result in an energy gain. We have to assess the environmental and humanitarian impact that these grand projects will have,” Kalua concludes. Read more stories like this: • After the Taliban: taking solar energy to remote parts of Afghanistan • Could renewable energy make rural electrification a reality? • Negotiating a cheaper clean energy deal for all • Advertising feature: Barefoot inspiration: power to the people, from the people Join our community of development professionals and humanitarians. Follow @GuardianGDP on Twitter.

Sweden's The Local are reporting that a school in Stockholm has introduced compulsory Minecraft lessons for their 13-year old students. I can now imagine school kids saying, "Maths? Lucky you! I've got double Minecraft." Not really, of course. I'm just jealous: my IT lessons were mostly about spreadsheets. 180 students at the Viktor Rydberg school will participate in the program. According to teacher Monica Ekman, "They learn about city planning, environmental issues, getting things done, and even how to plan for the future." Classes will focus on creating virtual worlds, and making electrical grids and water supply networks. "It's been a great success and we'll definitely do it again," Ekman continued. "We think it's a fun way of learning and it's nice for the students to achieve something." This isn't Minecraft's first trip to the scholastic rodeo. Joel Levin found fame as the Minecraft Teacher , after using the game as an element of his computer class. Mojang themselves plan to expand their educational remit by providing a free version of Minecraft's Pocket Edition for use with the Raspberry Pi . Thanks, Slashdot and Gizmag .

Live near one of the more than 6,000 fracking wells drilled in Pennsylvania within the last six years? Suffering from skin rashes, nausea or nosebleeds, and worried that nearby drilling is to blame? Don't bother calling the Department of Health, which apparently isn't concerning itself with these sorts of things. Pennsylvania, situated atop the natural gas-rich Marcellus Shale, has been a focal point of the nation's fracking boom, the potential health impacts of which we know little. And according to a damning report from NPR State Impact, the state has dealt with that lack of information about the health risks of fracking not by studying the health risks of fracking, but by ignoring the problem and hoping it goes away. Advertisement: According to two former workers with the state Health Department, who are now retired, employees who received phone calls from residents concerned about health risks were ordered to ignore them: “There was a list of buzzwords we had gotten,” [Tammi Stuck, who retired from the Department of Health two years ago] said. “There were some obvious ones like fracking, gas, soil contamination. There were probably 15 to 20 words and short phrases that were on this list. If anybody from the public called in and that was part of the conversation, we were not allowed to talk to them.” Normally, when fielding calls, Stuck would discuss the caller’s problem, ask about symptoms, and explain what services the department or other agencies could offer. However, for drilling-related calls, Stuck said she and her fellow employees were told just to take the caller’s name and number and forward the information to a supervisor. “And somebody was supposed to call them back and address their concerns,” she said, adding that she never knew whether these callbacks occurred. Sometimes, Stuck said, people would call again, angry they had not heard back from anyone from the department. ...“People were saying: Where’s the Department of Health on all this?” Stuck said. “The bottom line was we weren’t allowed to say anything. It’s not that we weren’t interested.” Marshall Deasy, who retired last June after putting in 20 years of service at the Bureau of Epidemiology in Harrisburg, said that in his office, talking about natural gas development was considered "taboo." In other words, the agency appears to be treating the idea that fracking could cause health problems like some sort of crazy conspiracy theory -- a categorization that's kind of hard to justify, considering the peer-reviewed research linking air and water pollution from oil and gas drilling to a bevy of health concerns. In Dallas, a jury recently awarded a family $3 million for damage caused by drilling near their property, including "physical pain and suffering." A state Department of Health spokesperson denied the allegations, and said that all complaints related to fracking are sent to the Bureau of Epidemiology. Only 51 cases have been logged, she added, and the agency has yet to find a link between drilling and illness. If there isn't more research to help establish such a link, it could be because this is an emerging field, and because the industry's had a vested interest in keeping such information quiet -- in cases in which residents have fought drillers and won, the terms of their settlements are often accompanied by gag orders. And if no health impacts have been documented in Pennsylvania, that could be because the state has yet to conduct even one study dedicated to this purpose. Of the over $630 million the state has raised through its impact fee, which is distributed among agencies involved in regulating drilling, one expert interviewed said that "not one penny" has been allocated to the Department of Health. Gov. Tom Corbett declined to comment.

The European Space Agency/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO, captured this image of a gigantic coronal hole hovering over the sun’s north pole on July 18, 2013, at 9:06 a.m. EDT. A space telescope aimed at the sun has spotted a gigantic hole in the solar atmosphere — a dark spot that covers nearly a quarter of our closest star, spewing solar material and gas into space. The so-called coronal hole over the sun's north pole came into view between July 13 and 18 and was observed by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO. NASA released a video of the sun hole as seen by the SOHO spacecraft, showing the region as a vast dark spot surrounded by solar activity. Coronal holes are darker, cooler regions of the sun's atmosphere, or corona, containing little solar material. In these gaps, magnetic field lines whip out into the solar wind rather than looping back to the sun's surface. Coronal holes can affect space weather, as they send solar particles streaming off the sun about three times faster than the slower wind unleashed elsewhere from the sun's atmosphere, according to a description from NASA. "While it’s unclear what causes coronal holes, they correlate to areas on the sun where magnetic fields soar up and away, failing to loop back down to the surface, as they do elsewhere," NASA's Karen Fox at the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., explained in an image description. These holes are not uncommon, but their frequency changes with the solar activity cycle. The sun is currently reaching its 11-year peak in activity, known as the solar maximum. Around the time of this peak, the sun's poles switch their magnetism. The number of coronal holes typically decreases leading up to the switch. After the reversal, new coronal holes appear near the poles. Then as the sun approaches the solar minimum again, the holes creep closer to the equator, growing in both size and number, according to NASA. The $1.27-billion (1 billion euros) SOHO satellite was launched in 1995 and is flying a joint mission between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). It watches solar activity from an orbit about the Lagrange Point 1, a gravitationally stable spot between Earth and the sun that is about 932,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from our planet. Follow Megan Gannon on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on SPACE.com.

A patient at a Toronto hospital is being tested for Ebola, though officials say it's "very unlikely" the individual has the virus. The unidentified patient is at a University Health Network facility. After news leaked that the network had "a patient with a fever and travel history from West Africa," a note was sent out Thursday afternoon to inform staff about the situation. "It is very unlikely that the patient has Ebola, but a test has been ordered as a precaution," according to the email sent by Gillian Howard, the hospital network's vice-president of public affairs. The patient is in isolation. Until test results come back, staff will use personal protective equipment when interacting with the patient. The note to staff indicates that "initial test results will be available within 24 hours." Dr. Michael Gardam, director of infection prevention and control at UHN, told CBC News on Thursday evening that the hospital was following protocol. "I'm not worried about this individual having Ebola. There's a number of circumstances around where they were and their symptoms, et cetera, which make it exceedingly unlikely that this person has Ebola virus," he said. "That being said, they technically fit the criteria of someone we should test and this is something that we always follow through on." The University Health Network is made up of the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, Toronto General Hospital, Toronto Western Hospital and the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute. In August, a man at a Brampton, Ont., hospital was isolated after he presented with flu-like symptoms after recently travelling to Nigeria. He tested negative for the Ebola virus. The United States is currently dealing with a single case of Ebola in Dallas, a man who travelled to Texas from Liberia. The outbreak in West Africa has killed some 3,300 people this year.

Get the biggest Aston Villa FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email Mark Robson is expected to join Aston Villa this week as part of Tim Sherwood’s backroom team. The 45-year-old will become the claret and blues first-team coach after Scott Marshall was today released. Strangely it will be the second time Robson, 45, has filled the void left by Marshall as he became Norwich’s U21 boss when the Scot joined Villa in 2012. In November he left Carrow Road but has continued to work with the FA in England’s junior set-up. For more Villa stories, click below to like our Aston Villa Facebook page Robson has extensive coaching experience and was briefly the joint-boss of Barnet alongside Edgar Davids last year. He spent a large chunk of his playing career at Charlton Athletic and is highly thought of by Sherwood. The new Villa boss is also actively searching for an assistant and he wants a quick appointment. On Tuesday he ruled out making a move for Swindon Town’s Luke Williams by describing the link as a ‘non-starter’ and is now assessing other options. PICTURES - Tim Sherwood's first Villa training session:

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Iran could hit U.S. bases in the Middle East in response to any Israeli strike on its nuclear facilities even if American forces played no role in the attack, the leader of Lebanon’s Iranian-backed militant group Hezbollah said on Monday. Lebanon's Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah addresses his supporters via a screen, during a rally marking "Quds (Jerusalem) Day",in the southern suburbs of Beirut, August 17, 2012. REUTERS/Sharif Karim “A decision has been taken to respond and the response will be very great,” Hezbollah Secretary-General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said in an interview with the Beirut-based Al Mayadeen television. “The response will not be just inside the Israeli entity - American bases in the whole region could be Iranian targets,” he said, citing information he said was from Iranian officials. “If Israel targets Iran, America bears responsibility.” Heightened Israeli rhetoric about Tehran’s nuclear facilities, which the West says could be part of a weapons program, has stoked speculation that it may attack Iran before U.S. elections in November. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged world powers on Sunday to set a “clear red line” to convince Iran they would prevent it from obtaining nuclear arms. Israel, thought to be the Middle East’s only nuclear-armed power, views Iran’s nuclear program as a threat to its regional dominance and to its very existence. Tehran says the atomic work is for peaceful purposes only. But Netanyahu’s cabinet is divided over the wisdom of attacking Iran, and Israeli officials have dropped heavy hints of a climbdown strategy, under which Netanyahu would shelve threats of an attack now in return for a stronger public pledge from President Barack Obama on conditions that would provoke U.S. action in future. Nasrallah said there were divisions in Israel over attacking Iran. “Personally I do not expect the Israeli enemy - at least in the coming months or foreseeable future - (to wage) an attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he said. Nasrallah pointed to the fragile global economy, which would be weakened further by any sharp rise in crude oil prices stemming from conflict in the Gulf, and to likely Israeli casualties in any war with Iran. “Netanyahu and (Defence Minister Ehud) Barak inflate the benefit and play down the cost,” he said, referring to Barak’s estimates that Israel could suffer up to 500 fatalities in any conflict aimed at wiping out Iran’s nuclear facilities. Hezbollah guerrillas fought a 34-day war with Israel six years ago in which 1,200 people in Lebanon, mostly civilians, and 160 people in Israel, mostly soldiers, were killed. War with Iran would be more deadly, Nasrallah said. “We don’t know what will happen in the region.” NO CHEMICAL WEAPONS He repeated a warning he made last month that Hezbollah could cause widespread destruction if it came into conflict with Israel again, but denied that the Shi’ite Islamist guerrilla and political movement would ever use chemical weapons. “We do not have chemical weapons and we will not use chemical weapons,” Nasrallah said. “The use of chemical weapons is forbidden - for us that is absolute. Unrest in neighboring Syria, which acknowledged for the first time in July that it possessed chemical or biological weapons, has led to Western fears that those weapons might fall into the hands of Islamist groups including Hezbollah. “I do not need chemical weapons - regardless of the religious or practical position,” Nasrallah said, addressing Israel. “You have factories, and you have bases, and compounds, and I have rockets.” Israel had several “weak points” which could be targeted, including “economic, industrial, electrical, chemical and nuclear” sites, the Hezbollah leader said. Even if Israel launched a first strike attack on Lebanon, destroying a large part of Hezbollah’s missile arsenal, the militant group would retain the capacity to hit back with deadly force, he added. Two weeks ago Nasrallah said Hezbollah could kill tens of thousands of Israelis by hitting targets with what he described as precision-guided missiles. “Hitting these targets with a small number of rockets will turn ... the lives of hundreds of thousands of Zionists to real hell,” he said at the time.

Story highlights Ayatollah Ali Khamenei says Iran will help anyone fighting Israel Israel's Ehud Barak says Iran's nuclear program must be stopped U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta fears Israel may strike this spring, official says A new report says Washington needs to put more teeth into its threats The supreme leader of Iran issued a blunt warning Friday that war would be detrimental to the United States -- and that Iran is ready to help anyone who confronts "cancerous" Israel. "You see every now and then in this way they say that all options are on the table. That means even the option of war," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said during Friday prayers in Tehran. "This is how they make these threats against us. "Well, these kinds of threats are detrimental to the U.S.," he said. "The war itself will be 10 times as detrimental to the U.S." Khamenei's rhetoric is hardly new. But the timing of his comments could prove critical with nuclear talks around the corner. Tensions between Iran and world powers have been ratcheted up in the aftermath of an alarming nuclear watchdog agency report in November that said Tehran was likely developing nuclear weapons. The standoff grew more serious this week with renewed fears of an Israeli pre-emptive strike on Iran to take out its suspected nuclear weapons program. Khamenei said Iran will support any nation or group that stands up against Israel. "The Zionist regime is really the cancerous tumor of this region and it needs to be removed and will be removed," Khamenei said to a cheering crowd. He said Iran doesn't interfere in other nations but has aided militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah in conflicts with Israel in Gaza and Lebanon. JUST WATCHED Rubin: Iran issue won't be a cakewalk Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Rubin: Iran issue won't be a cakewalk 03:18 JUST WATCHED Will Israel hit Iran's nuclear program? Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Will Israel hit Iran's nuclear program? 06:36 JUST WATCHED U.S. concerns about Israeli strike on Iran Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH U.S. concerns about Israeli strike on Iran 03:29 JUST WATCHED Source: Panetta thinks Israel could attack Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Source: Panetta thinks Israel could attack 03:22 His comments came after stern comments Friday from Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak. "Today, unlike in the past, there is a broad global understanding that it is crucial to stop Iran becoming nuclearized and that no options should be taken off the table," he said. Barak said allowing Iran to continue on its path will be far more complex and dangerous in blood and money than cutting it off now. "Those who say in English, 'later,' may find later is too late," he said. U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said he feared Israel could attack Iran sometime this spring in an effort to destroy its suspected nuclear weapons program, according to a senior administration official. The official declined to be identified due to the sensitive nature of the information. The United States and its allies have warned that Iran is trying to make a nuclear weapon. Iran insists that its nuclear program is for civilian energy purposes. A new report from the Bipartisan Policy Center said the United States needs to put more teeth into its threat to use military power against Iran. The Washington think tank recommended in its report that Washington should undertake visible, credible military preparations to go along with more intense sanctions and diplomatic efforts. The military activities could include naval deployments, military exercises and positioning supplies in the region. To stop Iran's nuclear clock, the report said, the United States "needs to make clear that Iran faces a choice: it can either abandon its nuclear program through a negotiated arrangement or have its program destroyed militarily, by the United States." The report also said the United States should give credibility to the Israeli military threat against Iran by selling Israel two to three KC-135 aerial refueling tankers and 200 GRU-31 bunker-buster munitions. Former Sen. Chuck Robb, who co-chaired the task force that wrote the report, said the group advocates neither war nor a military strike at the moment, but believes the United States will only be effective if it takes credible steps to let Iran know it is serious. Pentagon spokesman Capt. John Kirby said Panetta "has made it clear that he is comfortable with the military capabilities we have and operate in the region." However, Kirby said, "the U.S. military must and will be ready to provide the president options should those options be desirable." Khamenei blamed Western powers for Iran's troubles, starting with the brutal eight-year war Iran fought with Saddam Hussein's Iraq in the 1980s and continuing with the latest round of punishing international sanctions. "So far we have overcome all these challenges and none of them managed to bring (Iran) to its knees," Khamenei said. "We have stood firm and strongly treaded our course."

Independent America’s answer to those searches was the Fourth Amendment, with its requirement that law enforcement have probable cause to believe that evidence of a crime can be found at a particular place and time before a judge issues a warrant. Photo The ingenious feature of this demand is that it makes criminal investigations more efficient and accurate, even as it preserves liberty. If that rule and others in the Bill of Rights are followed, the police waste less time chasing false leads, make fewer erroneous arrests and leave the community safer. In other words, the framers handed down a system in which liberty and security were fused, one inseparable from the other. So it is hard to see how safety has been enhanced by the post-9/11 expansion of counterterrorism surveillance, which has uncovered hardly any known plots and instead burdens analysts with so much irrelevant noise that they have trouble hearing the ominous melodies. A recent study by the Breakthrough Institute found only two cases that benefited from the secret warrants made easier by the Patriot Act. The rest, the report concluded, “were broken open due to the combination of well-deployed undercover agents, information from citizen or undercover informants and tips from foreign intelligence agencies.” The two exceptions were the Portland Seven, Oregon Muslims who tried to travel to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban in 2001, and Najibullah Zazi, a Colorado resident from Afghanistan who pleaded guilty last year to planning a suicide attack in the New York City subways. Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters. Two successes in nearly a decade might be enough to satisfy a fearful public, but it is worth noting that both cases began with old-fashioned tips — the first from a landlord, the second from Pakistani intelligence linking Mr. Zazi to Al Qaeda — and could have been pursued with the law enforcement tools available before 9/11. The false dichotomy of liberty versus security is accompanied by another myth: that someone else’s rights are always the ones at risk, that I can give up their rights for my safety. It seems a comfortable bargain. The terrorist is covertly monitored, the drug dealer is searched and the upstanding citizen is protected. But it does not always work that way. The constitutional system of case law and precedent applies rulings on rights universally. So, legally, if a black man in a poor neighborhood can be stopped and frisked with minimal reason, so can a white woman in a rich neighborhood — even if the police tactics differ. American history is replete with assaults on liberties that first target foreigners, minorities and those on the political margins, then spread toward the mainstream. The 1917 Espionage Act, for example, was used to prosecute American labor leaders and other critics of the government, and the 1798 Alien Enemies Act was revived after Pearl Harbor to intern American citizens of Japanese ancestry. A similar process is taking place now, as the F.B.I. has begun using counterterrorism tools to search, infiltrate and investigate groups of American peace activists and labor leaders in the Midwest. The Fourth Amendment is weaker than it was 50 years ago, and this should worry everyone. “Uncontrolled search and seizure is one of the first and most effective weapons in the arsenal of every arbitrary government,” Justice Robert H. Jackson, the former chief United States prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, wrote in 1949. “Among deprivations of rights, none is so effective in cowing a population, crushing the spirit of the individual and putting terror in every heart.”

The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of authors/contributors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph.com. Every investment and trading move involves risk; you should conduct your own research when making a decision. The possibility of a war between the US and North Korea is threatening to derail the risk-on trade across asset classes. As a result, traders have been piling on safe havens like gold. Bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies were also benefitting from this until China decided to crackdown on the “initial coin offerings” (ICOs). So, will cryptocurrencies buckle after the Chinese clampdown or will the fear of a war support the currencies in the short-term? Let’s study the charts to forecast the next move on the top five digital currencies. BTC/USD In our analysis on Aug. 29, we had predicted a rally to about $5,000 levels and had recommended to trail stop losses higher to lock in the gains, as we expected strong resistance there. Hopefully, our readers were not surprised when price corrected from the psychological barrier of $5,000. So, what should be the next course of action? Bitcoin continues to trade within the ascending channel. The correction from the highs of $4,980 broke below the trendline support intraday. However, the closing was well above it. Therefore, the uptrend in Bitcoin is intact. We shall change our bullish view only when the cryptocurrency breaks below the trendline and the 20-day exponential moving average (EMA). At the current levels, we expect a retest of the $5,000 levels. However, we are not sure whether the digital currency will breakout in a hurry. We, therefore, expect a range bound action for a few days. Aggressive traders can go long at the current levels with a stop loss below $4,400 and a target of $4,980. However, please keep the allocation size small, as we are seeing signs of a negative divergence on the RSI. ETH/USD Our analysis of Ethereum also played out according to our expectations. $381 acted as a strong resistance and price retreated from there. Comparatively, Ethereum is weaker than Bitcoin because it broke below the 20-day EMA and fell to the 50-day simple moving average (SMA). However, it is also attempting to resume its rally following the sharp correction. As the price has broken out of the 20-day EMA, traders can buy at the current levels and keep a close stop loss at $318. A retest of $380 levels is likely. However, traders should keep a close watch at $354 levels, which is the 61.8 percent Fibonacci retracement level of the fall from $396.88 to $285. If price struggles to breakout at this level, consider closing the position and waiting for another setup to form. Please try to keep the allocation size small. Our bullish view will be invalidated if price breaks and closes below the ascending channel. BCH/USD Bitcoin Cash is presently trading in a descending channel. Both the moving averages have flattened out, which shows the possibility of range bound trading. If the digital currency breaks out of the channel, it can rally towards $736 levels. However, we don’t find any reliable buy setups. Therefore, we are not recommending a trade on it. XRP/USD Ripple never rallied the way we had expected it to. It has been volatile and direction less since breaking out of the descending triangle pattern. Nevertheless, it has not become completely bearish either, as it has not fallen below the 50-day SMA. We don’t see any reliable buy setups, therefore we are not recommending any trade on it for swing traders. However, the digital currency can rally to $0.3000 levels if it breaks out and closes above the downtrend line. Traders who attempt this trade should keep a stop loss below $0.1900. This is a risky trade, therefore, please think about keeping the allocation size only 25 percent of normal. LTC/USD Litecoin surpassed our target of $70 by a huge margin. $100 proved to be a strong barrier and price corrected to about 61.8 percent Fibonacci retracement levels of the rise from $41.65 to $98.28. Since then, the price has been in a pullback. However, we expect to see some kind of a consolidation for a few days before the digital currency again attempts to breakout of the $100 levels. Litecoin is likely to be volatile for the next few days. Therefore, we are not recommending a trade on it. The current situation is filled with uncertainty. Therefore, traders should reduce their allocation size considerably and adhere to their stop losses, as the digital currencies are likely to remain volatile for the next few days.

U.S. President Barack Obama gestures during a joint news conference with Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra at Thai Government House in Bangkok, Thailand, Sunday, Nov. 18, 2012. AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais As Israeli airstrikes into Hamas-controlled Gaza expand from government targets into civilian areas, President Obama reiterated his support of Israel's "right to defend itself." "[T]here is no country on earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders. So we are fully supportive of Israel's right to defend itself from missiles landing on people's homes," Mr. Obama said at a news conference in Bangkok during an international trip to Thailand, Myanmar and Cambodia. "Let's understand what the precipitating event here was that's causing the current crisis, and that was an ever-escalating number of missiles that were landing not just in Israeli territory but in areas that are populated," the president added. Hamas launched rockets into Israel leading to the current crisis. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was ready to "significantly" expand its airstrikes into Gaza and he indicated that Israel could invade Gaza with ground troops. "The soldiers are ready for any activity that could take place," he said at the weekly cabinet meeting. Israel's "Iron Dome" rocket-defense system has intercepted 250 Gaza-launched rockets aimed for Tel Aviv, the Israeli government said. Israeli officials have arrived in Egypt for talks about a cease-fire, and Palestinian officials had already been in Cairo for discussions. In Bangkok, Mr. Obama said long-term peace is unlikely unless Hamas agrees to cease firing rockets into Israel. "[T]hose who champion the cause of the Palestinians should recognize that if we see a further escalation of the situation in Gaza, then the likelihood of us getting back on any sort of peace track that leads to a two-state solution is, is going to be pushed off way into the future," Mr. Obama said. "So if we're serious about wanting to resolve this situation and create a genuine peace process, it starts with no more missiles being fired in Israel's territory and that then gives us the space to try to deal with these longstanding conflicts that exist."

When it was announced that conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker, best known as The Siamese Twins, were planning to come to France in 1831, French authorities were so afraid of the effect the men, then 20, would have on France’s women that they banned their entrance into the country. While the concept of conjoined twins — two independent people permanently joined as one — is intriguing for many reasons, few aspects spur as much curiosity as how two such people live romantic, sexual lives. According to author Joseph Andrew Orser’s new book, “The Lives of Chang & Eng,” the Bunkers, born in Siam in 1811 and connected at the midsection by a fleshy band several inches long, were spotted in their teens by a British merchant who first thought they were “some strange animal.” When they turned 18, he made a deal to bring them to America and exhibit them as public curiosities. Upon their arrival, they were subject to countless medical inquiries. One doctor, testing their connecting band with needles to determine sensitivity, found that “both boys drew away from punctures at the middle of the band, whereas at half an inch or more from the center, only the twin on that side felt the pain.” He also found that “when one experienced a sour taste, the other did as well,” and that “tickling one of them resulted in the other demanding a stop to it.” More than their connective similarities, though, the public wondered about the boys’ potential sex lives. One story held that Chang interfered in one of Eng’s pursuits, and that, according to one newspaper, “the brothers would have engaged in a duel, but ‘the parties could not agree on a distance.’ ” This and other tales were more than likely unfounded, but provided opportunities for public mockery. “The prospect of the twins engaging in sexual relations with women disturbed sensibilities,” Orser writes. “Concerns existed about the impact that the twins conjoinedness might have on women of childbearing age.” In one extreme example, when a woman in Kentucky gave birth to stillborn conjoined twins, she “claimed she had seen numerous representations of the twins in newspaper advertisements around the time she conceived her children, which affected her imagination.” The brothers gained fame as freaks, and saw opportunity as Americans. After a decade on the sideshow circuit, having saved some money, they retired, bought land in North Carolina, and set out to create lives for themselves as proper Southern gentlemen. They bought property, became US citizens, and even took on slaves — ironic, considering that throughout their early lives here, many questioned whether, despite their firm denials, they were slaves themselves. In 1843, Chang and Eng married, respectively, sisters Adelaide and Sarah Yates, daughters of a respected local landowner. While the girls had a “fair share of suitors,” the brothers had gotten to know them over several years, often visiting upon their return from business travels, and befriending the entire family. When the couples “made their intentions to marry known by riding together in an open wagon,” one report of the time cites how “all hell broke loose.” “A few men ‘smashed through some windows at [the girls’ father’s] farm house,’” and some of his neighbors “threatened to burn his crops if he did not promise to control his daughters.” The local media reacted to the unions with jibes. The Carolina Watchman, in a post titled “Marriage Extraordinaire,” wished for the marriage to be “as happy as it will be close.” Another paper inquired as to whether the women ought to be indicted for “marrying a quadruped.” Northern newspapers were appalled, as abolitionist papers placed “responsibility for the union squarely on a South contaminated by the sin of slavery.” One paper even called the marriage “bestial,” and referred to the tolerant local residents as “a community sunk below the very Sodomites in lasciviousness.” For their part, though, the two couples — and they were, unquestionably, two distinct couples, coming to live in separate homes, with the brothers alternating half weeks in each — sought little more than normal lives. But many among the public and the media, having barely brought themselves to tolerate the brothers’ existence, found the concept of intimate relations between them and “normal” women a step too far. Each wife gave birth in 1844. While no details survived about how the couples conducted their intimacy, it’s worth noting that the brothers’ first children were born six days apart, and a later pair eight days. (They would go on to have an astounding 21 children between them.) When the twins, in need of money, later returned to touring exhibitions, this time bringing two of their children along, many refused to accept this unconventional family. As they traveled through England, some in the British press “doubted whether the ‘family’ was even real,” Orser writes. “For some, it was too ‘disgusting’ to imagine these ‘human monsters’ as husbands or fathers.” In 1870, Chang suffered a stroke that “paralyzed his right side, the side closest to his brother.” Eng nursed him back to relative health as Chang “tied up his right leg in a sling” and, using both a crutch and his brother’s arm, went about his daily routine. But he never returned to full health, and took to drinking. A lingering cough later turned vicious, and he died on Jan. 17, 1874. His brother, complaining of ill health, asked his son to check on his brother. Told that Chang had passed, Eng replied, “Then I am going.” Over the next hour, he “suffered intense pain and distress, a cold sweat covering his body. The only notice he took of his dead twin was to move his body nearer to him.” Two-and-a-half hours after losing his brother, Eng Bunker died.

The prodigal son. The Porsche 911 is the most adored sports car of all time; with this Carrera RS 2.7 edition the most spectacular model to emerge from the fabled German automaker. That is largely down to the fact that the car was conceived as a highly civilised, highly tuned sports car that was equally efficient on the road as well as the track. The 911 Carrera was born to succeed. After retiring the hugely successful Le-Mans-winning Type 917 programme at the end of the 1960’s, the RS was created to bolster the brand’s formidable competition image – and in the face of its monumental billing, the 911 lived up to expectation. The burnt orange Carrera RS, pictured, rolls up to auction via RM Sotheby’s Driven by Disruption series- on the 10th December 2015 – estimated to fetch between $900,000 - $1,000,000. Despite its healthy price tag, the expected figure does not do the Porsche justice. Beneath its spectacular orange exterior, the car remains in pristine condition; having undergone a full restoration under former owner Lee Giannone. Dubbed ‘the nicest RS on the planet’, the extensive labour of love installed in the 911 is clear to see; as it boasts exceptional body work, perfect interior furnishings and of course, a formidable drive quality. Ensuring it is equally exhilarating today, as it was in 1973. The 911 remains at the pinnacle of motoring innovation and engineering, with this Carrera RS boasting a special place in both Porsche and worldwide automotive history for being the brand’s first competition-based homologation model.

USW Local 7-1 hits the picket lines against unsafe BP USW Local 7-1 president Dave Danko speaking on strike issues. (Fight Back! News/J Burger) On the picket lines in Whiting, IN. Whiting, IN - At midnight, Feb. 7, 1100 workers at the BP refinery here went on an Unfair Labor Practice strike, citing the company’s poor record at keeping workers safe on the job. Steelworkers Local 7-1 joins the picket lines today as does the local union in Toledo, Ohio, bringing the total to over 5000 nationwide on strike as of today. Local President Dave Danko said, "Workers are taking a stand on staffing and excessive overtime required by BP." He said the issue of sub-contracting loomed large in negotiations because the oil company is bringing in outside contractors to do routine maintenance when union steelworkers used to do the work. "With short-staffing and our members working overtime, they cannot be freed up for training. This sets the stage for the company to bring in outside contractors to do our work, jeopardizing safety," Danko said. All of the local issues with BP will have to be resolved in the national negotiations. The last meeting with the company negotiators was on Feb. 6. Bystanders on the picket lines spoke of seeing scab workers coming into the plant with license plates from as far as Pennsylvania, Georgia, Minnesota and Virginia. When pressed for how long the this strike may go, Danko said, "We will be here as long as it takes." Pickets are stationed at 10 gates spread around the massive refinery property and they are staffed 24 hours a day.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – The Israeli military said on Thursday that an aircraft and a tank had targeted two posts belonging to militants in the Gaza Strip after three rockets were launched at Israel. Sirens sounded in Israel at various locations on a day of heightened tension following demonstrations in the coastal enclave and the occupied West Bank as Palestinians protested at U.S. President Donald Trump’s announcement on Wednesday that he was recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Two rockets launched at Israel from the Gaza Strip fell short inside the Palestinian enclave earlier in the evening and a third, fired later, landed in an open area in Israel causing no casualties or damage, an army spokeswoman said. Gaza residents said there were no casualties from the Israeli attack and that two unmanned lookout posts were hit. A Jihadist Salafi group in Gaza called the Al-Tawheed Brigades – which does not heed the call from the enclave’s dominant force, Hamas, to desist from firing rockets – claimed responsibility for the launches. “In response to … projectiles fired at Israel throughout the day … an IDF tank and an IAF aircraft targeted two military posts in the Gaza Strip. The IDF holds Hamas responsible for the hostile activity perpetrated against Israel from the Gaza Strip,” an army statement said. During the Gaza war in 2014, Israel’s Iron Dome rocket interceptor system largely protected the country’s heartland from thousands of rocket barrages fired by militants. (Additional reporting by Ali Abdelaty in Cairo and Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza, Writing by Ori Lewis; Editing by Alison Williams)

We recently caught up with Jordan from Livestock (Canada) to talk about the retail business and the New Balance brand. Read on to gain their perspective on current sneaker trends, New Balance quality and why they feel that New Balance is a “no frills” company. (All photos provided by Livestock) How do you feel about the currently state of the sneaker game in Canada? In our humble opinion, the sneaker culture definitely has changed. Like everything else in the world, it’s not what it once was. Whether or not that means it is better or worse is pretty subjective. As a retailer, business is great, we are growing rapidly, our team is strong, and we couldn’t be happier about who we are and where we are at. On the other hand, as sneaker lovers and individuals, it’s hard to see the way products are viewed as a commodity. And it’s difficult to watch customers with an opportunist outlook, purchasing purposely with intent to make a quick eBay buck. What do you feel is the most important part of a New Balance shoe? Why? New Balance shoes are so iconic, they represent a moment in time and constantly reincarnate with tasteful colour pallets. The tonal colours and materials on the silhouettes are some of the best out there and a true sneaker head can’t have a collection without a pair of NB’s. Why is it important to carry New Balance at your store? Our store doesn’t focus on 1 single brand, we are a lifestyle store that gives variation to our customers in footwear and apparel. New Balance allows us to give that variety in a tasteful way that people really respond well to. Do you see a trend in New Balance bought in your region? The New Balance sneaker trend is growing throughout the world; we recently had a few members of our crew travel to Japan and the amount of New Balance sneakers worn over there was amazing. We are excited to be carrying New Balances and bring some life to other great footwear brands. How do you feel about the amount of New Balance being released in the last year or so? It’s great to see New Balance really pushing the amount of product that’s going out. We want to outfit people and allow them to explore their own taste; New Balance is one of the many brands we carry that allows our customers to develop their own personal styles. What do you take into account when choosing a New Balance shoe for your store? We always look at things holistically so the sneakers and apparel need to fit into the aesthetic of Livestock first and foremost. We never order things because of “hype” or because a certain celebrity is wearing something, we buy great products that we love and we hope our customers love as well. What do you see New Balance doing differently than other brands? New Balance sneakers always have amazing colorways. They stick to what they are good at and keep executing over and over. New Balance is a “no frills” brand and we love that. What ways are you using social media to push your store? We are all over social media simply because we love the fact that we can interact with customers all over the world and share great media with people who are into the same things we are. Check us out on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Can we expect any new collaborations with New Balance and your store? We’ve just launched a New Balance pack that’s exclusive to Livestock across North America. We are always working on new and exciting stuff, but for now those are on the downlow. You’ll definitely see some Livestock projects coming soon, so stay tuned.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Creator/TakehitoKoyasu Takehito Koyasu (born May 5, 1967) is a seiyuu born in—*WHACK* Advertisement: What!? I was just getting to that bit! Anyway, he is currently the most prolific seiyuu (voice actor) in the business. And when we say prolific, we mean it, with lots of varying roles he can pull off easily. Starting from a Determinator, to a calm, cool, intellectual, sarcastic character, to a nobleman to just plain comic relief/gay character. He created Weiß Kreuz, and is a part of the Weiss group, alongside the other leads: Shin-ichiro Miki, Tomokazu Seki, and Hiro Yuki. He is a true Man of a Thousand Voices. Has an alter-ego named "Zazel". Zazel sings the theme song for the CD drama starring Weiss' rivals, Schwarz. According to Anime News Network , he has the most number of roles in anime - as of March 2018 a total of 105 more roles than the next highest on the list. It shall be noted, also, that he's a Promoted Fanboy. Yep, he was a long-time Mobile Suit Gundam fan before landing the roles of Zechs, Gym, Mu and Frederick. Advertisement: Currently working on a series of CD dramas called Velvet Under World, which may or may not be a Weiß Kreuz spin off. For the most compelling arguments in favour of that, "Velvet Underworld" is Weiß Kreuz's first opening theme and VUW's main character's name? A.Y.A. He seems to be a good friend of Hikaru Midorikawa and, as a result, there's lots of instances where he plays characters who are rivals with Midorikawa's character, usually with Koyasu's character being the instigator of rivalry. Koyasu has also replaced Kaneto Shiozawa in many roles since the latter's death and can be seen as his successor as they do sound rather similar. Also has relationships with Akira Ishida, Unshou Ishizuka, and to an extent Tessho Genda.

Once upon a time, a child was born into wealth and wanted for nothing, but he was possessed by bottomless, endless, grating, grasping wanting, and wanted more, and got it, and more after that, and always more. He was a pair of ragged orange claws upon the ocean floor, forever scuttling, pinching, reaching for more, a carrion crab, a lobster and a boiling lobster pot in one, a termite, a tyrant over his own little empires. He got a boost at the beginning from the wealth handed him and then moved among grifters and mobsters who cut him slack as long as he was useful, or maybe there’s slack in arenas where people live by personal loyalty until they betray, and not by rules, and certainly not by the law or the book. So for seven decades, he fed his appetites and exercised his license to lie, cheat, steal, and stiff working people of their wages, made messes, left them behind, grabbed more baubles, and left them in ruin. He was supposed to be a great maker of things, but he was mostly a breaker. He acquired buildings and women and enterprises and treated them all alike, promoting and deserting them, running into bankruptcies and divorces, treading on lawsuits the way a lumberjack of old walked across the logs floating on their way to the mill, but as long as he moved in his underworld of dealmakers the rules were wobbly and the enforcement was wobblier and he could stay afloat. But his appetite was endless, and he wanted more, and he gambled to become the most powerful man in the world, and won, careless of what he wished for. Thinking of him, I think of Pushkin’s telling of the old fairytale of The Fisherman and the Golden Fish. After being caught in the old fisherman’s net, the golden fish speaks up and offers wishes in return for being thrown back in the sea. The fisherman asks him for nothing, though later he tells his wife of his chance encounter with the magical creature. The fisherman’s wife sends him back to ask for a new washtub for her, and then a second time to ask for a cottage to replace their hovel, and the wishes are granted, and then as she grows prouder and greedier, she sends him to ask that she become a wealthy person in a mansion with servants she abuses, and then she sends her husband back. The old man comes and grovels before the fish, caught between the shame of the requests and the appetite of his wife, and she becomes tsarina and has her boyards and nobles drive the husband from her palace. You could call the husband consciousness—the awareness of others and of oneself in relation to others—and the wife craving. Finally she wishes to be supreme over the seas and over the fish itself, endlessly uttering wishes, and the old man goes back to the sea to tell the fish—to complain to the fish—of this latest round of wishes. The fish this time doesn’t even speak, just flashes its tail, and the old man turns around to see on the shore his wife with her broken washtub at their old hovel. Overreach is perilous, says this Russian tale; enough is enough. And too much is nothing. Article continues after advertisement The child who became the most powerful man in the world, or at least occupied the real estate occupied by a series of those men, had run a family business and then starred in an unreality show based on the fiction that he was a stately emperor of enterprise, rather than a buffoon barging along anyhow, and each was a hall of mirrors made to flatter his sense of self, the self that was his one edifice he kept raising higher and higher and never abandoned. I have often run across men (and rarely, but not never, women) who have become so powerful in their lives that there is no one to tell them when they are cruel, wrong, foolish, absurd, repugnant. In the end there is no one else in their world, because when you are not willing to hear how others feel, what others need, when you do not care, you are not willing to acknowledge others’ existence. That’s how it’s lonely at the top. It is as if these petty tyrants live in a world without honest mirrors, without others, without gravity, and they are buffered from the consequences of their failures. “They were careless people,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of the rich couple at the heart of The Great Gatsby. “They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” Some of us are surrounded by destructive people who tell us we’re worthless when we’re endlessly valuable, that we’re stupid when we’re smart, that we’re failing even when we succeed. But the opposite of people who drag you down isn’t people who build you up and butter you up. It’s equals who are generous but keep you accountable, true mirrors who reflect back who you are and what you are doing. “He is, as of this writing, the most mocked man in the world.” We keep each other honest, we keep each other good with our feedback, our intolerance of meanness and falsehood, our demands that the people we are with listen, respect, respond—if we are allowed to, if we are free and valued ourselves. There is a democracy of social discourse, in which we are reminded that as we are beset with desires and fears and feelings, so are others; there was an old woman in Occupy Wall Street I always go back to who said, “We’re fighting for a society in which everyone is important.” That’s what a democracy of mind and heart, as well as economy and polity, would look like. This year Hannah Arendt is alarmingly relevant, and her books are selling well, particularly On the Origins of Totalitarianism. She’s been the subject an extraordinary essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books and a conversation between scholar Lyndsey Stonebridge and Krista Tippet on the radio show “On Being.” Stonebridge notes that Arendt advocated for the importance of an inner dialogue with oneself, for a critical splitting in which you interrogate yourself—for a real conversation between the fisherman and his wife you could say: “People who can do that can actually then move on to having conversations with other people and then judging with other people. And what she called ‘the banality of evil’ was the inability to hear another voice, the inability to have a dialogue either with oneself or the imagination to have a dialogue with the world, the moral world.” Article continues after advertisement Some use their power to silence that and live in the void of their own increasingly deteriorating, off-course sense of self and meaning. It’s like going mad on a desert island, only with sycophants and room service. It’s like having a compliant compass that agrees north is whatever you want it to be. The tyrant of a family, the tyrant of a little business or a huge enterprise, the tyrant of a nation. Power corrupts, and absolute power often corrupts the awareness of those who possess it. Or reduces it: narcissists, sociopaths, and egomaniacs are people for whom others don’t exist. We gain awareness of ourselves and others from setbacks and difficulties; we get used to a world that is not always about us; and those who do not have to cope with that are brittle, weak, unable to endure contradiction, convinced of the necessity of always having one’s own way. The rich kids I met in college were flailing as though they wanted to find walls around them, leapt as though they wanted there to be gravity and to hit ground, even bottom, but parents and privilege kept throwing out safety nets and buffers, kept padding the walls and picking up the pieces, so that all their acts were meaningless, literally inconsequential. They floated like astronauts in outer space. Equality keeps us honest. Our peers tell us who we are and how we are doing, providing that service in personal life that a free press does in a functioning society. Inequality creates liars and delusion. The powerless need to dissemble—that’s how slaves, servants, and women got the reputation of being liars—and the powerful grow stupid on the lies they require from their subordinates and on the lack of need to know about others who are nobody, who don’t count, who’ve been silenced or trained to please. This is why I always pair privilege with obliviousness; obliviousness is privilege’s form of deprivation. When you don’t hear others, you don’t imagine them, they become unreal, and you are left in the wasteland of a world with only yourself in it, and that surely makes you starving, though you know not for what, if you have ceased to imagine others exist in any true deep way that matters. This is about a need for which we hardly have language or at least not a familiar conversation. A man who wished to become the most powerful man in the world, and by happenstance and intervention and a series of disasters was granted his wish. Surely he must have imagined that more power meant more flattery, a grander image, a greater hall of mirrors reflecting back his magnificence. But he misunderstood power and prominence. This man had bullied friends and acquaintances, wives and servants, and he bullied facts and truths, insistent that he was more than they were, than it is, that it too must yield to his will. It did not, but the people he bullied pretended that it did. Or perhaps it was that he was a salesman, throwing out one pitch after another, abandoning each one as soon as it left his mouth. A hungry ghost always wants the next thing, not the last thing. This one imagined that the power would repose within him and make him great, a Midas touch that would turn all to gold. But the power of the presidency was what it had always been: a system of cooperative relationships, a power that rested on people’s willingness to carry out the orders the president gave, and a willingness that came from that president’s respect for rule of law, truth, and the people. A man who gives an order that is not followed has his powerlessness hung out like dirty laundry. One day earlier this year, one of this president’s minions announced that the president’s power would not be questioned. There are tyrants who might utter such a statement and strike fear into those beneath him, because they have installed enough fear. A true tyrant does not depend on cooperative power but has a true power of command, enforced by thugs, goons, Stasi, the SS, or death squads. A true tyrant has subordinated the system of government and made it loyal to himself rather than to the system of laws or the ideals of the country. This would-be tyrant didn’t understand that he was in a system where many in government, perhaps most beyond the members of his party in the legislative branch, were loyal to law and principle and not to him. His minion announced the president would not be questioned, and we laughed. He called in, like courtiers, the heads of the FBI, of the NSA, and the director of national intelligence to tell them to suppress evidence, to stop investigations and found that their loyalty was not to him. He found out to his chagrin that we were still something of a democracy, and that the free press could not be so easily stopped, and the public itself refused to be cowed and mocks him earnestly at every turn. A true tyrant sits beyond the sea in Pushkin’s country. He corrupts elections in his country, eliminates his enemies with bullets, poisons, with mysterious deaths made to look like accidents—he spread fear and bullied the truth successfully, strategically. Though he too had overreached with his intrusions into the American election, and what he had hoped would be invisible caused the whole world to scrutinize him and his actions and history and impact with concern and even fury. Russia may have ruined whatever standing and trust it has, may have exposed itself, with this intervention in the US and then European elections. The American buffoon’s commands were disobeyed, his secrets leaked at such a rate his office resembled the fountains at Versailles or maybe just a sieve (this spring there was an extraordinary piece in the Washington Post with thirty anonymous sources), his agenda was undermined even by a minority party that was not supposed to have much in the way of power, the judiciary kept suspending his executive orders, and scandals erupted like boils and sores. Instead of the dictator of the little demimondes of beauty pageants, casinos, luxury condominiums, fake universities offering fake educations with real debt, fake reality tv in which he was master of the fake fate of others, an arbiter of all worth and meaning, he became fortune’s fool. He is, as of this writing, the most mocked man in the world. After the women’s march on January 21st, people joked that he had been rejected by more women in one day than any man in history; he was mocked in newspapers, on television, in cartoons, was the butt of a million jokes, and his every tweet was instantly met with an onslaught of attacks and insults by ordinary citizens gleeful to be able to speak sharp truth to bloated power. He is the old fisherman’s wife who wished for everything and sooner or later he will end up with nothing. The wife sitting in front of her hovel was poorer after her series of wishes, because she now owned not only her poverty but her mistakes and her destructive pride, because she might have been otherwise, but brought power and glory crashing down upon her, because she had made her bed badly and was lying in it. The man in the white house sits, naked and obscene, a pustule of ego, in the harsh light, a man whose grasp exceeded his understanding, because his understanding was dulled by indulgence. He must know somewhere below the surface he skates on that he has destroyed his image, and like Dorian Gray before him, will be devoured by his own corrosion in due time too. One way or another this will kill him, though he may drag down millions with him. One way or another, he knows he has stepped off a cliff, pronounced himself king of the air, and is in freefall. Another dungheap awaits his landing; the dung is all his; when he plunges into it he will be, at last, a self-made man.

Keyonna Gunner, 22, was arrested and charged with felony injury to a child on Tuesday after police said she shocked a special needs child with a stun gun. See the most dangerous cities in Texas, according to FBI data. less Keyonna Gunner, 22, was arrested and charged with felony injury to a child on Tuesday after police said she shocked a special needs child with a stun gun. See the most dangerous cities in Texas, according to ... more Photo: MCSO Photo: MCSO Image 1 of / 42 Caption Close Fourth suspect arrested in disturbing abuse, death of special needs teenager 1 / 42 Back to Gallery Last week, Montgomery police arrested a trio of suspects accused of drugging and shocking a 14-year-old special needs child for multiple weeks. On Tuesday, police arrested Keyonna Gunner, 22, the fourth suspect in the household where the drugging death of the special needs victim occurred. The caretakers for the girl, Tommieretta Gunner, 43, and Marreissa Jones, 28, were arrested and charged with a first-degree felony injury to a child last Tuesday after police said the duo gave the special-needs teen two different high blood pressure medications over a three-week period in 2016. MORE DETAILS: Trio drugged, shocked Montgomery County girl before her death Now Playing: Surveillance video from within the household shows the girl struggling with the effects of both medications, which were not prescribed by a medical professional, according to Montgomery County Sheriff's Office. During this time and prior, the victim's father, 42-year-old Anthony Jackson, used a stun gun on his child seven times and threatened the girl at least fifteen times over a period of several months, police said. He was also arrested last week and faces a third-degree felony injury to a child charge. Authorities said the newly arrested suspect, Keyonna Gunner, also used a stun gun on the child while at the residence. She has been charged with felony injury to a child and taken to a county jail. Above: See the most dangerous cities in Texas, according to FBI data.

According to unconfirmed media reports, Surface Transport, Shipping and Rural Development Minister Nitin Gadkari’s official residence 13 Teen Murti lane residence may have been bugged. The claim was first published in the weekly Sunday Guardian and subsequently flashed by its sister news channel NewsX. But the story so far has not been confirmed, but it has come as a juicy fodder both for sections of media and opposition Congress. Since bugging is a politically sensitive issue, the issue could also figure today in Parliament. Sunday Guardian claims “the discovery was 'accidental' and a debugging exercise was immediately ordered, and more devices were consequently discovered. The weekly reports: Initial investigations have revealed that the bugs were "planted in the house by a foreign agency since the sophisticated listening devices found are used only by western intelligence operatives, particularly the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA)". It may be recalled that Edward Snowden's revelations carried by Washington Post on 30 June stated that top BJP leaders were under surveillance by a premier US spy agency. It could not be ascertained who besides Gadkari were the other BJP leaders who had been spied upon. Operations may now be going on to check whether, or not, other prominent BJP leaders too were under surveillance by this external agency. The BJP-led NDA government lodged a strong protest with the US State Department following the publication of the news in the Washington Post. The report elicited an immediate denial from the supposed 'target' of the surveillance. "Reports in a section of the media about listening devices having been found at my New Delhi residence are highly speculative," tweeted Gadkari. A source close to Gadkari told Firstpost that for them “the matter ends there. There was nothing more to add. We deny that any such device was found at Gadkariji’s residence. That media report does not say when and how the listening device was found but has gone on to suggest that it was done by foreign agencies, particularly by the US agencies. Only that media house knows how this is possible.” The security and intelligence agencies went into a tizzy after the story was flashed on TV channels. Sources said that two agencies, whom it concerned most, Delhi Police and Intelligence Bureau first checked whether their own officials and system had any information of this kind. Then Gadkari’s office and residence was flooded with phone calls and visits by security and intelligence officials. An official said it was an absurd situation: Gadkari’s official aides were asking security agencies for information, who in turn were asking same them for the same. Beyond Gadkari’s tweet, the BJP has preferred to ignore the story. Even in off-record conversations, BJP leaders remain firm in their denials -- except for BJP party member Subramanian Swamy who has jumped in fuel more speculation: "My own investigations and my sources reveal that this may happen not later than October last year. The planting of the device and that means at that time, when the UPA was in power, the NSA has specifically targeted the BJP and Gadkari was a very important person. He had the confidence of the RSS." While security agencies are still checking the veracity of the report, sources said the residence of senior BJP leaders and chambers of party president at headquarters 11 Ashoka Road is constantly scanned. “There is a laid out system whereby residence and offices of senior party leaders are regularly scanned to ensure that external device of any kind was not planted there. So far nothing out of ordinary has come to come to our knowledge”, a senior party functionary said. The BJP’s IT cell with equipped to handle the task. The party has an in-house mechanism to keep their key leaders offices and residential premises “clean”. Congress has latched onto the issue and straightaway launched a frontal attack on Modi. Party spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala said, "If reports of bugging of senior Cabinet minister Nitin Gadkari, who is also a former BJP president, are correct, they are indeed extremely serious. It reflects a certain lack of faith amongst ministerial colleagues and an absence of mutual trust. It's time that both Gadkari and also BJP and government come clean on the issue and place before the people of the country if at all there was bugging and if there was snooping being done ... at whose instance and at whose authority it has been done. And what is the reason, if any, for conducting such snooping. All these issues need to be clarified both by BJP as well as the Prime Minister and the home minister in the larger interest of people." Gadkari is one of the most influential ministers in the Modi government, and is part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s informal core group. He is a former party president and has close rapport with RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat. And while the capital is abuzz with rumours, Gadkari, is out of town, and will be back on Wednesday -- by when the storm in the teacup may have subsided. Firstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button.

The attention towards IBs began in early 80s in the USA; at that time, the Intelligent Building Institution described an IB as “one which integrates various systems to effectively manage resources in a coordinated mode to maximize: technical performance; investment and operating cost savings; flexibility”. From the appearance of that definition, many new ones have been developed, and will be analysed in this paper (see Section 2 below) in order to extract the common features of IBs. As a result, this paper is an attempt to review the available scholarly studies related to design and developments of IBs towards clarifying the available definitions and identifying their most significant key performance indicators (KPI). The paper is exploratory and boldly aims to provide a re-conceptualization of IB and to develop an analytical framework for more systematic enquiry. In addition, the paper frames a future research agenda and prepares the ground for more detailed works in this field. The review also covers the current status of IBs from different parts of the world including Europe and North America, Southeast Asia (Malaysia and Singapore), Far East Asia (Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, and China), Australia and New Zealand. The intelligence embedded into IBs are claimed to enable them to be highly responsive to users’ needs, the environment, and the society, and to be effective in minimizing the environmental impacts and natural resource wastes (Kua and Lee 2002 Kua, H. W., and S. E. Lee. 2002. “Demonstration Intelligent Building—A Methodology for the Promotion of Total Sustainability in the Built Environment.” Building and Environment 37: 231–240. doi: 10.1016/S0360-1323(01)00002-6; GhaffarianHoseini 2012 GhaffarianHoseini, A. 2012. “Ecologically Sustainable Design (ESD): Theories, Implementations and Challenges Towards Intelligent Building Design Development.” Intelligent Buildings International 4 (1): 34–48. doi: 10.1080/17508975.2011.630062). Reduction of operational costs through efficiency in energy management and the capability of being “user-oriented” encompassing improved safety, health, and well-being are other important goals of IBs (Silva et al. 2012 Silva, R. M., J. Arakaki, F. Junqueira, D. J. Santos Filho, P. E. Miyagi. 2012. “Modeling of Active Holonic Control Systems for Intelligent Buildings.” Automation in Construction 25: 20–33. doi: 10.1016/j.autcon.2012.04.002; Cempel and Mikulik 2013 Cempel, W., and J. Mikulik. 2013. “Intelligent Building Reengineering: Adjusting Life and Work Environment to Occupant's Optimal Routine Processes.” Intelligent Buildings International 5 (1): 51–64. doi: 10.1080/17508975.2012.760440). For the last three decades, the so-called intelligent buildings (IBs) were only a conceptual framework for the representation of future buildings. However, today, IBs are rapidly becoming inherent constituents of influential policies for design and development of future buildings. Undeniably, urbanized areas are expected to be highly influenced by IBs in order to promote smart growth, green development and healthy environments (Hollands 2008 Hollands, R. G. 2008. “Will the Real Smart City Please Stand Up? Intelligent, Progressive or Entrepreneurial?.” City 12 (3): 303–320. doi: 10.1080/13604810802479126; Choon et al. 2011 Choon, S. W., C. Siwar, J. Pereira, A. A. Jemain, H. S. Hashim, A. S. Hadi. 2011. “A Sustainable City Index for Malaysia.” International Journal of Sustainable Development and World Ecology 18 (1): 28–35. doi: 10.1080/13504509.2011.543012; Berardi 2013a Berardi, U. 2013a. “Clarifying the New Interpretations of the Concept of Sustainable Building.” Sustainable Cities and Society 8: 72–78. doi: 10.1016/j.scs.2013.01.008). Various studies have tried to map the evolution of the concept of IBs (e.g. Clements-Croome 1997 Clements-Croome, D. J. 1997. “What do We Mean by Intelligent Buildings?.” Automation in Construction 6: 395–400. doi: 10.1016/S0926-5805(97)00018-6, 2004 Clements-Croome, D. J. 2004. Intelligent Buildings: Design, Management and Operation . London : Thomas Telford.; Buckman, Mayfield, and Beck 2014 Buckman, A. H., M. Mayfield, S. B. M. Beck. 2014. “What is a Smart Building?.” Smart and Sustainable Built Environment 3 (2): 92–109. doi: 10.1108/SASBE-01-2014-0003). In essence, the emergence of information and communication technology (ICT), together with the development of automation, embedded sensors, and other high-tech systems are key elements in IBs (Kroner 1997 Kroner, W. M. 1997. “An Intelligent and Responsive Architecture.” Automation in Construction 6: 381–393. doi: 10.1016/S0926-5805(97)00017-4). 2. Review of existing definitions of IBs Back to 1988, an IB was defined as “one which has an information communication network through which two or more of its services systems are automatically controlled, guided by predictions based upon a knowledge of the building and usage, maintained in an integrated data base” (Leifer 1988 Leifer, D. 1988. “Intelligent Buildings: A Definition.” Architecture Australia 77: 200–202.). In that definition, networks, data processing equipment, automation, telecommunication, and building management systems (BMS) characterize the main constituents of IBs. During 1980s, definitions of IBs were mainly intertwined with the characteristics of automated technology, while later definitions were extended to include other features. An international symposium on IBs in Toronto in 1985 concluded that “an intelligent building combines innovations, technological or not, with skillful management to maximize return on investment” (Pennell 2013 Pennell, N. 2013. “Opportunities and Challenges for Intelligent Buildings.” In Intelligent Buildings: Design, Management and Operation. 2nd ed., edited by D. J. Clements-Croome, 305–312. London : ICE Publishing.). The Intelligent Building Institute (IBI) Foundation in 1989 defined an IB as “one which provides a productive and cost-effective environment through optimization of its four basic elements including structures, systems, services and management and the interrelationships between them” (Wigginton and Harris 2002 Wigginton, M., and J. Harris. 2002. Intelligent Skins. Oxford : Architectural Press.). Later, the European Intelligent Buildings Group (EIBG) in 1998 defined an IB as “one that creates an environment which maximizes the effectiveness of the building's occupants, while at the same time enabling efficient management of resources with minimum lifetime costs of hardware and facilities” (Nguyen and Aiello 2013 Nguyen, T. A., and M. Aiello. 2013. “Energy Intelligent Buildings Based on User Activity: A Survey.” Energy and Buildings 56: 244–257. doi: 10.1016/j.enbuild.2012.09.005). The IBI and EIBG definitions are derived from performance and operation points of view with focus on comfort, adaptability, reduced lifecycle costs, and enhanced control over available resources (Brad and Murar 2014 Brad, B. S., and M. M. Murar. 2014. “Smart Buildings Using IoT Technologies.” Stroitel'stvo Unikal'nyh Zdanij i Sooruzenij 5 (20): 15–27. http://www.unistroy.spb.ru/index_2014_20/2_brad_20.pdf). IBs are characterized or associated with application of sophisticated operational systems to lifecycle cost efficiency, and ecological performance (Bedos et al. 1990 Bedos, Joan, Puig Miro, Albert Girbal, Rovira Fontanals, and Josep Lluis. 1990. Intelligent Buildings and Areas. Definition of an Emerging Concept. Barcelona : Institut Cerd. Project INFRA.; So and Chan 1999 So, A. T. P., and W. L. Chan. 1999. Intelligent Building Systems, New York: Kluwer Academic Publishers.). During the 1990s, the definitions of IBs expanded to include many aspects related to a cohesive linkage between “users, building systems, and environment” as well as the key dimensions of “quality of life”. This can be illustrated by reference to the CIB (1995) Working Group W98 stating that an intelligent building is a dynamic and responsive architecture that provides every occupant with productive, cost-effective and environmentally approved conditions through a continuous interaction among its basic elements: places (fabric; structure; facilities); process (automation; control; systems); people (services; users) and management (maintenance; performance) and the interrelation between them. (Clements-Croome 2004 Clements-Croome, D. J. 2004. Intelligent Buildings: Design, Management and Operation. London : Thomas Telford.) Meanwhile, definitions developed in Japan by the Mitsubishi Electric Corporation in 1990 (Bystrom 1990 Bystrom, J. 1990. Intelligent byggande i Japan. Vol. 62. Stockholm : Sveriges Tekniska AttachÈer. (Utlandsrapporter, Utlansrapport Japan 9004) ISRN STATT-UR--90/04-J--SE.) and Shimizu Corporation in 1993 (Yasuyoshi 1993 Yasuyoshi, M. 1993. “Advanced Intelligent Building in Japan.” Proceedings of Future/build 1993; Building for Competitive Advantage. Chicago, Illinois, Washington, Intelligent Building Institute (IBI).) suggested that the human being is the focal point of IBs. The work of Clements-Croome (1997 Clements-Croome, D. J. 1997. “What do We Mean by Intelligent Buildings?.” Automation in Construction 6: 395–400. doi: 10.1016/S0926-5805(97)00018-6) was one of the first attempts to clarify the concept of IBs, their effectiveness, efficiency, and their potentials to respond to the social and technological changes. Early definitions of IB mainly focused on the role of technologies and later gradually moved towards the role of user interactions and social changes demonstrating a significant attention to the quality of life indices (Wigginton and Harris 2002 Wigginton, M., and J. Harris. 2002. Intelligent Skins. Oxford : Architectural Press.; Wong, Li, and Wang 2005 Wong, J. K. W., H. Li, and S. W. Wang. 2005. “Intelligent Building Research: A Review.” Automation in Construction 14: 143–159. doi: 10.1016/j.autcon.2004.06.001). In this line, many similar definitions support that future IBs should respond to user expectations and quality of life (Preiser and Schramm 2002 Preiser, W. F. E., and U. Schramm. 2002. “Intelligent Office Building Performance Evaluation.” Facilities 20 (7/8): 279–287. doi: 10.1108/02632770210435198; Wigginton and Harris 2002 Wigginton, M., and J. Harris. 2002. Intelligent Skins. Oxford : Architectural Press.). This is reflected in the following definition: “one in which the building fabric, space, service and information systems can respond in an efficient manner to the initial and changing demands of the owner, the occupier and the environment” (Arup 2003 Arup. 2003. www.arup.com/communications/knowledge/intelligent.htm.). Another contends that, “intelligent buildings are not just about technology, it is more about their suitability for their planned use and success at fulfilling the brief” (Clements-Croome 2013b Clements-Croome, D. J. 2013b. “Can Intelligent Buildings Provide Alternative Approaches to Heating, Ventilating and Air Conditioning of Buildings?” Dreosti memorial lecture.). It can be argued that one of the challenges towards transforming knowledge into action is the priority given to the technical dimension of IBs, often resulting in neglecting the social and economic perspectives (Cooper and Symes 2008 Cooper, I., and M. Symes. 2008. Sustainable Urban Development. Changing Professional Practice. New York , NY : Routledge.). Current definitions of IBs have gradually considered the users’ interactions and even the social values of users (Jamaludin 2011 Jamaludin, O. 2011. “Perceptions of Intelligent Building in Malaysia: Case Study of Kuala Lumpur.” PhD thesis, Malaysia: Universiti Teknologi MARA.; Ghaffarianhoseini 2012 GhaffarianHoseini, A. 2012. “Ecologically Sustainable Design (ESD): Theories, Implementations and Challenges Towards Intelligent Building Design Development.” Intelligent Buildings International 4 (1): 34–48. doi: 10.1080/17508975.2011.630062) and this transition can be observed in the evolution of the fundamentals of smart homes including Matilda Smart House (developed at University of Florida), MIT Smart House, and The Aware Home (developed at Georgia Institute of Technology) which raise the idea that intelligent living environments must be aware of and responsive to their occupants’ demands and activities. In the same scenario, the main focus of IBs has shifted to the concept of learning capability and the relationship between occupants and environment (Kaya and Kahraman 2014 Kaya, I., and C. Kahraman. 2014. “A Comparison of Fuzzy Multicriteria Decision Making Methods for Intelligent Building Assessment.” Journal of Civil Engineering and Management 20 (1): 59–69. doi: 10.3846/13923730.2013.801906). Additionally, Jiri Skopek describes the benefits of IBs: “In terms of several different issues – the efficiency aspect, the cost aspect, the environmental aspect, the health aspect and the security aspect” (Gray 2006 Gray, A. 2006. “How Smart are Intelligent Buildings?.” Building Operating Management 53 (9): 61–62. 64, 66. http://search.proquest.com/docview/203467047?accountid=28930.). Today IBs are enabling the connectivity between people, their environment produced by the systems, and the building to become much more real and effective. In contrast, there has been criticism directed towards IBs which, due to the utilization of integrated automated systems, consumes more energy than necessary (Jin 2012 Jin, W. 2012. “Advances in Intelligent and Soft Computing.” Advances in Intelligent and Soft Computing 158: 423–430. doi: 10.1007/978-3-642-29148-7_59). This has led to reconsidering the role of energy-saving features (Cook and Das 2007 Cook, D. J., and S. K. Das. 2007. “How Smart are Our Environments? An Updated Look at the State of the Art.” Pervasive and Mobile Computing 3 (2): 53–73. doi: 10.1016/j.pmcj.2006.12.001) such as Building as Power Plant initiative by Hartkopf (2004 Hartkopf, V. 2004. “Building as Power Plant—BAPP.” Cogeneration and Distributed Generation Journal 19 (2): 60–73. doi: 10.1080/15453660409509039) which has been selected by the US Congress as the national test-bed for advanced technology in buildings. IBs should be eco-intelligent (Goleman 2009 Goleman, D. 2009. Ecological Intelligence. London : Allen Lane.) and include ecologically sustainable design principles (Ghaffarianhoseini 2012 GhaffarianHoseini, A. 2012. “Ecologically Sustainable Design (ESD): Theories, Implementations and Challenges Towards Intelligent Building Design Development.” Intelligent Buildings International 4 (1): 34–48. doi: 10.1080/17508975.2011.630062; Ghaffarianhoseini et al. 2013 GhaffarianHoseini, A., N. D. Dahlan, U. Berardi, A. GhaffarianHoseini, N. Makaremi, and M. GhaffarianHoseini. 2013. “Sustainable Energy Performances of Green Buildings: A Review of Current Theories, Implementations and Challenges.” Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 25: 1–17. doi: 10.1016/j.rser.2013.01.010). The essence of existing smart houses in developed countries seems to be the embodiment of intelligent environment which is highly linked to sustainability principles (Ghaffarianhoseini et al. 2013a GhaffarianHoseini, A., N. D. Dahlan, U. Berardi, A. GhaffarianHoseini, and N. Makaremi. 2013a. “The Essence of Future Smart Houses: From Embedding ICT to Adapting to Sustainability Principles.” Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 24: 593–607. doi: 10.1016/j.rser.2013.02.032). The incorporation of passive design techniques with smart active features was seen as a necessity for improving the sustainable performance of IBs exemplified by the role of intelligent facades that offer evidence (Ochoa and Capeluto 2008 Ochoa, C. E., and I. G. Capeluto. 2008. “Strategic Decision-making for Intelligent Buildings: Comparative Impact of Passive Design Strategies and Active Features in a Hot Climate.” Building and Environment 43 (11): 1829–1839. doi: 10.1016/j.buildenv.2007.10.018) in achieving effective IB responses to their environment. Other studies also ascertain that energy-saving strategies are the inherent components of IB technologies (Strumiłło and Łódź 2014 Strumiłło, K., and Łódź, P. 2014. “Ergonomic Aspects of an Intelligent Building.” Advances in Social and Organizational Factors 12: 51–58.) while recommending integrating user involvement in sustainable energy performance of buildings (Janda 2011 Janda, K. B. 2011. “Buildings don't use Energy: People do.” Architectural Science Review 54 (1): 15–22. doi: 10.3763/asre.2009.0050). In the same way it is articulated that “the main objective in intelligent building design is to satisfy occupants’ need with high energy efficiency” (Yang 2013b Yang, R. 2013b. “Development of Integrated Building Control Systems for Energy and Comfort Management in Intelligent Buildings.” Doctoral diss., Ohio: University of Toledo.), while proposing the concept of energy-IB (Nguyen and Aiello 2013 Nguyen, T. A., and M. Aiello. 2013. “Energy Intelligent Buildings Based on User Activity: A Survey.” Energy and Buildings 56: 244–257. doi: 10.1016/j.enbuild.2012.09.005) and highlighting the adaptability of buildings to climate change (Thompson, Cooper, and Gething 2014 Thompson, M., I. Cooper, and B. Gething. 2014. The Business Case for Adapting Buildings to Climate Change: Niche or Mainstream? Executive Summary. Swindon: Innovate UK technology Strategy Board. Design for Future Climate.). From the economic point of view, it is essential to debate about the initial high costs and reliability of the application of intelligent technologies such as advanced sensors/actuators and energy management systems in IBs as well as the related operational and monitoring costs. Nevertheless, the ultimate added value of IBs is claimed to influence the economic feasibility of their production. Hence, achieving the following benefits can significantly affect the economic conditions, specifically in intelligent offices: lower healthcare costs, higher levels of work productivity, higher rental values, higher staff retention rates due to increased employee satisfaction, as well as minimization of the energy consumption and its operating costs (Clements-Croome 2015 Clements-Croome, D. 2015. “Creative and Productive Workplaces: A Review.” Intelligent Buildings International: 1–20. doi: 10.1080/17508975.2015.989674). Integrated design that offers flexibility and adaptability is essential for IBs to be economically viable (Hagras et al. 2003 Hagras, H., V. Callaghan, M. Colley, and G. Clarke. 2003. “A Hierarchical Fuzzy–genetic Multi-agent Architecture for Intelligent Buildings Online Learning, Adaptation and Control.” Information Sciences 150 (1): 33–57. doi: 10.1016/S0020-0255(02)00368-7). Supporting the claimed benefits of IBs, the EU study by Clements-Croome (2014 Clements-Croome, D. J. 2014. “Sustainable Intelligent Buildings for Better Health, Comfort and Well-Being.” Report for Denzero Project.) refers to several promising and innovative design initiatives; the world's first full-scale bio-reactive façade in Germany towards providing shade and renewable fuel source based on a collaboration between Colt International, SSC Ltd and Arup (Arup 2013 Arup. 2013. http://www.arup.com/News/2013_04_April/25_April_World_first_microalgae_facade_goes_live.aspx.); application of intelligent skins in building envelope with kinetic louvres by El Sheikh (2011 El Sheikh, M. M. 2011. “Intelligent Building Skins: Parametric-based Algorithm for Kinetic Facades Design and Daylighting Performance Integration.” Master thesis. University of Southern California.) towards responding to dynamic daylighting and users’ presence; the new offices of Apple company located in Cupertino in San Francisco Bay (to be completed in 2016) with 70% use of natural ventilation and an overall maximum resource efficiency as described by; design and development of the robotic façade as a mass-customizable constituent of building envelope for context-aware dynamic lighting as proposed by the MIT media lab (Lonergan et al. 2015 Lonergan R., Salzberg S, Hall H., Larson K. 2015. “Context-Aware Dynamic Lighting, MIT Media Lab.” https://www.media.mit.edu/research/groups/changing-places.); development of a climate control technology (local warning concept) for dynamically controlling localized heating in buildings by MIT Senseable City Lab, application of biomimetics in architectural design initiatives towards reducing the environmental threats to society such as climate change impacts as pointed out by Zari (2010 Zari, M. P. 2010. “Biomimetic Design for Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation.” Architectural Science Review 53 (2): 172–183. doi: 10.3763/asre.2008.0065), Vincent (2014 Vincent, J. F. 2014. “Biomimetics in Architectural Design.” Intelligent Buildings International 6: 1–12. doi: 10.1080/17508975.2014.874092), and Clements-Croome (2014 Clements-Croome, D. J. 2014. “Sustainable Intelligent Buildings for Better Health, Comfort and Well-Being.” Report for Denzero Project.); and consolidating design to fabrication as an innovative process towards automation in design and construction. Emerging technologies that could be applied to building sector might pose new possibility for enhanced performance levels of IBs but the actual effectiveness and efficiency to prove the benefits would need scrutinized monitoring and analysis. The aforesaid perceptions, representing the overlapping notion of IBs and energy-oriented features of green buildings, are clearly demonstrated in the environmentally friendly and sustainable strategies applied in several energy efficient IBs including the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Center by Renzo Piano in Noumea, New Caledonia based on the incorporation of the ancient and the modern representing the socio-cultural dimension of sustainability and passive design techniques using local materials and natural ventilation (Clements-Croome 2013b Clements-Croome, D. J. 2013b. “Can Intelligent Buildings Provide Alternative Approaches to Heating, Ventilating and Air Conditioning of Buildings?” Dreosti memorial lecture.; RPBW 2015 RPBW. Renzo Piano Building Workshop. 2015. http://www.rpbw.com/project/41/jean-marie-tjibaou-cultural-center/.), the award winning ST Diamond building in Putrajaya, Malaysia, the Sarawak Energy Berhad building in Sarawak, Malaysia, the Twelve West building in Portland, USA with integrated wind turbines mounted on the roof for electricity generation, the Manitoba Hydro Place in Canada with 70% energy savings compared to typical large office towers, and the Capital Tower as a mega-structure in Singapore's financial district plus many other prominent examples. The Edge in Amsterdam as the world's most sustainable office building, Al Bahr Towers in Abu Dhabi, and One Angel Square in Manchester as one of the most sustainable and innovative buildings in the Europe are among these exemplary IBs. Several interpretations of IBs draw attention to the meaning of intelligence in the IB context. The three essential components of intelligence are technology, function, and economy (Huang 2014 Huang, Z. Y. 2014. “Evaluating Intelligent Residential Communities Using Multi-strategic Weighting Method in China.” Energy and Buildings 69: 144–153. doi: 10.1016/j.enbuild.2013.10.026). The intelligence of IBs can be classified according to the following characteristics (So, Wong, and Wong 2011 So, A. T. P., A. C. W. Wong, and K. C. Wong. 2011. “A New Definition of Intelligent Buildings for Asia.” In The Intelligent Building Index Manual. 2nd ed. Hong Kong : Asian Institute of Intelligent Buildings.): Environmental friendliness – sustainable design for energy and water conservation; effective waste disposal; zero pollution. Space utilization and flexibility. Value-giving quality for economic whole lifetime costs. Human health and well-being. Working efficiency and effectiveness. Safety and security measures – fire, earthquake, disaster, and structural damages. Culture; meeting client expectations. Effective innovative technology. Construction and management processes. Health and sanitation. Likewise, IBs should be “safer and more productive for the occupants and more operationally efficient for the owners” (Ehrlich 2007 Ehrlich, P. 2007. “What is an Intelligent Building?.” In Web Based Enterprise Energy and Building Automation Systems, edited by B. Capehart, L. Capehart, P. Allen and D. Green, 17–22. Lilburn, GA: The Fairmont Press.) as supported by proposed dimensions for productive workplaces (Clements-Croome 2006 Clements-Croome, D. J. 2006. Creating the Productive Workplace. Oxon : Taylor and Francis.) to be taken into account including pleasure and joy, safety, consciousness and senses, indoor environmental quality, emotion, and the economic impacts. For instance, in the UK, approximately 90% of the entire operating costs of any business entity belong to the staff salaries and their benefits. Thereby, if IBs can provide healthy working environments, which can lead to higher productivity and healthy status of staff while avoiding staff absenteeism, more and more private and public sectors would be encouraged to invest in IBs. According to Gnerre, Cmar, and Fuller (2007 Gnerre, B., G. Cmar, and K. Fuller. 2007. “How can a Building be Intelligent if it has Nothing to Say?.” In Web Based Enterprise Energy and Building Automation Systems, edited by B. Capehart, L. Capehart, P. Allen and D. Green, 23–28. Lilburn, GA: The Fairmont Press.) “Intelligent buildings must talk. The business value is only achieved when they share what they know, communicating between building systems and with their owners.” Furthermore, the significance of sensory design for IBs is referred to by Kerr (2013 Kerr, C. S. 2013. “A Review of the Evidence on the Importance of Sensory Design for Intelligent Buildings.” Intelligent Buildings International 5 (4): 204–212. doi: 10.1080/17508975.2013.808982) “buildings that do not fulfil the (sensory design) brief leave occupants intellectually, physiologically, emotionally, behaviourally and spiritually unstimulated”. IBs should respond to the needs of their occupants and society, be functional and sustainable, and promote well-being of the people (Clements-Croome 2013 Clements-Croome, D. J. 2013. Intelligent Buildings: Design, Management and Operation. 2nd ed. London : ICE Publishing.). This could be the response to the claim of the mismatch between the expectations of users and the real products in current IBs (Naticchia and Giretti 2014 Naticchia, B., and A. Giretti. 2014. “On the Design of Intelligent Buildings for Ambient Assisted Living.” In Ambient Assisted Living, edited by S. Longhi, P. Siciliano, M. Germani, A. Monteriù, 381–388. New York: Springer International Publishing.). In this regard, the study refers back to a basic definition of IB originated from CIB in the 90's a sustainable intelligent building can be understood to be a complex system of inter-related three basic issues People (owners; occupants, users, etc.); Products (materials; fabric; structure; facilities; equipment; automation and controls; services); and Processes (maintenance; performance evaluation; facilities management) and the inter-relationships between these issues. (AlWaer and Clements-Croome 2010 AlWaer, H., and D. J. Clements-Croome. 2010. “Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Priority Settings in Using the Mutli-Attribute Approach for Assessing Sustainable Intelligent Buildings.” Building and Environment 45 (4): 799–807. doi: 10.1016/j.buildenv.2009.08.019) Furthermore, IBs require an intelligent process indicating the importance of collaborative process in design, implementation, and management (Clements-Croome 2013a Clements-Croome, D. J. 2013a. “Sustainable Healthy intellIgent Buildings for People.” In Intelligent Buildings: Design, Management and Operation. 2nd ed., edited by D. J. Clements-Croome, 1–24. London : ICE Publishing.). In this line, the study refers to the application of building information modelling (BIM) as recommended by Kensek (2014 Kensek, K. M. 2014. Building Information Modeling. New York , NY : Routledge.) due to its highly inclusive and collaborative notion with great potentials to involve various stakeholders. In a recent study, the importance of buildings management systems BMS was raised (Johnstone 2013 Johnstone, A. 2013. “Intelligent Building Management.” In Intelligent Buildings, edited by D. J. Clements-Croome, 187–197. New York: Routledge.), whereas another study implied the application of intelligent control strategies, including smart grids, smart metering, demand response control, and load shifting/shaving, as a fundamental component of IBs (Worall 2013 Worall, M. 2013. “Passive and Active Environmental Quality Control.” In Intelligent Buildings, edited by D. J. Clements-Croome, 49–58. New York: Routledge.). Likewise, highlighting the important influence of ergonomic aspects in IBs, five intelligent criteria for IBs are identified: input system that receives information by means of information receiver; processing and information analysis; output system that reacts to the input in form of a response; time consideration that makes the response happen within the needed time; learning ability (Strumiłło and Łódź 2014 Strumiłło, K., and Łódź, P. 2014. “Ergonomic Aspects of an Intelligent Building.” Advances in Social and Organizational Factors 12: 51–58.). Considering the multi-complex and interdisciplinary essence of IBs, they should be the product of an integrated team including clients, consultants, architects, engineers, contractors, and facilities managers in which all team members play a key role towards meeting the social, environmental and economic targets. It is crucial to stress the important role of innovation as an enabler and new products in IBs such as cloud computing (for virtual and thin computers), embedded sensors (for personalization and real-time feedback), smart materials, self-healing and low embodied (for energy efficiency), biomimetics (for economical use of materials and energy), robotics (for maintenance and internal surveys), using chaos, and complex theory and network science (AlWaer et al. 2013 AlWaer, H., F. Beltran, D. J. Clements-Croome, and D. Melo. 2013. “Innovative Futures.” In Intelligent Buildings: Design, Management and Operation. 2nd ed., edited by D. J. Clements-Croome, 313–332. London : ICE Publishing). Definitions of IBs are hence expanding to include learning ability as well as self-adjustability (Yang and Peng 2001 Yang, J., and H. Peng. 2001. “Decision Support to the Application of Intelligent Building Technologies.” Renewable Energy 22: 67–77. doi: 10.1016/S0960-1481(00)00085-9; Wigginton and Harris 2002 Wigginton, M., and J. Harris. 2002. Intelligent Skins. Oxford : Architectural Press.; Wong, Li, and Wang 2005 Wong, J. K. W., H. Li, and S. W. Wang. 2005. “Intelligent Building Research: A Review.” Automation in Construction 14: 143–159. doi: 10.1016/j.autcon.2004.06.001; Kaya and Kahraman 2014 Kaya, I., and C. Kahraman. 2014. “A Comparison of Fuzzy Multicriteria Decision Making Methods for Intelligent Building Assessment.” Journal of Civil Engineering and Management 20 (1): 59–69. doi: 10.3846/13923730.2013.801906). From the above review, it can be concluded that IB existing definitions can be categorized into three clusters, namely: performance-based, system-based, and service-based definitions as previously pointed out by Wang (2009 Wang, S. 2009. Intelligent Building and Building Automation. New York: Routledge.). The performance-based definitions (such as the definitions by IBI and EIBG) predominantly concentrate on the building performance and the expectations and increasing demands of users (and of society) while considerably less attention is given to the integrated technologies and intelligent systems. The service-based definitions mainly characterize the IBs based on their quality of services. On the other hand, the system-based definitions generally refer to the technological systems and integrated intelligence used in the buildings but linked to the occupants responses. Likewise, the Chinese IB Design Standard (GB/T50314-2000) describes IBs as those buildings which “provide building automation, office automation and communication network systems, and an optimal composition integrates the structure, system, service and management, providing the building with high efficiency, comfort, convenience and safety to users”. Summarizing the analysed definitions, this review shows how definitions of IBs have changed over time. By analysing the drivers that affect the evolutionary progression of IBs and the role of interdisciplinary collaboration between professionals, developers, clients, and policy-makers pathways can be defined that lead to the exploration of the true potentials for IBs (Figure 1). Table 1 summarizes the key features and components of IBs derived from the available definitions. Figure 1. Evolutionary progression of IBs. Table 1. Key features and components of IBs based on available definitions. CSVDisplay Table

Big Body Bes came onto the rap scene as Action Bronson's charismatic cousin several years ago and has since made a name for himself through guest appearances on some of Bronson's projects. Whether it's his rant at the end of "72 Virgins" or seeing him critique gourmet food on Fuck, That's Delicious!, one can appreciate Body's way with words. In the clip above, the block veteran gets on the mic to wax poetic about Pelle Pelle leathers, and his barber's cameo on an episode of Gangland. The beat is an original produced by DJ J Hart and the words are Body's own. The freestyle comes as part of the Off Top series done by vintage apparel shop Top Shelf Premium (check out more here). We also hopped on the phone with Bes to talk Malik Yoba, box cutters, and what inspires him. Check the interview below. When was the first time you noticed the resemblance between yourself and the actor Malik Yoba? Every time I'm in the Bronx I get harassed. They keep asking me when we're gonna do a New York Undercover reunion episode and I have to tell them: "Listen, that's not me." Me and Malik have the same barber, that's why. POST CONTINUES BELOW Where can I get a bulletproof Pelle Pelle? The bulletproof Pelle is custom, you gotta live that type of life. You gotta either have a felony, be at the Beacon, or be in the Island. The Pelle jacket itself is undamageable, it can't be tarnished because it's a piece of history. The Pelle leather represents success and it represents struggle. When you first start getting money and you're able to put on a leather jacket, it feels like an achievement; like you just won a medal. Towards the end of the video you said you'd like to be stabbed only when you're wearing silk. Can you elaborate on that? If anybody ever wants to harm me, just make sure I'm well-dressed when you do it. Do me the courtesy and make sure I have a shape-up first. How many uses are there for the box cutter? First of all, shouts out to the person that invented the box cutter. Secondly, I would say there about 1,336 ways to use a box cutter. Cutting steak, carving turkey, and handling disputes are some of my favorite uses for it. You see, the box cutter is a peacemaker once you hear that click. POST CONTINUES BELOW That click basically means: Tate quieto. We might wanna hash things out. [Laughs.] Ya tu sabes, loco. I be shaking your hand or might be gutting a Dutch. Either way, that box cutter right there brings life, it brings joy. Should we expect more freestyles from you? I never tried to sell you a shirt, I never tried to sell you anything. I don't do features. I turned down more money than any upcoming artist has ever turned down and I put that on my life. I'm building up my foundation. The people know me, they're familiar with me, they done grown with me. So when I bring my project out, everyone knows what to expect. What inspires Big Body Bes? I would have to say the street. The ghetto inspires me, it's what made me. What do you channel during your rants? I channel the pain. But I also channel the glory. In one rant, I'm gonna give 15 different moods and emotions. Like I might say, "I'm over here on a Jet Ski, but I still got something sharp in my sock."

Elmer J. Fudd is one of the most famous Looney Tunes characters. He’s the sworn enemy of Bugs Bunny. Elmer is hunting Bugs Bunny but he usually ends up seriously hurting himself. Another key feature of his character is the way he speaks. Elmer J. Fudd speaks replacing his Rs and Ls with Ws. Because of that, one of his trademarks is his quote “Shhh. Be vewy vewy quiet, I’m hunting wabbits”. Initially Elmer didn’t have intentions to hunt Bugs Bunny. He came to the country to photograph wildlife. In the cartoon from 1940 “Elmer’s Candid Camera” Elmer reads “How to Photograph Wild Life,” gets his camera kit and heads into the countryside. He comes upon a sleeping rabbit and wants to take photos of him. The rabbit is Happy Rabbit, the predecessor of Bugs Bunny. Elmer sets up his camera and that’s when he realizes that that won’t be an easy task. Before he could take the first photo, Happy Rabbit wakes up and then the real trouble starts for Mr. Fudd. In Elmer, Happy Rabbit found a convenient victim to harass just for the fun of it. At first the rabbit is seemingly helpful, but his various antics are driving Elmer insane, causing him to jump into a lake and nearly drown. Happy Rabbit saves him and ensures that Elmer is ok. After he was sure that Elmer is all right he kicks him back into the lake and throws Elmer’s photography book (“How To Photograph Wildlife”) on his head. That is the end of this cartoon and the start of the endless chase between Elmer J. Fudd and Bugs Bunny. (Ep. 04) – Elmer's Candid Camera by tranghuyen0213 Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmer%27s_Candid_Camera

Hardware Camera Software Both Vibrant only Captivate only AllShare Accounts & sync AT&T FamilyMap Daily Briefing Add to Home AT&T Hot Spots Files ("My Files" on the Captivate) Alarm & Clocks AT&T Maps Media Hub Amazon MP3 AT&T Music Memo Audio Postcard AT&T Navigator Mini Diary Avatar AT&T Radio MobiTV Call Log Instant Messaging Video Player GoGo Mobile Banking Voice Recorder Kindle Mobile Video Voice Search Layar Where Write and Go My Account YPmobile My Device Slacker Swype Tips TeleNav GPS The Sims 3 ThinkFree Office Visual Voicemail Voice Dialer Wrap-up Let's start with the packaging. Neither the Vibrant nor the Captivate bother to try to impress you with crazy or unusual boxes -- a trend that's been picking up steam as of late -- though the Vibrant's is definitely prettier, a mixture of matte black interspersed with glossy black text like "camera," "network," "movies," "social," and other words clearly designed to clue you in to some of awesome features you'll be enjoying when you tear the package open. AT&T, meanwhile, seems to have demanded that Samsung stay in line with the carrier's box art standards -- white and orange without much pomp. Inside, both boxes treat you to basically the same mix of items: besides the phone itself, you've got an in-ear wired stereo headset with replaceable silicone buds (unusually nice for a bundled 'set), a relatively small USB charger and micro-USB cable, and an assortment of manuals and related documentation. The Vibrant also includes a second "lavender" battery cover to replace the standard black and dark blue one (though our review package was missing it), a microSD-to-SD adapter, and a 2GB microSD card -- provided more to bundle the movie Avatar than to supplement the 16GB that's already on board.Physically, the two phones are surprisingly different despite their identical innards, a testament to the breadth and depth of customization companies like Sammy can provide to a carrier when they decide to offer a particular phone. Which one you prefer is mainly a matter of personal taste, though we'll caution you that you shouldn't form your opinion from these (or any) pictures alone. We had expected the Captivate's faux woven rear to be extraordinarily cheesy, for instance -- but in reality, it look quite good and it's made of some sturdy metal. Don't get us wrong, we still would've preferred a blank brushed metal cover in its place, but all things considered, it could look a lot worse. We also really liked the mechanism by which the cover comes off: you pull down on the cap toward the bottom of the phone, which disengages the latches holding the cover in place.And actually, that leads us to our problem -- we prefer the back of the Captivate and the front of the Vibrant. Put bluntly, the back of T-Mobile's device is glossy plastic that feels (and looks) like it belongs on a phone half the price at best. It also lacks the Captivate's neat cover interlock -- here, you just pry the entire rear off, which has never been a satisfying experience for us on any phone. Not a big deal, but the least they could've done is made the whole thing out of a matte, soft touch plastic -- or heck, for starters, just don't print a shiny metallic dot matrix pattern across the entire thing. We're giving you options here, Samsung! Anyhow, we mentioned that we prefer the front of the Vibrant, though we admittedly don't any objective reasons why; we just dig the rounded corners and the subtle chrome ring around the edge. Your mileage may vary.Going around the sides of the phones, the features are basically the same, though the differences are amusing -- and, once again, they speak to the wacky little customizations that carriers request. Here's an example: the power button, which also controls screen standby as it does on most Android phones, is located on the right edge. On the Vibrant, though, the button has icons for both power and lock, while the Captivate shows power alone. Makes you wonder the kinds of discussions AT&T and T-Mobile had with Samsung when making that decision, doesn't it? Moving on, the bottom's got just a mic hole, the left side has a volume rocker (which forms two bumps on the Captivate, a nice touch), and the top has your micro-USB port and 3.5mm headphone jack. One problem we noticed specific to the Captivate is that the curved edge makes it tricky to connect some micro-USB cables, because the cable's housing can strike the outer-most part of the edge before you've gotten it inserted enough to make a connection; ultimately, we were able to use all of our cables by pressing hard enough, but it made us a little uneasy.Samsung actually did something really cool with the micro-USB port. We've never been fans of the flimsy plastic or rubber flaps that you often find covering these -- especially since micro-USB was designed specifically with robustness in mind -- but Sammy sort of split the difference with the Galaxy S line by using a sliding door instead of a flap. It's easy to use, locks securely into place in both the closed and open positions, and you don't have to worry about the flap getting in your way or breaking off when it's pulled off for charging. Actually, we're pretty sure you could just leave the door permanently open and never worry about it again.Anyhow, let's stop beating around the bush and get to the real reason we're all interested in these phones: the display. The Galaxy S line is among the first to use Samsung's so-called Super AMOLED tech -- and as you may have already heard, it's the real deal. You get the same great black levels you're accustomed to with other AMOLED phones, but in general, color reproduction on these new displays seems to be more accurate (though still very high-contrast and bordering on oversaturated in some cases) and maximum brightness is better than any AMOLED you've ever seen. It still underperforms most LCDs in direct sunlight, but we tested the Vibrant and Captivate outside on a completely clear day under a blazing noon sun and were at least able to make out what was going on on the screen (albeit with a healthy dose of squinting) in a situation where a Nexus One or Droid Incredible would simply look blank. As we'd mentioned before, the Vibrant comes with a copy of Avatar pre-loaded on a microSD card, and it's the perfect way to put the display through its paces -- it looks absolutely amazing. Makes us wish Samsung would take a stab at commercializing affordable Super AMOLED televisions, but we imagine that's a few years off yet.All Galaxy S models use the same 4-inch WVGA Super AMOLED unit, which we've found to be a perfect compromise for a full touchscreen smartphone -- you basically eliminate the complaints that 3.5- and 3.7-inch displays are too small without going overboard and alienating really small-handed users like the Droid X and EVO 4G have done. Having just recently tested both of those 4.3-inch beasts, we found ourselves not really missing the extra third of an inch on the Vibrant's and Captivate's screens, but we definitely noticed their smaller size in the hand. Of course, both of these phones clock in at just under 10mm thick, which also helps immensely; in that regard, you enjoy the Droid X's svelte shell without the hump at the top (the Vibrant feels a tad thinner, but when you set the pair down on a table, you realize that it really isn't).When we first played briefly with a European-spec Galaxy S prototype back at CTIA in March, we thought that it felt a bit light and cheap. Not so with these. Don't get us wrong, they're still quite light -- even with their 1500mAh battery packs installed -- but we were delighted that we weren't able to detect any creaks, squeaks, or overly-flexible parts anywhere. Heck, even the screens feel better to the touch (or fingernail tap) that just about any we've tested in recent memory -- they don't have any perceptible "give" to them, which is reassuring.Directly below the display are four capacitive buttons, the usual suspects on Android devices: Menu, Home, Back, and Search, in that order from left to right. Importantly, the buttons are low enough so that you can press them without risking actuating the bottom of the screen or vice versa. One thing that bothered us about them, though, was that they're lit on a different timer than the display; they time out after about two seconds and turn on again when any of them or the display is touched. You'll need the lights at first to remember which button is which, because seemingly no two Android devices have them in the same order, and we found that they're pretty difficult to see in some lighting conditions when they're not backlit. What's more, though, we found it really distracting on the Vibrant -- the lights are actually really bright, so your attention is drawn to that row of buttons every time they turn on or off. That'll happen to you frequently if you're, say, reading websites and scrolling every few seconds. The lights function the same way on the Captivate, but they're much dimmer so it wasn't nearly as distracting.Battery life is tricky on these phones, and we think we know why: Super AMOLED. After fully charging, we let the phones go all night syncing two email accounts connected to both GSM and WiFi and drained about 30 percent from each; in the morning, we set the screens to stay on (30 minute timeout, actually, the max these phones will allow) at automatic brightness and they were both dead within two hours. We think it's possible for a normal human being to eke through a full day, but perhaps not without consciously remembering to not dally with the screen on and to set brightness as low as possible while still being usable.Though the Vibrant and Captivate have theoretically identical cameras, they seem to perform quite a bit differently in some respects, due in part to software. The Vibrant is slower between shots, primarily because it pops up a preview asking you what to do with the shot you just took before sending you back to the viewfinder. Initial camera app load times and autofocus times are both quite quick, though, so that's a plus.Out of the box, the Vibrant was producing warmer shots (see above) and actually seems quite a bit sharper; we're almost certain the sensors and optics are identical, so we have to believe this is either a compression issue or some combination of post-processing steps that the phones are taking; obviously, the Vibrant looks better, and the phones are both configurable enough to correct any white balance issues you may have. Video was a different story -- 720p worked well with enough lighting, and both devices seemed to be in lockstep with one another in terms of overall capture performance, though the Vibrant was once again the warmer of the two.There are other bigger issues, too -- most notably the lack of a flash. Samsung appears to be taking the gamble that weak LED flashes that cast harsh, nasty light aren't useful, anyway, possibly in order to shave a few tenths of a millimeter off the overall thickness of the phones. Needless to say, in regular incandescent to dim indoor lighting, we found the camera to be practically useless (pictured right). There's a "night mode," sure, but boosting ISO well beyond a sensor's capability is no substitute for actual light.If you're a seasoned Android user -- particularly on stock Android 2.1, 2.2, or Sense -- you're likely going to wish a pox upon the Galaxy S UI. As with most Android skins, it seems to serve no particular purpose other than the maker's self-aggrandizement and a need to feel like they're something more than a hardware manufacturer. Here's a hint, though, Sammy: when you make hardware this good and you supply virtually all of the world's high-resolution mobile AMOLEDs, you don't need to try to justify your existence with a lame UI skin!We don't mind this kind of software when it genuinely and legitimately adds value to the plain-vanilla experience, but we constantly struggled to figure out how or why TouchWiz 3.0 was adding value to the Android 2.1 build that lies underneath it. Having access to seven home screen panels is always nice, getting Swype pre-installed is a great bonus, and we kind of liked the phones' unusual "puzzle lock" option which lets you view messages and missed calls right from the home screen by dragging a puzzle piece into its corresponding hole -- but overall, the ends don't justify the means. For example, the Applications menu puts seemingly randomly-colored squares behind each and every app icon, giving it a cartoonish look that simply doesn't match the elegant hardware. Samsung also took an annoying cue from Motorola, separating its own widgets into a separate "Samsung Widgets" menu item on the home screen rather than dropping them in the regular Widgets menu where they belong.That said, it could be worse; nothing about TouchWiz 3.0 is particularly annoying or counterproductive, it's just different mostly for the sake of being different. Just as with the harwdare, there are differences in the software between the Captivate and Vibrant, too; some are big, others quite subtle (differences in the camera UI, for instance). Both products come with a variety of bundled apps; actually, some of these aren't "apps" in the traditional sense of the word, they're just shortcuts that the manufacturers have elected to place in the Applications menu (the Vibrant's "Add to Home," for example, which does exactly the same thing as a long press on the home screen).Below is a list of all the preinstalled apps and shortcuts on both phones' Applications menus that are above and beyond stock Eclair; most of it can't be removed, thought a couple items (like The Sims 3 and Layar on the Vibrant) can.Notice that the Captivate has removed access to Amazon MP3 in favor of AT&T Music. Speaking of limitations specific to the Captivate, you're unable to sideload apps (just as with the Aria and Backflip) -- but refreshingly, the home screen search widget is using Google, not Yahoo, so it seems like the carrier is easing off its crusade to screw up Android just a little bit.It's not just about failing to add value -- it's about quality control, too. We were blown away by the number of typos, grammar issues, weird choices of words, and oddball UI problems we came across in the Vibrant in just a few minutes' time without even looking too hard (interestingly, some of these -- "Sweep screen" for example -- are fixed in the Captivate, suggesting AT&T may have tested the phone more rigorously). Granted, these are all extremely minor, but things like this just look bad, and they reflect poorly on a product that could be absolutely rock solid from a technical perspective. Does any mortal human know what an "SNS account" is? And yes, "Sweep screen" nearly made us put a Karate Kid wallpaper on the Vibrant, but we ultimately decided to maintain some modicum of restraint through the review.We mentioned that these phones have Swype installed, though only the Vibrant uses it by default; you've got to enable it on the Captivate out of the box. Even if you're not into Swype, though, these phones have some of the most generously-configurable input options we've ever seen on an Android phone without having to install additional keyboard. In addition to Swype, you've got access to the stock Android 2.1 keyboard (which some folks prefer) in addition to a Samsung one, which is further configurable as full QWERTY, XT9, or -- on the Captivate only -- a handwriting mode, though it's more trouble than it's worth. We generally liked Sammy's keyboard, though when you're using it in QWERTY mode, it really doesn't bring anything special to the table -- it's just fast and simple.One major annoyance we noticed is that neither the Captivate nor Vibrant were able to connect to our Macs in mass storage mode, and only the Captivate could connect to PCs. In practice, what that means is that transferring media and big files to and from your phone becomes quite a bit trickier (and slower) because you've got to use Bluetooth or something like an SD / microSD reader. We were able to connect them using Media Transfer (MTP) mode, so that's an option if you've got an app like iPhoto, Lightroom, or Image Capture available and you just need to move media. [Turns out you can finagle mass storage mode into working if you turn on USB debugging mode for some reason. -Ed.]And here's a bigger issue: incredibly, we've been able to verify that AGPS ships totally broken on both phones -- in other words, you can't get a wireless network-assisted fix. When we first reviewed the phones, we admit, this is a feature we'd taken for granted, especially since they ship with stock Google Maps -- and you don't realize just how much you need reliable AGPS until it stops working. There's a fix floating around -- and we have to believe Samsung is going to fast-track a firmware update -- but for now, this is the first thing you're probably going to want to do once you get the phone.From a speed perspective, both the Vibrant and Captivate benchmark very well -- consistently over 8 MFLOPS in Linpack, which is a strong figure for Android 2.1. And hey, with 1GHz Hummingbird cores, they'd better benchmark well, right? Problem is, that benchmark didn't seem to consistently translate well to real-world usability for some reason. The UI was generally speedy (screen transitions and so on), but it started to get slow in places where it really mattered, notably the browser. Both zooming and scrolling on complex pages was often a laborious, stuttery task, even with the phone brand new, stock, and untouched by the thousands of background tasks we obviously intend to run. It's usually a bad sign when a bone stock Android phone can't render the browser smoothly.As is too often the case with Android devices these days, mediocre software threatens to spoil superb hardware. And let us say it again for emphasis -- both of these phones are really pretty, attract a ton of attention, fit great in the pocket and the hand, and sport displays that will simply knock your socks off. You won't be disappointed. And here's the good news: unlike some phones we've tested, the software isn't bad enough to ruin the experience. Sure, we'd like to be able to remove some of the crapware and restore a couple morsels of functionality that AT&T saw fit to remove, but overall, Samsung's tweaks thankfully don't get in the way of enjoying these otherwise-awesome handsets.In fact, you could argue that the Vibrant instantly becomes the best phone T-Mobile offers (with the myTouch 3G Slide being a close second). On AT&T, well... it's either second or first, depending on whether you love or hate the iPhone 4. If we had to choose between the two, we'd go with the Vibrant -- we prefer the looks just ever so slightly, but more importantly, it lacks AT&T's boneheaded restrictions. Either way, though, if you're in the market for an Android phone and you're locked into T-Mobile or AT&T, you won't be disappointed picking these up.Additional reporting by Myriam Joire

Newspaper publishers have warned that if a would-be regulator funded by Max Mosley is formally recognised it would amount to “an attack on free speech” and expose the press to punitive and damaging legal costs. The News Media Association (NMA) said it would be dangerous for approval to be given to Impress by the Press Recognition Panel at a meeting on Tuesday because it could lead to the triggering of legislation that will expose newspapers not signed up to its regime to pay the costs of both sides regardless of whether a complaint is rejected. Lynne Anderson, the deputy chief executive of the NMA, said that Impress was “not independent, it is not funded by the industry but by a wealthy donor, it has no significant relevant publishers, it has no code of standards and it is not viable”. Most major newspapers have their complaints handled by Ipso, which has refused to accept recognition by the Press Regulation Panel, arguing it would amount to state regulation. Some others, such as the Guardian and the Financial Times, have their own system of regulation – and none is a member of Impress. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Newspaper lobby group NMA says Impress ‘has no significant relevant publishers, no code of standards and is not viable’. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images Anderson added: “Recognising Impress would not create an effective press regulator but it would be an attack on free speech, imposing on 90% of the newspaper and magazine industry who have joined an effective self-regulator, Ipso, a system of punitive costs and damages designed to coerce them into compliance with a state-sponsored system of regulation.” Recognition of any press regulator is meant to trigger section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013, which would expose any newspaper not signed up to its regime to exemplary damages in libel cases and impose so-called cost-shifting. Impress's charter recognition deferred after publishers' objections Read more Although the exemplary damages part of the act is already on the books, former culture secretary John Whittingdale decided last year not to commence cost-shifting under section 40 of the act. However, those in the industry say they expect a decision to recognise Impress would be followed by renewed calls to implement the legislation in full. In an awkward appearance in front of the culture, media and sport select committee on Monday, the culture secretary, Karen Bradley, repeatedly refused to say when or if she would bring in cost-shifting. “I am considering the position very carefully,” she told the committee. “I have not made a decision about timing, and I certainly do not rule out commencing section 40 at some point in the future.” Supporters of the section 40 legislation, which received cross-party support in the wake of the Leveson inquiry, claim it will help those with limited resources take on newspapers that print false stories about them. It is also designed to protect newspapers from paying costs awarded by judges if those taking them to court do not try working through an arbitration process. However, newspapers say it will be abused by the rich and powerful to stifle the press and taken advantage of by lawyers pursuing spurious claims in the knowledge they will still be paid. In the run-up to the PRP meeting, newspapers have used their leader columns to argue against imposing the costs rule. On Monday, the Sun made a direct appeal to the prime minister, Theresa May, not to allow “this historic calamity to happen on your watch”, describing it as “state-sponsored blackmail”. The leader echoed its sister title, the Times, which last Thursday described the system of state-backed regulation as “inimical to freedom of expression” and said section 40 would create “perverse incentives” for the rich to intimidate the press. Pieces in the Daily Mail and the Telegraph made similar arguments. Industry sources said many newspaper owners would continue to fight state-backed regulation if Impress is recognised, both through legal challenges and by trying to convince the government not to impose legislation that would force those who do not join to pay the costs of both sides in libel cases even if they win. Avenues being considered include appeals under the Human Rights Act over freedom of expression and access to justice, and attempts to challenge the legitimacy of Impress in the UK courts. Impress has so far been largely funded by £3.8m from Mosley, who won a privacy case against the News of the World over false claims he was involved in a “sick Nazi orgy” and has been one of the leading voices calling for tighter regulation of the press. Ipso declined to comment on Tuesday’s meeting, but its chair, Sir Alan Moses, last week said the UK press would be “doomed” if it signed up to state-backed regulation. Referring to section 40, he told the Society of Editors conference in Carlisle: “You should be wary, very wary, very wary indeed of anything that looks like an attempt too corral you into submission.”

Finally, some light at the end of a very long tunnel in the taxi dispute. A city review of the taxi industry will be completed by the end of this year. That comes directly from Mayor Jim Watson’s office on Tuesday. But while the mayor has realized changes to the taxi industry have to be made sooner rather than later, the taxi drivers themselves seem intent on driving away any goodwill they had left in the city. You can almost hear Uber counting up their future earnings. Watson has met with city staff and Gloucester-Southgate Coun. Diane Deans to ensure everyone supports expediting the review. While the mayor was on holidays and unavailable for comment, the taxi drivers continued their job action — slowing down traffic on the Airport Pkwy and attempting to block other taxis from picking up their fares in a timely fashion. If their goal is to alienate the public and promote Uber, they’re doing a great job at it. A little background in case you’ve missed it. Coventry Connections, the company which owns many of the taxi companies and dispatches for almost all of the cabs, increased from $2 to almost $5 the fee cabbies must pay to service the airport. In protest, the cabbies refused to pick up fares, so Coventry locked them out, and then allowed other cab companies to pick those fares up — something not previously allowed. While the other taxis initially declined to take those fares, that quickly changed. So much for solidarity forever. How about 24-hour solidarity! Not so catchy. Meanwhile, Uber has been cutting into their business. (And you can be sure at this point, they’re taking away even more.) Even before this recent job action, cabbies were complaining they were losing about 40% of their business to Uber, which doesn’t operate under the same rules and regulations as the licenced cabbies. So yes, now the city is picking up the pace, and is promising a review of the entire taxi industry will be completed by the end of the year. Good thing. Deans, the chair of the city’s community and protective services committee which oversees the taxis, said she met with the mayor and city staff Tuesday morning. She wants to see the review completed before the end of the year but, more importantly, she wants to make sure it’s done right. "I understand (Watson) is interested in expediting the process and to the extent we can do that, we will. But I pointed out to the mayor, it is absolutely critical we do our due diligence, we need a fulsome consultation with all of the parties," she said. With time of the essence, the city is hiring an outside consultant — with a maximum budget of $300,000 — to do the review. While the RFP has closed, no one has yet been hired. "I think we can do that, but I’m not prepared to compromise on public consultation," Deans said. She makes it clear the city regulates the taxi industry to ensure accessibility for the customer and public safety. And while the emergence of new hailing technologies may have allowed Uber to enter the market in a big way, that will only be part of the study. As for the cabbie war going on right now, Deans said that’s not something the city would get involved with directly. However, if cabbies are obstructing traffic, the city and police can enforce the Highway Traffic Act, she said. Susan Jones, the acting deputy city manager, believes the review’s end-of-year deadline can be met. "We believe that we can come up with a common sense approach which incorporates the new technology and is meeting service demands," she said. "This present model has been in existence for 30 years and we never contemplated this kind of new technology. So we need to determine how you can improve service. We’re in the business of regulating public safety and the protection of the consumer, there are lots of components." Jones is smart enough to know technology will continue to influence the industry. "This review needs to have some outside-the-box kind of thinking. We don’t know what the industry will look like in the future. There may be driverless cars, who knows what’s it all going to look like." Twitter: @susansherring

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is either slightly ahead or way ahead of Republican Donald Trump with just 13 days until Election Day, according to new polls released Wednesday. An AP-GFK poll shows Clinton leading by an astonishing 14 points, 51 percent to Trump’s 37 percent, in a four-way race. In a two-way heat, Clinton’s lead narrows to 13 points. A new Fox News poll finds Clinton ahead by a much smaller margin ― just 3 points ahead in a four-way race, 44 percent to 41 percent. She also leads by 3 points head to head with Trump. Other recent polls show Clinton with a lead ranging from 2 points to 12 points. It’s best not to freak out just yet over which of Wednesday’s polls are right. Instead, consider the aggregate of recent polls for a more sober look at the race. According to the HuffPost Pollster aggregate, Clinton is leading by about 7 points in the four-way race, 46.6 percent to 39 percent. In the head-to-head race with Trump, Clinton leads by 6 points, 48 percent to 42 percent. Both new polls are consistent with that aggregated result when you consider their margin of error. The Fox News poll has a 2.5-point margin of error. When applied to each candidate’s share of the vote, that means there could be as much as a 5-point fluctuation in the Fox poll margin. The AP-GFK poll has a slightly higher margin of error, also placing its results within the range of what the aggregate shows. Another reason for variation in the new polls could be the dates the surveys were administered. The AP-GFK poll was conducted Oct 20 to Oct. 24, just after the Oct 19 presidential debate, where Clinton was praised for a strong performance. The Fox News poll was conducted a few days later, from Oct 22 to Oct. 25. Perceptions of the debate may have been more muted in people’s minds by then. In addition, the AP-GFK poll was conducted online. Fox used live phone interviews. Each of the pollsters uses different techniques to screen for likely voters. Regardless, the aggregate of polls confirms that Clinton is winning. Clinton leads in a two-way race in all 36 polls conducted in October. In the four-way race, she’s ahead in 48 of 52 October polls. The HuffPost Pollster presidential election forecast gives Clinton a 97.5 chance of winning.

Ukraine, Israel/Palestine and other countries The bloody conflict in Ukraine, alongside the slaughter of the Palestinian people in Gaza, has brought the issue of the ‘national question’ once more forcefully onto the political agenda. How can we open a road to begin to solve seemingly age-old intractable issues? This is the question which is sharply posed for the workers’ movement, firstly in the regions immediately affected by war, but also for the international labour movement. PETER TAAFFE writes. Events in the last few months have graphically underlined that the different capitalist powers are totally unwilling and incapable of providing a democratic and just solution to the situation in Ukraine. The sheer hypocrisy of US imperialism and European capitalism on the one side and Russia’s oligarchic Putin regime on the other, in seeking the mantle of defenders of ‘oppressed nations and minorities’, will fool few thinking workers. It is a naked cash calculation allied to their strategic political and military vital interests that are at stake. ‘The right of self-determination’ is a hollow phrase, so much small change, to be quickly discarded if it stands in their way. ‘We will cripple Russia with sanctions’ warn the major Western imperialist powers, led by the US. ‘We will retaliate with our own sanctions starting with the seizure of the assets of British companies, including Shell and British Petroleum’, replies the Putin regime. If the capitalists, and their parties and representatives, have no solution, the left, including some describing themselves as Marxists, display absolute ideological confusion and helplessness in the face of what, in the Ukraine and the Middle East, are dire national and ethnic conflicts. There is not an atom of a socialist, let alone a Marxist, approach in the analysis of most of what passes as the ‘left’ in Britain. For instance, one leaflet distributed by ‘Solidarity with the Antifascist Resistance in Ukraine’ at a recent London demonstration on Gaza proclaims: “We are against the UK and Western governments’ backing for the far-right regime in Kiev”. There is nothing wrong with this, particularly as the Kiev government has leaned on right-wing and even neo-fascist forces in its murderous campaign in Eastern Ukraine. But where is the equal condemnation of the imperialist Russian oligarchic regime of Putin with its openly professed intentions to dominate the ‘near abroad’, some of the countries of the former ‘Soviet Union’, and, in the process, its trampling on democratic and national rights? There is no mention of this, but one of the prominent supporters of this campaign stated at its launch meeting: “It’s not my business to criticise the Russian oligarchy, but if I were, it wouldn’t be to criticise them for intervening too much, but for not intervening at all”! Incredibly he also stated that “the national question is not an issue” in the Ukraine and that, “when you have US imperialism, NATO, Angela Merkel, the Con Dem government and Ukrainian fascists on one side, I know which side I’m on”. The clear implication here is that the workers’ movement – let us remind ourselves that this is coming from a ‘Marxist’ – should be on the side of Putin’s oligarchic regime and its intervention in the Ukraine. We, on the other hand, steadfastly upheld the legitimate national aspirations of the peoples of Ukraine, Crimea, etc, while opposing and fighting against the far right and openly fascist forces in Ukraine, which in the recent elections got no more than 3% of the vote. At the same time, we seek to forge and cement class unity, giving critical support to genuine socialist forces even where they are weak. No finished formulas It is vital to support the genuine democratic and national aspirations of the peoples of the Ukraine and the region. For instance, in relation to Crimea, it was correct to give support to the right of self-determination – including secession from Ukraine – which appeared to be the wish of the overwhelming majority of its population. At the same time, it is the bounden duty of Marxists, when giving critical support to any genuine independence movements, to also defend the rights of all minorities; in the case of Crimea, the Tartars and others. There were claims that the Crimean referendum was not conducted in a fair, non-coercive fashion. But there was little doubt that a majority of the population favoured returning to Russia. All doubts, however, could be removed either through the election of a revolutionary constituent assembly – a parliament – convened through mass committees to establish the will of the people, or a democratic referendum. Does this mean that we favour separatism, and the breaking up of formally integrated states? No, not automatically. There are no once and for all finished formulas where the national question is concerned. The situation on the ground in Ukraine is very fluid; what can be a correct demand at one stage can be overtaken by events. But we do not support the forcible retention of one group or nationality within a state that is considered by them to act as an oppressor. We advocate a voluntary socialist confederation. It was through this method that the real ‘Soviet Union’ of Lenin and Trotsky – and not the Stalinist caricature which masked the domination of the centralised bureaucratic Russian elite – was created. But as Lenin said more than 100 years ago, a new society, necessarily democratic as well as socialist, could not be built on the ‘slightest compulsion’ against any nationality or group for that matter. In general, the right of self-determination applies to a nationality, linked to a distinct territorial entity. However, sometimes this can take the form of a city or smaller entity which considers itself separate and apart from other countries or regions. For instance, we have envisaged the future possibility of an entity for Brussels – within a Belgian socialist confederation – whose population consider themselves different from Wallonia or the Flemish region. Similarly the struggle in the Ukraine, particularly eastern Ukraine, could be so fragmented through the bloody conflict which is taking place at the present time that what could result would not be a contiguous state or statelet but a process of cantonisation of the region. In the million-strong city of Donetsk, which has been bombarded by Ukrainian government forces and threatens to become a ghost town, a situation could arise with the population demanding separation both from Ukraine and Russia. It would be incumbent on genuine Marxism to support the people of the city if this is what they desired, while at the same time linking this to a socialist confederation of Ukraine and the region. Such an outcome is not at all fanciful, as critics may suggest. The unipolar world – with the US as the dominant world power able to impose its stamp on events – has passed into history. The US is still the most important economic and military power, and will remain so for some time. But there are limits to its power. A new post-Iraq ‘syndrome’ has emerged, with the pronounced war-weariness of the American people underpinning opposition to a permanent ‘boots on the ground’ interventionist policy. Bombing from the air and the extensive use of drones are now the preferred options. On the other hand, bombardments like this often produce the opposite results to that intended. Israel-Palestine Like Ariadne’s thread, only a rounded-out Marxist analysis can lead us through the labyrinth of the national question. This particularly applies to the complex question of the national rights of the Palestinian and Israeli people, highlighted once more in the Gaza conflict, which now resembles Grozny, with countless deaths and a quarter of its 1.2m population displaced. The CWI have consistently argued that a way out of this bloody conflict, which satisfies the rights of Palestinians and Israelis, is to advance the long-term solution of two states – a socialist Palestine and a socialist Israel – with Jerusalem possibly as a shared capital, linked to the idea of a socialist confederation. This idea, along with our past opposition to indiscriminate sanctions against Israel – because this could further push Israeli workers into the arms of the Israeli government and the right – has now, belatedly, come under attack in the US by the International Socialist Organisation (ISO), which is linked to the British SWP. They wrote on 17 August, criticising the CWI’s US co-thinkers, Socialist Alternative, that “their attitude about Israeli Jewish workers is consistent with the political position about the right of Israel to exist maintained historically by the international grouping to which both Socialist Alternative and the Socialist Party in Britain belong, the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI)… This belief in the right of Israelis to their own nation informs the CWI’s and Socialist Alternative’s position on BDS [boycott, disinvestment and sanctions campaigns]. But it is premised on a fundamentally wrong view of the socialist principle of the right of nations to self-determination. There is no support in the genuine Marxist tradition for the position that a colonial settler state – which is, by definition, an apartheid state, whether it is a Jewish state, in which non-Jews are politically disenfranchised; or the apartheid state of South Africa, in which non-white South Africans were politically disenfranchised – has a right to exist”. The right of self-determination is not a “socialist principle”, as the ISO asserts, but a democratic task. Genuine democratic principles are supported and resolved in this epoch through socialist revolution. We have answered these arguments of the ISO and others many times. In Marxism in Today’s World we wrote: “The most important law of the dialectic is that truth is concrete. On the historical issues, it is indisputable that Trotskyism, starting from Trotsky himself, opposed a Jewish state being formed on the territory of Palestine. That was his general position in the inter-war period. However, he modified his stance after the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews became evident. A new situation had emerged. Trotsky was always flexible when taking account of new important factors. There was a feeling on the part of the Jewish population to get out of Germany and Europe and with this went increased support for the dream of a new homeland. “Under socialism, reasoned Trotsky, if the Jews wanted a state in, say, a part of Africa, with the agreement of the African people, or in Latin America, it could be considered, but not in Palestine. Here, it would be a bloody trap for the Jews. It is amazing how this prediction has been borne out… The Trotskyist movement opposed the establishment of a separate Jewish state in Israel because it was a wedge against the Arab revolution. Israel was set up as a result of the colonisation of Arab lands, by driving out the Palestinians and by using a mixture of radical and even ‘socialistic’, nationalist rhetoric directed towards a Jewish population who had escaped the nightmare of the Holocaust and the second world war”. On the issue of colonial settler states we pointed out: “A state or a series of states can be established by the brutal displacement of peoples. Look at the removal of the Greek population from many parts of Asia Minor and of Turks from Greece following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. If you went back and redrew the map, you would now have huge exchanges of populations. As a result of a terrible crime against the Jews in Europe under Nazism-capitalism, this was then used as justification for a crime against the Palestinian people. That remains an indisputable historical fact. “However, the reality now is that, in the course of time, a Jewish or Israeli national consciousness has been created. What do Marxists say to this? Just ignore the real situation and continue with the old position? The solution of… [the ISO] and others on the left is a Palestinian state – which was originally our policy – of a unified Palestinian state with autonomous rights for the Jews. They put it forward, however, in a bourgeois context, while we always put it forward in a socialist framework. We do not have the position of a two-state solution on a bourgeois basis as do, for instance, some tiny groups. That is a utopian dream”. Previous proposals envisaged only a small portion of historic Palestine going to the Palestinian people. Former Israeli prime minister “Olmert’s proposal for a re-division of Palestine, which is now off the agenda, would leave just 10% as a state for the Palestinians. It is a Bantustan. It is not a viable state as far as the Palestinians are concerned. There is no possibility of a viable capitalist two-state solution. An interim arrangement could not be ruled out but it is not a solution to the national problems of either the Palestinians or the Israelis. Nevertheless, the idea of a two-state solution, of a socialist Palestine and a socialist Israel within a socialist confederation of the Middle East is, at this stage, a correct programmatic demand”. (Marxism in Today’s World, 2013 edition, pp29-30) No doubt the ISO and others dismiss the idea of a socialist confederation in the Middle East as an unrealisable solution to the problems of the masses throughout the region. But the capitalists themselves are not at all dismissive of the huge economic benefits that would flow from the implementation of such a confederation: “For example, Egypt has low-cost labour but high youth unemployment. Neighbouring Libya has excess capital, huge infrastructure projects and an insatiable demand for workers. Turkey has the expertise to build airports, bridges and roads. These dots need connecting. According to our research, at least $20bn of Gulf money has been pledged to Egypt in recent months but with no long-term plan. The Arab League, the existing regional structure, does not have the credibility, capability or creativity to help these nations pull together”. (Financial Times, 20 June 2014) The capitalists in the Middle East are incapable of realising such a project. The working class, however, working in a unified fashion and establishing democratic socialism throughout the region, would be able to implement a socialist confederation. Boycott Israel campaigns The ISO have drawn a crude comparison between Israel today and South Africa under apartheid. However, this will not reinforce their criticisms of the CWI but undermine them. Contrary to what the ISO asserts, there are profound differences between the South African apartheid regime and Israel, particularly from a demographic angle. There were seven times more Africans and others than the white population in South Africa. This is not the situation in Israel/Palestine at this stage. If threatened with destruction, the Israeli population will fight. We wrote in Marxism in Today’s World (p32): “Even the ‘peace camp’ will fight if their right to a separate state is under threat. The Israeli working class will fight if you threaten them that they will be driven into the sea. Therefore, transitional demands are necessary in order to approach the masses. We say: you decide what the borders of a future state will be under a socialist confederation. It is even possible, on the basis of a socialist revolution in the Middle East, that the Israelis and the Palestinians would then decide to live together in one state with autonomy for both. We cannot say beforehand. But the dialectic of the situation is if you try and impose one state on them now, it will be rejected. “Israel is a running sore in the region. A key question in the Middle Eastern revolution is how to split the Israeli workers away from the ruling class. Challenge them, threaten the idea of an Israeli ‘homeland’, then there is no chance of achieving this”. At the moment, we have to face the fact that the Palestinian and Jewish peoples have decided that they could not live together in one state. That is their consciousness. What does a Marxist and a Trotskyist say in this situation? The ISO just repeats dogmatically abstract formulas which bear no relationship to reality on the ground. Socialists and Marxists cannot compel different peoples to live in the same state. On the issue of BDS campaigns the ISO belatedly criticises an article by Judy Beishon in Socialism Today (No.169, June 2013). Once more, their arguments are not just false but are completely inaccurate. Neither she nor the CWI oppose all boycotts. We do stress that only unified mass action of Israeli and Palestinian workers can create a force which can overthrow the capitalists, both Israeli and Palestinian. However, selective targeted boycotts can play an auxiliary role in weakening the Israeli state by, for instance, a boycott of Israeli arms exports, as well as goods and produce from the occupied territories or a boycott of universities located there. Such measures can be useful in highlighting the oppression of the Palestinians. But by themselves they will not be sufficient to seriously undermine the grip of the Israeli government or ruling class, no more than sanctions and the boycott of South African goods seriously weakened the apartheid regime. Moreover, a targeted campaign, which could grow now in the wake of the horror of Gaza, should be discussed with both Palestinian but particularly Israeli workers. All of this was discussed in some detail in Judy’s article, which we stand behind. A similar one-sided approach has also been adopted by the ISO in relation to the retaliation by Hamas with rockets fired into Israel. We have never opposed the right of the Palestinians to defend themselves against Israeli attacks, including armed defence in Gaza and legitimate attacks on military targets in Israel itself. We did, however, point to their ineffectiveness – it is like using peashooters against tanks – but also that they are counter-productive when indiscriminately used against civilians. It drives Israeli workers into the arms of their own worst enemy, the right-wing government of Netanyahu, just as the Israelis’ indiscriminate attacks on civilians in Gaza have not undermined but strengthened Hamas. The national question is immeasurably more complicated than even existed at the time of Lenin and Trotsky. For Marxists it has two sides. We are opposed to bourgeois nationalism, which seeks to divide the working class. We are for the maximum unity of the working class across borders, continents and worldwide but at the same time we oppose the forcible incorporation of distinct nationalities into one state against their will. We are for the independence of Ukraine but totally oppose the Kiev regime and its policy of leaning on right-wing neo-fascists and Ukrainian nationalists in its suppression of the rights of minorities. Equally, we oppose the Great Russian chauvinism of Putin and his supporters and fight for class independence in the fight for a socialist confederation of the region. It is only in this way, through a clear class programme and perspectives, which avoids abstract propagandism, that a path can be cleared to win over workers to socialism and Marxism even in the difficult objective situation of war and conflict.

ADVERTISEMENT You may remember, early in the campaign, Donald Trump said he would like to run for president as a Republican, but he ran into GOP establishment resistance. So, he said, fine, he would run as an independent. Then, the GOP said he would be allowed to run for the nomination, but only if he promised to support the eventual candidate. ADVERTISEMENT All the candidates took the “pledge,” but now, we’re finding that “rules were meant for other people.” According to The Wrap, Kasich and Rubio are going back on their word: Donald Trump’s rivals have begun to hedge in their responses to questions about whether they would support the GOP frontrunner if he were to become the Republican Party’s nominee for president. Speaking on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Sunday morning, Ohio Gov. John Kasich said of Trump, “I would like to support the nominee. But he’s not going to be the nominee. That’s just not going to happen. [Then, there’s Rubio]. . .the Republican establishment favorite said that he is starting to question his own pledge to support Trump as the party’s nominee. “It’s getting harder every day to justify that statement to myself, to my children, to my family, and to the people that support me,” Rubio said. “This country deserves better. At some point, people have to wake up here. This is really going to do damage to America.” But wait! There’s more! Not only are candidates refusing to support the party’s candidate—now, Politico reports that the GOP is planning to run as. . .third party?? PLAYBOOK FACTS OF LIFE: If someone told you [two months] ago that a GOP candidate would finish second in Iowa and [then] easily win in N.H., S.C. and Nevada, you would call that person the Republican nominee-in-waiting. This explains why most donors are throwing in the towel on a dump Trump campaign. . . Cue stories on whether an establishment figure runs as third-party conservative — a prospect now more likely than Trump bolting the GOP for an independent run, and perhaps more likely than a brokered convention. Please send Playbook your list of conservatives most likely to do this: [email protected] and [email protected] THAT SAID … This goes on for a long time because there are now three Republican parties: the Pissed Off (Trump), the Purists (Cruz) and the Realists (Rubio). Trump owns the angry and a slice of both other camps, which gives him his decisive edge in a three-way. But the other two would be insane to buckle before the bitter end. So expect a lot of 40-25-25 outcomes. So the Republican establishment is trying to figure out how it can run a candidate it CAN control. Why not just destroy the party, they ask? It wouldn’t be the first time. Abraham Lincoln and a group of other dissenters killed the Whig Party and established the GOP in 1854. And in 1912, Former President Theodore Roosevelt bolted from the Republican Party to form the Progressive (“Bull Moose”) Party. The irony is that, unlike today’s GOP, both Roosevelt and Taft were “progressives,” and that the split came because Roosevelt thought the Republican candidate William Howard Taft was not liberal enough. What’s different this time is that it’s not individuals leaving a party. It’s the party leaving its loyal followers. There is no question that Republican voters overwhelmingly prefer Donald Trump this year. But he is too independent. He won’t follow orders, so the establishment wants to run it’s own candidate against its own party, as this New York Times article shows: Spurred by Donald J. Trump’s mounting victories, a small but influential — and growing — group of conservative leaders are calling for a third-party option. . . William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard magazine, said he would work actively to put forward an “independent Republican” ticket if Mr. Trump was the nominee, and floated Mr. Sasse as a recruit. We do have a recent example of this kind of activity. In 2006, Joe Lieberman was seen as disloyal to Bill Clinton; lackluster in his support for his Al Gore, when he was Gore’s running mate in 2000; and way too supportive of the George Bush war in Iraq. Therefore, a little-known teacher named Ned Lamont won the Democratic Party’s nomination for US Senator in Connecticut. Lieberman ran as an independent and held onto his own seat, following an inept and amateur campaign by Lamont. But even that was not the same. The party did support its own candidate. Lieberman had to appeal to his former supporters to bolt the party. So let’s recap. . . We have a party telling Trump he would have to SWEAR to support the eventual candidate in order to run as a Republican. All the candidates swore. Trump then pulled in record numbers of people who had never voted before, and built a juggernaut toward the nomination. THEN, suddenly, all these people who demanded that Trump support the nominee, refused to support him if HE won. And now, after demanding that Trump NOT run third-party, the GOP establishment is plotting to run a candidate against itself. Technically speaking, is this a smart political move for the GOP? Or is it disingenuous, hypocritical, or just insane?

Illinois Wesleyan University nursing students care for a mock drug overdose case in the school's simulation lab in Bloomington, Ill., in this November 2014 photo. (Photo: David Proeber, AP) Drug overdose death rates have increased in 26 states and Washington, D.C., and overdoses continue to outpace car crashes as the leading cause of injury-related deaths, according to a new report. Nearly 44,000 people die from drug overdoses each year, a figure that more than doubled from 1999 to 2013, and more than half of them stem from prescription pills. The report from Trust for America's Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which was released Wednesday, ranks states on their actions to curb the most common causes of injury-related deaths — drug abuse, motor vehicle deaths, homicides, suicides, falls and traumatic brain injuries. "Over 10 years, the opioid prescriptions have quadrupled, but there's not a change in the overall pain that Americans had in that same period," said Amber Williams, executive director of Safe States Alliance, an organization of experts who work on injury and violence prevention nationwide. "There's definitely a mismatch between the prescriptions and the health issues because the issues have remained the same." Williams said these drugs, which in the past were used primarily for chronic pain or cancer treatment, are now being used for more treatments, leading to an increase in the prescription of opioids. West Virginia, Kentucky and Nevada had the highest number of drug overdose-related deaths, according to the report. North Dakota saw the lowest rate: Only 2.6 per 100,000 people died from drug overdoses in a year. Overdose death rates have decreased in six states — Washington, North Dakota, Maine, Florida, Arkansas and Alabama. In March, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released guidelines to address opioid-drug related overdose, death and dependence. The three-part strategy calls for more training and educational resources for health professionals making prescribing decisions, an increase in the use of naloxone, a drug that can prevent an overdose when taken correctly, and expanding access to medication assistance treatment. The number of states that have "rescue drug" laws that allow prescription access to naloxone have doubled since 2013. Now 34 states and Washington, D.C., have laws that allow access to the drug and the FDA is meeting to discuss how public health groups may be able to expand use of the drug to reduce the risk of overdose. The Centers for Disease Control is in the process of reviewing applications from states for new funding to help bolster states' efforts to prevent prescription drug abuse, said Deb Houry, director of the CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. The CDC will award 15 to 16 states $750,000 to $1 million each year for four years. Houry said states will have to use the money to enhance their prescription drug monitoring programs and implement community or insurer/health system interventions to prevent prescription drug overdose and abuse. Education for physicians about "overprescribing medication" and the dangers of prescribing opioids is just as important as educating consumers or those at risk of developing addiction, said Robert Lubran, a division director at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's Center for Substance Abuse Prevention. "SAMHSA's surveys of households show that people tend to share these medications, and they usually get them from one physician," Lubran said. It's easy to assume people dying from drug overdoses are hard drug users, but that's not always the case, said Howard Josepher, a social worker and president and CEO of Exponents, a New York City-based drug treatment facility. He said a common issue his organization runs into is that people don't realize the danger of mixing alcohol and drugs. "Overdose isn't just from heroin or opioids. Many times people are drinking or taking other kinds of drugs, and it isn't an overdose as much as a drug poisoning issue," he said. Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1MMmQSf

FOXBOROUGH, Mass. -- Reporters covering the New England Patriots had their fill of coach Bill Belichick during offseason camps. as Belichick held news conferences three consecutive weeks and then capped things off with back-to-back pressers Tuesday and Wednesday this week. Belichick saved his most expansive answers for Wednesday, sticking around late to make sure reporters had everything they needed. Here's what we learned: Lewis has made an early impression. In the competition for the pass-catching running back role previously held by Shane Vereen, four-year veteran Dion Lewis has put himself in position to be a dark-horse candidate worthy of consideration. Lewis hasn't played in a game the last two seasons. "He’s missed some time lately [in 2013, 2014], so we’ll see where he’s at, but he’s had a good spring," Belichick said. "He's done a good job." Bill Belichick likes the versatility of free agent pickup Jabaal Sheard. AP Photo/Darron Cummings Working Sheard on both sides in a variety of roles. Free-agent signing Jabaal Sheard is a hybrid player who could be a 4-3 defensive end or 3-4 outside linebacker. The Patriots are using him in both roles in their multiple defense. "He’s played on his feet here here, played down, both sides, so he’s getting a lot of exposure to different things," Belichick said. "He’s been good." Getting a feel for McClain. In the cornerback mix, the Patriots signed former Falcon Robert McClain to a one-year deal and he's aligning on the left side, right side and in the slot. He's also a factor on special teams. "He’s a smart kid, works really hard – one of our hardest workers," Belichick said. "He needs to be versatile and he is." What Belichick appreciates about Bolden. When it comes to four-down players on the roster, running back Brandon Bolden is part of the list. Belichick likes him. "He’s a good early-down back, he’s a good third-down back and he’s good [on] fourth-down; one of our best special-teams players, certainly one of our best offensive special-teams players along with [Matthew] Slater. So he’s a very valuable guy, fills a lot of roles, smart, doesn’t need a lot of reps, and he’s got a lot of experience." What he's looking for in this offseason-camp setting. Belichick said the main things coaches ascertain from offseason camps is "a little better evaluation of how the players are handling things mentally, their assignments; there’s more things they have to worry about and the communication as a team from the signal callers on out to each of the different groups of players. It’s not an evaluation of the physical part, but it’s an evaluation of the mental part and their ability to think quickly, process information, handle different situations and communicate individually and as a group." Second-round pick keeps up. Safety Jordan Richards, who missed the first six practices of the offseason because Stanford had yet to hold graduation ceremonies, hasn't fallen too far behind. "He’s really smart," Belichick said. "We gave him some information to work on while he was away. He’s obviously studied it and worked hard at it. For a guy who wasn’t here, he had a pretty good idea of what we were doing. He kept up on the installation, and he’s done a good job out on the field. He’s smart; he communicates well. He had a lot of playing experience in college, of course, but that seems to be transferring pretty quickly out here."

Diesel’s owners say the 6-year-old Sheltie was so harmless he was afraid of thunderstorms. And that's why they are stunned and distraught their dog was fatally stabbed in the mouth with a sharp stick Friday as horrified neighbours looked on. Diesel the Sheltie dog was allegedly killed by a neighbour in Richmond Hill. ( Handout ) York Region police said the dog was stabbed with a spike attached to a broom handle around 6 p.m. that day. Harmony Gayne, who described her dog as loyal and full of life, said she was on her way home from school when her mother Molly called to tell her something was wrong. When Harmony got to the house she saw the dog lying lifeless on the ground with blood near his jaw. “He was lying there dead on the grass. I came and gave (Molly) a hug,” said Harmony, 24. Article Continued Below Police arrested a Richmond Hill man, who they haven’t identified. He was released from custody and ordered to appear in court May 25 on charges of injuring or endangering an animal. Eye witnesses said Molly Gayne was walking Diesel in the neighbourhood near Bayview and 19th Aves. when she and a neighbour exchanged insults after the man accused her of not keeping her dog away from him. “The dog walked up to him in a friendly manner. But the guy poked him with a stick in the mouth. The dog was on a leash,” said a witness who asked not to be named. The dog staggered away bleeding from the mouth, and moments later collapsed near his home, the witness said. “It made, like a whimpering sound” after the stabbing, the witness said, adding he had seen the dog many times in the past. The witness said the assailant was wearing sunglasses, so he couldn't see his eyes, but from the man's body language he seemed angry at the time. Another neighbour said her father heard Molly yelling, “He just killed my dog.” Article Continued Below The Gayne family got Diesel from relatives in the U.S. in March 2006. The American relatives, who adopted him from a shelter, had to give him away due to allergies. Harmony said her family didn't know the alleged assailant prior to the incident. Neighbours say he rents a basement apartment down the street from the Gayne family. The owner of the home where he lives declined to comment when the Star knocked on her door. Read more about:

Moving day at the 2015 United States Disc Golf Championship saw the leaderboard change a few times as some rode a consistent hot round while others left a few shots out on the course. We talked with the pros as they came off of Hole 18. Steve Brinster Overall: -15 Round Three: -10 (57) Position: Tied-5 “I started off really strong, even had a little bogey on Hole 4 and then got back on track. Had a birdie putt on Hole 8 and it rolled into a tough spot. Made a really great putt there and then birdied Hole 9. That gave me seven birdies out of the front 10. I hadn’t made it on the green on Hole 10 yet and parked it into the bricks. I was feeling good and kept it going. It kind of fizzled a little at the end. I had a pretty good opportunity on Hole 15. I gave myself a look, but hit a tree branch in a tough spot and bogyed. Then I missed about a 28 footer on Hole 17. You shouldn’t feel too bad about a par there, but it felt like an opportunity that I lost. Hole 18 is dangerous and birdied that. To come in with a 57 I guess is good. I felt like I could have finished a little stronger.” “I like how my game is feeling. I putted really solid today. It’s easy to talk about the ones you missed, but they were mixed in there with some really good ones in some windy conditions.” Barry Schultz Overall: -4 Round Three: +3 (70) Position: Tied-26 Didn’t quite have the mental energy I typically have out there. It showed on some of my shot selections and executions. I’ll have try harder again tomorrow. Eagle McMahon Overall: -6 Round Three: -+2 (69) Position: Tied-19 “Tough day today. I got off to a decent start but on Hole 6 and 7 I went 5-4 and that messed me up for the entire round. It was kind of a downward spiral from then on. I kept it in the 60, at least that happened. Tomorrow, I hear it will be rainy, I’ll play safe and keep it between the ropes. Many won’t score as well so if I can have something in the mid-60s, I feel like I’ll finish well.” Ricky Wysocki Overall: -20 Round Three: -10 (57) Position: Tied-2 “I knew coming into day 3 I had to shoot in the 50s and while I started off a little slow, I was able to birdie seven of the back nine. I had to light it up to make up for the mistakes on the front nine. I’m right where I want to be heading into the final day. Being in the lead group is a great spot to be on the final day. Now I can make my move.” Paul McBeth Overall: -20 Round Three: -10 (57) Position: Tied-2 “I still had a mistake on Hole 13, I was trying to lay one up and gave up two strokes right there. I need to clean that up, other than that, I drove a lot better and again made all my putts. I feel good though. If I can do this tomorrow, and hopefully jumped up to the lead card, I can put some pressure on Nate because I know he’s been playing well. Time to put some pressure on Nate and the others on the lead card. Come out hot and clean up those mistakes on the stretch of Holes 11, 12, 13, and 14. I’ve given away too many strokes there. I think I gave Ricky Wysocki four strokes over that stretch. Got to clean that up and continue what I’ve been doing on the rest of the course.” Nate Doss Overall: -16 Round Three: Even (67) Position: 4 “That was the front nine from I don’t know where. I don’t know what happened. Everything felt great, game was on point, a few bad kicks here and there. I do feel proud of how I brought it together on the back nine. Hole 17 is what Hole 17 is. I have the game plan to lay up and unfortunately took a bad roll. Just have to deal with this one and put it behind away. Still have 18 holes to play and want to make a decent run tomorrow.” “Still sitting in fourth is a huge surprise to me. I could have never guessed that. I feel fortunate to be in a premier group and to play with the guys on the card.” Nate Sexton Overall: -23 Round Three: -7 (60) Position: 1 “Got a good game plan and I’m sticking to it. My dad (his caddy) is helping me a lot. He’s reminding me when to give it a little extra juice on the shots where short is a problem. He reinforces what I already know. We’re a good team.” “I feel pretty good though. Everyone else was struggling and I raced out to a seven shot lead after being tied. That was pretty shocking. I didn’t know what was going on at the second card, I don’t really care, I’m just focused on my game plan. Made a few mistakes on Hole 12 and 13 to give a few strokes back, but righted the ship and closed strong to get back to that same spot above my card mates.” “I know it’s not over, but leading with 18 holes to play feels great. There is no better spot to be. You can’t envy anyone who is one stroke behind though. I know there will be pressure, but I’m not focused on who’s behind me or how far ahead I might be. I’m just going to play golf I can be proud of and if that wins, that’s great.”

Quote from: T0mb3ry on Thu, 09 March 2017, 15:04:35 https://world.taobao.com/item/546306549074.htm?spm=a312a.7700714.0.0.0w4mRG#detail Neat colorway guys. Show us more! Hi Tom As you know we are a small Planck lovers community, We love your creamy orange color way so much, so we make a small keyset for Planck/Preonic. This is a small range group buy ,and we haven't made any propaganda in any platforms. the second hand SA market is so high that some traffickers push the SA carbon price as 3~10 times that real lovers can not get them at all. And Planck Preonic Atomic users are at a small niche, few keycaps can fit this little keyboard. Sorry for having not asked you for a permission, hope you understand why we launch this little keyset. Thank you... Hey Hoq!Thank you for clarification, that this is a small GB for chinese planck community. The thing is, it intersects with my drop this summer and you sure knew it. I thought first time you guys are for confrontation. But since its clarified right now and with SPs MOQ it cant harm my drop actually. Thus i think its ok.Keep in mind next time its better to coordinate such things with a designer (not only me) btw runner of the colorway. In case of GMK which has quite high MOQ such actions might sabotage the whole drop or GB. Thats not cool.Its quite weird these days with all the copy paste happening. Sometimes i think why to put time and effort in the whole if somebody will always try to **** on your work for no reason. Anyway atleast all the "You cant own a colorway" trolls could came several times in their popcorn baskets. Thus i am not telling i own that colorway but its still not a reason that some people try to throw ****s on me, since i do not make Carbon artificial rare and i put a lot of time and effort in my sets. Carbon will run every Year as long as demanded and alternating between SP SA and GMK. So the second hand prices will drop some day to reasonable values.

PLANTATION, Fla. (AP) Serbia’s Miomir Kecmanovic won the Metropolia Orange Bowl Boys’ 18s singles title for the second consecutive year Sunday, beating China’s Yibing Wu 6-3, 6-1 on green clay at the Frank Veltri Tennis Center. The 17-year-old Kecmanovic will finish the year as the world’s No. 1-ranked junior. He’s the third player in the Orange Bowl’s 70-year history to win consecutive Boys’ 18s singles titles, joining Billy Martin (1973-74) and Harold Solomon (1969-70). Kecmanovic also joins Dominic Thiem (2011) and Andy Roddick (1999) as the only players to win the Boys’ 18s singles titles at both the Eddie Herr in Bradenton and Orange Bowl in the same year, dating to 1993 in the tournaments played in consecutive weeks. Sixteen-year old Kaja Juvan of Slovenia won the Orange Bowl Girls’ 18s singles title. She beat top-ranked Anastasia Potapova of Russia 6-1, 6-4.

Date Rating Tag User Tip 04-21 22:23 1 sleep @terebifunhouse You can always crash w/ friends, or friends of friends, or a video room or a lobby couch, or under a table. 04-21 22:23 2 sleep @sasuraiger You don't NEED a hotel room: I'm sure there'll be SOMETHING at the con that's open all night! 04-21 22:23 1 events @terebifunhouse Events the con didn't plan, promote, or ever intend on having are the best events to complain about. 04-21 22:25 -4 hallways @terebifunhouse Doorways are to stop in. Hallways are to text in. Dealers rooms are to have fistfights in. Dealers are to shoplift from. 04-21 22:26 0 skits @terebifunhouse The convention won't let you force 1500 people to watch your dumb-ass skit? Just do it in the lobby! It's your lobby too! 04-21 22:28 2 drama @terebifunhouse Big emo drama brewing? Have it out at the con and be forced to spend rest of weekend with people you just told to f** off. 04-21 22:30 12 transport @terebifunhouse You should ensure your car's in good shape before going to cons. Sadly you can't afford to do this -you go to too many cons. 04-21 22:32 1 cosplay @terebifunhouse Photogs- always halt cosplayers for photos! Cosplayers- always stop dead still for all photos when & wherever asked! 04-21 22:32 -2 cosplay @terebifunhouse Didn't win the costume contest? Obviously it was rigged big time. 04-21 22:36 7 cosplaynazi @terebifunhouse 50 years of anime, 14,000 characters, but you HAVE to cosplay as 1 of 2 Nazis. How dare Bar Mitzvah next door get offended? 04-21 22:36 0 weapons @andrepaploo The sharper the prop weapon, the better! Don't let staff ruin your awesome costume you totally bought on Ebay. 04-21 22:37 7 recursive @terebifunhouse Fired from your job because you took too much time off for anime cons? That's OK, now you can go to more anime cons! 04-21 22:38 5 guests @terebifunhouse Somebody nobody ever heard of worked on a show nobody saw? He'd make a perfect anime con guest! Start bugging cons now! 04-21 22:39 0 weapons @terebifunhouse when con rules say "no live steel" they REALLY mean, "all other metals are OK." it's only steel they're worried about. 04-21 22:40 6 parents @terebifunhouse Mom - looking for your 17 yr old at the con? Tell staff she's 12 and missing and watch the Amber Alert fun begin! 04-21 22:46 -2 music @andrepaploo Want to promote your rap music? Tack on an anime theme, and those cons will start rolling out the dough! 04-21 22:52 3 yaoi @sasuraiger Underage? Want yaoi doujins? I'm sure that guy will sleep with you for them. @exedore_uk went to sleep before posting this 04-21 22:52 12 marco @DarylSurat You don't need blindfolds or a swimming pool to play Marco Polo. Just shout it nonstop for 72 hours! Everyone can play! 04-21 22:53 8 booze @botoggle Nobody can tell you're drinking if it's in a Powerade bottle. (courtesy @exedore_uk) 04-21 22:56 2 signs @sasuraiger Your body is an advertising surface and the product being sold: you can't afford NOT to hold or wear a sign! 04-21 22:57 7 ego @terebifunhouse if you can't hold a grudge over some trivial wrong done you by con staff for AT LEAST ten years, you aren't really trying. 04-21 22:57 21 stuff @DarylSurat Anime cons = the BEST place for raves, videogame tournaments, gothloli, steampunk, fire dancing, furry, foam swordfights, robot cars, indie wrestling, local bands, renfaire battles, US cartoons/comics, Star Trek. Anime? There's cosplay/hentai! 04-21 22:58 3 cosplay @terebifunhouse Not annoying enough? A gigantic cosplay prop will ensure your ability to annoy complete strangers for yards around! 04-21 22:59 1 cosplay @terebifunhouse Yes we know it's a Japanese cartoon con, but everybody has to see your pirate, Stormtrooper, Indiana Jones costume!! 04-21 23:00 4 cosplay @terebifunhouse Need a fast costume? A pair of goggles turns ANY OUTFIT into an amazing Steampunk creation that will wow the crowds! 04-21 23:00 6 cosplay @terebifunhouse Need a fast costume? A pair of cat ears turns ANY OUTFIT into an amazing anthropomorphic creation that will wow the crowds! 04-21 23:03 1 videogames @terebifunhouse Maybe you didn't pay for a badge, but that doesn't mean you can't complain bitterly about the con's lame Halo tournament. 04-21 23:05 4 hotel @terebifunhouse Leaving valuables in a unsecured hotel room full of people you just met? Always a good idea 04-21 23:06 4 booze @terebifunhouse Do you become violently ill every time you drink? Maybe the parties at THIS con will be the exception! Sure, why not? 04-21 23:08 3 guests @terebifunhouse -they call it "stalking guests", but you know it really means "being their NUMBER ONE FAN!!" 04-21 23:09 5 music @terebifunhouse everybody knows the best place to see live music is a hotel ballroom, not some "nightclub" where they sell "beer". 04-21 23:10 3 health @hoover_dam Sleep, meals, showers, these things are all optional 04-21 23:11 13 money @DarylSurat When paying for hotels, always get the money from everyone on SUNDAY, once everyone's made all their pocky & porn purchases. 04-21 23:12 7 ecchi @hoover_dam It's loli and/or shota, not child porn, you uneducated louts; you just aren't as enlightened about sexuality as the Japanese 04-21 23:13 3 memes @ota_g Not getting enough attention at home? At an anime con you have an eager audience just ready to hear you shout internet memes 04-21 23:13 2 money @hoover_dam @DarylSurat Also, you can only check out through the front desk, not via phone, tv, or computer. 04-21 23:14 3 fanart @andrepaploo Meeting an artist in Artist Alley is ALWAYS the best time to bring up the topic of your favourite fetish! 04-21 23:15 3 hygiene @ShadowbladeEdge Showers? That's time you're wasting that you could be using to look for porn. 04-21 23:15 3 ego @terebifunhouse Q&A with guests at panels, always include lots of personal information with your questions. Other fans want to know YOU! 04-21 23:16 1 panels @andrepaploo Keep talking nonsense at that person hosting the panel, and eventually they'll let you take over! 04-21 23:17 6 hallways @andrepaploo The cement convention floor is an excellent place to practice gymnastics! Aim for the Olympics, young Narutard! Your skull's jam-like innards are going to be totally okay when they hit the floor, because you're a NINJA! 04-21 23:20 9 food @DarylSurat You may only eat Japanese/Chinese food while at an anime convention. Find the nearest Panda Express and TEAR THAT MOTHER UP. 04-21 23:27 2 ego @terebifunhouse Just because they didn't invite you, that doesn't mean you aren't a guest! FORCE your way into that green room! 04-21 23:28 3 creepy @Battlehork Be sure to accost strangers who look like they just happen to be there coincidentally and discuss Queen's Blade or Qwazer 04-21 23:29 2 hotel @La_Franziska For extreme comfort, cram at least 10 people in one tiny motel room! Showers and deodorant are optional! 04-21 23:29 4 fanart @terebifunhouse Artist Alley can be many things. For you it can be a place to sell bootleg T-shirts and a table to sleep under! 04-21 23:31 1 dealers @sasuraiger Man, the cool new hashtag is definitely #animeconprotip: by the way, did you know the dealer's room is a great place to practice your jutsu? 04-21 23:31 -2 ego @andrepaploo Anime cons aren't about anime! They're about getting onto your favourite YouTube show! 04-21 23:31 2 memes @timmaughan nothing says good time for all like screaming this week's Internet memes at the top of your voice in the hallway! 04-21 23:33 3 ego @terebifunhouse Anime con staff fails to acknowledge your web page about the convention? HATE THEM FOREVER 04-21 23:34 16 memes @terebifunhouse Do you think there are people at the con who might not know the cake is a lie? Better not take that chance! 04-21 23:34 3 cosplay @La_Franziska Want to get a start on your modeling career? Cosplaying at cons is the way to go! You don't even have to know what anime is! 04-21 23:34 6 yaoi @sdshamshel Nothing says you're cool like making out with another guy to attract a circle of fangirls. 04-21 23:35 1 panels @terebifunhouse Great programming suggestion - panels about people doing panels about doing panels at anime cons 04-21 23:36 0 dealers @sasuraiger Can't afford that luxury otaku item? Dealers are required to accept your sexual favors! 04-21 23:36 3 music @botoggle It's been nearly fifteen minutes since we last heard Caramelldansen here in the reg pickup line -- but you can fix that! 04-21 23:38 3 cosplay @La_Franziska Did a movie based on a comic come out recently? Better cosplay as the most popular character! You'll be so unique! 04-21 23:38 1 panels @sdshamshel The best anime panels are the ones that just feed into your audience's myopic view of their favorite shows. 04-21 23:38 3 industry @ANNZac Did Funimation not announce your favorite show? During the Q&A, ask them if they did! Maybe they were waiting for you to ask! 04-21 23:39 2 cosplay @terebifunhouse Need a fast cosplay idea? Get a CARDBOARD BOX out of the GARBAGE and WEAR IT ON YOUR HEAD. 04-21 23:40 2 money @andrepaploo Offer to make out with people in the hallways to boost your con spending money! Prostitution is where it's at! 04-21 23:40 5 ecchi @sasuraiger Go ahead, touch her. You're in character! 04-21 23:41 2 weapons @terebifunhouse Great sekrit storage place for your $300 ninja weapons - under a table in the hotel lobby 04-21 23:42 7 guests @vamptvo All voice actors are contractually obligated to speak sexually inappropriate lines in character. 04-21 23:43 3 cosplay @vamptvo Nobody ever thinks to cosplay as Ed Elric. 04-21 23:44 -1 cosplay @Cadha13 You can take all the photos you want in the bathroom of the cosplayers, they're in character! 04-21 23:44 4 thegame @Athena_chan The game is the most important thing ever, make t-shirts and signs to ensure that everyone else loses 04-21 23:45 3 useful @rjmeily That coffee machine in your room can be very helpful in making hot ramen, tea, and soup if you bring some chicken bullion. 04-21 23:45 2 guests @ANNZac If you agree to buy Vic Mignogna's lunch, he'll definitely return your emails after the con! 04-21 23:45 0 guests @Cadha13 Ask the guests if they can go to your room, even if they are guys. 04-21 23:46 1 hugs @La_Franziska It's perfectly okay to glomp anyone cosplaying as your favorite character. They'll love you for it! 04-21 23:46 3 cosplay @andrepaploo Don't bother with a bra. Your boobs have a mind of their own, and will not fall out of your skimpy, ill-fitting costume 04-21 23:47 1 hygiene @rjmeily showers are very overrated during a con! /sarcasm 04-21 23:47 1 hugs @gerjomarty Make sure you give a free hug to as many people as you can! They just can't wait to hug you! 04-21 23:47 0 cosplay @andrepaploo And for the guys, underwear is totally optional for those spandex tights your mom sewed! You're in character! 04-21 23:47 3 cosplay @sdshamshel Cosplay is an activity for everyone to enjoy. Except that bitch who totally doesn't deserve it. Is her dress made of FELT? 04-21 23:48 0 ego @sasuraiger You're definitely the funniest guy in this room. Hell, you could talk over this whole showing and nobody would mind! 04-21 23:48 1 hugs @Athena_chan Love free hugs? Make a sign saying that you give them away and everyone will want to hug you no matter how creepy you look. 04-21 23:49 -1 hygiene @rpguy_ad Soap and deodorant only waste space in your bags. You'll be just fine if you miss three days' worth of showers! 04-21 23:49 2 hugs @MichaelToole Starved for affection? That's OK! Hugs are FREE, especially if you advertise with a handwritten cardboard sign! 04-21 23:49 -1 videogames @La_Franziska Handing over the game controller to the next person waiting? That's crazy talk. Play Melty Blood to your heart's content! 04-21 23:50 -3 hugs @timmaughan teenage girls: insist on hugging my g/f ensuring that she feels uncomfortable and never wants to come with me again. 04-21 23:50 0 yaoi @sdshamshel Carrying around paddles establishes you as a connoisseur of yaoi in the eyes of others. 04-21 23:50 0 ego @vamptvo Yeah, guest Q&As are for learning about guests, but more importantly they're for you to show off your vast anime knowledge. 04-21 23:50 1 kids @andrepaploo A teen annoyed by little kids at your con? Complain to adult staff members about how immature they are! 04-21 23:51 2 panels @terebifunhouse make sure to get on as many con panels as you can, they lead to great things - namely, more anime con panels. 04-21 23:52 -1 dealers @Athena_chan For some fun try on every single hat for sale at a booth and then walk away not buying anything, dealers & artists love that! 04-21 23:52 2 thegame @DasGreggo "The Game" is the most hilarious thing ever, and you should make sure to tell every third person you see that they lost it. 04-21 23:52 0 rules @vamptvo Staffers who kick you out for "unruly conduct" are just lame adults who don't understand your love for Light Yagami. 04-21 23:52 0 memes @Thedigitalbug shouting memes in the hallways will make you look cool in the eyes of your peers 04-21 23:52 -1 crossplay @rpguy_ad Guys: Dressing like Sailor Moon is TOTALLY normal. They're not laughing at you - just with you. 04-21 23:52 3 screaming @ANNZac Whenever you see something you like or even simply recognize, let others know by screaming your loudest. 04-21 23:52 2 feedback @hoover_dam The best time to air your grievance about something requiring immediate attention by con staff is 3 weeks after the fact 04-21 23:55 2 marco @rpguy_ad EVERYBODY loves a game of Marco Polo in the middle of 15,000 people! You won't piss off the people around you by screaming! 04-21 23:55 1 bootleg @andrepaploo Print out stuff you found on Deviant Art and sell it at your table! No one will notice! 04-21 23:55 2 japanese @sdshamshel Make sure to ask all of your questions in five-minute long strings of broken Japanese. Without translating for everyone. 04-21 23:55 0 cosplay @TexasDevin Your cosplay is only complete when you have bare feet, but the escalator doesn't know that. 04-21 23:55 0 staff @andrepaploo Crying at staff will solve EVERYTHING! 04-21 23:56 0 useful @rjmeily don't take people who do not like anime to an anime con, unless they are really good friends with you or a bf/gf. They will just whine and complain. 04-21 23:56 0 food @terebifunhouse Dinner at cons should involve at least 15 people crammed into a van, 14 separate checks, 3 hours, no tip 04-21 23:57 0 videogames @sasuraiger You're the best at Anime-Themed Videogame. That guy was definitely cheating, that prize is YOURS! 04-21 23:58 2 videogames @andrepaploo DDR-Funk is your gift to the masses! Keep sweating and hogging those mats! 04-21 23:58 4 meta @8c Mention something that irritates you about anime cons in an imperative tone. Call it a "protip". This is never not hilarious 04-21 23:58 -2 hotel @hoover_dam Why would you leave the housekeeping staff a tip? Pfft, it's their job to clean up your room. 04-21 23:59 3 hygiene @terebifunhouse keep the 'do not disturb' sign on your door all weekend long. Who needs fresh towels or toilet paper? NOT OTAKU 04-22 00:00 1 hugs @Omega_Zed It's perfectly fine to glomp total strangers. Even better if you grab their naughty bits 04-22 00:00 -2 sleep @Athena_chan Can't afford a hotel room? Just sleep under the tables in Artist Alley! That's why they leave them there! 04-22 00:01 1 guests @rpguy_ad It's totally not in bad taste to tell an anime staffer that you watched all of his stuff fansubbed! He'll love you for it! 04-22 00:01 3 management @terebifunhouse Con Guests - did they EXPLICITLY tell you NOT to run up huge bar tabs for friends, family, total strangers? I think not. 04-22 00:01 0 skits @andrepaploo Skits are always the best time to bring up your favorite adult-rated fan fiction trope! 04-22 00:02 1 cosplay @TexasDevin You should absolutely cosplay the no-name background character with no lines in one scene in the third episode of season two 04-22 00:02 0 cosplay @terebifunhouse Nothing says 'excellence in costuming' like adults with foam hair waving their hands pretending to fire magic force beams. 04-22 00:02 0 dealers @andrepaploo Always be sure to tell Vendors which of the anime they sell you'll never buy because you downloaded it online! 04-22 00:02 1 otaku @predederva don't be johnny otaku...i've never been to a con but after seeing him in that video...just don't be him 04-22 00:04 1 hallways @nikoscream See the "No Photos" & "No Standing in the Halls" signs? They're just suggestions. Who needs to walk through halls anyway? 04-22 00:04 2 cosplay @Battlehork Pope Benedict XVI may be unpopular right now, but everyone loves Pope Hentai 04-22 00:05 1 badge @terebifunhouse (1) wear con badge in hard to spot location. (2) complain loudly every time you're asked where your badge is. 04-22 00:06 -1 hallways @DasGreggo Stopping in the middle of a narrow hallway to have your picture taken isn't just okay, it's expected. 04-22 00:06 2 hallways @hoover_dam The people walking through your photoshoot in the hotel's main hallway are the ones being rude, not you 04-22 00:06 0 screaming @sasuraiger The English language is so overrated and drawn out. Have you tried keeping your communication to squeals? 04-22 00:06 0 panels @irriadin show up for the most popular panel at the con five minutes before it starts. Waiting in line is for losers. 04-22 00:09 0 dance @TexasDevin In the J-music room, you absolutely MUST demonstrate that you have memorized the band's dance--move for move... every time. 04-22 00:09 2 dance @sasuraiger They're all watching you dance in the hotel lobby. But why aren't they PAYING to watch you dance in the hotel lobby? 04-22 00:10 -1 ecchi @ohkatsu If she says she's eighteen, then you're A-OK! 04-22 00:10 0 cosplaynazi @timmaughan if old people on public transport are offended by you dressing as a Nazi, tell them cosplay is a basic human right! 04-22 00:10 0 japanese @magicalemi Now that you're in Japanese 101, show off your skills by inserting as many Japanese words into your speech as possible 04-22 00:11 0 photos @Cadha13 It is the Photographers Prime Directive to be as much of a jerk as possible, even towards other photogs. 04-22 00:11 0 staff @nikoscream You know those info booth people? Everything at the con is their fault and you should yell at them for it (for @napoleana). 04-22 00:11 1 ecchi @TexasDevin Desperate, single, and male? I've heard a fox tail and a little yaoi display will certainly impress that girl! 04-22 00:13 0 industry @Cadha13 boycott Funi at their panel and ask for their signatures on your copy of Moonphase. 04-22 00:14 -2 guests @rpguy_ad Don't let a silly thing like "security" get in the way of meeting a guest! Sneak into their rooms. You'll be fine! 04-22 00:14 -1 consuite @nikoscream The consuite is a god-given right. Whenever it's closed or out of food, the con is out to get you. 04-22 00:14 3 facepalm @terebifunhouse The weather, location of elevators, bad food in restaurant across the street - these things are all the convention's fault. 04-22 00:15 -2 japanese @ShadowbladeEdge Display your prowess in Japanese by shouting kawaii constantly and adding desu to the end of anything you say. 04-22 00:15 4 badge @rpguy_ad Using a fake ID is fine, if it's to get into Anime Hell. 04-22 00:17 -1 japanese @Cadha13 Ask all of the girls to say "Nya", Onii-tan, and "Nau" when in your presence. 04-22 00:17 1 weapons @terebifunhouse crowded hotel lobbies full of pottery and glassware are THE BEST places for your lightsaber duel. 04-22 00:18 0 ego @sasuraiger You've got ideas nobody in history has had! Ask the guest to draw the project you've been thinking of. They'll be honored! 04-22 00:18 0 yaoi @otakudan if you hit a stranger with a yaoi paddle, they have the right to punch you in the face 04-22 00:18 1 sleep @nikoscream Need a place to sleep? Try the hall floor. 04-22 00:19 1 cosplay @Gaijinder Ladies: If you're going to dress up as Scantily Clad Character, be prepared to not go anywhere for awhile. Grab a Snickers. 04-22 00:19 0 lines @DasGreggo Make sure to get into the longest line possible, even if you don't know what it's for. Because it's bound to be AWESOME. 04-22 00:20 1 cosplay @Cadha13 If in doubt, always ask the cosplayer for her number, so you can send her that picture of you. 04-22 00:22 -1 lines @MichaelToole Lines are merely suggestions, and can be safely ignored at your convenience. 04-22 00:22 0 photos @Cadha13 When reaching for your camera, she's reaching for her gun. Remember! 04-22 00:23 2 staff @terebifunhouse If enough people ask, the con HAS to let us perform "Rocky Horror". IT'S THE LAW. 04-22 00:24 0 ecchi @Gaijinder Couples engaging in PDA=annoying. Couples engaging in PDA while in line=Godsend. 04-22 00:26 3 fandumb @terebifunhouse EVERYONE wants to know ALL ABOUT that anime music video you're going to make someday. Also, your fanfic. 04-22 00:26 1 japanese @Cadha13 Always add a verbal tic to your speech, like "nyaa" or "nau" to show how much you care and know Japanese People. 04-22 00:26 0 elevators @MichaelToole via @hoover_dam - Remember to always take the elevators, even if you're only going down one floor. Stairs are for chumps! 04-22 00:26 0 rules @rpguy_ad Everybody likes a rebel - break all of the rules and you'll be a convention hero! 04-22 00:28 1 consuite @MichaelToole Out of money for food? Just use the con suite for all meals! No con suite? No prob, beg strangers in the halls for handouts! 04-22 00:28 0 hugs @DasGreggo That guy dressed nicely wearing a tie is definitely cosplaying. Even if he doesn't have a badge, GLOMP HIM ANYWAY. 04-22 00:29 -1 useful @calaggie Not contributing anything to because I'm not good at sarcastic fake advice humor. (My real tip: don't lose your wallet.) 04-22 00:29 2 kids @ANNZac Are you a cranky old timer? Be sure to spam Twitter with anecdotes about how annoying teenagers at anime cons are! 04-22 00:30 0 ego @Cadha13 Show your passport to say that you have really gone to Japan. 04-22 00:31 1 subs @GWOtaku Whenever you're in a video room, scream for Japanese w/ subtitles even if the official dub is scheduled! 04-22 00:31 3 booze @rpguy_ad Booze makes every anime con better. Wait... that's a real one. I think. 04-22 00:32 0 panels @lwelyk It's not intruding on the panel, it's getting in line for the next one. 04-22 00:32 0 kids @andrepaploo Regale younger anime fans with tales of how current anime sucks, and Robotech and Starblazers are so awesome! 04-22 00:33 0 meta @botoggle make sure to let everyone know how bitterly you disapprove of everyone else's bitter anecdotes 04-22 00:33 0 heylisten @lwelyk hey, you know what is an underrated show that people need to hear about? Death Note. 04-22 00:33 1 cosplay @ZeroXOmega There's no better time to dye your hair. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dC7Ew4rqpto 04-22 00:33 0 ecchi @neito Rape is how they say hello in japan. say hello to everyone! 04-22 00:33 2 food @Cadha13 Pizza is the standard food, but knockoff sushi is the next best thing. 04-22 00:33 1 videogames @lwelyk No one has ever made the OTACON! joke at otakon before. 04-22 00:34 -1 cosplayl @andrepaploo Slap on some eyeliner and a white t-shirt, and you're ready to be the only L in town! 04-22 00:35 3 kids @terebifunhouse Older fan? Remember to complain about how all those kids are ruining your cartoon convention. 04-22 00:35 -1 dance @andrepaploo Dancing with girls 1/2 your age at an AnimeRave is always appropriate! 04-22 00:35 0 japanese @lwelyk Saying kawaii and baka makes you cool 04-22 00:35 0 clothes @Cadha13 Take a lot of time on your wardrobe, just wear a "Yukkuri" shirt and you're set to get fine women. 04-22 00:36 1 fun @MichaelToole If everything we complained about at cons disappeared, cons would be pretty boring. Don't forget to have some goddamn fun! 04-22 00:36 1 games @andrepaploo Your thirties are always a great time to beat 8 year olds at YuGiOh! 04-22 00:37 3 hotel @terebifunhouse If they didn't want you to scrawl graffiti all over the stairwell, they wouldn't have painted it such a nice white. 04-22 00:38 2 cosplayl @fromage Be original, cosplay as L. 04-22 00:38 1 elitism @ShadowbladeEdge Did that total stranger just suggest that anime are anything like filthy cartoons? Then you're obligated to berate them. 04-22 00:38 0 japanese @LeoJTravis10 When you go to a dealers room be sure you say "Chi" to everyone you encounter. 04-22 00:38 1 ego @Cadha13 Make sure to let everyone know about your dissatisfaction about the "Endless Eight". 04-22 00:39 2 ecchi @akitafuki don't accept candy from guys dressed up as old, perverted men. 04-22 00:39 2 memes @Blacotaku1 4chan IS the #1 source for everything anime! Go & shout fucking retarded memes at the top of your lungs outside of a panel! 04-22 00:39 0 vawork @sasuraiger You'd make a hell of an anime voice actor. If you could just get Yuri Lowenthal to sit down and listen, he'd get you work! 04-22 00:40 1 hygiene @Blacotaku1 Wash ya ass!!!!!! 04-22 00:40 0 hygiene @Izandra A can of Axe body spray is way cheaper than a hotel room with a shower. 04-22 00:40 0 ecchi @lwelyk If she didn't want you to sexually harass her, she wouldn't be there 04-22 00:40 1 cosplay @ElfGrove It's appropriate to not wear a shirt at restaurants as long as your cosplay doesn't wear a shirt. Everyone will understand. 04-22 00:40 2 hygiene @MichaelToole So how many more of these do we have to think up before it becomes a trending topic? Also, brush your damn teeth! 04-22 00:41 0 sleep @ElfGrove Don't bother getting a hotel room for the con. You can sleep in the elevators. Or not at all. 04-22 00:41 -1 hygiene @tondog Showers only take away from the fun. Who cares about others, your personal enjoyment is all that matters. 04-22 00:42 1 clothes @stringedsonata Cons are not strip clubs. Please don't confuse the two and show up at a con dressed like a stripper. Esp if you're underage. 04-22 00:42 4 health @terebifunhouse your medical condition knows it's a special weekend, so quit taking those prescription meds! 04-22 00:43 0 cosplay @Cadha13 Pants were invented after WW2, so cosplay as Lucchini and act Italian. 04-22 00:43 0 cosplay @MichaelToole Remember the scene in Evangelion where Rei was coming out of the shower with only panties and a towel? Yeah, cosplay THAT. 04-22 00:44 2 hugs @GWOtaku Whenever you see someone with a "hug me" sign, you should totally do it. Preferably from behind! They didn't say HOW. 04-22 00:44 0 memes @andrepaploo @MichaelToole Who knows? Repeat internet memes endlessly because everyone loves memes! 04-22 00:45 2 memes @tondog 4chan is real life. It's totally OK to shout out whatever is at the top of your mind. Go ahead. Nobody will mind. 04-22 00:45 0 dealers @andrepaploo Buy that skeezy Evangelion merchandise, because Gainax won't make anymore EVAR! 04-22 00:45 1 staff @MichaelToole Your con staff job is MUCH more important than your real job. Or your health! Or your finances. 04-22 00:45 0 hotel @Cadha13 Ask the Motel management why there are no Onsen there! And Demand for same room privileges too! 04-22 00:47 2 management @blackbluesock Yeah, the con chair got arrested for a felony and is a known pedophile? So what? 04-22 00:47 3 elevators @DasGreggo The happening place to be after hours at an anime convention? The elevator, baby. Up and down, all night. 04-22 00:47 0 panels @Gaijinder All you need to do for an "educational" panel is just play 2 1/2 hours of clips and 5 minutes of actual info! 04-22 00:48 0 food @rpguy_ad Eating is overrated, and dealers take credit cards. Don't let groceries get in the way of that Yoko statue! 04-22 00:48 0 staff @ANNZac If you're staff, make sure you treat every problem, no matter how minor, as though it's a gigantic stress catastrophe. 04-22 00:48 0 memes @Cadha13 Just buy a Minolta Maxxum 9000 and add a +1 and say it's over 9000! 04-22 00:49 1 dealers @GWOtaku that fat guy in the dealer's room that wants to sell you yaoi is a great person and definitely fascinating to talk to. 04-22 00:49 0 weapons @Gaijinder You can TOTALLY fight in the halls w/ weapons you just bought! Come up with your own unique way of holding them, too! 04-22 00:50 -1 staff @blackbluesock Never thank your staff. Ever. They don't need positive reinforcement. 04-22 00:50 -1 panels @rpguy_ad Heckling the panelists isn't just allowed - it's encouraged. Give those spoony bards a piece of your mind! 04-22 00:50 0 staff @andrepaploo Hissing at staff is an excellent way to let them know who's boss! 04-22 00:51 0 hugs @tondog If you must glomp, be sure to run though as many people as possible. It's more fun that way. 04-22 00:51 2 staff @andrepaploo When volunteering, employ Emo attitude for maximum chance of advancement! Because you're teh mature! 04-22 00:51 0 cosplay @Athena_chan Cosplay is the most important thing you do. Feel free to skip out on work or school to make sure it's finished for the con! 04-22 00:51 -1 hygiene @aresef Deodorant is optional. Raves are not. 04-22 00:52 -1 ego @Cadha13 Throwing food and heckling is a great way to say you are boss! 04-22 00:52 0 management @blackbluesock As a con chair, you totally have a right to go chill in the hot tub with a hot girl instead of working with your girlfriend 04-22 00:52 0 yaoi @ElfGrove Everybody's a fan of yaoi. Hit that random person with your yaoi paddle. Better yet, molest the cosplayers! 04-22 00:52 3 memes @lwelyk All Your Base NEVER gets old. 04-22 00:52 0 cosplay @spacecoyotl my non-sarcastic : Dear Hetalia cosplayers, don't do this: http://bit.ly/b74Jsq 04-22 00:53 0 cosplay @SirInsania Make cosplaying as a schoolkid the highlight of your creativity. A real school uniform will suffice just fine. 04-22 00:53 0 industry @Cadha13 just broadcast your blog to everyone and say you're in the biz. 04-22 00:55 6 guests @ElfGrove Those voice actors totally write & produce anime. Show them your script or homemade manga. 04-22 00:55 1 cosplay @Gaijinder Going to an Asian Marketplace? You'll totally blend in wearing your Inu-Yasha cosplay! 04-22 00:56 0 gameshow @DasGreggo Your game show is the best event going on right now and everyone should come...oh shit, that one's vanity. Sorry, sorry! 04-22 00:57 0 elitism @MarcFBR Bleach, One Piece, Naruto, Digimon, etc. are actually mature shows, you just need to explain why to everyone! 04-22 00:57 2 hygiene @djranmas Soap is your best friend. 04-22 00:57 0 staff @blackbluesock Planning out the video room is the most important detail. 04-22 00:57 1 memes @Cadha13 Saying your favorite characters lines NEVER get old. 04-22 00:59 0 panels @blackbluesock Being a panelist gives you the right to be an elitist and insult others for not holding your high values. 04-22 01:00 1 ecchi @Cadha13 Asking a cosplayer to be your waifu totally acceptable. 04-22 01:00 2 elitism @rpguy_ad New fans will totally laugh at your jokes against their favorite shows! Elitism rocks! 04-22 01:02 0 ego @emperorj Everyone knows Miyazaki could never direct anything as deep as Mars of Destruction, just tell everyone. 04-22 01:02 0 cosplay @Velvet_Jones @Gaijinder If you plan to wear cat ears, just don't. You'll have much dignity leftover if you follow this tip. 04-22 01:02 0 industry @Godlen Remember to ask FUNimation during their industry panel if they will make a Naruto game for the Playstation 4. 04-22 01:02 0 guests @djranmas Voice actors and actresses love it when you ask them to sign the hentai doujin with the character they voiced in it. 04-22 01:04 0 health @janaiblog Your money and health do not matter during con weekend. Buy that $200 1/8 Rei figure and eat that triple bacon melt. 04-22 01:04 4 hugs @zerochan I don't want your free hugs, because you are a gross, unbathed, hygenically disgusting human being. 04-22 01:04 0 health @GTebbetts Yeah, drink on Wednesday, 'cause you're living on Pop-Tarts and coffee 'til Sunday night. 04-22 01:05 1 industry @DickMcVengeance @Godlen Adding to that Don't forget to ask them if they're going to license X series, because it's so awesome. 04-22 01:05 -2 booze @Chunlichan underage drinking laws do not apply at cons. Same for unwanted groping, drugs, and public drunkenness. 04-22 01:06 2 meta @andrepaploo Anime cons are great, Attendees and Staff are always awesome, and avoiding the excesses mentioned on #animeconprotip is a good idea! 04-22 01:06 1 schedule @magicalemi If you're organizing a con, be sure to pick the hotel with the religious fundamentalist convention the same weekend. 04-22 01:06 1 ecchi @blackbluesock Go ahead. Hang on that hot underage girl all con and demand her attention 24/7. She'll love it. 04-22 01:07 1 guests @zerochan The VAs really do care about the 18+ fanfic you wrote involving the characters they voiced! Be sure to have them act it! 04-22 01:07 1 ecchi @Gaijinder Know Your Make Out Spots: Elevator @ 2AM, on/under stairs, during a panel, or if you're daring--Opening Ceremonies. 04-22 01:07 0 skits @Chunlichan make sure your masquerade skits mention yaoi, or they will suck! 04-22 01:07 -2 ecchi @blackbluesock If a girl is at an anime con, she doesn't mind being degraded to a sexual object. That's what anime is about! 04-22 01:08 1 hotel @amwashington Cram a dozen people into your single hotel room. When housekeeping comes, yell "Everybody hide!" 04-22 01:08 1 hygiene @GNitro NO! Showers are necessary! RT @DasGreggo: Two words. Showers? Overrated. 04-22 01:08 -1 videogames @zerochan You don't need any strange, interesting Japanese imports in the game room when you have Street Fighter IV and Brawl! 04-22 01:08 1 consuite @tondog Consuite = Good replacement for regular food. Use it for all your food needs. 04-22 01:09 0 seating @rpguy_ad can't get a good seat? climb on someone's shoulders! They'll be happy to hold you up for a better view! 04-22 01:09 0 ecchi @Cadha13 Make sure that you vent your perverse ways to others, like #4chan. 04-22 01:09 1 hugs @miwasatoshi Free glomp signs aren't obnoxious or creepy, they're AWESOME. 04-22 01:09 1 fanart @MaximoLorenzo If you're in artist alley be sure to take up 14 tables with carbon copy generic artwork. After all it is Walmartists alley. 04-22 01:10 0 yaoi @stringedsonata I'm sure those hot guys cosplaying as Cloud and Sephiroth would LOVE to make out with each other on your request! 04-22 01:10 0 sleep @djranmas Getting a hotel room is overrated. Just chill out in the 24-hour video room, staff won't mind. 04-22 01:11 3 water @Godlen be sure to bring lots of dollars, since ICE COLD WATER is ONE DOLLAR 04-22 01:11 1 yaoi @stringedsonata If said cosplayers say no? They're just playing hard to get and you should keep asking them to "yaoi for you" all weekend! 04-22 01:11 2 press @rpguy_ad Your facebook page TOTALLY qualifies you for press status, and don't let ANYBODY tell you differently! 04-22 01:11 1 stereotypes @blackbluesock If a girl gets angry, she's just a tsundere. That dere will come out soon. 04-22 01:11 1 hallways @miwasatoshi Who cares about traffic flow? All cosplay photos should happen amongst the biggest crowds! 04-22 01:11 0 subs @aresef Working on a fansub automatically makes you fluent in Japanese. 04-22 01:12 0 facepalm @janaiblog When the normies outside the con ask what the con is for, tell them it's about super kawaii Japanese cartoons. 04-22 01:12 -2 useful @kaine23 Use the coffee maker or microwave for ramen noodles. 04-22 01:12 0 ecchi @Cadha13 Make sure that you bring your little sister to the con, she'll be bigger than the guests in popularity. 04-22 01:12 0 fanart @spacekase @MaximoLorenzo REMEMBER: Nothing but mid-shot, 3/4 view busts of Naruto characters standing around, please! 04-22 01:13 1 parents @rpguy_ad See a clueless parent escorting their kid? Feel free to tell them all about lolicon and how awesome it is! 04-22 01:13 -1 management @Lea_Hernandez As head of the Green Room, it is your job to make your friends, not the guests, as comfortable as possible. 04-22 01:13 3 videogames @DasGreggo Yeah, that green cloud in the video game room? Totally not toxic. Come on in! 04-22 01:13 1 donny @terebifunhouse it's all about not doing what Donny Don't doesn't do...'nt. 04-22 01:13 0 ecchi @miwasatoshi Cosplayers are ALWAYS legal, so con hookups are totally risk-free! 04-22 01:13 0 guests @GTebbetts Best way to get a staff autograph? Ask the translator to get it for you. He's got plenty of time on his hands. 04-22 01:13 1 elevators @aresef The average elevator can hold 15 people or more. 04-22 01:14 -3 cosplay @kaine23 buying your costume at Hot Topic = popular and well-known cosplayer. 04-22 01:14 0 dance @RubyCosmos Hotel/conference centre hallways are sad and boring places. Caramelldansen helps. 04-22 01:14 0 cosplay @Chunlichan cosplaying as Edea or some other large headpiece character? Go ahead and sit in front! No one will mind! 04-22 01:14 -1 dealers @djranmas We love it when you say you're coming back to our dealer table later! I have no problem holding that shirt for you! :D 04-22 01:14 0 transport @Gaijinder The Rave Conga Line is the best method of transport this side of the subway. 04-22 01:15 0 panels @janaiblog During a panel, be sure to argue with the panelists as much as possible. No one at all will find you annoying, trust me. 04-22 01:16 0 cosplay @RubyCosmos Write real tiny on your cosplay entry form and use long faux-Japanese names. The masquerade MC accepts your challenge! 04-22 01:16 0 photos @Cadha13 Always state the brand of your camera, before taking the shot. 04-22 01:17 0 management @Lea_Hernandez Con chair, it is your job to take the Japanese guests off-site for a 6-hour dinner on Sat. afternoon. You've earned it. 04-22 01:17 1 ecchi @janaiblog That lolicon you bought in the dealers room should be kept in a clear plastic bag so everyone can see how hardcore you are. 04-22 01:18 0 yaoi @rpguy_ad Show random people your favorite parts of those yaoi doujinshi you just bought! They'll appreciate your enthusiasm! 04-22 01:18 0 rules @misuzulive Something you normally wouldn't or shouldn't do, why not - it's probably okay here! 04-22 01:19 9 keepdreaming @RubyCosmos Girls go to cons specifically to find boyfriends. Boyfriends just like you. 04-22 01:19 0 ecchi @MichaelToole You met a hottie at the dance, and brought em back to the room, but it's occupied! That's OK, just get busy in the hallway. 04-22 01:19 2 facepalm @odin047 When the normies outside the con ask what the con is for, tell them it's about Nazi Catgirls in Bikinis 04-22 01:20 2 revpsych @Godlen Fan girls: God Len would totally not like it if you sat on his lap and licked his face. 04-22 01:20 0 dealers @Gaijinder Tell vendors how you won't buy any "old stuff". Because anime didn't exist before 2003! 04-22 01:21 0 fanart @vsatone @MaximoLorenzo Only draw really young looking girls with huge eyes and vacant expressions. Dodge and burn coloring a plus. 04-22 01:22 0 ecchi @Cadha13 Vocaloid Incest is TOTALLY in style and prepare for RinXLen Cosplay. 04-22 01:23 0 management @Lea_Hernandez Giving that creepy guy convicted of a federal crime a chance to do his parole-required public service is a great idea! 04-22 01:23 1 games @rpguy_ad Nothing says you're a good sport of a gamer like ragequitting and calling your opponent four-letter words. 04-22 01:24 2 hugs @DarkIceXIII If you're carrying around a free hug sign, be careful. There's a strong chance Pedobear is present, and you're asking for it. 04-22 01:24 2 weapons @colonydrop Always remember to check your bokken in with Otherkin Furry Yomiko Readman at the desk. 04-22 01:26 1 management @nikoscream When starting a con, be sure you have never gone to one before & don't check to see if one is in town the same weekend. 04-22 01:26 0 memes @janaiblog During Anime Pictionary, it's a good idea to yell "IT'S A JACKAL!" lots of times. This joke will never get old. 04-22 01:27 0 photos @Godlen Camera + Cosplayer + Escalator = Perfect picture opportunity! 04-22 01:28 0 skits @janaiblog If you're in the Cosplay Masquerade, make sure your skit is from KH2, FMA, or Bleach. No one cares about anything else. 04-22 01:29 1 staff @jvowles A great way to get rich and have a fulfilling social life is to staff an anime convention. It's great for your career, too! 04-22 01:30 0 cosplay @theariman If your favorite voice actor is at the con, cosplay as a character he or she voices. The meta jokes will write themselves! 04-22 01:30 2 dance @RubyCosmos How to run lights for the rave: 1) Leave the strobes on. 2) Pat yourself on the back. You're done! 04-22 01:30 1 hallways @kittykatya Get 50 of your friends; find the most-used hallway; take up all the space & dance like idiots. The fire marshals dig that. 04-22 01:31 2 useful @ichigosundae There's a lot you can can do with the in room coffee maker. (hot water = anything instant win) 04-22 01:32 0 clothes @Cadha13 Get your local Anime Club to wear the same clothes and storm the Dealer's Room and the Video room. 04-22 01:32 0 cosplay @Gaijinder Stormtroopers are totally relevant. 04-22 01:33 0 japanese @8c RT @witchbernkastel DESU ISN'T FUNNY/CUTE AND RECENT ANYMORE. stop it. // she's right~desu 04-22 01:34 0 hygiene @theariman Time spent showering takes away from time spent blowing your money in the dealers' room. 04-22 01:34 0 fanart @sw_inku @MaximoLorenzo make sure that their hands are tastefully behind their backs or cropped off at the wrist! Hands ruin pics 04-22 01:36 0 hygiene @ichigosundae So what if the guy next to you smells like he rolled in something dead, consider it an endurance challenge! YOU CAN DO IT! 04-22 01:36 0 food @Cadha13 Ask the Con Staff where the ramen shop is. 04-22 01:37 0 rules @RubyCosmos If you don't like an event's rules, tell staff to bend them for you. They'll do it because you're special. 04-22 01:38 0 skits @odin047 If you're in the Cosplay Masquerade, make sure your skit is a musical or poorly choreographed. No 1 cares bout anything else 04-22 01:38 1 hygiene @redthehaze SHOWERING IS NOT OPTIONAL. 04-22 01:39 0 cosplay @theariman EVERYONE loves original character cosplay! 04-22 01:40 1 hygiene @ichigosundae It's quite simple to create a wand that disguises a can of Febreze. You are now Magical Girl Hygiene-Chan! 04-22 01:43 -1 hygiene @aresef @redthehaze A few sprays of Axe will do just fine. 04-22 01:43 2 schedule @DasGreggo Your hotel is also hosting a Christian convention? Oh, do your best to MAKE THEIR LIVES MISERABLE, YOU'RE HARDCORE YO. 04-22 01:44 -3 health @jvowles Don't drink water, eat properly, or prepare in any way to take care of yourself -- con staff are just like your parents! 04-22 01:45 0 rules @RubyCosmos Remember, you're attending the con -- the hotel is incidental. Therefore, hotel rules don't apply to you. 04-22 01:45 1 schedule @Cadha13 Drive the guy who is most likely to start a war with the Christian Con goers and make sure he wears a wife beater too. 04-22 01:46 1 booze @taitaisanchez Know your god damned drinking limits. 04-22 01:47 -2 health @ichigosundae No, really. You can totally survive on that box of pocky and expired liter of calpis. You are heap strong otaku! 04-22 01:47 1 clothes @Cadha13 wearing decent clothes is optional, but drinking is not. 04-22 01:48 1 hygiene @ManaisanOtaku Shower. Every day. Dear god, please just shower! 04-22 01:48 0 ick @neumaverick No matter how tired or drunk you are never EVER shit on the hotel lobby couch! God I wish this wasn't based on true events. 04-22 01:48 0 hygiene @shoujokakumei Take a shower. Every day. Really. Body spray is not an acceptable substitute. Baby wipes will do in an emergency ONLY. 04-22 01:49 0 ecchi @ManaisanOtaku Her cleavage is hanging out? You are NOT allowed to put your face in it! 04-22 01:49 0 ecchi @Godlen Remember the rule of equivalent exchange: 1 box of Pocky = 1 blow job. 04-22 01:51 2 hallways @animevice Quit f@%#ing STOPPING at the bottom of STAIRS and ESCALATORS and right outside DOORS. Seriously. People are trying to MOVE. 04-22 01:53 0 clothes @Cadha13 Only hot men can be topless, everyone agrees. 04-22 01:53 0 cosplay @Mor3ndo Everyone has something to say about #animeconprotip. Mine would be to avoid all cosplay contests at any costs. 04-22 01:54 1 ecchi @skeletalknight Don't be a hot girl alone. 04-22 01:54 -1 food @IFollowBunny You cannot survive on Pocky and Ramen 04-22 01:55 -1 panels @jvowles Everyone came to the con to hear you ask the guest the same question you missed when you showed up late! 04-22 01:56 0 vawork @DasGreggo You're just one step away from becoming a voice actor, all you have to do is ask one of the guests how to get into the biz! 04-22 01:59 3 guests @jvowles Yes, the Japanese pop star really does want a marriage proposal from an underaged sweaty nerd. Go for it! 04-22 01:59 0 ego @djranmas Having drinks with guests and industry people at the bar on Friday night means you're the man and everyone worships you. 04-22 02:00 1 industry @neumaverick When yelling at company rep on said company's terrible dub for show A be sure said company actually owns show A. 04-22 02:00 1 cosplay @theariman Feel free to make fun of Pokemon cosplayers, even if they are older, larger and stronger than you, and practice martial arts 04-22 02:01 -1 ego @Cadha13 Saying you're part of the local Anime Club makes you the boss of the territory. 04-22 02:01 -1 cosplay @alexalectric If you cosplay a popular character from a popular series, everyone loves you, so go ahead and act like you run the place. 04-22 02:01 1 industry @MarcFBR @neumaverick Don't forget to ask company A when they will announce show X, despite company B releasing it next week. 04-22 02:01 -2 rules @Thedigitalbug during opening ceremonies, be sure to ask if it's possible to attend 2 VERY popular panels back to back in the same room 04-22 02:02 -2 hugs @typo1138 Ignore that cosplayer saying they don't want you to "glomp" them. That's secretly exactly what they want! 04-22 02:03 -1 screaming @odin047 The staff needs your help! Be sure to yell at anyone who you see. FEAR WILL KEEP THEM IN LINE!!! 04-22 02:04 4 yaoi @verbthatnoun Thank god that guy is screaming "Yaoi!" I would've never found it otherwise. 04-22 02:04 -1 industry @odin047 Be sure to ask the American companies to make better anime. 04-22 02:05 0 dance @RubyCosmos Feel free to get up onstage to dance at the rave. Remember, you're one of the cool ones. And the DJ gets lonely. 04-22 02:05 0 yaoi @AJtheFourth If you don't know what, 'no climax no point no meaning' means, take down that 'will yaoi for money' sign. Yaoi is not a verb 04-22 02:06 2 hallways @omonomono @animevice i made the same mistake. Always hang out by the narrowest part of the hallway so you won't miss your friend 04-22 02:06 -1 vawork @rpguy_ad stalk the FUNimation reps while claiming to be the next Vic Mignogna. You'll get a contract for sure! 04-22 02:08 1 cosplay @neumaverick We truly believe that you are a big Mr. Po Po fan, we really do. There is no need for the blackface make-up to prove it. 04-22 02:09 0 japanese @ichigosundae So what if the Japanese you know is "kawaii!!!" You go tell that company their translations are all wrong. 04-22 02:09 1 cosplay @ExecutiveOtaku Don't cosplay a male character who wears a long red coat unless you're ready to tell 90% of people that you're NOT ALUCARD! 04-22 02:10 0 cosplay @verbthatnoun It's okay to PDA if it's arguably in-character. 04-22 02:11 1 cosplay @ladybot The cops will obviously recognize you as Naked Snake with a prop gun outside on Boylston Street, not a guy in militia gear. 04-22 02:15 0 cosplay @Cadha13 Cosplaying as your favorite Anime Director is NOT creepy. 04-22 02:17 0 japanese @Willr123 Jump to 5:10. This is what your "Fluent Japanese" sounds like, congoer. http://bit.ly/9NSylW 04-22 02:17 2 schedule @neumaverick If there is a wedding taking place at the con hotel be respectful. Only crash the reception if dressed similar to Tuxedo Max 04-22 02:19 -1 yaoi @aresef Yaoi paddles are how you say hello. 04-22 02:20 2 bootleg @neito Take a notepad into the dealers room so you can write down the names of all the anime you want to pirate when you get home. 04-22 02:21 0 cosplay @soymilkpudding If someone else is cosplaying the same character as you, you're required by law to point out every mistake in their costume. 04-22 02:22 2 ego @djranmas Standing in the hot sun at the Baltimore CC 7am Thursday to be #1 for your badge pickup makes you the man! BE PROUD! 04-22 02:23 1 keepdreaming @sasuraiger The anime con maid will fall in love with you if you keep calling her back to the table to stare into her beautiful eyes 04-22 02:25 -1 transport @Cadha13 Make sure when driving, you don't sleep or take a shower before going to the con. 04-22 02:28 1 crossplay @alexalectric Being the "genderbent casual" version of your favorite male character is cool and unique. A lot of thought is required. 04-22 02:28 2 transport @Cadha13 When driving, take plenty of Pocky, canned coffee and ramen for roadside meals. 04-22 02:33 0 cosplay @odin047 If someone else is cosplaying the same character as you, you're required by law strangle them. yeah you V cosplayer. 04-22 02:34 0 vawork @Black_ReaperHei it's ok to stalk people from professional anime companies and demand they hire you as a Voice Actor. 04-22 02:34 -2 food @DasGreggo You can totally live off Pocky and Ramune all weekend. 04-22 02:35 -1 ecchi @Black_ReaperHei it's ok to only watch moe shows and loli shows and tell people about it. They won't think you are a pedo at all. 04-22 02:37 1 keepdreaming @Black_ReaperHei the ladies would be impressed by how many figures you own and how your favorite anime character is a high school girl. 04-22 02:39 1 cosplay @Black_ReaperHei It's ok to dress half-naked as long as it's part of the cosplay. Also shaving? Fuck that shit. 04-22 02:40 2 keepdreaming @Thedigitalbug Big convention? Bring plenty of condoms with you... 04-22 02:41 0 cosplay @Black_ReaperHei you should always be loyal to your waifu even if some slut cosplays as your waifu. Remember it's not really her. 04-22 02:42 0 cosplay @Cadha13 Wear makeup, a dress, and bring a guitar. Call yourself a member of an obscure Visual Kei band. 04-22 02:42 3 keepdreaming @kamanashi @Thedigitalbug And don't forget the lube. 04-22 02:49 -1 hygiene @Black_ReaperHei Showering is for fags. Be a man and let people smell YOUR MANLINESS THAT WILL IMPRESS ALL THE LADIES. 04-22 02:51 0 cosplay @Cadha13 Show up in a white button down shirt and black pants call yourself the worst person in the world. "Ikari, Shinji Ikari" 04-22 02:59 -1 vawork @Driverbob there's a good chance those voice actors are secretly talent scouts. Ask them how to get started as a VA, sure to impress! 04-22 03:01 -1 rules @Driverbob there is always time for "just one more" autograph, just ask the staffer watching the line, they'll take care of you! 04-22 03:05 1 hygiene @nekonezume Leave your soap and deodorant at home. 04-22 03:09 1 health @djranmas The con plague is a rite of passage. You'll be fine in 6 hours, tops! :D 04-22 03:10 0 press @FistoftheMFK Anime Journalists always know how the convention is being run and what the intentions are! 04-22 03:12 0 memes @Mor3ndo I just remembered the best #animeconprotip. Don't quote 4chan memes and attitudes. It makes you a goddamn loser. 04-22 03:12 0 dubs @neumaverick 90's dub quality always creates a stir of interesting and well thought out debate. Except Shinesman. Shinesman was awesome. 04-22 03:13 0 thegame @Mor3ndo There are few things more annoying than kids who think they are cool when they get to say old things like "I lost the game!" 04-22 03:15 3 guests @Black_ReaperHei NEVER MAKE FUN OF VIC IN FRONT OF HIS FANGIRLS. They are like demons sent from hell to serve their master. 04-22 03:18 0 ego @vlumayag It's totally fine to show off your superior knowledge in all things anime (and NOT come off as a total ass). 04-22 03:19 0 japanese @DasGreggo @DJRanmaS srsly, and while we're at it, We all love it when you scream in fangirl Japanese...KAWAII BAKA NEKO FOREVAHHHH 04-22 03:19 -1 guests @tjandamal Follow your favorite guest back to their hotel room. They'll appreciate your devotion and dedication. 04-22 03:20 0 music @Cadha13 Singing Anime theme songs make you quite the individual. 04-22 03:21 1 cosplay @greyrondo Cosplayers, save your most sweltering costumes for summer conventions. And wait for the AC to fail in the panel rooms. 04-22 03:21 0 guests @vlumayag Personally, I enjoy when fangirls tell me about their favorite VA and their endless attempts in tracking them down. 04-22 03:23 1 dance @Black_ReaperHei Dancing for no reason what so ever is the best way of showing people how awesome u are 04-22 03:24 3 management @tjandamal Giving your staff necessary information shrinks your peen! Make sure NO ONE has the info they need to run their department. 04-22 03:24 -1 screaming @kamanashi @Black_ReaperHei Don't forget running around screaming for no good reason. 04-22 03:25 -1 management @DasGreggo @tjandamal If you're head of Artist Alley, it's best not to let anyone except your close personal friends get tables. 04-22 03:26 0 thegame @tjandamal the only thing more hilarious than THE GAME is "all your base" and speaking in 1337. 04-22 03:27 -1 dealers @tjandamal Dealer's room rules don't apply to you. Nazi memorabilia and poorly made bootlegs, go! 04-22 03:28 0 photos @rspeed Nobody can tell you're a pervert if you use a telephoto lens. 04-22 03:28 1 cosplay @GlenWien If you notice you've been having difficulty getting a date then maybe you should stop wearing your costume in public lol 04-22 03:29 1 cosplay @serenityfails Color hair spray and a cheap t-shirt with words written on it combine to create a well-crafted and recognizable costume! 04-22 03:29 1 guests @jsyadao Proper things to ask guests to do: Repeat their signature lines; answer 2 questions at once; answer inane Q's for your meme. 04-22 03:29 0 photos @Cadha13 When taking photos, always take photos of the Asians, even of you are in Oregon. 04-22 03:30 3 facepalm @tjandamal if you meet a gay couple, ask them to kiss so you can squee at them. It is totally not insulting or jaw-droppingly rude. 04-22 03:31 2 guests @jsyadao Also, monopolize a guest's time in panels. Those other people waiting to ask questions aren't important. It's ALL YOU, BABY! 04-22 03:31 0 management @uminomamori Absolutely never answer emails from people who want to participate in events and/or gave you money. 04-22 03:31 -3 hugs @tjandamal if someone declines your offer of free hugs, hug them anyway. Who doesn't love being touched by strangers? 04-22 03:33 2 health @GlenWien If you run across an attractive blue woman in a restaurant she's probably not from Pandora but instead choking on her food 04-22 03:34 0 health @uminomamori Stock up on pixie sticks and coffee. Then don't eat anything real all day. 04-22 03:34 1 kids @Cadha13 Think of the Children! Bring your friends. 04-22 03:34 3 kids @DasGreggo If you're 12 years old and your parents just dropped you off outside, NO PROBLEM, COME ON IN. 04-22 03:35 2 management @tjandamal Never, ever send out exhibitor registration confirmations. It will undermine your aura of ~*mystery*~ 04-22 03:35 -1 ecchi @Black_ReaperHei Remember that if they look old enough to have fun with then it's ok to take that lucky guy or girl to your hotel room 04-22 03:36 0 ecchi @FistoftheMFK if you see a girl who poses naked on the internet for an adult cosplay site, it's okay to ask her if she'll have sex for $$$ 04-22 03:36 2 ecchi @uminomamori Go around artist alley asking 15 year old girls to draw you porn. They'll be too creeped out to say no! 04-22 03:38 2 food @onac911 It's ok to buy pocky sticks and ramune for about 20 bucks 04-22 03:39 1 crossplay @RayAyanami_PUB If you're an overweight 35-year-old man, make sure to cosplay as a 17-year-old girl. It's totally not #nightmarefuel! 04-22 03:41 0 ecchi @GlenWien hanging out around aquaman is probably your best chance of getting that fish smell on you lol 04-22 03:41 6 skits @tjandamal the ideal length for a cosplay skit show is between 5 and 8 hours. 04-22 03:42 0 cosplayl @Mister_Retro Wearing a white shirt, blue jeans, and no shoes will get you laid. You'll be the best L cosplayer there, even without a wig! 04-22 03:42 2 anagram @DasGreggo "I love tentacles" anagrammed is "It Cleanest Love." Think about it. 04-22 03:44 0 cosplay @Cadha13 Wear a trenchcoat, a Casio G-shock and have a camera. Instant Speed Grapher, not a creepy dude. 04-22 03:45 0 ecchi @RayAyanami_PUB The ideal hentai room? Nothing but Pleasure Island and Night Shift Nurses. 04-22 03:46 2 cosplay @ohkatsu If you're a female cosplayer, treat every problem, no matter how minor, as though it's a gigantic stress catastrophe. 04-22 03:47 0 feedback @ExecutiveOtaku When attending any other con, it's always polite to remind everyone how this or that event was better at Otakon. 04-22 03:47 0 screaming @uminomamori Holding a screaming contest for freebies at your Artist Alley table is an awesome idea. 04-22 03:47 0 crossplay @onsenmark You're a big fat dude with a beard? You wanna cosplay as either Kei or Yuri? Go right ahead! You'll be the hit of the con! 04-22 03:47 0 ecchi @HaroldClark That creepy guy who took your pic? Don't worry, he won't masturbate to them! :D 04-22 03:49 0 skits @Himemiya no one has EVER done a dance skit! 04-22 03:49 1 meta @Rilkar Retweet every #animeconprotip you read. The people searching it really like reading the same ones five times in a row. 04-22 03:51 0 memes @Black_ReaperHei Yelling old and dead memes to random people is a great way of getting attention 04-22 03:51 -1 weapons @Cadha13 Hold a play fight in the dealer's room, with their own swords. 04-22 03:57 -1 weapons @maridahhadiram Volunteer at the con and act like a total ass to everyone about peacebonding. It's the only way to earn people's respect. 04-22 03:58 0 photos @cosplayshots Only take pictures of cosplayers jumping off of stairs. All other photos suck. 04-22 03:59 0 staff @Cadha13 Ask the con staff where do they keep the Chocobos. 04-22 04:00 1 creepy @ladybot That person over there would love to talk about The Slayers with you, and so would I. 04-22 04:01 -1 ick @Rammykun pee on your seat at a big panel. You'll thank me later 04-22 04:01 -1 hotel @ladybot Everyone really appreciates your cleverness when you write messages on the windows of your hotel room with bars of soap. 04-22 04:03 0 hotel @Cadha13 Write out your love for a character with soap on the sidewalk. Before it rains. 04-22 04:03 2 cosplaynazi @ladybot You show those free-speech-oppressing con organizers what for: wear your Nazi regalia, especially on Easter/Passover. 04-22 04:04 -1 cosplay @maridahhadiram If you don't have time to make a costume, it's okay to glue cotton balls to a bra and go as 'Sexy Naruto'. Wig is optional. 04-22 04:06 0 thegame @cosplayshots Screaming "YOU JUST LOST THE GAME" at everybody in the convention center is ALWAYS cool and original! 04-22 04:06 1 hygiene @Kevin4theWin Soap and Deodorant are your best friend use them lavishly! Every day of the con! 04-22 04:06 -1 dealers @ladybot The best place to settle a dispute with the dealers' room coordinator is in the men's room. Be sure to yell so he can hear. 04-22 04:07 -1 memes @Cadha13 Scream every time you hear "chair", especially at Fanime. 04-22 04:12 -1 drugs @ladybot The convention dance is probably a safe enough place to sell meth, so don't worry about trying to conceal your activities. 04-22 04:13 0 guests @Rammykun go around saying you're Vic Mignogna. Watch all the ass come to you. 04-22 04:15 1 press @rpguy_ad A press badge is a golden ticket that allows you to be as big of a jerk as you want. Work? Pfft! That's for suckers! 04-22 04:16 0 industry @Cadha13 Say that you are from Funimation and see all of the fans swarm you. 04-22 04:16 2 crossplay @Rammykun if it looks like a chick, it's a dude. If it's a dude, it's a chick. But in the end, you win 04-22 04:19 1 stereotypes @Cadha13 If the cosplayer is Lucy from Elfen Lied, she's a yandere and you should make her drunk and unleash her to the public. 04-22 04:20 2 elevators @pdelahanty You paid HOW MUCH to go to the convention and you're just going to spend it riding the elevator up and down? 04-22 04:22 0 dance @DasGreggo You know what would be HILARIOUS? A CONGA LINE. DO IT. DO IT NOW! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! 04-22 04:22 2 staff @jvowles Never provide your REAL contact information to the con staff responsible for issuing your reimbursement. That'll show 'em! 04-22 04:24 2 useful @zioncleric Bring something to pass the time while waiting. Be sure that thing has extra batteries. 04-22 04:24 2 amv @lheiskell You have this great idea for a Drama AMV contest entry. Ah! My Goddess Movie. Yes! No one has done that before. 04-22 04:27 0 hotel @jvowles You should definitely put off getting your hotel room until the last minute. Nobody goes to #Otakon anyway, right? 04-22 04:30 1 schedule @jvowles Immediately discard your program book, then complain that there's nothing to do in the 30 rooms of programming. 04-22 04:30 1 water @zioncleric Hah! Who needs "water"? You can run perfectly fine on Mountain Dew and packets of sugar for 3 days! 04-22 04:31 1 ego @jvowles When participating in any public discussion, it's best to assume everyone shares your narrow tastes and extreme opinions. 04-22 04:32 1 photos @jvowles The bottom of the escalators is the BEST place to stop people to get cosplayer photos. 04-22 04:32 0 marco @onsenmark There's ALWAYS time for a rousing game of Marco Polo! 04-22 04:33 1 amv @DasGreggo Submit an anime music video with Naruto footage, synced up perfectly to your favorite Limp Bizkit song. It'll be AWESOME. 04-22 04:36 -1 photos @Cadha13 Always take photos near stairs, escalators and motel room windows. 04-22 04:39 1 weeaboo @akitafuki Weeaboos are the best people to strike up a conversation with. 04-22 04:39 0 weapons @SpiralReverie #Latetothegame Open weapon bans are a SUGGESTION, and for pussies. People will respect you for waving a gun in their face! 04-22 04:49 0 hygiene @onsenmark Who the hell has TIME to shower? You might MISS something! 04-22 04:52 0 creepy @maridahhadiram Start long, one-sided conversations with total strangers about how you write in your death note. People find that sexy. 04-22 04:58 0 cosplay @akitafuki It's polite to fawn over cosplayers and bombard them with questions. 04-22 05:01 0 dealers @ichigosundae @jvowles That drives me crazy! Also, you don't need to take off *huge cosplay prop* before entering the dealer's room. 04-22 05:02 0 cosplay @Cadha13 Just wear a brown pair of pants and green suit jacket, and start to make #deadpansnarker comments about this con. 04-22 05:08 0 fanart @sw_inku make sure to cover up your lack of actual art and prints by having a tv looping anime or some sort of video game at ur table 04-22 05:16 1 dance @Driverbob Conga Lines - learn em, love em, live em, especially in the dealers room. 04-22 05:26 0 health @ANN_Ed Yes, ambulances are part of the regular programing, don't worry (unless you're the person they're putting in it). 04-22 05:38 0 hotel @ANN_Ed You don't need to reserve a hotel room, ~someone~ will let you stay in theirs. 04-22 05:39 0 hotel @ANN_Ed If that doesn't work you can sleep in the hotel lobby, that's why they put out couches. 04-22 05:41 0 hotel @DasGreggo @ANN_Ed Or in the video rooms. Nobody ever thinks to check in there for sleepers. 04-22 05:41 0 hotel @otakureview Don't forget those dark convention center corners RT @ANN_Ed: If that doesn't work you can sleep in the hotel lobby 04-22 05:42 1 cosplay @debaoki cardboard boxes make swell costumes. sure, you won't be able to sit down or see where you're going, but POCKY is sexy, no? 04-22 05:50 -2 press @Kevin4theWin make sure you're on the press pass list for journalism like @Kevin4theWin & @Omega_Zed unlike other sites we're established! 04-22 06:51 5 videogames @uminomamori YES, please tell me about your RPG character's life history in depth. 04-22 07:23 0 memes @LoboJoe Remember to scream out memes at the top of your lungs. Everyone in the vicinity will be impressed at your wit. 04-22 11:36 -1 cosplay @skeletalknight If you're fat, cosplay as a fat character or don't cosplay at all. 04-22 11:54 0 ecchi @kyaathecatlord Be proud of your hentai dvd collection, advertise for a private viewing in your hotel room! No age limit! 04-22 12:32 0 cosplay @keithel Make sure you make the largest/most cumbersome, but most awesome costume so you require 7 people to help accept your award. 04-22 12:34 0 water @keithel Make sure you don't drink water so that you pass out during the dance. Wouldn't want to waste the EMTs that the con paid for 04-22 12:34 0 hallways @keithel The best place to play DDG is right in the middle of a busy hallway. 04-22 12:44 0 memes @agentbishie It's a shame this new generation is unaware of older memes. Bring back the classics like "CHAIR". We'll all appreciate it! 04-22 13:51 1 hallways @stardust462 best place to talk with your 15 friends? In the middle of the hallway. Everyone else can just find another way around. 04-22 13:53 0 cosplay @stardust462 Sure, you can still enter your costume you bought in the craftsmanship contest. Just make sure you know what a serger is. 04-22 14:13 0 rules @sdshamshel Being with tens of thousands of other people is just like being in a room by yourself, so you should act the same way! 04-22 14:14 0 music @tjandamal one last #animeconprotip - Everyone in the hotel wants to hear J-pop/trance at full blast. For extra courtesy, loop the same 3 tracks. 04-22 14:19 2 music @kyaathecatlord Yes, Carameldansen is the Mona Lisa of music and I'd love for you to blast it repeatedly outside my hotel room. 04-22 14:37 0 hygiene @ananawa Smelling fresh and clean always helps 04-22 14:45 1 lines @skeletalknight Get your shit signed and MOVE THE FUCK ON. 04-22 14:50 1 food @lady_bealzabub Remember to eat. Trust me. :P 04-22 14:55 0 useful @Vegete Don't buy the food at a vendor in the con. You can spend half that at the deli across the street. 04-22 15:10 0 cosplay @tristencitrine Don't bother bringing cosplay repair supplies. Someone will have a glue gun and you can use it for everything, even skin! 04-22 15:11 0 bootleg @jzeitler Make sure you get a CD signed by the guests. Remember, "Son May" is moonspeak for "totally legit, honest". 04-22 15:14 1 bootleg @keithel It's perfectly legit for Haruhi figs to come in Sailor Moon boxes! 04-22 15:14 1 booze @taitaisanchez Alcohol poisoning is a myth. One more shot! Be a man/woman/furry/otherkin! DO IT! 04-22 15:17 2 memes @jzeitler If attendance is just shy of 10k people, you know what to say. Do so at the top of your lungs, repeatedly. 04-22 15:33 0 ego @JLeeBly You're the only one that'll be using the convention center bathroom -- go ahead and destroy every stall early Friday. 04-22 15:37 0 hygiene @Jfreekao if you brought your own toiletries, do yourself a favour and chuck 'em at the door. 04-22 15:40 0 fanart @JLeeBly Are you an artist? Just bring 500 copies of two androgenous characters making out. It's like printing money. 04-22 15:53 0 panels @alexleavitt After the panel is over, swarm the panelists with questions, so the next panel knows just how awesome the previous one was. 04-22 15:56 0 cosplay @noushisubs there is no too fat and no too small sized 04-22 15:58 0 thegame @laureninspace The Game is of highest importance to everyone. Make sure to let other attendees know they've lost. 04-22 16:01 0 useful @11DBHK "FYE back home totally has it cheaper", especially if it is a newly-released, legit, import only figure / plush toy. 04-22 16:05 0 dealers @11DBHK make sure you wear many hooks, loops, and wooden swords, so rotating wildly in a dealer booth alerts you to damaged merch. 04-22 16:08 0 ecchi @JLeeBly Bring $1 bills, because like a strip club, there are plenty of well-endowed girls with low self-esteem and a shopping list. 04-22 16:11 0 dealers @11DBHK the proper starting offer when haggling for a $60 figure is 15, then 13. Putting things on hold w/o returning is a compliment 04-22 16:13 2 memes @11DBHK one more: Wearing a Guy Fawkes mask and yelling 'mudkip' is not only cool, but tells fellow attendees you are 'in the know'. 04-22 16:15 0 lines @HT5K Make extra sure to steer the registration line into the street. Everyone in town should see your awesome cosplay. 04-22 16:17 1 bootleg @11DBHK okay, just ONE more: Spend an hour asking for recommendations on manga from a vendor. Download them when you return home. 04-22 16:25 0 staff @codemastermm @11DBHK @HT5K #REGEX Make sure your volunteers ask every merchant for free swag; they love giving things to those who help 04-22 16:33 1 dance @codemastermm Doing the Haruhi dance is a perfect way to pick up women. Make sure to do it in front of escalators and main walkways 04-22 16:51 0 lists @pdelahanty Why look at the www.AnimeCons.com list when you can just email asking where the nearest con to you is? 04-22 16:57 0 cosplayl @onac911 As long as you wear a white shirt, blue jeans, and unwashed hair, you will slowly become the perfect L. 04-22 17:01 1 hallways @11DBHK To prevent overcrowding, spend as little time as possible in the main hallways - run at top speed from event to event. 04-22 17:02 0 useful @Besthpfan something that's 40 bucks in vendor room was 15 bucks across the street at Sears. true story. 04-22 17:03 0 cosplay @magelet Remember to make your cosplay as skimpy as possible, regardless of your weight. Less clothing is always TEH SEX. 04-22 17:05 0 dealers @Apreche Be first in line for the dealer's room, and you'll get special goodies that sell out immediately. 04-22 17:07 1 cosplay @magelet Remember, everyone loves it when a person with giant props blocks their view. Sit front and center in every panel. 04-22 17:10 0 crossplay @magelet When crossplaying a man, there is no need to bind your chest. No one will notice that the "guy" over there has tits. 04-22 17:31 0 kids @borrie Ask if your 14 y.o. friend next to you can get into the 18+ showing you're about to enter. The answer surely can't be no. 04-22 17:32 0 money @Theranthrope I you manage to squeeze $30 out of your parents for the dealer's room, remember to squeeze at least $5 out of them for food. 04-22 17:33 0 cosplay @Theranthrope Cosplay: shiny satin and hot glue, that's all you really need... 04-22 17:35 1 booze @Theranthrope a suitcase full of booze can open many a closed door to otherwise "private" room parties 04-22 17:37 0 cosplay @Theranthrope Cardboard Gundam: that NEVER gets old 04-22 17:39 0 useful @VuTTran Make sure your Final Fantasy item is out, so Nobuo Uematsu can sign it, instead of the plastic bag cover it's in. 04-22 17:42 0 guests @ananawa Yoshiyuki Tomino will make you cry and die a little on the inside 04-22 17:43 0 vegas @magelet Cons are like Vegas: what happens there, stays there. 04-22 17:50 0 photos @SakuraMikage Stunna shades and DAT ASS poses are a must for every cosplay photoshoot. 04-22 18:13 0 ecchi @Theranthrope "Yes, those ARE real. No, you may NOT check!" 04-22 18:15 0 hygiene @Theranthrope "...It's called Speedstick it's not expensive" 04-22 18:16 0 cosplay @Vegete dispite what @magelet says, Fit Otaku look better in skimpy cosplay. 04-22 18:17 0 hygiene @Theranthrope When in doubt: Febreze 04-22 18:17 2 fanfic @taitaisanchez Yes, he's paying attention to you talk about your fanfiction, no he's not staring at your chest. 04-22 18:20 0 weapons @Theranthrope "It's NERF or nothin'!" 04-22 18:22 0 yaoi @magelet And in that vein, It's an excellent idea to slip yaoi under the hotel room door of the infamous anti-gay VA. 04-22 18:25 2 booze @Theranthrope THE LIVER IS EVIL AND MUST BE PUNISHED! 04-22 18:27 1 yaoi @animesg Oh yes...VAs just love it when you ask them if they appreciate the dirty yaoi fanfics done of their characters. *sarcasm* 04-22 18:30 0 sleep @magelet SLEEP IS FOR THE WEAK!! 04-22 18:42 0 cosplay @Theranthrope "WHITE MAGE POWAH!" Is NEVER a good cosplay idea... 04-22 18:45 1 health @Theranthrope When you look at your sore and blistered feet at the con, think to yourself: "pain is weakness leaving the body" 04-22 18:47 -1 sleep @Theranthrope Who needs a hotel room when there's a perfectly good screening room to sleep in. 04-22 18:50 0 cosplay @axeonos wearing cosplay with a sign is good, wearing JUST the sign Bad 04-22 18:56 1 crossplay @axeonos well aren't you clever, you made a female version of a male character using just your boobs 04-22 18:58 0 ego @0taqueen Be sure always to speak your mind, even on the most controversial subjects. Fans love it when you keep it "real." 04-22 19:00 2 videogames @Theranthrope "Tatsunoko-what? Melty-who? Whoo! STREET FIGHTER IV!" 04-22 19:02 0 useful @heeroyuy135 Costco is your friend 04-22 19:03 2 food @Theranthrope Instant ramen is NOT one of the four food groups 04-22 19:05 -1 cosplay @axeonos doesn't matter how much you put into your cosplay, unless its seen on Adult Swim - no one will know who it is 04-22 19:14 0 ego @axeonos yes i spent nearly a fortune coming to this con JUST to hear all about your original character/how much you love that VA 04-22 19:20 1 management @tjandamal Whatever you do, don't let the guests find out until they arrive that they're staying at the Crackhouse Hotel. 04-22 19:23 0 staff @axeonos never mind that the staff are doing their jobs, working the past 9 months before to get this con ready, they're still lazy 04-22 19:29 1 management @JLeeBly Guest Relations loves it when you miss your flight or nail them with your version of "hidden fees" right before takeoff. 04-22 19:30 0 guests @JLeeBly Have a favorite guest? If flooding the forums hasn't helped bring them to your con, harassing them by e-mail surely will. 04-22 19:32 1 vawork @axeonos i'm very sure the VA would be THRILLED to hear about you wanting to be a voice actor, tell them everything in detail 04-22 19:34 0 management @JLeeBly Sure, why *wouldn't* we want to fly your manager down as well? Might as well throw in lodging and food while we're at it... 04-22 19:36 1 hotel @GTebbetts The Castlegate Hotel? Sounds like a WONDERFUL place for a convention! 04-22 19:36 0 dealers @axeonos dealers absolutely LOVE it when you try to steal from them, then deny when they have witnesses and price tag still on it 04-22 19:38 1 black @SakuraMikage Anytime a black person at a con sees another black person, they will keep a tally of it and most likely tweet/text about it. 04-22 19:41 0 vawork @Theranthrope At the VA Q&A remember to ask: "How do I become a VA?" & "Do you listen to the original Japanese?" VAs LOVE those questions 04-22 19:42 0 badge @JLeeBly When paying for your badge at registration with loose change, be sure to accompany it with a diatribe on how you found it. 04-22 19:44 0 staff @axeonos sign up to volunteer in advance - and not show up. staff love to ask old friends for favors to cover your ass all the time 04-22 19:47 0 staff @Theranthrope sign up to volunteer in advance, show up, THEN disappear. It's not like staff have better things to do than cover for you. 04-22 19:51 -1 rules @Theranthrope "BUTTON DO NOT PRESS!" Is only a suggestion 04-22 19:56 0 music @Theranthrope Karaoke song list: If it wasn't on cartoon network, it doesn't exist. 04-22 19:59 1 health @Theranthrope (@ Anime Vegas '09) By all means; stay up all night, don't eat all day, THEN donate blood. You'll be JUST FINE. 04-22 19:59 2 guests @axeonos the VA goes to 20 to 30 cons a year- of course they are going to remember you from 5 years ago. 04-22 20:01 1 photos @gmsenpai Taking a picture of your panel is a good idea, posting that picture on Twitter is a better idea. 04-22 20:04 0 sleep @kiss_my_a_soul save money, sleep in the hallway. It's not dangerous or annoying 04-22 20:05 1 cosplay @axeonos doesn't matter how long you spent sewing your outfit, people will still ask where you bought it online 04-22 20:05 1 booze @Theranthrope If you manage to budget more money for alcohol than food, then U R DOIN IT RITE 04-22 20:06 0 cosplay @kiss_my_a_soul always look at security officers. They love it when a man with fake guns stares at them. 04-22 20:06 0 food @Theranthrope Wei-Chi soup, good to that last drop 04-22 20:08 0 facepalm @kiss_my_a_soul stage fake riots, everyone gets a kick out of it. 04-22 20:09 1 hallways @axeonos best place for a mock battle/sword fight = blocking the entrance or right in front of escalators/elevators 04-22 20:36 1 feedback @axeonos telling staff they are sucking at what they are doing and how you would do it better is a great way to earn respect. -.- 04-22 21:06 0 panels @neito how many hetalia panels does the con have? if the answer is anything less than "all of them", complain loudly! 04-22 21:06 0 cosplaynazi @neito Dress up like a Nazi. Cus, you know. It's not like those guys were dicks or anything. 04-22 21:08 2 memes @neito Remember, if it was funny two years ago when you saw it on 4chan, it's still funny now! Keep yelling it! 04-22 21:11 -1 staff @neito Ignore volunteers. They're only there to ruin your good time, not to direct traffic or anything. 04-22 21:12 2 hotel @neito Hotel room capacities are suggestions. it's perfectly fine to squeeze 10 people into a room with one bed. 04-22 21:14 0 drama @neito Everyone loves cosplayer drama. Complain loudly about cosplay at every possible moment. 04-22 21:16 0 hallways @neito it's perfectly fine to block off an entire hallway to get a picture. anyone who complains about it is a hater. 04-22 21:18 0 weapons @Theranthrope Buy shurikens from a vendor, test how sharp they are by throwing them at a tree by con entrance... in front of a staffer 04-22 21:22 0 rules @Theranthrope I don't care what happened to your con booklet, ignorance of the rules is not going to LOWER the odds of me yanking your badge 04-22 21:22 0 hygiene @neito Don't bother to shower at all. That's time you could spend at the con! Don't worry, nobody will notice. 04-22 21:24 0 ecchi @neito Girls, dress like sluts. It doesn't matter that you're 14, all attention is good attention! 04-22 21:27 0 lines @Theranthrope line cutting is SOOOO endearing and moe~ 04-22 21:28 1 yaoi @neito There may be people around who don't know you're into yaoi. make sure to inform everyone as loudly as possible. 04-22 21:29 0 guests @Theranthrope That restraining order from that one particular VA just means they respect your determination and love to play hard-to-get 04-22 21:29 0 lines @Theranthrope Line cutting is SOOOO manly and GAR 04-22 21:30 -1 hugs @neito there's no need to warn people before you glomp them. simply tackle them at full speed onto the hard concrete floor. 04-22 21:33 0 screaming @neito remember, the louder you yell your joke, the funnier it is. 04-22 21:33 7 giggity @Theranthrope "Anime con fangirls, I keep getting older, but they stay the same age." 04-22 21:38 0 parents @Theranthrope "No mom, it's an anime convention. It's about cartoons!" ...because telling her about all the gay-sex porn is a BAD IDEA 04-22 21:42 2 kids @neito it's bullshit that they won't let you into hentai panels when you're 17. It's not like it's the law; cons just make this up 04-22 21:43 1 meta @awesome_engine Being sarcastic about convention goers is a GREAT way to get them to change their behaviour. 04-22 21:48 3 rules @Theranthrope "I AM A UNIQUE AND BEAUTIFUL SNOWFLAKE." ...to whom the rules do not apply. 04-22 21:50 1 ego @neito if someone says they didn't like your favorite show you need to get into a screaming argument with them to defend your honor 04-22 21:53 1 ecchi @neito if a girl displays even the smallest amount of cleavage, you must stare at it and drool. 04-22 21:54 1 stereotypes @neito there are no "real" girls that are anime fans, so feel free to be a sexist asshole. 04-22 22:22 1 hugs @axeonos those people carrying around expensive dolls/cosplay props are just bowling pins that love it when you glomp/bang into them 04-22 22:32 -1 music @axeonos carmel danson needs to be played continuously. the more you play it the more you will be loved by the fandom. 04-22 22:39 0 lines @axeonos the person in front and behind you in line can double as a pillow as you wait for the event 04-22 22:49 0 guests @axeonos Stalking is a way to tell that voice actor/cosplayer that you love them, love their style and find them interesting 04-23 01:38 0 hygiene @Theranthrope "Who needs a shower, when there's Febreze!" 04-23 01:47 0 food @Theranthrope The four basic food groups of the anime convention: cup ramen, pizza, sugar, and Chef Boyardee 04-23 02:58 0 cosplay @lheiskell If you're bringing your toddler to the con, COSPLAY. Extra points if you choose a dark/evil character. Toddler Gaara ftw 04-23 05:10 0 ecchi @rattmice You're not actually here for the con are you? No, you're here to get drunk and fuck jailbait because you can't do it at home 04-23 05:16 0 cosplay @VuTTran You spend a ton of money for a convention and you decide to waste it standing in line 3+ hours before the Masquerade starts? 04-23 05:27 0 cosplay @theariman If you think your cosplay is funny now, well then...get hammered as quickly and early as possible; it'll be HILARIOUS! 04-23 07:39 1 ecchi @Theranthrope Cosplay sex always sounds better on paper... 04-23 07:47 0 sleep @Theranthrope Why stay in an expensive hotel when there's a perfectly fine screening room to sleep in 04-23 07:47 0 ecchi @Theranthrope Why stay in an expensive hotel when there's a perfectly fine screening room to bang in 04-23 07:50 1 tv @Theranthrope Hit TV show idea: "ABC's To catch a Predator: Anime Expo Edition" (I know I'd watch) 04-23 07:53 0 vegas @Theranthrope What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas... except for the STDs, unplanned pregnancies, and Sex Offender registrations... 04-23 07:57 0 parents @Theranthrope Go "...but mom, Anime helps me learn about different languages" when you've never heard anime in anything other than English 04-23 08:02 0 ecchi @Theranthrope "Rape-Lay" the LARP, is NEVER a good idea... 04-23 08:06 0 vegas @Theranthrope What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas... doesn't count if you happen to live there 04-23 15:33 1 drugs @Vegete Stay away from the chicks huddled in the corner of the bathrooms, laughing, with nosebleeds, during the rave... 04-23 16:33 0 lines @Vegete instead of waiting in the pre-reg line 4 hrs before it opens, show up an hour or two before it CLOSES. Less peeps, more time 04-23 17:32 2 management @proz Even if 20 anime cons are in the state you live in, you should definitely start one yourself. Definitely never enough cons. 04-23 17:39 2 guests @proz All major anime cons can afford X Japan and have their managers on speed dial. Request for them, they'll get right on it. 04-23 17:44 2 management @proz It's true. If you start your own anime con, 5000 people will show up and it'll only take 6 months of easy work. No kidding. 04-23 18:01 0 badge @proz All cons are secretly free. Money given at reg is only a Suggested Donation. Print 100 badges for your friends, it's okay. 04-23 18:14 1 crossplay @proz The bigger you are the younger the character you should cosplay. Highly consider crossplay if youre a guy. Show lots of skin 04-23 18:16 0 staff @proz Con security is the best place to release all that pent-up hidden aggression on the attendees. They'll totally understand. 04-23 18:24 0 cosplay @empty_flowers When asking a friend to help you cosplay, make sure you only get your shit together last minute! 04-23 22:33 1 guests @proz All anime cons are secretly BFFs with Aya Hirano. Only reason she doesn't show up to any US cons is because of her shyness 04-24 02:26 0 press @AnimeJamSession AJS #38 - You should always be prepared when doing podcasts. http://goo.gl/fb/SHdv8 04-24 19:09 0 parties @Theranthrope Unless you WANT to be forcibly flogged and grogged, stay away from room parties with a pirate flag displayed on the door 04-24 21:17 1 guests @animesg VAs don't find it awkward at all when underage girls ask to marry them in Q&A. Someone is bound to come around so ask often! 04-24 21:20 1 industry @animesg Never anger the anime gods. @funimation has the power to bless your con or smite you down with a lightning bolt up your ass. 04-24 21:23 0 management @animesg When you're running around like a chicken with your head cut off at your own con...don't worry. You're doing it right. :) 04-24 21:38 0 sleep @animesg Only at an anime con is it considered acceptable to sleep in the corner like a hobo. 04-24 21:59 0 food @Theranthrope The chicken and rice MRE is not to be used as a personal lubricant 04-24 22:03 0 useful @Theranthrope When buying ramen to be cooked with the hotel room's courtesy coffee pot, make sure it is cup ramen, not instant ramen 04-24 22:04 0 useful @Theranthrope When buying ramen to be cooked with the hotel room's courtesy coffee pot, make sure that there is a courtesy coffee pot 04-24 22:11 1 videogames @Theranthrope The game Dwarf Fortress and anime cons have more in common than you know... 04-24 23:16 0 cosplay @proz 5 minutes before cosplay show starts so you can sign-up now & enter? No problem, you'll be the first one on stage. 04-24 23:17 1 events @proz There's a secret hidden door to get into every event even if con security claims the room is full. Look for it. 04-24 23:18 0 sleep @proz Bathtubs & Closets are perfectly acceptable places to sleep in crammed hotel room 04-24 23:21 1 ecchi @proz "If a woman tells you she's 20, and looks 16 - she's 12." - Chris Rock. Also an #animeconprotip 04-25 22:28 0 cosplay @animesg Dressing like an Otaku and then saying you're a meistes from Shakugan No Shana doesn't make it cosplay. It just makes it sad. 04-26 21:57 0 ecchi @Thedigitalbug It's completely not awkward to watch an 18+ hentai screening with a bunch of guys 05-06 15:49 -1 dealers @VasTheStampede Attempt to make a shopping list of what you want to look for in the Dealer's Hall, to help when you get distracted! 05-27 21:17 0 hygiene @colonydrop As Fanime approaches, here's an #animeconprotip: Think of showering as the anime that you have to watch every day until you die. 06-06 16:01 -1 staff @animesg When hosting a convention, always remember not to panic until the day AFTER the con. Then you may run around screaming. 06-06 16:06 -1 sleep @animesg Espresso is your friend. Especially when staying up to unholy hours and getting up at the ass crack of dawn to host a con. 06-06 16:10 -1 dealers @animesg The Dealers Room: Guaranteed to relieve you of your hard earned cash for that neko hat and keyblade you just HAD to have. :) 06-06 16:13 0 management @animesg Screening Room: The place for the Con Head to catch some z's before opening. Ignore the Vice when he come looking for you. 06-06 16:17 0 cosplay @animesg Anime Cons: The only place where people won't call you crazy for dressing up but instead will want to take your picture. 06-18 09:14 1 cosplay @TnAdct1 Need something to do for your cosplay skit, be original and just do the Time Warp from Rocky Horror. 06-20 21:14 0 hallway @ananawa Whatever you do, don't crash through or lean against a temporary partition wall.

GÜNTER GRASS, an enthusiast for the centre-left ideas of Willy Brandt, chronicled the slow post-war rise of social democracy in an elegant memoir called “From the Diary of a Snail”. The creature struck the writer as an apt metaphor for that school of thought. It was unhurried but purposeful: a “politics of small progressions”, defying setbacks and promising moderation. It avoided both the reactionary tendencies of many conservative movements, and the revolutionary posturing of the far left. But the snail is stuck. In recent years, governments of the centre-right have eclipsed their rivals in elections across Europe. Strikingly, parties of the centre-left have failed to capitalise on the most profound crisis in capitalism brought by the financial crash of 2007-08. Far from seizing the opportunity to win an argument for greater state regulation and a less intense embrace of free-markets, the left has been swept out of power in many places and found it hard to return. Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks. In Germany Angela Merkel, the Christian Democratic chancellor, has been in office since 2005. In Britain a Tory-led government has held power since 2010, and the twice-defeated Labour Party is preoccupied by infighting about its future, with the most dynamic candidate for its leadership coming from the far left. In France the Socialist president, François Hollande, has dismal ratings and little chance of re-election. Even Scandinavia, a byword for the moderate left in the 1970s and 1980s, has lost the habit. True, Sweden reverted to Social Democrat-led government in late 2014, after eight years of centre-right rule. But the new administration is following a budget plan drawn up by its predecessors. Norway’s conservatives put an end to 12 years of left-wing coalitions in 2013, and Helle Thorning-Schmidt, Denmark’s centre-left leader, lost power in June. The former eastern bloc hosts some moderately successful parties with state-socialist leanings (in the Czech Republic, notably), but elsewhere, nationalists and conservatives have benefited from a post-crash mood of uncertainty. Of course, personalities matter, and just now there are few commanding ones on the centre-left. Europe’s memorable leaders of a social-democratic hue, from Brandt and Helmut Schmidt in Germany, to Bruno Kreisky in Austria, Gro Harlem Bruntland in Norway and even Tony Blair, have been confident sorts, not just purveyors of consensus. In today’s rather dull landscape, Sigmar Gabriel, leader of Germany’s Social Democrats and vice-chancellor in a grand coalition with Mrs Merkel, stands out as a lively character but this has yet to boost his party’s chances of taking power in Germany. Human factors aside, some deeper problems have afflicted the social democrats. One is an anti-incumbent backlash. The centre-left was widely in power when the crisis struck: in Britain, Greece, Portugal and Spain. Voters lashed out at those in charge, in no mood for excuses. This impatience helps explain a couple of exceptions. Italians, tolerant of Silvio Berlusconi’s whimsical ways, turned left when the Democratic Party found a plausible leader in Matteo Renzi. He now cuts a lonely figure on a European stage where economic dramas have their endings scripted by Germans of the centre-right. And Mrs Merkel, incumbent during the crisis, survived because the German recession was short, and then established herself as Europe’s foremost leader: tough on euro-zone debtors yet able to hold the European project together. For all the rows about austerity, preaching it sounded more reasonable to voters than Keynesian wizardry. Electorates may also have concluded that, if cuts had to be made, they were better entrusted to parties in favour of a less bloated state sector to start with. Social democrats’ reliance on high public spending to bring about social transformations lacked credibility at a time when markets were dumping the bonds of highly indebted states. More galling has been the propensity of some centre-right governments to steal the left’s policies, like boosting minimum wages in Germany and Britain, or the British Tories’ embrace of gay marriage. Since the fall of Soviet Communism, mainstream parties of left and right have been threatened with fragmentation. But the centre-left has suffered more, afflicted by the shrinking of the industrial working class and falling trade-union membership. Old dogs, new tricks A newer problem, aggravated by the crisis, has been the rise of populist, anti-establishment challengers. Greece’s once-mighty PASOK was nearly flattened by flamboyant Syriza; Spain’s Socialists have lost some ground to anti-austerity Podemos. Even UKIP, Britain’s anti-EU party, originally home to discontented Tories, now draws support from former Labour voters. Matthew Taylor, a former aide to Tony Blair, the last centre-left leader elected in Britain, says insurgent movements can claim to be more in touch with ordinary folk—marginalising older parties that once thrived on representing the masses. The newcomers, Mr Taylor reckons, are more organisationally inventive, whereas traditional parties on the left are tethered to conventions and hierarchies. Anti-immigration sentiment has proved invidious for parties caught between the embrace of diversity and the protectionist instincts of many workers. The self-image of social democrats as generous and open-hearted sorts has turned into a liability. Fortunes shift: a decade ago, people were reading a tract on the “Strange Death of Tory England”. This proved a trifle premature. But social democrats face a long road back. Franz Walter, a political historian at Göttingen University, notes that Germany’s Social Democrats have been an influential force for over 150 years, but have held power for just over 30. With their gradualist ethos and pursuit of distant goals, they may be happier winding a trail to power than wielding it. Social democrats, Mr Walter sighs, “are never happier than when dreaming of a better future”. And rather often these days, someone else is busy forging it.

"Decoding Nazi Secrets" During the following program, look for NOVA's Web markers which lead you to more information at our Web site. NARRATOR: In spring 1946, an order came through to destroy all the records of what had been the Allies' most secret operation of World War II: the codebreaking unit at Bletchley Park. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Everything was destroyed, there wasn't a scrap left. NARRATOR: By mid 1940, the German Army had conquered all of western Europe. Hitler was tightening the noose around Britain. In the Atlantic, German U-boats were decimating Allied convoys, threatening to cut off Britain's only lifeline. But Churchill had a secret weapon, the strangest military establishment in the world. Crossword fanatics, chess champions, mathematicians, students and professors, Americans and British, all came here with one common aim: to unlock the secrets of the Enigma, a machine that concealed Germany's war plans in seemingly unbreakable code. If Enigma could be penetrated, everything Hitler plotted would be known in advance. At Bletchley Park there unfolded one of the most astonishing exploits of the Second World War. Many here had never seen a code before, yet it was their job to find a way to crack Enigma. In the process, they devised ingenious codebreaking machines that were forerunners of the modern computer. But everything they did remained classified for 30 years. Tonight NOVA reveals the secrets of the men and women who helped turned the tide of victory and shape the future. Major funding for NOVA is provided by the Park Foundation, dedicated to education and quality television. C|Net, bringing the digital age into focus. C|Net.com, the source for computers and technology. This program is funded in part by Northwestern Mutual Life, which has been protecting families and businesses for generations. Have you heard from the quiet company? Northwestern Mutual Life. And by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you. Thank you. NARRATOR: In 1939, Germany introduces a devastating new kind of warfare, blitzkrieg. Lightning attacks by tanks and planes bring Europe to its knees. Blitzkrieg depends on surprise, demanding speedy communication. So radio is crucial to the attack plans. Every day the skies are full of German radio signals. The German high command has trained thousands of wireless operators in preparation for the conquest of Europe. Their job is to be able to interpret Morse code in any conditions. But there is still the problem of how to keep the messages secret. So the German military has adopted a seemingly invincible code-making machine. The Enigma turns a message into unintelligible gibberish, letter by letter. When the message is sent in Morse code, all an enemy would see is a meaningless string of letters. But when the German operator at the receiving end types the coded letters back into his Enigma machine, the real message appears. In this way vital war plans remain totally secret. The high command never wavers from its belief in the security of Enigma. They are so confident that they deploy the Enigma throughout the German war machine. They never imagine what was about to happen at Bletchley Park. NARRATOR: This is the machine the German high command believed would protect their secrets. This is the Enigma. TONY SALE: Its complexity's enormous. I mean, if I sent just one message on an Enigma machine today it would still take a super Cray computer, the fastest in the world, a year to go through searching for that one message without supporting evidence as to what that message might have been. NARRATOR: Long before the war began, the airwaves were full of coded messages as Hitler prepared for battle. Cracking the German ciphers became the priority of a special British Intelligence unit. In 1938, the unit, known as the Government Code and Cipher School, or GC&CS, moved into Bletchley Park, an ornate mansion 50 miles north of London. From this rooftop room, wireless operators contacted listening stations all over Britain that were intercepting German messages. Bletchley Park's code name was Station X. The challenge of breaking the Enigma demanded a special kind of talent. GC&CS set about recruiting. ANDREW HODGES: The people who a few years earlier were regarded as too young and not knowing anything of importance, of not being real people, not having, not being significant grown-up people, suddenly they were the people who held the keys to the Reich. ARTHUR J. LEVENSON: Codebreaking was a somewhat esoteric profession. But it wasn't clear exactly who would make a good codebreaker. People who were recruited were asked whether they did crossword puzzles. And if they said they did and enjoyed doing them, and did them well, that was generally enough to get you in. We discovered people of a whole variety of backgrounds did very well. Anthropologists, Egyptologists, paleontologists, and even an occasional lawyer turned out to have the knack. NARRATOR: Bletchley Park evolved into a unique operation in which military discipline, uniforms, and rank no longer mattered. The sole imperative was to break the Enigma, and break it as quickly as possible. DONALD MICHIE: At that age you can just take fire and blaze away, half out of your mind with enthusiasm and dedication, you're not married, you don't have to worry about the kids and the rent and so forth. And during that sort of short period of your life you can live like a madman and, you know, take almost no sleep and - determined to do it. NARRATOR: But youth and determination weren't enough. Mathematicians were enlisted to take on the daunting complexity of the Enigma. Only a completely new approach to codebreaking could help to penetrate its secrets. But if the work at Bletchley Park were to succeed, absolute secrecy was essential. Some of the recruits had no idea of the purpose of their work. GWEN WATKINS: Most of us who were among the - what shall I say, the hoi polloi, the lower grades, never knew what went on at Bletchley Park. The only time I realized what we were actually doing was when I was shown a code book which had just been captured and rushed to Bletchley from a captured plane, and of course we had no plastic envelopes or anything then, the poor thing was just given to me as it was and I was horrified to see a huge bloodstain on it, the blood 'round the edges was drying, but the blood in the middle was still wet and I realized then that somewhere was this German - this German air crew bleeding, still bleeding while I was decoding - I was writing out in modern German their new code book, and that did bring the war very close. NARRATOR: The Germans were supremely confident in the Enigma. Its basic principle was simple, but it could scramble messages in millions of different ways. Pressing one typewriter key would light up a totally different letter. An electrical current was sent from the keys to the letters through a series of rotors. Each time a key was pressed a rotor would turn, altering the wiring and so changing the letter that was produced. TONY SALE: The total number of ways in which the Enigma machine can be configured for any particular message is 150 million million million. So it was an enormous complexity which was why the Germans thought it was completely safe. NARRATOR: The Enigma was first developed as a commercial encryption device in the 1920s and patented in London. German banks and railways were among its first customers, but the German military was quick to see its potential. Each day German operators in the field received a new set of instructions from base on how to set up the Enigma. They had to make three adjustments so that both the sender's and receiver's machines would match. First, which rotors to put into the machine and in what order. TONY SALE: The rotors contained one of the central secrets of the Enigma machine, which was the cross wiring inside the wheels. The whole of this maze of wiring inside changed every time a letter was entered and that's what gave the Enigma machine its vast complexity. NARRATOR: The second step was to change the wiring of each rotor by adjusting the ring of letters around the rim - 26 combinations on each wheel. The third step was the plugboard. Using his secret instructions for the day, the operator could wire up each typewriter key to a totally different letter. TONY SALE: This was what the Germans thought was the killer cryptographically. This plugboard enabled you to transpose letters completely, a pair of letters. Now because there are 26 sockets on the front of the Enigma machine, you can plug these pairs of letters together in an absolutely astronomical number of combinations, about one-and-a-half million million combinations that you can use on the front. NARRATOR: Once the machine was set up, the message was encoded letter by letter. These letters were then sent by Morse code to the receiver at the other end. The Germans were never shaken in their belief in Enigma's invincibility. At first, all the codebreakers had were meaningless groups of coded letters and endless patience. And in the first months of the war the new recruits were getting nowhere. TONY SALE: At the beginning of the war there was a great difficulty because although we had intercepts which we knew were enciphered using the Enigma machine, we didn't know enough detail about the machine to be able to even begin to find any method of breaking it. Unless you've got the exact key you just cannot get anywhere with it at all and this is a major difference from any code systems prior to that, that the Enigma machine, there's no sense of nearness, you're not nearly at a solution. You've either got the solution or you haven't got the solution. NARRATOR: The search for a solution began long before the war. Starting in 1931 and continuing for seven years, a hard-up German army clerk secretly obtained more than 300 documents, including the instructions and settings for the Enigma machines. He sold them to the French Secret Service, but their cryptographers showed little interest. Next the stolen documents were offered to the British Secret Service. At this stage, GC&CS was skeptical that Enigma could be broken and politely declined the offer. Finally the documents went to the Poles. With Germany breathing down their necks, their response was very different. A deal was struck. With the stolen documents in hand, three brilliant young Polish mathematicians, Zygalski, Rozycki and Rejewski, set to work on the Enigma. The Poles soon realized that they had to figure out how the Germans had wired the Enigma's keyboard to the first rotor. Since any typewriter key could be wired to any letter on the rotor, the number of possible wiring orders was astronomical. But if the Poles could work this out, it would be a vital first step in breaking the Enigma. TONY SALE: Rejewski had a flash of inspiration and he thought, what about if they've been stupid enough to just use ABCD as the order round the rotor, and they had, all the multitude of millions and millions of ways in which they could have scrambled the connection from the keyboard to the entry point, and they'd just chosen ABCD. And Marian Rejewski in desperation tried that, it worked, and suddenly he'd got the internal connections of the whole of the German forces machine. NARRATOR: But in 1939, on the eve of the invasion of Poland, the Germans added an extra choice of rotors to the Enigma and the Poles could no longer read any of the messages. In desperation, they invited British and French officials to a secret meeting in a forest near Warsaw. They revealed how they had previously broken the Enigma. The British were astonished. TONY SALE: And Dilly Knox, he was one of the members of the team that went there, and the first thing he asked Rejewski was, what is this mapping from the keyboard to the entry rotor, and Rejewski said, ABCD. And Dilly Knox went, oh God, we never thought of that, it's too obvious, why didn't we think of that? NARRATOR: Within weeks of that meeting, Poland was invaded and war broke out. The Polish cryptographers had given Bletchley Park their own replica of the Enigma machine, but the extra rotors the Germans had added meant that the codebreakers were still in the dark. As the flow of German messages increased, at last they began to see a way of achieving the impossible. The starting point was the messages themselves. The British had set up a worldwide network of radio listening posts operated by the military, the post office, and even the London police. They were known as Y Stations. JOAN NICHOLLS: Wherever the Germans were, we were listening. When there was a lot of excitement, the wires would be absolutely humming with Morse, they'd be transmitting all over the place. We'd really have cramp in our fingers sometimes, trying to write it down non-stop. NARRATOR: Round the clock and around the world, thousands of operators were writing down meaningless groups of coded letters, the raw material for Bletchley Park. Their approach to cracking the Enigma began with another Polish breakthrough. One of the special procedures the Germans followed in setting up their machines was known as a double indicator. It was to be the Enigma's Achilles' heel. The instruction sheets for each day told the German operator how to set up his Enigma. They specified the order of the rotors and the position of the ring of letters around each rotor. The sheets then provided instructions for wiring up the plugboard. All Enigmas on a network had to be set up identically for the system to work. But there was one extra level of security. If the enemy captured the instruction sheets, they would be able read all the messages. To prevent this, each message had its own secret rotor setting, chosen by the operator. First the operator had to pick three random letters. He sent these in plain text to the operator at the receiving end, allowing that other person to line up his machine identically. TONY SALE: But now the operator had to be able to tell the operator at the receiving end what the actual message settings from which he was going to start enciphering the message, and that had to be conveyed to the operator the other end but not revealed to any interceptor, and the way that they chose to do this was to use the Enigma machine itself to conceal this message setting. NARRATOR: So the operator encoded a second group of three letters as the secret message setting itself. TONY SALE: And supposing he thought of SWJ, and when he keys in SWJ the lamps light up ITV. Because the Germans felt that radio transmissions might be unreliable they went a step further and they actually asked the operator at the sending end to key in the message setting twice. So the procedure was to key in SWJ SWJ and to note down all six lamps that lit and that was a crucial mistake because the repetition of the message setting gives a cryptographer a toe-hold into finding out what it actually is, repetitions are always bad news in cryptography. NARRATOR: By encoding the same letters twice, the Germans gave the codebreakers their first clue about the setting of the Enigma rotors. Soon there was a second clue. The Poles had noticed a strange quirk in the way the rotors worked. In about one out of eight intercepts, the Enigma was turning one of the letters in the message setting into the same coded letter twice. The mistake of sending the message setting twice was revealing a flaw in the machine itself. Although it was designed to produce random coded letters, there were certain situations in which the Enigma was much less random than the Germans believed. DONALD MICHIE: There is no such thing as a random, a truly random sequence that can be generated by a purely deterministic machine. That just cannot be. It's part of the definition of randomness that it cannot be explained or predicted in any way whatsoever. The whole game of cipher design is to design machines which are flawed, they have to be, but in which the flaws are as small, inconspicuous as possible. NARRATOR: It was just such a flaw that broke the Enigma. Bletchley Park called the repeated letters "females." Only a few configurations of the machine could produce these females. If the codebreakers now worked their way through them, they would find that day's settings. The codebreakers produced huge cards, known as Jeffries sheets, with holes punched through in an alphabetical grid representing the wheel positions that could produce females. By lining these sheets over each other, the codebreakers could hunt through the wheel positions to find out how the Enigma had been set up for that day. PAM BREWSTER: They were, John Jeffries, they were really his rather special baby. And they were on sort of cartridge weight paper. Not very thick card, they got very dog-eared. And as far as I remember there were two alphabets that way and that way. It was like solving a very difficult crossword puzzle. You could actually see it happening. And the triumph when you found it worked, that was fascinating. LEVER: Marvelous. Absolutely marvelous. There's nothing like seeing a code broken. That is really absolutely the tops. LESLIE YOXALL: The one thing that was very interesting was that people were very reluctant to go home at the end of the shift. There was a certain amount of "Move over!" You know "Let me sit down and get on with it." People wanted to hang in there. ALAN ROGERS: On one occasion I was on the evening shift but when midnight came I was stuck in a message that was, had gripped me so hard I worked right through 'til breakfast time. From four o'clock in the afternoon to breakfast the next day. Simply because this had to get done. NARRATOR: In the spring of 1941, the naval war was building up in the Mediterranean. Hitler had joined forces with the Italian Fascist Mussolini. Both dictators were dreaming of global empires. The Allies knew that the Germans had given Enigma machines to the Italians. One of the codebreakers trying to break in to the Italian messages was 19-year-old Mavis Lever. MAVIS LEVER: Sometimes you'd have to spend the whole night assuming every position that there could be on the three different wheels, and there we called them Red, Blue and Green, the wheels, I think they did too. So that you would have to work at it very, very hard and it was that I think that made one pink-eyed and after you'd done it for a few hours you wondered whether you'd ever see anything when it was before your eyes because you were so snarled up in it all. NARRATOR: Mavis and the other codebreakers didn't know it, but they were about to make their first major impact on the war. MAVIS LEVER: The one that came up was real good stuff, drama, "Today's the day minus three," just that and nothing else. And so of course we knew that something was going to happen, the Italians were going to do something, the Italian Navy, in three days' time. Why they had to say that I can't imagine, it seems rather daft but still they did. NARRATOR: The British fleet was based in the Egyptian port of Alexandria under the command of Admiral Andrew Cunningham. Bletchley Park intercepted a message that would lead the Admiral to hatch a clever plan. MAVIS LEVER: Well then a very, very large message came in which was the battle orders, how many cruisers there were and how many submarines were to be there and where they were to be at such and such a time, absolutely incredible that they should really spell it all out. NARRATOR: Mavis had decoded just the message that Cunningham needed to outwit the Italians. MAVIS LEVER: It was 11 o'clock at night and it was pouring with rain when I rushed, ran, absolutely tore down to take it to the Italian - to intelligence to get it across to Cunningham. NARRATOR: Within hours the decoded message was on its way to Cunningham in Egypt. The Italian fleet was gathering off Cape Matapan on the Greek coast. Their plan was to attack a British convoy at midnight. Alexandria was a nest of spies. The problem for Cunningham was how to act on the message without giving his plans away. If he led the fleet out to sea the Italians would know immediately. Cunningham embarked on an elaborate ruse to fool the spies. He wanted his enemies to believe that all was quiet. MAVIS LEVER: He did a real Drake on them, well more than Drake, because he played golf and pretended he was, you know, just going to have a, you know, a weekend off. SIR ROBERT ATKINSON: Admiral Cunningham was a crafty fellow, and by subterfuge he was able to lead the enemy to think he was socially engaged doing something else, and I've no doubt when he went ashore at Alexandria to play golf, that information was in Italy within about five minutes. NARRATOR: But at night Cunningham slipped back on board and led the British fleet out to sea, to the precise spot where the Italian ships were gathered. The ruse worked. Cunningham caught the Italians completely off guard. That night the Italians lost nearly 3000 men, the cream of their navy. It was the first major coup for Bletchley Park. NEWSREEL: The Navy does it again. Here is the British Mediterranean fleet preparing for what proved to be the greatest naval engagement so far fought in this war. The Battle of Matapan is one more proof that Britain is the unchallenged ruler of the Mediterranean waves. NARRATOR: The Navy were the heroes of the Battle of Matapan. Bletchley Park was of course never mentioned, but the codebreakers had their own reward. MAVIS LEVER: Then Cunningham himself came, it was the first thing he wanted to do when he came was to see the actual message that had been broken, and he was very nice and we had a drink, and we were in this little cottage and the walls had just been whitewashed, now this will show you how sort of silly and young and giggly we were, but we thought it would be jolly nice if we could get, talk to Admiral Cunningham and get him to lean against the wet whitewash and go away with a white stern. So that's what we did so, you know, it's rather terrible, isn't it, that on the one hand everything's so - seems to be so very organized, and these silly young things are wanting to snare the Admiral. NARRATOR: But their joy was to be short-lived. TONY SALE: And then disaster struck. The Germans issued a decree, no more double enciphering of the message setting, just single enciphering. Catastrophe, suddenly the Jeffries sheets didn't work and so suddenly darkness fell. NARRATOR: Gloom descended not only on Bletchley Park but on all British cities. For months, relentless bombing had become part of everyday life. The Blitz was a war of blood and nerves. SARAH BARING: Well, there was one very good remark is, the only good German is a dead one. We felt very, very strongly. Well, they'd bombed us, they'd - every day, every night - with Heinkels and Dorniers. They'd killed a lot of people in London and in the cities, you couldn't have any pity for Germans under those circumstances. WINSTON CHURCHILL [voice over]: What a triumph the life of these battered cities is over the worst that fire and bomb can do. NARRATOR: During the grim months of the Blitz, Bletchley Park was one of Churchill's few glimmers of hope. Access to the enemy's innermost secrets could make the difference between victory and defeat. The codebreakers were working around the clock to break the Enigma. They had divided into huts to attack different parts of the German war machine. Hut 6 was now concentrating on the Air Force Enigma. NARRATOR: The Luftwaffe's code, nicknamed RED, soon proved vulnerable. Ironically, the German Air Force thought itself so technologically advanced that it was careless about security. For months, Bletchley Park had tried to crack the secret messages from German airfields to their headquarters in Berlin. They had to find a way - and quickly. Hitler was preparing to invade Britain. JOHN HERIVEL: It was like looking for something in a dark room, one didn't really know what one was looking for, and I thought and I thought. But I had great confidence, I felt, I am going to find some way to break back into the RED. NARRATOR: John Herivel turned his thoughts to the Enigma operator. There were set procedures to be carried out to prepare each Enigma for that day's messages. The settings of the rotors and the Ringstellung - the alphabet ring around the rotors - were crucial. If the secret instructions were not followed exactly, the security of the whole system would be at risk. But John Herivel discovered that the operators were making a fatal mistake. It became known as the Herivel tip. TONY SALE: What the operator should do, of course, is when they've done a setting on a cipher machine, you should always spin the wheels so that it randomizes the position. But the whole of the Herivel tip depended on the German operator either being under pressure or lazy and not doing that. NARRATOR: The operator had to send the three random letters by Morse to the person at the other end so that both machines would be set to the same start position. But Herivel realized that if the operator failed to spin his rotors as he should, then the three letters he was sending over the airwaves - uncoded - would be the secret ring setting. Instructions were quickly sent out to the Y Stations to pay particular attention to the first messages they intercepted each day. That's when the mistake would show up. Hut 6 studied the opening letter groups of the intercepts as fast as they arrived to see if the Herivel tip would work. Sometimes the operator made only a half-hearted attempt to spin the rotors. So LWZ would become LYB - just a click or two away - or perhaps LUX. But as the codebreakers plotted out each letter group, they would begin to see clusters of letters that revealed the original secret setting. Herivel's tip was working. At last, they had a way to break Luftwaffe RED. The codebreakers could now give the RAF vital information about how the Luftwaffe was organized and what it was planning - even if they didn't always know the details. PETER CALVOCORESSI: You don't get a message saying, we are going to do the following great things in the next six months of the year, signed Hitler. Nothing like that at all, you don't get anything on a plate. There was a case of an intercept which consisted entirely of figures, random figures, and someone says, I wonder if they are coordinates on a map, and they all turned out to be airfields. You did in fact get from that that they were readying and building up airfields, because they were going to concentrate their forces on attacking Britain. Hut 6 broke the Air Force Enigma every day until the end of the war. And they kept discovering new types of careless mistakes by the German operators that gave them away. To avoid interception, the Germans had to disguise each message setting. They thought they had found the perfect solution: use the Enigma itself to conceal the setting. The operator had already been told to think up three random letters for the initial rotor setting. Now he was told to think up three more, and type them into the Enigma. They would be the key for that particular message, and since they were being encoded, they could be transmitted in complete safety. ARTHUR J. LEVENSON: On the surface it looks like a foolproof indicator system, the true setting of the message is hidden. However, the weakness was leaving the selection of the three letters to the operator at random, and human beings simply are not random. NARRATOR: Hut 6 soon saw connections between the two sets of supposedly random letters. Once they got the first three letters which were sent in plain text, they could often guess the second three, which were in code. One operator called Walter became legendary at Bletchley Park. Every day he would set his rotors to the first three letters of his name and then type in the first three letters of his girlfriend's name, Klara. LEVENSON: One wonderful one: the outside indicator was TOM, and we thought oh, tom-tom, and we thought that, that didn't work. It was TOM MIX, the American cowboy actor from the 1920s, I don't know, I didn't know in Germany anybody knew who Tom Mix was, but apparently he had a following in Germany. NARRATOR: HIT was almost invariably followed by LER. Even Hitler was helping to break the Enigma. TONY SALE: They were given the manuals, they were told exactly what to do and how to use the machine, but part of the problem was this myth that the Enigma machine was completely unbreakable. And this was buried deep in the German psyche, so therefore they thought why bother, you know, nobody can break these messages if we use these keys because they're easy. ARTHUR J. LEVENSON: If you saw LON as the first three, it was almost certain that DON was the second. MAD was RID, BER was LIN. MAVIS LEVER: In the heat of battle you'd put up dirty words, and I am the world expert on dirty German words. The worst message I ever had come near me was one from the German high command to someone in Abwehr, the German Intelligence, reprimanding them for using these words because, did they not know that young girls were having to decode them? And of course a young girl at Bletchley was devastated because they were - however, they went on doing it, I might say, never mind the reprimand, but it was nice to think the Germans had that side of them that they would think that perhaps they oughtn't to use dirty words in their encodements. NARRATOR: Despite its success in breaking the Luftwaffe RED code, Bletchley Park had got nowhere with the Enigma of the German Navy - and it was the Navy that was now the problem. By the spring of 1941, German U-boats were wreaking havoc in the Battle of the Atlantic. Every merchant ship sunk deprived Britain of the supplies it needed to survive. Slow-moving convoys of merchant ships regularly crossed the Atlantic to and from America. The United States had not yet entered the war but the convoys supplied half of Britain's food and all of its oil. Although protected by escorts, its convoys were still easy targets for the German U-boats. Hitler had ordered Admiral Karl Donitz to destroy Britain's lifeline. SIR ROBERT ATKINSON: It was Donitz who realized quite early on that he could defeat the Allies by bringing England to its knees by starving us, if he could break that North Atlantic route then there could be no food, fuel, troops, munitions come to this country and he could win that war by U-boats, and he nearly succeeded. H.J. KRUG: Donitz tried to build up a kind of elite spirit and everybody was proud to take part in that and we were very eager to join that force, and of course we had been brought up to adore taking risks in the National Socialist period when we were boys. So we were not really aware of the risk. NARRATOR: Donitz built giant fortified U-boat pens on the French coast. From here his U-boats could strike out into the Atlantic. To attack the convoys, Donitz organized his U-boats into hunting groups or wolf packs, operating along specific patrol lines. As the slow moving convoys crossed the Atlantic, wolf packs of 30 or more U-boats would lie in wait. SIR ROBERT ATKINSON: Almost every convoy there would be losses. They were very crafty, these German U-boat commanders. They would anticipate our route and submerge in daylight just ahead of the convoy and let the convoy pass over them and torpedo right, left and center and we wouldn't know where the attack had come from. NARRATOR: Donitz controlled the wolf packs by radio messages encoded in the naval Enigma. Breaking it was to be the biggest challenge faced by Bletchley Park. If they failed, the Battle of the Atlantic - and the war - could be lost. One mind held the key to breaking the Enigma, and it belonged to Alan Turing. PETER HILTON: Alan Turing was unique, I mean he was a genius, and what you realize when you get to know a genius well is that there's all the difference between a very intelligent person and a genius. With very intelligent people, you talk to them, they come out with an idea, and you say to yourself, if not to them, I could have had that idea. You never had this feeling with Turing at all. He constantly surprised you with the originality of his thinking, it was marvelous. NARRATOR: Soon after becoming a research fellow at Cambridge at only 22, Alan Turing invented the first basic concept of a computing machine. Bletchley Park suited both his genius and his eccentricity. ANDREW HODGES: He had funny manners. He didn't like wearing a tie, he always looked untidy, but he quite liked being out in the country where he cycled around, he cycled with a gas mask on during hay fever period. He didn't care what he looked like, he just thought that doing the job was what mattered. SARAH BARING: He was very shy of women, particularly girls. I don't think he'd ever met any girls before. I did once offer him a cup of tea and he shrank back as if he was going to be shot. And he used to, bless his heart, walk down to the canteen in a curious sideways motion, with his head down. But he was such a star, we all thought he was the best, wonderful thing. NARRATOR: Alan Turing set himself the challenge of cracking the Enigma. In an attic room at Bletchley Park, Turing began studying the U-boat messages. All he had to go on were the scrambled letters. In an astonishing feat of deduction, Turing discovered exactly how the Germans were hiding the crucial message setting. Unlike the Luftwaffe, the German Navy was leaving nothing to chance. Instead of letting the operator choose three letters at random for his message setting, he had to get them from a list. Although Turing had no information about the naval procedures, he managed to identify exactly how they selected their daily keys from a set of secret tables. Instead of replacing one letter with another, these so-called bigram tables substituted pairs of letters. UNIDENTIFIED MAN: These codes were printed on rose paper in a ink that would immediately fade out if it got wet, so our orders were, in case of any difficulty, immediately to throw this material overboard or at least soak it in water so it could not be read. NARRATOR: Brilliant as Turing's deduction was, it was useless without the secret bigram tables, and those were on board the U-boats. Then came an amazing stroke of luck. Captain Fritz Julius Lemp was a hero of the Third Reich. His U-boat, the U-110, had sunk the first ship in the war. In April1941, he set out on what was to be his last mission. David Balme had just turned 20. He was an officer on H.M.S. Bulldog, which was escorting a convoy from Liverpool bound for America. DAVID BALME: We were south of Iceland and we knew we were being shadowed, you'd get the reports back from the admiralty - from the admiralty, you're being shadowed by U-boats. And we always knew we'd be attacked in this area. Suddenly two ships were torpedoed, one after another. It was obvious where the attack come from, and the Corvette Aubretia made a very accurate attack on the U-boat, must have got the depth charges at just the right depth. NARRATOR: Georg Hogel was the Enigma operator on U-110. He had been with Captain Lemp throughout the war. GEORG HOGEL [voice over translation]: The light went out and we found ourselves sitting in the dark. Only the emergency lights came on. We then tried to restore power and check for water leaks. DAVID BALME: It was a classic attack, depth charges underneath the U-boat, blew it to the surface. It was the dream of every escort vessel to see a U-boat blown to the surface, because usually they just sink when you do have a successful attack and go down to the bottom. NARRATOR: This was just the chance that Turing and Bletchley Park had been waiting for. On board the U-110 were the secret bigram tables. GEORG HOGEL [voice over translation]: Down below we had no idea what was going on above us. But the commander on the bridge kept shouting, "get out, get out!" We asked, "what shall we do with the secret papers?" The order came back to leave everything and simply try to get out. I don't know - but we can't be blamed for following orders. You can't imagine what it was like if you weren't there. NARRATOR: The Germans abandoned ship, leaving the code books behind. But Georg Hogel had one precious document he had to rescue - a book of love poems to his girlfriend. GEORG HOGEL [voice over translation]: I went back down and grabbed the key to the place where the books were kept. I got my book out and tried to put it in my pocket. But it didn't fit, it was too big. So I unbuttoned my shirt and shoved it in there. It lay against my chest and that's how I swam for half an hour. NARRATOR: David Balme led a boarding party across to the stricken submarine. Fearing that the Germans had left men behind to scuttle the boat, Balme went aboard first. DAVID BALME: One couldn't imagine the Germans would have abandoned this U-boat floating in the Atlantic without someone down below trying to sink her. At any rate I got on, got my revolver out - secondary lighting, a dim blue lighting, was on and I couldn't see anybody, just a nasty hissing noise which I didn't like the sound of. To this day I don't know what it was. NARRATOR: The rest of the boarding party began to search the U-boat. They had no idea what they were looking for. They did not know about the secret bigram tables. David Balme had never heard of Bletchley Park. DAVID BALME: I sat down at the captain's desk in his cabin, and suddenly amongst all the things, I think his iron cross was there and I put that into a bag and various odds and ends, but also I came across a sealed envelope, I didn't open it, wouldn't have understood at any rate, being I'm not speaking German, but it obviously was something fairly important, being a sealed envelope in his desk, so I popped it into my pocket. NARRATOR: Little did David Balme realize that the envelope in his pocket would transform the intelligence battle against the U-boats. It contained procedural handbooks, a U-boat navigational chart, and the vital bigram tables. These documents gave Bletchley Park a major leap forward in decoding. Captain Lemp died in the attack. No one will ever know why he did not scuttle the U-boat or destroy the codes. GEORG HOGEL [voice over translation]: You can't change things in retrospect. I had to leave because those were the orders. And the unequivocal order was to leave everything behind and go up and climb onto the deck. There was no other way. NARRATOR: The only document on the U-110 that did not end up in British hands was the book of love poems to Edith. The papers that were captured, including the bigram tables, were priceless. When the documents reached Bletchley Park, the codebreakers rejoiced. The tables and charts would lead to a drastic improvement in fixing U-boat positions, so convoys could be routed evasively around the wolf packs. VALERIE EMERY: The prize were the bigram tables and they were magnificent, although some of them had got a bit wet and we had to dry them. Geoffrey Tandy, having been at the Natural History Museum, had access to proper drying paper which he brought down by a load, and we had to dry those and clean them up and distribute them as necessary. NARRATOR: Almost immediately the results were evident. On June 23rd, 1941, Bletchley Park decoded a U-boat message that would save a convoy. It was heading for England laden with supplies, and the codebreakers discovered that a wolf pack of 10 U-boats was lying in wait. Armed with this knowledge, the Admiralty could reroute the convoy and set up a counter attack. The attack lasted five days; two of the U-boats were sunk and the convoy arrived safely. The Allies had a formidable new weapon in the Battle of the Atlantic. But the war was far from over. Frustrated in his attempts to crush Britain, Hitler now dreamed of conquest in the east. In the spring of 1941, decoded Enigma messages hinted at preparations for a massive invasion of Russia. Once the invasion was under way, Bletchley Park began decoding other, more alarming messages. As the German troops advanced, the SS and police sent signals reporting their mass killings of Soviet Jews. Although no one anticipated the full scale of the genocide, this is now known to be the opening chapter of the Holocaust. When Churchill saw the decodes amidst other evidence, he wanted the whole country to share his outrage. WINSTON CHURCHILL [archive, radio speech]: Since the Mongol invasions of Europe in the 16th century, there has never been methodical, merciless butchery on such a scale. We are in the presence of a crime without a name. NARRATOR: Churchill was taking a chance that the Germans would realize their codes had been broken, exposing the work of Bletchley Park. It was a huge gamble. In fact, the head of the order police was suspicious and ordered new restrictions on the sending of reports on the mass killings by radio. Luckily for Bletchley Park, the German high command never lost its faith in the Enigma. But to avoid further risk of exposure, security was tightened and all information resulting from Bletchley Park decodes bore the top secret rating, code word Ultra. PETER CALVOCORESSI: The Germans didn't attach much importance to intelligence at the beginning. You don't if you're winning. They attached importance to the Blitzkrieg and winning the war quickly. We attached great importance to intelligence because we had our backs to the wall and we had nothing else that we could rely on. NARRATOR: By the summer of 1941, Bletchley Park was able to crack the naval Enigma in less than two days, due partly to the U-boat documents and partly because they had learned to exploit a crucial weakness of the Enigma machine. When an operator typed a message on the Enigma, the machine would replace every letter with a different one. The letter typed in never came out the same. This was yet another basic flaw in the Enigma that could be exploited. The simple fact that no coded letter could ever be the original letter was vital to the codebreakers in their quest to unravel the messages. As they studied the intercepts, it became clear that the Germans kept repeating certain set phrases. It was soon possible to predict which message contained a particular phrase. Bletchley Park called these phrases "cribs." PETER HILTON: I remember "Nieder mit die Englander," down with the English. And of course "Heil, Hitler." "Heil, Hitler" was enormously valuable, I mean you should never inculcate in your military, anyway, the tendency to have exactly the same phrase opening every statement of a great victory. NARRATOR: As military bureaucracy settled into routine, the Germans often sent the same message at the same time every day. NIGEL FORWARD: There was one remarkable one which we used to, used sometimes to cheer us up as a sort college yell, because it had such a wonderful rhythm. It went as follows: nicht und fliebar, nicht auf Gebaude, gift zu Dusseldorf, puffel swoll," and you can imagine six or seven adults who had nothing better to do on the night shift reciting this and feeling a lot better afterwards, perhaps two or three times in some cases. I mean, that message in itself was pointless. All it said was, "you cannot fly from this place, no building has taken place, signed off, whatever." It would have been much better if they hadn't sent it, from their point of view. It was simply the way into the code. NARRATOR: When they suspected the presence of a set phrase, the codebreakers then searched for it in a message. Finding the correct position for the crib relied on the flaw in the Enigma. The codebreakers lined their crib up against the coded message. Since they knew the Enigma would never duplicate a letter in the original, if any pairs of letters did match, the phrase must be in the wrong position. They slid the crib along the message until they found a point where none of the letters were the same. This could be where the phrase was located. If successful, they could then work out the Enigma settings for the next 24 hours. The codebreakers became so adept, they would create their own cribs. They would ask the RAF to drop mines in a specific stretch of sea. The Germans would immediately send a message giving a grid reference for the mines. The codebreakers knew the grid reference CF97 would be spelled out in the coded German message. So they used "caesar fritz nein sieben" as the crib to find the Enigma key. Bletchley Park called this gardening. By now the codebreakers were not merely learning about the Enigma, but about the whole system of war communication. Could the new intelligence have an impact on an entire military campaign? The test came in the deserts of North Africa. A new German general was making a name for himself with his aggressive attacks on the British: Erwin Rommel. MANFRED ROMMEL: My father was what you could call a warrior, he was more a soldier's general, not a paper general. He was very lucky in Africa, not having been wounded, except one day when a British splinter from a shell hit his belt, but the splinter was sticking in the belt and not in his body. Throughout 1941 the desert war swung back and forth across Libya as the Germans tried to capture North Africa. With only radio for communications, Rommel's North African campaign depended on the Enigma. MANFRED ROMMEL: My father had never an idea that the German code was broken. He could not imagine that something like this could happen. NARRATOR: But Rommel's strategy had one major weakness. He relied totally on the Italians to bring in supplies. Rommel's supply lines were a natural target for the British. The RAF was able to attack Italian convoys crossing the Mediterranean to Rommel because the codebreakers could read both the German Luftwaffe Enigma and the Italian special machine cipher. PETER HILTON: I could not understand how Rommel failed to realize that we were breaking important signals. I mean, he was a superb general, he was winning, but then he started losing because his supplies were always sunk in the Mediterranean. NARRATOR: Bletchley Park could pinpoint the location of enemy oil tankers and even know how much gasoline they were carrying. But to keep Ultra safe, it had to look as though the British knew about the convoys from some other source. RALPH BENNETT: There was an absolutely rigid rule that we could not use Ultra unless first of all an aircraft had been sent out to reconnoiter. Once the Ultra had been proven by the Germans seeing a British airplane looking at the convoy, then you could use it, but not until. They might very well say, "I wonder how they knew it," but fortunately they always deluded themselves by saying it must have been an Italian traitor in the Naples docks. MANFRED ROMMEL: My father ended his life with the suspicion that there was a gap in the Italian high command through which news escaped and arrived at the British side. But in heaven he must apologize towards the Italians and say, "I was wrong." NARRATOR: But in the game of intelligence, the Allies had losses as well as gains. Although the German secret service never cracked an Allied cipher machine, Rommel did obtain vital inside information from a spy. The incident began earlier in 1941 when a group of American codebreakers visited Bletchley Park. With America not yet officially at war, the secret services on both sides were nervous about collaborating. CARL BOYD: Spies are not prone to share a great deal straight away, you know. They - it takes time for spies to warm up with one another, and even British and American spies, they played their cards very close to their chests. NARRATOR: Although the British worried about the possibility of American security leaks, they began sharing decoded Enigma messages and diplomatic reports about the war. British security fears were justified, for these exchanges soon gave Rommel his own intelligence breakthrough. Reports on the British campaign in North Africa were sent regularly to Washington by the U.S. military attaché in Cairo. The Germans intercepted the messages, but couldn't break the diplomatic code. Then, in September 1941, the Italian secret service broke into the U.S. embassy in Rome and stole the code book used to encipher all U.S. diplomatic messages. The thieves copied the code book and returned it to the safe without anyone knowing. Now Rommel could read all embassy transmissions about the British campaign. Armed with information about British troops and tanks, Rommel launched a bold assault through Libya, pushing the British back 300 miles in 17 days. The news that reached Churchill painted a grim picture of defeat. Now the British needed their own intelligence coup to reverse the disaster. At Bletchley Park, the codebreakers raced to crack the daily rotor settings. Some breaks came in only six to 12 hours. Still, lives might be saved if the operation could be speeded up. The gifted codebreaker Alan Turing had long been intrigued by the idea of building machines to automate the codebreaking process. The Poles had built such a device before the war, but Turing set out to improve on their ideas. Turing's goal was to build a machine that could figure out how the German operators had set up their Enigmas for that day's messages. Using stock phrases, or cribs, to deduce the rotor settings was the most time-consuming part of the whole codebreaking process. ANDREW HODGES: Alan Turing's great breakthrough was seeing - that finding out the rotor settings from that crib was something that could be done by a machine, that was the great starting point and brought the whole thing into the modern age. NARRATOR: Turing's machine was vastly more powerful than the Poles' earlier device. Curiously, Bletchley Park called it the Bomb, perhaps because of the ticking noise it made while operating. ARTHUR J. LEVENSON: An average Bomb run was about 15 minutes. Occasionally I heard we beat the Germans to the decryption. This happened when A would send B a message and B would almost immediately send back a message, a very short message, which just said, "I can't read you." We would get the solution faster than the other guy could decipher the second sending. And if it was something hot, it'd get out in the field before the German commander got his. NARRATOR: The Bomb was an array of electromechanical drums that simulated the rotors of the Enigma machines. The drums clicked round letter by letter, testing the thousands of possible Enigma settings - 20 every second - until the correct one had been found. TONY SALE: Before Turing, the perceived wisdom was, you've just got to go around searching for this one solution which will break a particular message. Turing said no, what you do is you use the mathematical technique of rejecting all things that it couldn't possibly be. So it was a very powerful search engine, but working in a negative sense in that it rejected millions and millions of possibilities very, very quickly and arrived at the correct answer. NARRATOR: The Bombs radically sped up the pace of decoding. By the end of the war there were 200 of the devices at six different locations, enabling Bletchley Park to decode 90,000 messages a month. ANDREW HODGES: The algorithmic process, as we call it now, by which the crib and the cipher text were processed on these mechanical systems, they were the most advanced, most complex processes that had ever been used in the history of the world. I can't think of anything else with its logical and statistical sophistication. It's something you should think of as years and years before its time. NARRATOR: Meanwhile, in August 1942, Churchill traveled to North Africa, determined to reverse the Allies' fortunes. His first action was to inject fresh blood into the leadership of the 8th Army. He appointed a decisive new general, Bernard Montgomery, to take on Rommel's Africakorps. He knew from Ultra that Rommel was prepared to attack somewhere in Egypt - but where? Montgomery predicted the ridge at Alam Halfa. RALPH BENNETT: Monty said, looking at the ground, he will go over the Alam Halfa ridge. Some days later we decoded a signal from Rommel saying, I am going to attack on the 30th of September the Alam Halfa ridge, which is exactly what Monty had said. I think from that moment on Monty was so confident of his own intelligence that he couldn't be beaten, he couldn't - he knew everything. NARRATOR: But Montgomery had another advantage. The Allies finally realized that the Germans were reading U.S. embassy reports on the British campaign, so the embassy changed its diplomatic code. Rommel no longer knew what the enemy was planning. Montgomery was still receiving Ultra from Bletchley Park. Soon, the German forces were under enormous pressure. But some of the decoders began to feel impatient with Montgomery. PETER HILTON: We felt that Montgomery did not trust the intelligence information that Bletchley Park was providing him with, because we believed in our own arrogant way that we were probably providing a service to the military that no other military had ever had in the history of warfare. NARRATOR: On the 23rd of October, the British launched its attack at El Alamein. ARCHIVE RADIO: Our mandate from the Prime Minister is to destroy the Axis forces in North Africa. We're going to finish with this chap Rommel once and for all. NARRATOR: British intercept stations logged over 300 messages a day in the battle that followed. Bletchley Park knew Rommel's plans, his forces, and his losses. For the first time in the war, an army moved into battle with precise advance knowledge of the enemy. Ultra told Montgomery of Rommel's critical shortages of fuel and tanks. On the evening of the 2nd of November, Rommel signaled Hitler for permission to retreat. JOHN PRESTWICH: Alamein was marvelous, because you had these desperate messages from Rommel saying, Panzer Army is exhausted, we've enough petrol for 50 kilometers, ammunition is contemptible, and so on, and we have between 11 and 17 operational tanks in the whole of Panzer Army Africa. NARRATOR: Hitler replied the next day, ordering Rommel not to yield a step, either victory or death. Montgomery read the message within hours. At El Alamein Montgomery's superior forces crushed Rommel. Yet he decided not to pursue the remnants of the retreating German Army. RALPH BENNETT: We told Monty over and over again how few tanks Rommel had got. So Monty could have wiped Rommel off the face of the earth. Why he didn't do so, why he didn't wipe it off the face of the earth, I simply do not know, nobody else knows. JOHN PRESTWICH: Why was the Hut 3 information not used? It was so full, I mean that was our exasperation. We were giving Monty every conceivable information about the state of Rommel's troops, the number of operational tanks, which was terribly crucial. I mean, you know, enough - about as many tanks as could be parked on the lawn at the back of this house. In desert warfare, no tanks and you're finished. RADIO ARCHIVE: This is the BBC Home and Forces program. Here's some excellent news which has come during the past hour from GHQ Cairo. It says, the Axis forces in the western desert after 12 days and nights of ceaseless attacks by our land and air forces are now in full retreat. BARBARA QUIRK: "Somehow war seems the natural state of affairs, and peace when it comes will take a hell of a lot of getting used to." NARRATOR: At the time of El Alamein, the U.S. had been at war with Germany for nearly a year. Even before Pearl Harbor, the British Admiralty had been passing decoded U-boat messages to the American Navy. Churchill and Roosevelt knew that the Battle of the Atlantic was crucial and that Ultra gave them a vital edge in the fight against the U-boats. In February 1942, the Admiralty received disastrous news. An abrupt change in the U-boat code plunged Bletchley Park into darkness. They could no longer read the U-boat signals. Equally serious was an abrupt change in U-boat tactics. German submarines switched from the North Atlantic and began prowling the eastern seaboard of the U.S. There, the marauding U-boats maintained radio silence. When they did transmit, their signals couldn't be decoded. All over the Atlantic, the Allied navies struggled to cope with mounting losses at sea. As the crisis deepened, the naval Enigma team at Bletchley Park worked round the clock to crack the new code, which they called Shark. Since none of the old codebreaking tricks would work, it was obvious that Donitz had somehow drastically changed the Enigma. For the Allies on both sides of the Atlantic, it was a severe blow. COLIN BURKE: Well, unfortunately the British lost control of the Enigma, and America was left without the kind of vital information needed to protect its convoys. There were an awful lot of protests, and England was very hesitant to tell us that they had lost control of the code. NARRATOR: Before the blackout, the Admiralty's submarine tracking room had been able to pinpoint U-boats with the help of the navigational positions radioed between Donitz and his crews. Now all they had were rough directional fixes on the signals themselves. Toward the end of 1942, the Allies were losing ships at over four times the rate before the blackout. Finally Bletchley Park figured out what Donitz had done. Though still believing the Allies could never crack Enigma, he was worried about internal security, and ordered the addition of a fourth rotor to the machine. The revolving rotors, with their maze of constantly changing electrical wiring, were the secret of the Enigma. Introducing a fourth one vastly multiplied the number of potential settings. Now the codebreakers would have to build a new type of device to simulate the four-rotor Enigma, and pacify the increasingly impatient Americans. COLIN BURKE: It got to the point where by mid-1942 the Americans declared that no matter what, they would go their own way and make sure they'd get their own independent capability against the German submarine menace and its code systems. And it became quite touchy as to whether or not the two sides would cooperate. NARRATOR: Tensions grew when secrets were withheld from an American intelligence officer visiting Bletchley Park. He wrote an angry report home. To resolve the crisis, Bletchley Park's second-in-command traveled to Washington for a meeting with the U.S. Navy. They signed an agreement to resolve concerns about security and to cooperate fully on the breaking of the naval Enigma. As part of the deal, American codebreakers would be sent to Bletchley Park. Together they would take on the challenge of the fourth rotor. SARAH BARING: What I think bothered us most was the destruction of the merchant shipping and the destruction of the naval ships, and knowing that if only we could break this wretched code, we could save so many lives and sink so many U-boats. NARRATOR: The first chance to get back into the naval Enigma came when a fresh set of captured U-boat code tables arrived at Bletchley Park, enabling the codebreakers to uncover a critical weakness in the four-rotor system. The German four-rotor Enigma used mainly on submarines had to communicate with other naval stations that used only a three-wheel machine. To solve the problem, the fourth rotor could be set in a special position that allowed the machine to simulate an old fashioned three-rotor Enigma. With the help of the captured tables, the codebreakers worked out the settings of the first three rotors on the Bombs as they had in the past, then simply ran through all 26 positions of the fourth rotor until they found the right one. Soon, the daily settings were on their way to the Admiralty and America. After 10 months in the cold, Bletchley Park was back. SHAUN WYLIE: The excitement when we got back into the U-boats was terrific. I was on night shift and somebody came running and said, "We're back into the U-boats," and it was the one that meant we were going to be able to go on getting into the U-boats so that was terrific. It wasn't just a one off, it was - we were going to be able to do it steadily. Churchill was told as soon as possible. It was a great moment. NARRATOR: Once again Bletchley Park could help reroute convoys around the Wolf Packs. Airborne radar and improved escort support helped assure victory in the Battle of the Atlantic. Although only a few of the men and women of Bletchley Park were in a position to appreciate it, the breaking of the naval Enigma was their finest hour. By the spring of 1943, they were decoding dozens of messages a day, and cooperation with the Americans was taken to a new level. The U.S. codebreaking unit was known as Arlington Hall, after its headquarters in northern Virginia. After the war, it would become the National Security Agency, or NSA. Here the first American officers were selected to join the codebreakers at Bletchley Park. WILLIAM BUNDY: I remember vividly, a group of us were convened in a room there, and the moment we came in they were told, "What you're going to hear today is something you will not discuss, and it means that you will never be put where you can be captured by the enemy." And I was picked to be the commanding officer of that outfit, and that's how I got to Bletchley Park. NARRATOR: During their voyage to England, the officers were ordered to tell a bizarre cover story, that they were messenger pigeon experts in the signal corps. This aroused the suspicions of an officer who was checking their identity. ARTHUR J. LEVENSON: They asked us whether we'd had the Army general classification test, they said they couldn't find our scores on our records. They said, would you mind taking the test, and we said no, we don't mind. There were five of us, and we took the test, and this sergeant graded them, and he came running up, he says, "Holy mackerel. What scores! You guys ought to be in intelligence!" I don't think I'd ever met an Englishman in my life until that point. I had been full of stereotypes about the English, you know, they're distant and have no sense of humor, and these were the most outgoing, wonderful people. Fed us when it was quite a sacrifice, just enough screwballs to be real fun. LORD BRIGGS: It was the first time I'd ever been involved in my life in any serious discussion, both either about war or politics with an American. It was there that I learnt for the first time to drink tomato juice, it was the first experience I had with American coffee and American bacon, so that in a way America was introduced to me through this Bletchley prelude. NARRATOR: The Americans quickly settled into life at Bletchley Park. The only serious dispute arose when the British challenged the Americans to a game of rounders, the British version of baseball. BARBARA EACHUS: We said of course, we were delighted, you know, our honored allies. So the Americans came and we showed them how they could play with - they said what, no baseball bat? We said no, we just use this broom handle. So they said fine. And we played. It was a lovely day. We all played well. And at the end of the game, we all sort of clapped each other on the back and the Americans said well, "We're sorry we beat you," and the British captain said, "I'm sorry we beat you." And that was a little bit of an incident, because the Americans said they thought they'd won, and we said we knew we'd won. And they said, "Well what rules do you play by?" And we said, "Our rules." NARRATOR: As the Americans adapted to their new life, their colleagues told them about a mysterious and daunting codebreaking problem. They knew that in addition to Enigma, the Germans sometimes used another completely different kind of cipher machine. TONY SALE: Now we knew nothing about this cipher machine, it was kept completely secret by the Germans, and we first began to intercept radio transmissions in 1940. It was actually a group of policemen on the south coast of England. They were listening for German agent transmissions from within the U.K. Of course there weren't any because we'd captured all the agents, but they were still listening for these and they heard these weird signals. And they sent them to Bletchley Park. NARRATOR: At first, the decoders puzzled over the origin of the strange signals. Hitler had demanded a cipher machine for the German high command that was faster and even more secure than the Enigma. His experts devised a coding system based on the teleprinter machine. Teleprinters operated on a simple, universal binary code that was widely known. But the Germans connected the teleprinter to a machine that cunningly exploited the teleprinter language itself to produce a complex code. The secret German coding machine was called the Lorenz. To scramble a message the Lorenz used 12 rotors - not just the three or four of the Enigma. DONALD MICHIE: The Lorenz machine transmits a string of letters, each one of which is actually a mix of the real letter of the real message and a piece of machine crafted gobbledygook, that machine being of diabolically complex craftiness. So at the end of it, what comes out and goes over the ether and is transmitted, is a single string of total gobbledygook. NARRATOR: The Lorenz relied on a mathematical system called "modulo two addition." This allowed the string of meaningless letters added to the message at one end to be removed at the other by a similar math calculation. TONY SALE: The operator presses a key on his teleprinter, that generates an electrical signal, the Lorenz machine then adds an obscuring character to this signal and the result is then transmitted. At the other end of the link another Lorenz machine set to exactly the same configuration regenerates exactly the same obscuring character, adds it back to the cipher text, and by the magic of modulo two arithmetic they cancel out and leave you with the plain text. NARRATOR: The security of the Lorenz depended on the fact that it was adding a string of random letters to hide the real message. TONY SALE: But because it's a machine, it can't generate a completely random set of letters. It's what's known as pseudo random. Unfortunately for the Germans it was more pseudo than random, and that's how it was broken. NARRATOR: Bletchley Park gave the mysterious code the name FISH. They worked out that fish was based on teleprinter language. How to strip off the obscuring code was anybody's guess. But on the 30th of August, 1941, a lazy German operator gave the whole game away. TONY SALE: When he got to the end of keying in this nearly 4,000 character message by hand, the operator at the receiving end sent back in German the equivalent of, "Didn't get that, send it again." And then like idiots they both put their Lorenz cipher machines back to the same start position, and then he began to key this long message again. NARRATOR: When the operator began to encode the same message a second time, he grew impatient and abbreviated parts of it. The resulting slight changes enabled the codebreakers to strip off the random letters that were cloaking the message. PETER HILTON: For me the real excitement was this business of getting these two texts out of one sequence of gibberish, it was marvelous. Never, never met anything that was quite as exciting. Especially since you knew that these were vital messages. NARRATOR: Now that they had decoded the message, could they use it to figure out exactly how the Lorenz machine worked? For the next two months, the codebreakers hunted laboriously for patterns in the endless strings of obscuring letters. Eventually they were able to reconstruct the precise mechanics of the Lorenz - a machine they had never seen. They even built their own replica. Since it was used to crack the mysterious Fish code, they called the replica Tunny, after a fish in the tuna family. Once the Lorenz settings were found, Tunny could turn the messages into plain German. Despite the advances in understanding Fish, it still took at least a month to decode a single message, and by then the information was generally useless. LORD JENKINS: It was a curious life, it involved mental gymnastics and it could be, could be very wearing, particularly if you didn't succeed. I mean, you could spend nights in which you got nowhere at all. You didn't get a single break, you just tried, played around, played around through this bleak long night with total frustration, and your brain felt literally raw, your psyche or whatever it is felt frustrated, but your brain always literally felt raw at the end of it. NARRATOR: But the whole process was about to be speeded up. At the post office research station in London, a brilliant young telephone engineer hit upon the idea of an electronic machine that would automate the hunt for the Fish settings. The machine would be nothing less than the world's first programmable computer. THOMAS H. FLOWERS: I tried to tell Bletchley Park what my ideas were, but you must understand the technology that I was using was then only just known to very few people in the whole world. NARRATOR: Though the codebreakers were skeptical, Flowers was convinced the answer lay in vacuum tubes - hundreds of them. TONY SALE: Tommy Flowers started in March 1943 with a blank sheet of paper, never been done before. I mean Flowers was thinking of a machine with 1,500 valves in it. The biggest machine ever at that time had 150 valves in it, so this was an enormous leap into the dark, but Flowers was convinced he could make it work - nobody else was but he was - and so he started more or less off his own bat. THOMAS H. FLOWERS: We just told people to do things. We had the power, we had the authority to tell anybody - we had the first priority in the whole country for everything, and we could just tell people what we wanted and not tell them what it was for. NARRATOR: Over Christmas 1943, Tommy Flowers installed the world's first programmable computer at Bletchley Park. Eventually ten more were built, all dedicated to analyzing the secret messages of the German high command. They were given the name Colossus. Colossus could read a coded message at high speed and then search for the settings of the Lorenz code wheels. It could accomplish this in minutes instead of a month. TONY SALE: Tommy Flowers realized that it was possible to read paper tape optically at very high speed, and this is going at 5,000 characters a second, 30 miles an hour the tape goes through there. And it's quite incredible that it can actually read information at that speed. THOMAS H. FLOWERS: In fact, we did a test on how fast we could drive it before the tape broke, and we got up to nearly 60 miles an hour, so we decided that was a bit - when it did break it went all over the place, it just disintegrated. NARRATOR: Colossus began operating five months before D-Day, the critical invasion of France in June1944 that would turn the tide against Hitler. Tanks and guns choked every main road and street in southern England. The Allies prepared an elaborate deception. They set out to trick the Germans into thinking that the attack on Normandy was simply a diversion. Double agents in Britain relayed the false information to Berlin, but only the codebreakers could tell if the deception was working. PETER CALVOCORESSI: The Germans were deceived for a very long time, far more than we expected and far more successfully. But we also got a bonus, if you like. That is, we knew they were deceived, because from Ultra we could see that they were not moving troops into Normandy, they had to say to themselves, they'll pop over to Calais. The Germans were not only deceived, they were known to be deceived. NARRATOR: It was an enormous subterfuge and an even bigger gamble. Around the clock, the Allies searched for the merest hint of German suspicion. The invasion was poised to strike. But then, a vital message was decoded at Bletchley Park. ARTHUR J. LEVENSON: Just before D-Day, Marshal Rommel, the desert fox, was appointed inspector general of the western defenses, and he sent this enormously long message, very detailed description of the western defenses, where each unit was located and what equipment they had. It was a - it was 70,000 letters, which was read. NARRATOR: When Bletchley Park decoded Rommel's message, it contained alarming news. German tanks were massing at the exact spot where American troops were about to parachute into Normandy. ARTHUR J. LEVENSON: They were going to drop the - one of the airborne divisions right on top of a German tank division. They would have been massacred. They changed it. NARRATOR: It was June 4th, 1944. Reassured by the codebreakers that all was well, the massive army began to move forward. Then came a discouraging setback. PAT BING: We went on duty that night and they said, "Well, tonight is the invasion and they're going across." And so we slaved away. Well, of course as everybody knows, by about four o'clock in the morning, the weather was so bad they had to bring them all back. Which of course was bad luck for us because they then came and said, well you can't go walking about Bletchley when you know that the invasion's going to be tomorrow night, so we just had to stay there. NARRATOR: Twenty-four hours later, the Allies launched the biggest military invasion in history. SARAH BARING: We had dinner and we came out at eleven o'clock, and I suddenly started to hear a hum and it got louder and louder and louder, and I knew what it was. And about ten minutes later the sky was black with aircraft towing gliders, and my friend said, I wonder what that is, and I said, I haven't the faintest idea. WILLIAM BUNDY: And about three o'clock, I think it was, suddenly there was a real rustle and very shortly the word spread that there had been German traffic saying that paratroopers were dropping all over the place. So we knew, we knew this was it. NARRATOR: The decoded messages showed that the deception had worked. Hitler's troops were split between Normandy and Calais and were unable to counter the onslaught. Over half the German forces had remained in the northeast, awaiting an attack that never came. At Bletchley Park, those who knew about the invasion weren't allowed to leave for 48 hours. Even now, nobody was taking any chances. PAT BING: We staggered out feeling rather the worse for wear, but knew it was then general knowledge, and went home, and my lady I was billeted on said to me, where the bloody hell have you been? And I said, well I've been working. She said, "Well you've missed all the fun." And I said, "What fun?" And she said, "Well there was the invasion, it's been on the radio" - 'cause no television - it's been on the radio. I said, "Oh lovely," you know, and went to bed. BARBARA QUIRK: "Tuesday, 6th of June, 1944, invasion began. 10 a.m. breakfast, letter from Maureen, spent morning washing and ironing, on at four, life quite hectic. Feel somewhat anticlimax-y now the second front has begun. Not a bad day, really." NARRATOR: It had not been a bad day for the codebreakers either. They had accurately foretold the position of all but two of the 62 German divisions. Enigma and Lorenz messages were read throughout the D-Day operation. By the end of the war, they had handled at least 63 million characters of high level code between Hitler and his generals. In the months that followed, Bletchley Park would continue to chronicle the disintegration of Nazi Germany - right until the end of the war. Finally, at the cost of at least 50 million lives, the Second World War came to an end. LORD BRIGGS: When the final signal came through from Donitz surrendering, it was in clear and not in code, and that was extremely interesting because you felt the war was then really over. When messages did begin to come through in clear, then all the secrets of the war really were beginning to fade into history already. NARRATOR: In the roll call of those who had brought about victory, the codebreakers of Bletchley Park would never be mentioned. The operations there were to stay a secret for the next 30 years. Eight of the ten Colossus machines were destroyed. The remaining two were moved to British secret service headquarters, where they may have played a significant part in the codebreaking operations of the Cold War. In fact, the Russian military had developed a code that was similar to the high command's Fish code. So the techniques invented at Bletchley Park were still to prove vital in a very different kind of conflict. In 1960, the order finally came to destroy the last two Colossus machines. THOMAS H. FLOWERS: That was a terrible mistake. I was instructed to destroy all the records which I did. I took all the drawings and plans and all the information about Colossus on paper and put it in the boiler fire, saw it burn. NARRATOR: Tommy Flowers returned to the post office and was forgotten. In all the secrecy, Colossus never received recognition as the world's first programmable computer. Instead, that honor was to go to the American Eniac. As for the codebreakers, they all dispersed, some back to universities and others into the fledgling computer industry. A few stayed on in the British secret service, while some of the Americans returned to Arlington Hall. The most innovative thinker of all, the man whose inventiveness had been at the center of Bletchley Park's success, died tragically. In 1954, Alan Turing took his own life after being persecuted as a security risk because he was gay. DONALD MICHIE: Alan Turing is one of the figures of the century. The world of computing and now the world of the Internet stems from Alan Turing's fundamental ideas. There were other great men in Bletchley Park, but in the long, long hall of history, I think Turing's name will probably be the number one in terms of consequence for mankind. NARRATOR: Apart from the Atom Bomb, there was no greater secret in World War II than the work of the codebreakers of Bletchley Park. Their breakthroughs gave the Allies a vital edge in the U-boat war, the tank battles against Rommel, and the D-Day invasion. But their impact was felt far beyond the battlefield. Eavesdropping and decryption won a new prominence in the minds of politicians as well as generals. The transatlantic alliance, that took its first hesitant steps at Bletchley Park, would mature and prove critical during the Cold War. And the roots of today's computer era trace back directly to the dazzling inventiveness of Turing, Flowers, and their wartime colleagues. In the end, though, Bletchley Park's greatest achievement lay not in broken ciphers but in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of lives it saved. TONY SALE: Historians generally agree that it shortened the war by two years. Bletchley Park didn't win the war, that was won by people with guns and bullets and things out in the field, but I think Bletchley Park is a great exemplar, particularly to the younger generation now, of brains over bullets. You can defeat an enemy intellectually, and that was shown here. The World Wide Web relies on more sophisticated codes than were used in all of World War II. On NOVA's Website, find out how cryptography affects you today more than you may think. To order this show, or any other NOVA program, for $19.95 plus shipping and handling, call WGBH Boston Video at 1-800-255-9424. NOVA is a production of WGBH Boston. Major funding for NOVA is provided by the Park Foundation, dedicated to education and quality television. This program is funded in part by Northwestern Mutual Life, which has been protecting families and businesses for generations. Have you heard from the quite company? Northwestern Mutual Life. C|Net, bringing the digital age into focus. CNET.COM, the source for computers and technology. And by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you. Thank you. This is PBS. Next time on NOVA: they risked it all in a perilous flight to the finish. It was a very important secret, and it paid off. Now, get the real story behind the race to fly faster than sound.

BOSTON — A retired Massachusetts judge Tuesday defended her decision to order a mentally ill woman to have an abortion and be sterilized against her wishes, and she blasted Boston University for rescinding a job offer after her ruling sparked controversy. Christina Harms said she believed the schizophrenic woman would have chosen to have an abortion if she had been mentally competent. In her ruling, she granted a petition from the woman’s parents to have their daughter declared incompetent and awarded guardianship to them for the purpose of consenting to the abortion. Ms. Harms‘ ruling drew spirited debate from bloggers on both sides of the abortion issue. Her written ruling remains sealed, under family court rules, but the gist of it became public after the state appeals court overturned the decision on Jan. 17. Now the former judge has taken the unusual step of defending her decision publicly, both in media interviews and in a letter sent Monday to other family court judges in Massachusetts. The Boston Globe first reported on the judge’s letter. Ms. Harms, who retired six days before the appeals court ruling, said a decision by Boston University’s School of Law to back out of a job offer shortly after the appeals court overturned her ruling sends the wrong message about judicial independence. “Being a judge is not like being a contestant on ‘American Idol,’ ” she said Tuesday. “You are not looking for votes.” The 31-year-old woman has not been named; she was identified in court papers only as “Mary Moe.” She had characterized herself as “very Catholic” and said she was opposed to having an abortion. Her parents had said their daughter was not a devout Catholic; they sought consent from the court for an abortion. Ms. Harms said the woman had been taken off some of her anti-psychotic drugs because the medications could have harmed the fetus. After hearing from the woman and from her parents, the judge said she found that the woman had severe delusions, including her belief she was not pregnant, therefore the woman was not competent to decide whether to have an abortion. Ms. Harms said she also found that the woman, if she had been mentally competent, would have chosen an abortion to protect her own well-being. In overturning Ms. Harms‘ decision, the appeals court used unusually strong language. The court said no one had requested sterilization and that the judge “appears to have simply produced the requirement out of thin air.” Ms. Harms said she had been negotiating with BU’s law school since August about a newly created position in which she would help the school in its efforts to increase the number of judicial clerkships and internships offered to its law students. After first asking for her biography for a public announcement, BU officials said they never made a formal job offer to Ms. Harms. But they also acknowledged that the controversy created by her ruling contributed to the decision to take her out of the running for the job. In a letter to Ms. Harms‘ lawyer, BU Deputy General Counsel Erika Geetter denied that it was concern about the judge’s ruling that persuaded the school not to move forward on the job. Retired appeals court Judge Rudolph Kass called the decision by BU “unfortunate.” “You don’t want judges sniffing at the winds to see what’s popular,” Mr. Kass said. “They should be trying to do what’s right in the circumstances.”

The prominent leader of a militant left-wing group was arrested earlier this week on charges stemming from a violent brawl last year between white nationalist groups and counter-protesters. Yvette Felarca, 47, was taken into custody in Los Angeles on Tuesday on charges of inciting and participating in a riot, and assault likely to cause great bodily injury, the Sacramento County District Attorney's Office said Wednesday. The charges come after an eight-month investigation. Felarca, whose name in public records appears as Yvonne Capistrano Felarca, has been identified as the leader and spokesperson for the anti-fascist group By Any Means Necessary. She is among several people arrested this week in connection to the wild skirmish that broke out at the state Capitol in June 2016 when more than 300 counter-protesters confronted about 30 members of the Traditionalist Worker Party, which has been called a white nationalist group. Felarca, who is a middle school teacher in Berkeley, attended the Capitol protest and gave television interviews after the melee. She was captured on video hitting a member of the TWP and calling a man a Nazi before punching him in the stomach repeatedly while shouting for him to “get the f*** off our streets.” WARNING: GRAPHIC LANGUAGE The district attorney's office said many counter-protesters were masked, making it difficult to bring charges -- including in connection with numerous stabbings and an assault on a Sacramento television station's news crew. Fourteen people had stab wounds, cuts and bruises, with two of the injured surviving critical stab wounds. A day after the melee, someone sent an anonymous threat to Berkeley’s Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School where Felarca was a teacher, Berkeleyside reported. In September 2016, Felarca was placed on administrative leave. She returned to her classroom six weeks later. In addition to the June clash, Felarca has been prominent at several other events involving the Occupy movement, and more recently between supporters and opponents of President Trump and other conservative leaders. She was also among the people who protested Milo Yiannopoulos’ appearance at UC Berkeley earlier this year. During an appearance on Fox News after the protests, she said she was obligated to shut down his “racist, misogynistic and homophobic” messages. Others charged in connection to the June 2016 rally include William Planer, who prosecutors say was supporting the TWP. He was arrested in Colorado and is awaiting extradition to California. Porfirio Paz, a counter-protester was arrested in Southern California, while another counter-protester, Michael Williams was arrested in Yolo County. The district attorney's office also rejected dozens of lesser charges including unlawful assembly and possessing illegal signs and banners. "Our role is to investigate the incident and make recommendations to the district attorney's office," highway patrol spokeswoman Fran Clader said Wednesday. "Ultimately it's up to the district attorney's office to determine who should be arrested and face charges." The Associated Press contributed to this report.

This past June, Maine legislators passed a law, An Act to Recognize Local Control Regarding Food Systems, which allows cities and towns in the state to adopt laws permitting farmers and other food producers within their borders to engage in a host of direct-to-consumer food sales. The law, intended to bolster local food economies in the state, allows Maine municipalities to "regulate by ordinance local food systems," and requires the state, in turn, to "recognize such ordinances." While the act was intended to protect people like the "one-cow farmer who feeds the people in his community the food they want to eat," its protections had limits. "The law does not cover sales outside a given city or town that has a food sovereignty ordinance in place," I wrote in a column shortly after the law passed. "Neither does the law pre-empt federal law." And it's that latter area that got Maine into hot water with the federal government, before the law ever took effect. "Maine's Department of Agriculture is concerned that the law would keep it from inspecting any meat slaughtered and processed in a town that is food sovereign, negating an agreement it has with the USDA to meet federal standards," the Portland Press Herald reported last week. Indeed, threats made by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) against the state forced Maine lawmakers this week to amend its food-sovereignty law. In a July 6 letter from USDA to Maine's agriculture department, the federal agency threatened to pull its approval of slaughterhouses in the state, which could have temporarily shuttered five facilities in Maine and left Maine livestock farmers scrambling to find available out-of-state slaughter options. The letter, written by the USDA's Alfred Almanza, says the agency is "concerned that the Food Sovereignty Act, if implemented as currently written, would contravene Federal food safety laws and regulations." The USDA also threatened Maine—one of 27 states to run its own meat inspection system—with federalization of its slaughter regime. At an emergency legislative session this week, Maine lawmakers amended the law to require cities and towns that adopt new ordinances under the Food Sovereignty Act to "comply with state and federal laws when developing local ordinances for meat and poultry production and sales." That followed a committee vote to amend the law last week. While the Press Herald contends "[t]he cause of the problem is [Maine's] food sovereignty bill," that's not really the case. The causes (plural) of the problem reside in Washington. These causes are the USDA, Congress, and the Supreme Court. Maine's food sovereignty movement arose earlier this decade as a response to a state law requiring even the smallest poultry farmers to invest tens of thousands of dollars on needless processing costs. "Show me a farmer who spends $30,000 to sell $1,000 worth of food and I'll show you a farmer who's out of business," I write in my recent book, Biting the Hands that Feed Us: How Fewer, Smarter Laws Would Make Our Food System More Sustainable. "Food sovereignty ordinances sought to address the absurdities of laws like these." The idea that local farmers might butcher and process their own meat for commercial sale—or use a local abattoir to do the same—rubbed the USDA all wrong. That's because of a 1967 federal law that granted the USDA ultimate oversight of all beef, poultry, and pork processing for commercial sale. While the USDA does carve out a few exceptions—for farmers who don't intend to sell their meat to a grocer or restaurant or other commercial outlet and instead sell to, for example, bulk meat to an individual buyer—few can use a custom, non-USDA slaughterhouse. If it sounds bizarre to you that the USDA will fight for its power to regulate the sale of a single steak in some rural Maine town, that's not the half of it. The fact a law even exists that makes the USDA even believe the agency has such power is one part of the real problem. It's not just Congress's fault, though. According to the Supreme Court, almost everything—including baking a loaf of bread at home for your family—is interstate commerce. I may not like the way the federal government regulates interstate commerce in meats and meat products. Put another way, I don't like it. But that doesn't mean the federal government doesn't have plenary power to regulate these sales if it so chooses. It does. The Constitution, including particularly the Commerce Clause, speak clearly on this. But intrastate commerce is not interstate commerce. Maine's Food Sovereignty law clearly and only pertains to the former. "The new law will face tests, no doubt, particularly in cases where local food sovereignty ordinances might bump up against federal law," I wrote of Maine's Food Sovereignty Act in my July column. "Maine farmers, consumers, and lawmakers will have to be vigilant about the potential for [incursions] from the USDA and FDA." Those incursions happened. Rather than repeal the law, though, as the USDA no doubt would have preferred, Maine lawmakers amended it to allow the law—and farmers and local food communities in the state—the opportunity to thrive. The Food Sovereignty Act faced its first test, and it survived.

Company's £5.5bn redevelopment plan to create 25,000 jobs and 16,000 new homes between 2012 and 2024 Plans to restore one of London's most recognisable landmarks have been given the go-ahead today by the city's mayor, Boris Johnson. The £5.5bn redevelopment of Battersea power station in south London, which has been derelict since its closure 27 years ago, will entail the construction of thousands of homes and shops. It will also bring closer an extension of London Underground's Northern line. It will mean the creation of up to 25,000 jobs – 15,000 of them within the power station building – and the overall construction of 16,000 homes. The grade-II listed building, which featured on the cover of Pink Floyd's Animals album, has stood empty since it was decommissioned in 1983 as a number of plans to redevelop the 40-acre site failed. The redevelopment proposal has been put forward by the company Real Estate Opportunities (REO). It includes a commitment from the developers of more than £200m towards funding a two-station extension of the Northern line from Kennington. Johnson said: "Battersea power station has long been an iconic feature of the capital's skyline, and these plans will make sure that status is retained for years to come. "The building was once a vital motor helping to power the capital. With its future secured through this regeneration, it will once again play a part in driving London's economy." The plan now needs the approval of Eric Pickles, the secretary of state for communities and local government. Rob Tincknell, director of REO, said: "I am delighted that the mayor of London has supported the redevelopment of Battersea power station, bringing us even closer to delivering the regeneration of one of London's most iconic landmarks. "We now look forward to the application passing to the secretary of state for communities and local government for final consideration." The firm said it hopes to begin construction on the first phase of the development in early 2012, and to complete it in 2016.The remaining phases, including the new underground station that will follow, are scheduled for completion in 2024.

Two days following the developer-only release of iOS 10 beta 3, Apple today released iOS 10 Public Beta 2 for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. The software is now available to public beta testers who are signed on the Apple Beta Software Program. For those wondering, iOS 10 Public Beta 2 and developer beta 3 offer the same features. Folks on the first public beta with an appropriate configuration profile installed on their device should see an over-the-air download in Settings → General → Software Update. NOTE: the second public beta and the third developer beta offer the same features. What’s new in iOS 10 Public Beta 2? Here’s our own Andrew O’Hara with a walkthrough video detailing changes in iOS 10 Public Beta 2, which corresponds to developer-only beta 3. Subscribe to iDownloadBlog on YouTube for more videos from the iDB team. iOS 10 Public Beta 2 contains fixes for 3D Touch and replying to texts from the Lock screen, a softer keyboard clicking sound, a new Rest Finger to Open switch in Accessibility settings allowing you to correctly revert the unlock behavior to iOS 9, subtle haptic feedback when locking the device manually, Notification Center and Music app tweaks, App Store for iMessage Apps and other goodies. For detailed overview of the above changes in iOS 10 Public Beta 2, see our write-up. iDB’s iOS 10 previews iOS 10 Public Beta 1, which corresponds to developer-only beta 2, packs in more than three dozen new features, tweaks and refinements that we detailed in our hands-on article—our video highlights them all. Check out our iOS 10 previews: For smaller changes in iOS 10, see our iOS 10 Tidbits series. iOS 10 availability iOS 10 is available to members of the Apple Developer Program and, as of July, to public beta testers signed on the Apple Beta Software Program. The operating system will release as a free update for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch this fall. System requirements for iOS 10 are same as those for iOS 9, with the exception of the iPhone 4s, original iPad mini and iPad 2 which are are no longer supported. Your thoughts on beta 2 We’d like to hear from people who have installed the latest public beta on their iOS device. Are you satisfied with the progress Apple’s made vs. the previous beta? What’s your favorite new feature in iOS 10 Public Beta 2, and why? Hit us in comments! By the way, macOS Sierra Public Beta 2 also released to testers today.

The era of computer screens is ending, the TED Conference in Vancouver heard today, as Microsoft's Alex Kipman appeared to share the stage with holographic mushrooms and a NASA scientist on Mars. "We're like cave people in computer terms. We've barely discovered charcoal and started drawing stick figures in our caves." Kipman was demonstrating Microsoft's Hololens, augmented reality glasses that let their wearer see and interact with holograms — one in a succession of gee-whiz moments featuring virtual and augmented reality at this year's TED. Start-up Meta unveiled their augmented reality glasses to TED yesterday, with CEO Meron Gribetz conducting a 3D phone call and finely nudging a holographic brain around. "The ability to move around holograms like Ironman just became real," he said. "It feels like some version of this is going to be a really big deal," said Chris Anderson, curator of TED. Which gadget will prevail is uncertain indeed, but evangelists for this technology see applications far beyond video games — from shoe shopping to confronting our fears. A video feed from Alex Kipman's Hololens demonstration showed the audience what he was seeing, though the holograms did not actually join him on stage. (Bret Hartman/TED) Virtual v. augmented Virtual and augmented reality tend to get lumped together, with both abandoning the two-dimensional screen for something that appears to be right in front of — or around you. The big difference is whether the images join you as holograms in your living room (augmented) or transport you to another world (virtual). An attraction called "The VOID" at TED this year showed visitors including Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg just how immersive virtual reality can be. CBC Reporter Lisa Johnson tried out The VOID and other virtual and augmented reality technologies on display at the TED Conference in Vancouver this year. (Lisa Johnson) I got to try it too, and from the moment you pull on the glasses and vibrating vest, you can't see the room or people standing next to you, unless they're in the same gear. "If you get disoriented, reach for a wall," we were advised. "Most of the walls are real." A portal takes us into an ancient temple. A virtual torch (that we can actually carry around, because it's a real rod) lights stone walls while you walk, solving puzzles to escape. I get uncomfortable with heights, and at one point I could feel my stomach clench as we stood next to a virtual cliff, even though I knew I was in a room in the Vancouver Convention Centre. Remember when Han Solo went through <a href="https://twitter.com/voidvr">@voidvr</a> at <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/ted2016?src=hash">#ted2016</a>, and he LOVED it?! <a href="https://t.co/EQOflnNFWh">pic.twitter.com/EQOflnNFWh</a> —@voidvr On the flip side, augmented reality keeps you in this world, which is its strength, said Gribetz. Two people wearing Meta's glasses "can make eye contact and pass each other holograms directly," he said. "This is just a whole new way of communicating between humans" Meron Gribetz demonstrates Meta's augmented reality glasses on stage at TED, which let the wearer see and interact with a hologram. (Bret Hartman/TED) Augmented or virtual, here's how you might use this technology. 1. Conquering fears As you might have guessed from the example above, virtual reality is already being used to help people with phobias, by exposing them to a dose of the scary thing. "You'll be able to — in a very safe way — experience a scary situation that feels very very real," said Ariel Garten, the Toronto-based co-founder of the meditation headband Muse, who also watches technology trends. "Together with your therapist, you can modulate the level of fear." It's showing promise on individuals with PTSD, said Garten. Fear of flying? Get on a virtual plane, and experience take-off, knowing you can pull the plug at any time without causing an air security nightmare. Google's $20 Cardboard viewer is an inexpensive way to dabble in virtual reality. The user's smartphone sits behind lenses in a cardboard shell, making video created for the viewer appear 3-D. (Lisa Johnson) 2. Living a story Virtual reality as a storytelling tool for journalism is already here, with the New York Times last year shipping Google's inexpensive cardboard viewer to subscribers to virtually experience a Syrian refugee camp on their smartphones. Chris Milk of Vrse, who created those videos with the Times, calls virtual reality "the last medium" for storytelling. As he puts it: instead of listening to a caveman around the campfire tell his story of hunting a mammoth, you're hunting with him, or even being the mammoth being hunted. That makes virtual reality "an empathy machine," he told TED. During his talk, everyone in the TED theatre had cardboard viewers and earphones to participate in what Milk called the largest collective virtual reality experience ever. But as soon as I had my face in the cardboard, I wasn't in a theatre with a thousand people anymore. I was on a lake, with a train barreling down. The TED attendees hold up Google Cardboard viewers with their own smartphones inserted to watch virtual reality videos created by immersive storyteller Chris Milk. (Marla Aufmuth/TED) 3. 3-D online shopping Once augmented reality gets to a consumer level, Meta's Gribetz sees you using it to consume: online shopping in three dimensions. "Go and touch the graphics the way your brain wants to, touch them, smack them, explode them, do whatever, that's what we showed." When I got to try Meta's glasses, I couldn't gently nudge and turn the holograms; the demo set was an earlier generation than what was used on stage. Moving a floating orb meant sticking my hand into it, clenching a fist, and keeping it clenched as I dragged the object around. But still, I could turn a running shoe around, zoom in to see the stitching and pull it apart to reveal the layers of the sole. 4. Virtual visits A warning to grandparents: using video chats like Skype and Facetime to communicate with grandkids may become old-school. Both Meta's and Microsoft's demonstrations showed what could bluntly be called 3-D phone calls: the caller projected in front of you. Garten sees that becoming even more immersive, with long-lost friends meeting in a virtual world, even if they're sitting in cafés in different countries. "In the far, far future ... we can sit there and have a conversation side-by-side underneath a tree, even though we're both in different parts of a world." Psychedelic mushrooms appeared to spring up on stage with Microsoft's Alex Kipman, via a video feed that captured holograms he was seeing through Hololens glasses. (Bret Hartman/TED) 5. Everyday computing Microsoft and Meta both talk of holograms from their augmented reality glasses replacing computer screens for everything we do. No more hunching over a computer screen, a bevy of screens could appear in front of you for even such mundane tasks as word processing and checking email, according to Meta. That will take years, but Garten agrees that wearable computers are the next stage in the progression from PC on the desktop to the smartphone in the pocket, to possibly the glasses in front of our eyes. "This is just going to be a normal part of our daily lives."

just the Humanized version of It's alright, I'm here It happend again tonight. It has been five hours since the the sun disappeard behind the rim of the World. I was doing some late-time studies and wanted to continue my attemped on a Star-map, as i heard soft steps going down the the hall. I turnd towards the door and as it opend i saw Adagio standing there, shaking as if she were cold, but I already knew what happend. Tears streaming down her face and eyes tainted red.There was no doubt Adagio had one of her Nightmares again. She had those from time to time, at those time she came to me. "P...papa... I had.... had... a bad dream again!", she stutterd, speech broken up, "can i sleep in your room tonight?" It was sad that, nights like this were the only times... when she would call me that.-Excerpt from: Starswirls lost Diary-

WASHINGTON — The American commander in Afghanistan now believes that United States troops probably did not follow their own rules in calling in the airstrike that decimated a Doctors Without Borders hospital when no American and Afghan troops were in extreme danger, according to officials with direct knowledge of the general’s thinking. Under the rules, airstrikes are authorized to kill terrorists, protect American troops and help Afghans who request support in battles — like those in Kunduz, recently taken over by the Taliban — that can change the military landscape. The idea is to give troops leeway but keep Americans out of daily, open-ended combat. The Special Operations Forces most likely did not meet any of the criteria, the commander, Gen. John F. Campbell, has said in private discussions, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter. The Special Operations Forces also apparently did not have “eyes on” — that is, were unable to positively identify — the area to be attacked to confirm it was a legitimate target before calling in the strike, the officials said.

Hearts of Stone, the first paid expansion for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, hits stores tomorrow — digitally, at least. The planned physical version of the new content has been delayed, according to a post on developer CD Projekt Red's official forum. Marcin Momot, the studio's community coordinator, wrote in a thread about the limited-edition boxed version of Hearts of Stone that "due to logistical problems, customers will be unable to obtain the physical edition of the game for several days after launch." Not only is the special edition box meant to include the $19.99 game expansion, it also comes with real Gwent cards based on those available in the game. These cards can be purchased separately, Momot said, from a special site. Also mentioned in the post is GameStop as the possible exclusive storefront for the retail version. "We are working with GameStop to fix this situation as soon as possible," said Momot. The Witcher 3 players who don't want to wait around for a box to add to their gaming shelf can pre-order Hearts of Stone just in time for its Oct. 13 release. Just like the basic game, it will be available for PlayStation 4, Windows PC and Xbox One. The next major update to the game, which previously offered free downloadable content, is Blood and Wine. An official release date has not yet been announced, but it's expected to drop during the first quarter of 2016. Update: GameStop now lists the physical Hearts of Stone bundles for purchase on both PlayStation 4 and Windows PC. The Xbox One version of the set is still not available.

These numbers come from new, detailed carbon-footprint calculations for U.S. counties, made by two energy and resources researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. The researchers published their work in a new paper, but also made some cool online tools to let you compare your carbon use to your neighbors' to your heart's content. For example, let's compare the average carbon emissions for a household in Diamond Bar in southern California and one in Indianapolis : Congrats, city-dwellers! Your carbon footprint is just half the size of the national average. But… too bad, all the suburbs surrounding your city cancel out the effects of your greener lifestyle. At worst, households in the suburbs emit four times the amount of carbon as households in cities do. As you can see, Diamond Bar residents emit very little carbon for electricity, but that's not because they necessarily use less. California has very clean energy sources, while many in the Midwest rely on coal. On the other hand, Diamond Bar residents emit fifty percent more carbon from car fuel than residents of Indianapolis—this might be because Diamond Bar is primarily suburban, or because Diamond Bar has a high median household income, or both. "The goal of the project is to help cities better understand the primary drivers of household carbon footprints in each location," David Kammen, one of the carbon-footprint calculators, said in a statement. "We hope cities will use this information to begin to create highly tailored climate action plans for their communities." If different American cities emit carbon in wildly different ways, the thinking goes, then different cities should do different things in an effort to reduce their emissions and stall global warming. Kammen and his colleague Christopher Jones' work also suggests that it's the suburbs that need the most work in America. Suburbanites have bigger houses and own cars, which contribute to their carbon output. They also tend to have higher incomes, which is associated with greater emissions. But Kammen has solutions, too, based on his research. "Suburbs are excellent candidates for a combination of solar photovoltaic systems, electric vehicles and energy-efficient technologies," he said. Curious about your own household's footprint? You can calculate it, roughly, on Berkeley's Cool Climate Network site. Don't miss the calculator for figuring out how many tons of carbon you would save a year for doing things like riding a bike or switching to compact fluorescent light bulbs. You can also check out a map of the carbon emissions of counties throughout the contiguous United States, and see the city-suburb emissions effect at work. Kammen and Jones published their work in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

If North Carolina had any hopes that businesses will forget about the state’s anti-LGBTQ law passed last year and bring jobs back to the state, at least some of those hopes were dashed over the weekend by a major sports organization. The Atlantic Coast Conference, which is part of the NCAA and the host of Charlotte’s second largest annual event (after the CIAA basketball tournament), said it will continue moving its championship football game out of Charlotte until North Carolina repeals the state’s anti-LGBTQ law. The championship game had been played in Charlotte every year since 2010, according to the Associated Press. The ACC already moved its latest game, played in December, out of the city after the NCAA’s broader announcement that it was pulling sports events out of the state in response to HB2, the state’s anti-LGBTQ law. “If something changes in the state of North Carolina, that would be welcome,” Atlantic Coast Conference Commissioner John Swofford told the AP. “Our presidents made what they believe is a principled decision in that regard as to where our championships should be held and shouldn’t. I don’t see that principle changing.” The follow-up suggests the initial decision wasn’t a one-off move, and the association will continue boycotting the state until it repeals HB2. HB2 has already led to a lot of political and economic backlash in the state HB2, which former Gov. Pat McCrory signed into law last March, repealed and banned local civil rights laws that protect LGBTQ people from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in the workplace, housing, and public accommodations (restaurants, hotels, and other places that serve the public). It also banned transgender people from using the bathroom that aligns with their gender identity in schools and government buildings. The law led to a huge backlash across the country. It’s a key reason that McCrory lost his reelection to Democratic challenger Roy Cooper in November. That led the state to consider repealing the law back in December, but that effort failed due to Republican opposition to a repeal. When passed, HB2 also led to a wave of business boycotts due to its discriminatory nature. PayPal and Deutsche Bank pulled expansions into the state that would have created hundreds of jobs. The NBA and NCAA pulled events from the state. Several musicians, such as Bruce Springsteen and Pearl Jam, canceled concerts in the state. A+E Networks and 21st Century Fox said they would reconsider using North Carolina as a filming location in the future. More than 200 major CEOs and business leaders signed a letter asking McCrory to repeal the law. By Wired's estimate, North Carolina as of September had lost $395 million — “more than the GDP of Micronesia” — as a result of the law. Based on this latest news, that number has only kept going up — and it will continue doing so until North Carolina repeals its law. For more on HB2, read Vox’s explainer.

French police have identified a young man responsible for up to 80 robberies in student housing in the central city of Lyon through the ear prints he left behind while checking for residents. The 26-year-old Georgian was caught red-handed in February, a police source said Friday, adding that subsequent investigations showed his ear prints on the front doors of the scene of some 80 similar robberies in Lyon. Ear prints, like fingerprints, are unique. The man left the incriminating traces while listening in on doors to check if there was anyone inside, the official said, adding that it was an “old technique” which could be very useful. Police said robberies at private homes had spiked in the Lyon area recently, averaging about 19 a day, often by gangs of Eastern Europeans. Lyon police arrested four Georgians on April 16 for 75 robberies.

Persons using assistive technology might not be able to fully access information in this file. For assistance, please send e-mail to: mmwrq@cdc.gov. Type 508 Accommodation and the title of the report in the subject line of e-mail. Vital Signs: Overdoses of Prescription Opioid Pain Relievers --- United States, 1999--2008 On November 1, 2011, this report was posted as an MMWR Early Release on the MMWR website (http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr). Abstract Background: Overdose deaths involving opioid pain relievers (OPR), also known as opioid analgesics, have increased and now exceed deaths involving heroin and cocaine combined. This report describes the use and abuse of OPR by state. Methods: CDC analyzed rates of fatal OPR overdoses, nonmedical use, sales, and treatment admissions. Results: In 2008, drug overdoses in the United States caused 36,450 deaths. OPR were involved in 14,800 deaths (73.8%) of the 20,044 prescription drug overdose deaths. Death rates varied fivefold by state. States with lower death rates had lower rates of nonmedical use of OPR and OPR sales. During 1999--2008, overdose death rates, sales, and substance abuse treatment admissions related to OPR all increased substantially. Conclusions: The epidemic of overdoses of OPR has continued to worsen. Wide variation among states in the nonmedical use of OPR and overdose rates cannot be explained by underlying demographic differences in state populations but is related to wide variations in OPR prescribing. Implications for Public Health Practice: Health-care providers should only use OPRs in carefully screened and monitored patients when non-OPR treatments are insufficient to manage pain. Insurers and prescription drug monitoring programs can identify and take action to reduce both inappropriate and illegal prescribing. Third-party payers can limit reimbursement in ways that reduce inappropriate prescribing, discourage efforts to obtain OPR from multiple health-care providers, and improve clinical care. Changes in state laws that focus on the prescribing practices of health-care providers might reduce prescription drug abuse and overdoses while still allowing safe and effective pain treatment. Introduction In 2007, nearly 100 persons per day died of drug overdoses in the United States (1). The death rate of 11.8 per 100,000 population in 2007 was roughly three times the rate in 1991. Prescription drugs have accounted for most of the increase in those death rates since 1999 (2). In 2009, 1.2 million emergency department (ED) visits (an increase of 98.4% since 2004) were related to misuse or abuse of pharmaceuticals, compared with 1.0 million ED visits related to use of illicit drugs such as heroin and cocaine (3). Prominent among these prescription drug--related deaths and ED visits are opioid pain relievers (OPR), also known as narcotic or opioid analgesics, a class of drugs that includes oxycodone, methadone, and hydrocodone, among others. OPR now account for more overdose deaths than heroin and cocaine combined. OPR frequently are diverted for nonmedical use by patients or their friends or sold on the street. In 2010, 4.8% of the U.S. population aged ≥12 years used OPR nonmedically (4). Nonmedical use of OPR costs insurance companies up to $72.5 billion annually in health-care costs (5). States regulate the use of prescription drugs, such as OPR, and the practices of prescribers and pharmacists. States also finance and regulate health care for Medicaid populations, which are at greater risk for overdose (6). States therefore have a central role in ensuring that OPR are used legally and safely. Comparisons among jurisdictions in drug overdose mortality, nonmedical use of OPR, and OPR sales can help identify risk factors and effective prevention measures. Among the states, OPR sales varied fourfold in 2002 (7), and death rates for overdoses involving OPR varied from 1.8 to 15.6 per 100,000 population in 2006 (2). More rural and more impoverished counties tend to have higher prescription drug overdose death rates (8,9). Methods For this report, death rates are based on the National Vital Statistics System multiple cause of death files (10). Rates were age-adjusted to the 2000 U.S. Census population using bridged-race* population figures. Drug poisoning deaths, referred to as drug overdose deaths in this report, were defined as those with an underlying cause of death classified by the International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision (ICD-10) external cause of injury codes as X40--X44, X60--X64, X85, or Y10--Y14. Rates include injury deaths of any intent (unintentional, suicide, homicide, or undetermined) for U.S. residents. Among deaths with drug overdose as the underlying cause, CDC identified the type of drug involved using ICD-10 codes: prescription drugs (T36--T39, T40.2--T40.4, T41--T43.5, and T43.7--T50.8), including prescription opioid pain relievers (T40.2--T40.4); illicit drugs (T40.1, T40.5, T40.7--T40.9, and T43.6); or only unspecified drugs (T50.9 alone). The prescription drug category includes some over-the-counter medications. Some deaths involved prescription and illicit drugs and are counted in both drug categories. Years of potential life lost (YPLL) before age 65 years were calculated by subtracting age at death from 65 years and summing to get the total YPLL. Rates of nonmedical OPR use in the past year by state were obtained from the 2008--2009 National Surveys on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) (11). Nonmedical use was defined as use of a prescription pain reliever without a prescription belonging to the respondent or use for the experience or feeling the drug causes. The prescription pain reliever category includes OPR and selected barbiturate combination products used for headaches. Annual drug sales for 1999--2010 were determined from the Automation of Reports and Consolidated Orders System (ARCOS) of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) (12). For this report, ARCOS sales data were used as a surrogate for OPR use. DEA provided data on sales to pharmacies, hospitals, and practitioners for codeine, fentanyl, hydrocodone, hydromorphone, meperidine, methadone, morphine, and oxycodone (Kyle Wright, personal communication, April 11, 2011). Sales of drugs to substance abuse treatment programs were not included. Amounts of drugs were standardized to morphine milligram equivalents (13). The percentage of the state population below the federal poverty level by race and ethnicity during 2007--2008 was provided by the Kaiser Family Foundation (Rachel Licata, personal communication, August 10, 2011). Trends in substance abuse treatment admission rates were based on the Treatment Episode Data Set (14). Rates were calculated for admissions for treatment of substance abuse where the primary substance was an OPR. Spearman's correlation coefficient was used to correlate the absolute increase in the non-Hispanic white overdose death rate during 1999--2008 with poverty level by state. Fisher's exact test was used to compare the proportions of states above and below national rates. Test results are statistically significant at p<0.05. Results In 2008, a total of 36,450 deaths were attributed to drug overdose, a rate of 11.9 per 100,000 population (Table 1), among which a drug was specified in 27,153 (74.5%) deaths. One or more prescription drugs were involved in 20,044 (73.8%) of the 27,153 deaths, and OPR were involved in 14,800 (73.8%) of the 20,044 prescription drug overdose deaths. Rates varied by sex, race/ethnicity, and age. For deaths involving OPR, the rate among non-Hispanic whites and American Indians/Alaska Natives was three times higher than the rates in blacks and Hispanic whites. All death rates were highest among persons aged 35--54 years. Overdose resulted in 830,652 YPLL before age 65 years, a number comparable to the YPLL from motor vehicle crashes. Rates for all outcomes studied varied widely by state (Table 2, Figure 1)† Overdose death rates ranged from 5.5 per 100,000 population in Nebraska to 27.0 in New Mexico. The prevalence of nonmedical use of OPR during 2008--2009 ranged from 3.6% in Nebraska to 8.1% in Oklahoma. The rate of OPR sales ranged from 3.7 kg per 10,000 population in Illinois to 12.6 kg in Florida. The highest sales rates were clustered in the Southeast and the Northwest. Among the 27 states with overdose death rates above the national rate, 21 (77.8%) had rates of nonmedical use above the national rate. Among the 24 states with death rates at or below the national rate, six (25.0%) had rates of nonmedical use above the national rate (p<0.001). Among the 27 states with death rates above the national rate, 21 (77.8%) had rates of OPR sales above the national rate. Among the 24 states with death rates at or below the national rate, five (20.8%) had rates of OPR sales above the national rate (p<0.001). During 1999--2008, overdose death rates, sales, and substance abuse treatment admissions related to OPR increased in parallel (Figure 2). The overdose death rate in 2008 was nearly four times the rate in 1999. Sales of OPR in 2010 were four times those in 1999. The substance abuse treatment admission rate in 2009 was almost six times the rate in 1999. The rate of sales of OPR in 2010, 7.1 kg per 10,000 population, was equivalent to 710 mg per person in the United States. The percentage of the non-Hispanic white population below the poverty level during 2007--2008 correlated positively with the increase in overdose death rates among non-Hispanic whites from 1999 to 2008 by state (r = 0.54; p<0.001). Louisiana, Mississippi, Kentucky, and West Virginia had some of the largest mortality increases and some of the highest poverty levels among non-Hispanic whites. Conclusions and Comment The epidemic of prescription drug overdoses in the United States has worsened over the last decade, and by 2008, drug overdose deaths (36,450) were approaching the number of deaths from motor vehicle crashes (39,973), the leading cause of injury death in the United States. Parallel trends in deaths and OPR sales between 1999 and 2008, combined with continuing upward trends in ED visits (4), OPR abuse treatment admissions (14), and OPR sales after 2008 suggest that the death rate also has increased since 2008. Preliminary 2009 death data are consistent with such an increase (15). These increases occurred despite numerous warnings and recommendations over the past decade for voluntary education of providers about more cautious use of OPR (16). Differences in OPR overdose mortality by race/ethnicity match the pattern for medical and nonmedical use of OPR, with the lowest rates for medical and nonmedical use among Asians and blacks and the highest rates among American Indians/Alaska Natives and non-Hispanic whites (4,17). Differences in OPR overdose mortality by race and ethnicity cannot explain the wide variation in death rates among states, given the equally large differences in non-Hispanic white mortality between states. Nor can demographic differences fully explain the wide variations among states in the nonmedical use and sales of OPR. Montana and Iowa, for example, have largely non-Hispanic white populations but widely varying rates of nonmedical use and sales of OPR. By 2010, enough OPR were sold to medicate every American adult with a typical dose of 5 mg of hydrocodone every 4 hours for 1 month. Increased use of OPR has contributed to the overall increases in rates of overdose death and nonmedical use, and variation among states in OPR sales probably contributes to state variation in these outcomes. Given that 3% of physicians accounted for 62% of the OPR prescribed in one study (18), the proliferation of high-volume prescribers can have a large impact on state use of OPR and overdose death rates. Large increases in overdoses involving the types of drugs sold by illegitimate pain clinics (i.e., "pill mills") have been reported in Florida (19) and Texas (20). Such clinics provide OPR to large volumes of patients without adequate evaluation or follow-up. Another possible contributor to state disparities is poverty, which was associated with greater increases in state death rates during 1999--2008. Medicaid populations are at greater risk of OPR overdose than non-Medicaid populations (6). The findings in this report are subject to at least four limitations. First, vital statistics underestimate the rates of prescription and illicit drugs because the type of drug is not specified on many death certificates. Second, respondents might underreport nonmedical use of OPR in surveys such as the NSDUH. Third, ARCOS data reflect sales to retail outlets by state, but some drugs might have been used by nonstate residents or sent to other states by mail-order pharmacies or otherwise not used by state residents. Finally, sales data did not include buprenorphine, an opioid primarily used for substance abuse treatment, though sometimes prescribed for pain. Its inclusion with drugs primarily used to treat pain would have inappropriately increased sales rates. Public health interventions to reduce prescription drug overdose must strike a balance between reducing misuse and abuse and safeguarding legitimate access to treatment. To find this balance, health-care providers should only use OPR in carefully screened and monitored patients when non-OPR treatments have not been sufficient to treat pain, as recommended in evidence-based guidelines (21). States, as regulators of health-care practice, have the responsibility and authority to monitor and correct inappropriate and illegal prescribing. Data from state prescription drug monitoring programs, which collect records of prescription drugs prone to abuse from pharmacies, and Medicaid claims data can be used to identify and address OPR misuse and abuse. State Medicaid programs and other public insurers can use economic measures to hold providers accountable for their prescribing of OPR and other controlled prescription drugs. State professional licensing boards can take action against prescribers misusing their licenses, and law enforcement agencies can take action against illegal activities. State policies that focus on providers operating outside of normal medical practice, such as laws prohibiting so-called "pill mills," are a promising approach (19). All interventions need to be evaluated further and new interventions developed. Concerted attempts to address this problem, especially in states with high rates of OPR sales, nonmedical use, or overdose mortality, might help control the epidemic. Reported by Leonard J. Paulozzi, MD, Christopher M. Jones, PharmD, Karin A. Mack, PhD, Rose A. Rudd, MSPH, Div of Unintentional Injury Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, CDC. Corresponding contributor: Leonard J. Paulozzi, lpaulozzi@cdc.gov. References CDC. WONDER [Database]. Atlanta, GA: US Department of Health and Human Services, CDC; 2010. Available at http://wonder.cdc.gov. Accessed September 27, 2011. Warner M, Chen L, Makuc D. Increase in fatal poisonings involving opioid analgesics in the United States, 1999--2006. NCHS Data Brief. Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics; 2009. Available at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db22.htm. Accessed October 3, 2011. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Highlights of the 2009 Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) findings on drug-related emergency department visits. The DAWN Report. Rockville, MD: US Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration; 2010. Available at http://oas.samhsa.gov/2k10/dawn034/edhighlights.htm. Accessed October 3, 2011. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Results from the 2009 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: volume 1: summary of national findings. Rockville, MD: US Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Office of Applied Studies; 2010. Available at http://oas.samhsa.gov/nsduh/2k9nsduh/2k9resultsp.pdf. Accessed October 3, 2011. Coalition Against Insurance Fraud. Prescription for peril: how insurance fraud finances theft and abuse of addictive prescription drugs. Washington, DC: Coalition Against Insurance Fraud; 2007. Available at http://www.insurancefraud.org/downloads/drugDiversion.pdf. Accessed September 26, 2011. CDC. Overdose deaths involving prescription opioids among Medicaid enrollees---Washington, 2004--2007. MMWR 2009;58:1171--5. Paulozzi LJ, Ryan GW. Opioid analgesics and rates of fatal drug poisoning in the United States. Am J Prev Med 2006;31:506--11. Hall AJ, Logan JE, Toblin RL, et al. Patterns of abuse among unintentional pharmaceutical overdose fatalities. JAMA 2008;300:2613--20. Paulozzi LJ, Xi Y. Recent changes in drug poisoning mortality in the United States by urban--rural status and by drug type. Pharmacoepidemiol Drug Safety 2008;17:997--1005. Xu J, Kochanek KD, Murphy S, Tejada-Vera B. Deaths: final data for 2007. Natl Vital Stat Rep 2010;58(19). Available at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr58/nvsr58_19.pdf. Accessed October 3, 2011. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. State estimates of substance use and mental disorders from the 2008--2009 National Surveys on Drug Use and Health. NSDUH Series H-40. Rockville, MD: US Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration; 2011. Available at http://store.samhsa.gov/shin/content/SMA11-4641/SMA11-4641.pdf. Accessed October 3, 2011. US Department of Justice. Automation of Reports and Consolidated Orders System (ARCOS). Springfield, VA: US Department of Justice, Drug Enforcement Administration; 2011. Available at http://www.deadiversion.usdoj.gov/arcos/index.html. Accessed September 26, 2011. Gammaitoni AR, Fine P, Alvarez N, McPherson M, Bergmark S. Clinical application of opioid equianalgesic data. Clin J Pain 2003;19:286--97. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Quick statistics from the Drug and Alcohol Services Information System. Rockville, MD: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration; 2011. Available at http://www.oas.samhsa.gov/quick.cfm. Accessed September 29, 2011. Kochanek KD, Xu JQ, Murphy SL, et al. Deaths: preliminary data for 2009. Natl Vital Stat Rep 2011;59(4). Available at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/nvsr.htm#vol59. Accessed September 30, 2011. Kuehn BM. Efforts aim to curb opioid deaths, injuries. JAMA 2009;301:1213--5. CDC. Health, United States, 2006. Hyattsville, MD: US Department of Health and Human Services, CDC, National Center for Health Statistics; 2006. Available at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/hus06.pdf. Accessed September 27, 2011. Swedlow A, Ireland J, Johnson G. Prescribing patterns of schedule II opioids in California Workers' Compensation. Oakland, CA: California Workers' Compensation Institute; 2011. Available at http://www.cwci.org/document.php?file=1438.pdf. Accessed October 3, 2011. CDC. Drug overdose deaths---Florida, 2003--2009. MMWR 2011;60:869--72. Forrester MB. Ingestions of hydrocodone, carisoprodol, and alprazolam in combination reported to Texas poison centers. J Addictive Dis 2011;30:110--5. Chou R, Fanciullo GJ, Fine PG, Adler JA, Ballantyne JC, Davies P, et al. Clinical guidelines for the use of chronic opioid therapy in chronic noncancer pain. J Pain 2009;10:113--30. Key Points Death from opioid pain relievers (OPR) is an epidemic in the United States. Sales of OPR quadrupled between 1999 and 2010. Enough OPR were prescribed last year to medicate every American adult with a standard pain treatment dose of 5 mg of hydrocodone (Vicodin and others) taken every 4 hours for a month. Abuse of OPR costs health insurers approximately $72.5 billion annually in health-care costs. State-based prescription drug monitoring program records and insurance claims information can identify and address inappropriate prescribing and use by patients. State laws and regulations based on these data need to be enacted, enforced, and rigorously evaluated. Additional information is available at http://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns. TABLE 1. Drug overdose death rates by selected characteristics --- National Vital Statistics System, United States, 2008 Characteristic Age-adjusted rate* All drugs† Prescription drugs§ Opioid pain relievers¶ Illicit drugs** Overall 11.9 6.5 4.8 2.8 Sex Men 14.8 7.7 5.9 4.3 Women 9.0 5.3 3.7 1.4 Race/Ethnicity White 13.2 7.4 5.6 2.8 Hispanic†† 6.1 3.0 2.1 2.5 Non-Hispanic 14.7 8.4 6.3 2.9 Black 8.3 3.0 1.9 4.0 Asian/Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander 1.8 1.0 0.5 0.6 American Indian/Alaska Native 13.0 8.4 6.2 2.7 Age group (yrs) 0--14 0.2 0.2 0.1 ---§§ 15--24 8.2 4.5 3.7 2.2 25--34 16.5 8.8 7.1 4.4 35--44 20.9 11.0 8.3 5.3 45--54 25.3 13.8 10.4 6.0 55--64 13.0 7.3 5.0 2.5 ≥65 4.1 3.0 1.0 0.3 Intent Unintentional 9.2 4.8 3.9 2.6 Undetermined 1.1 0.6 0.5 0.2 Suicide 1.6 1.1 0.5 0.1 TABLE 2. Rates of drug overdose death, nonmedical use of opioid pain relievers (OPR), and OPR sales, by state --- United States State Drug overdose deaths* OPR Overall Non-Hispanic whites Nonmedical use† Sales§ Rate (SE) Rate (SE) % (SE) Rate (SE) National 11.9 (0.1) 14.7 (0.1) 4.8 (0.1) 7.1 (0.0) New Mexico 27.0 (1.2) 25.1 (1.7) 5.7¶ (0.6) 6.7 (0.2) West Virginia 25.8 (1.2) 26.6 (1.3) 5.9¶ (0.6) 9.4 (0.2) Nevada 19.6 (0.9) 27.5 (1.3) 5.9¶ (0.4) 11.8 (0.2) Utah 18.4 (0.9) 20.4 (1.0) 5.3¶ (0.4) 7.4¶ (0.2) Alaska 18.1 (1.6) 18.1¶ (2.1) 5.2¶ (0.8) 8.2 (0.3) Kentucky 17.9 (0.7) 19.6 (0.7) 6.0 (0.3) 9.0 (0.1) Rhode Island 17.2 (1.3) 19.5 (1.5) 6.1 (0.6) 5.9 (0.2) Florida 16.5 (0.3) 23.9 (0.5) 4.1 (0.2) 12.6 (0.1) Oklahoma 15.8 (0.7) 17.5 (0.8) 8.1 (0.3) 9.2 (0.2) Ohio 15.1 (0.4) 16.0 (0.4) 5.5 (0.2) 7.9 (0.1) Louisiana 15.0 (0.6) 19.2 (0.8) 5.3¶ (0.3) 6.8 (0.1) Pennsylvania 15.1 (0.4) 15.6 (0.4) 4.1 (0.2) 8.0 (0.1) Tennessee 14.8 (0.5) 17.2 (0.6) 4.9¶ (0.2) 11.8 (0.1) Washington 14.7 (0.5) 16.1 (0.6) 6.1 (0.2) 9.2 (0.1) Colorado 14.6 (0.5) 15.0¶ (0.6) 5.7¶ (0.3) 6.3 (0.1) Delaware 14.5 (1.3) 18.7 (1.8) 5.6¶ (0.7) 10.2 (0.3) Wyoming 14.4¶ (1.8) 14.6¶ (2.0) 3.9¶ (0.9) 6.0 (0.3) Montana 14.1¶ (1.2) 13.7¶ (1.3) 5.3¶ (0.6) 8.4 (0.3) Indiana 13.2 (0.5) 14.4¶ (0.5) 5.7¶ (0.2) 8.1 (0.1) Alabama 13.1 (0.5) 17.6 (0.7) 5.1¶ (0.3) 9.7 (0.1) Arizona 13.1 (0.5) 17.1 (0.7) 6.0¶ (0.2) 8.4 (0.1) Arkansas 13.1¶ (0.7) 15.6¶ (0.9) 5.1¶ (0.4) 8.7 (0.2) Missouri 13.1 (0.5) 14.2¶ (0.5) 4.4¶ (0.2) 7.2¶ (0.1) North Carolina 12.9 (0.4) 17.1 (0.5) 5.0¶ (0.2) 6.9 (0.1) South Carolina 12.6¶ (0.5) 16.7 (0.8) 4.7¶ (0.3) 7.2¶ (0.1) Maine 12.3¶ (1.0) 12.2 (1.0) 4.7¶ (0.5) 9.8 (0.3) Michigan 12.2¶ (0.4) 13.0 (0.4) 5.7 (0.2) 8.1 (0.1) Maryland 11.9¶ (0.5) 15.3¶ (0.7) 3.8 (0.2) 7.3¶ (0.1) Massachusetts 11.8¶ (0.4) 12.9 (0.5) 5.3¶ (0.2) 5.8 (0.1) Oregon 11.7¶ (0.6) 12.8 (0.6) 6.8 (0.3) 11.6 (0.2) Vermont 10.9¶ (1.4) 10.9 (1.4) 4.6¶ (0.7) 8.1 (0.4) Connecticut 10.8¶ (0.6) 12.5 (0.7) 3.8 (0.3) 6.7 (0.1) Mississippi 10.6 (0.6) 16.1¶ (1.0) 4.7¶ (0.3) 6.1 (0.1) Illinois 10.5 (0.3) 11.7 (0.4) 4.1 (0.1) 3.7 (0.1) Wisconsin 10.5 (0.4) 10.4 (0.5) 4.8¶ (0.2) 6.5 (0.1) California 10.4 (0.2) 16.1 (0.3) 4.8¶ (0.1) 6.2 (0.0) Idaho 9.7 (0.8) 10.7 (0.9) 5.8¶ (0.4) 7.5¶ (0.2) Georgia 9.5** (0.3) 13.4** (0.5) 4.6¶ (0.2) 6.5 (0.1) District of Columbia 9.4¶ (1.4) ---†† --- 3.7 (0.7) 3.9 (0.3) Hawaii 9.4 (0.9) 16.4¶ (2.3) 5.1¶ (0.4) 5.9 (0.2) New Hampshire 9.3 (0.8) 9.5 (0.9) 5.9 (0.4) 8.1 (0.3) Virginia 9.1 (0.3) 11.9 (0.5) 4.6¶ (0.2) 5.6 (0.1) Texas 8.6 (0.2) 13.2 (0.3) 4.6¶ (0.1) 4.2 (0.0) New York 8.4 (0.2) 10.0 (0.3) 4.4¶ (0.1) 5.3 (0.1) Kansas 8.0 (0.5) 8.6 (0.6) 5.0¶ (0.3) 6.8¶ (0.2) New Jersey 8.0 (0.3) 10.5 (0.5) 3.8 (0.2) 6.0 (0.1) North Dakota 7.6 (1.3) 7.5 (1.4) 3.9¶ (0.6) 5.0 (0.3) South Dakota 7.3 (1.1) 6.2 (1.1) 3.8 (0.6) 5.5 (0.3) Minnesota 7.2 (0.4) 7.2 (0.4) 4.4¶ (0.2) 4.2 (0.1) Iowa 7.1 (0.5) 7.5 (0.5) 3.6 (0.3) 4.6 (0.1) Nebraska 5.5 (0.6) 5.8 (0.7) 3.6 (0.3) 4.2 (0.2) FIGURE 1. Drug overdose death rate in 2008 and rate of kilograms (kg) of opioid pain relievers (OPR) sold in 2010 --- United States Alternate Text: The figure above shows drug overdose death rates in 2008 and rates of kilograms (kg) of opioid pain relievers (OPR) sold in 2010 in the United States. Rates for all outcomes studied varied widely.

A farmer carries buckets to collect water as he walks on a dried-up pond on the outskirts of Yingtan, Jiangxi province November 3, 2009. Many Chinese wheat-growing provinces in the north seeded clouds over the weekend to help end a persistent drought and encourage the growth of winter wheat. A farmer carries buckets to collect water as he walks on a dried-up pond on the outskirts of Yingtan, Jiangxi province November 3, 2009. Many Chinese wheat-growing provinces in the north seeded clouds over the weekend to help end a persistent drought and encourage the growth of winter wheat. Reuters/Stringer Climate change is the primary cause affecting Australia's food security, and is set to drive up the prices of several food items. The Climate Council’s report on food, climate change and farming, “Feeding a hungry nation”, reveals that the agriculture industry has suffered and will suffer due to Australia’s worsening climate change. The Climate Council’s report mentions that about 50 per cent of Australia’s agriculture sector is irrigated, but the availability of rainfall is about to decline. Low rainfall as well as a rise in temperatures have already affected areas of Southern Australia and resulted in poor crop yields. If the climate remains the same, the results will be worse. The intensity of extreme weather events such as bushfires, droughts and cyclones is leading to decreased productivity across the agricultural sector. This also includes the livestock and dairy industries. Reduced agricultural production is a big issue for Australia as the gross value of all agricultural commodities produced was roughly $50 billion for the calendar year ending June 30, 2014. The fishing, forestry and the agriculture sector employed 2.8 per cent of all employed Australians in August 2014 and represented 2.4 per cent of real gross value added to Australia’s economy in 2013-14, revealed data from Austrade. Farming association Grain Growers Australia said farmers were concerned about climate change and already dealing with challenges like drought as well as seasonally variability, a Future Directions report said. Data from the Grains Research and Development Corporation, or GRDC, also revealed that farmers in Australia have become more efficient with their water use. “Between 1982 and 2012 more than half of Australia’s wheat-growing regions have improved their WUE [water use efficiency] by at least 50 per cent,” the report noted. Farmers are already dealing with the challenges of climate change even if they might not necessarily know that the problems they face are due to climate change. Those that recognise climate change are taking steps to protect their farms from the effects, said Joshua Gilbert, chair of Young Farmers, a subgroup of the NSW Farmers, who also works on the family cattle stud in Nabiac NSW. Contact the writer at feedback@ibtimes.com.au, or let us know what you think below.

Getty Images The Jets are two-touchdown underdogs against the Patriots on Thursday night, but Jets defensive end Mo Wilkerson likes his team’s chances. Wilkerson told Bob Glauber of Newsday that he believes the Jets will knock off the Patriots and earn their second win of the season. “If our game plan is as good as it was, I don’t see why we won’t be 2-0,” Wilkerson said. “I’m confident in our coaching staff to have a great game plan and us being 2-0.” After Wilkerson said on WFAN that “We’re going to go to Foxboro and get this win. . . . We’re going to be 2-0,” several media outlets characterized him as guaranteeing victory. But Wilkerson said he wasn’t going so far as to pull a Joe Namath. “I’m not saying I’m guaranteeing it, but I’m saying if we do our jobs and follow our game plan, I don’t see why we wouldn’t be 2-0,” Wilkerson said. “We had a good game plan in the first game and we won, so why wouldn’t I feel that way for this game? I’m here with these guys every day and I see all the hard work that myself and everybody else on this team is putting in. We can be a dominant defense.” So Wilkerson isn’t guaranteeing a win, he’s just saying the Jets will win.

UNCOVERING the history behind supposedly scandalous nuns has helped fuel interest in archaeology projects in Oxford. About 500 volunteers from Archeox, the Archaeology of East Oxford Community Project, have been excavating a medieval nunnery at Minchery Farm Paddock, between Blackbird Leys and Littlemore. The five-week dig finished on Friday when Oxford University Vice Chancellor Prof Andrew Hamilton paid a visit to see some of the historic finds. Project director Dr David Griffiths, of Oxford University’s Department for Continuing Education, said the area explored was part of the site occupied by Littlemore Priory, a nunnery established in around AD1110. It was closed down by Cardinal Wolsey in 1525 after accusations were made that the nuns were involved in scandalous practices, including sharing beds. Dr Griffiths said: “Several of the nuns also had illegitimate children.” Part of the nunnery buildings, dating back to the 1400s, later became a farmhouse and still stand as the Priory Pub, near Oxford United’s Kassam Stadium. The 47-year-old from Headington said the wider £500,000 scheme, backed by the university and the Heritage Lottery Fund, was launched in 2010 and could run until 2014. He said: “Community archaeology is something fairly new but it has really taken off in East Oxford and we now have hundreds of people who are developing the skills and abilities to carry out the research themselves. “We have been tackling part of the city which has been overlooked in archaeological and historical terms, and eventually there will be an exhibition to display the finds – I would love to see a museum in East Oxford one day.” He said all the finds would be analysed to reveal more about the diet and lifestyle of the people who have lived there over the centuries. He said: “Our excavations have revealed stone walls, floors and hearths, which show that the priory buildings were once much more extensive, and included domestic, kitchen and workshop areas. “We have also found evidence of peat layers, which tell the story of the landscape over a much longer timescale. “Finds dating to the period of the nunnery include a large amount of medieval pottery, and decorated glazed floor-tiles showing heraldic designs such as birds and griffins. Roman pottery suggests that the site was in use in earlier times. “Perhaps the most exciting and surprising finds have been a small group of prehistoric worked flints, including a beautiful Bronze Age arrowhead dating to around 4,000 years ago.”

Uncategorized PayPal on Blockchain: ‘Why Don’t We Just Use a Database?’ If something works, why change it? PayPal’s Harper Reed has dismissed “boring” Blockchain technology, choosing to stick to the traditional databases. ‘Why Don’t We Just Use a Database?’ In the midst of the “chainwashing” trend, some companies seem to be taking the high road and staying clear of Bitcoin’s underlying Blockchain technology. This is the case with PayPal which, despite its ambitions to become the dominant global online payments platform, has distanced itself from this prospect. When asked about the potential for blockchain technology at the 4YFN conference, Harper Reed, the Director of Software Development for PayPal, dismissed it stating: Whenever people say why don’t we use the blockchain to do this, I think why don’t we just use a database? This is, in fact what PayPal has been doing all along with its own centralized online payments app Venmo, which is now processing nearly $20 billion USD per year and is much in vogue among millennials, in particular. Reed went on to reference Bitcoin’s “dark market” image as the medium of exchange for the deep web economy, suggesting that the technology would benefit from a rebrand: When I think of blockchain I think of drugs, and I’m not really a drug user so I find it really boring. PayPal & Bitcoin However, this comes as a relatively refreshing stance towards Blockchain, despite Reed’s misconception regarding Bitcoin being a “drug currency.” PayPal seems to be more focused on results and on the user-experience itself, rather than on hype and the technology that works in the background, which was the key point of Harper Reed’s talk at 4YFN, the startup spin-off of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Nevertheless, PayPal has had several “encounters” with blockchain technology and Bitcoin itself. In June 2016, PayPal partnered with the digital asset exchange and wallet Coinbase, allowing users to sell bitcoin and cash out to their PayPal accounts. Peter Thiel, PayPal co-founder and close adviser to President Donald Trump, has also expressed his interest in the technology, having invested in several Bitcoin startups himself. He once stated: PayPal had these goals of creating a new currency. We failed at that, and we just created a new payment system. I think Bitcoin has succeeded on the level of a new currency. Thiel is becoming an extremely important adviser for Donald Trump, who is increasingly being associated with Bitcoin supporters like 21 Inc. CEO Balaji S. Srinivasan and the recently appointed U.S. Budget Chief Mick Mulvaney, also known as “Bitcoin Congressman.” Will PayPal retain its competitive edge in the future despite shunning blockchain technology? Share your thoughts below! Images courtesy of Shutterstock, queerty.com, wikipedia.com

Peter Dutton has said a benefit of the financial sector royal commission will be that industry super funds will face more scrutiny, given they have “union members and whatnot on the board”. After the Turnbull government’s shock decision on Thursday to announce the royal commission, the immigration minister attempted to put some positive spin on the move, which came after mounting political pressure from the Nationals. As the fallout continued, the Australian Bankers’ Association pledged to fully cooperate with the Turnbull government’s banking royal commission, saying the major banks “do not fear scrutiny or accountability”. Malcolm Turnbull orders royal commission into banks and financial sector Read more And UBS banking analysts Jonathan Mott and Rachel Bentvelzen predicted the royal commission would cost Australia’s major banks between $50m and $100m each to participate. Although shares in the big four banks fell sharply after the inquiry was announced, losses were pared back during the day. Commonwealth Bank finished 2% lower but NAB stock rose to close 1% higher. With several National MPs and senators in open revolt, joining the Greens and Labor in a push to set up a banking commission of inquiry, the Turnbull cabinet decided to head off what the prime minister said was “a sense of inevitability” about an inquiry, leading to the announcement on Thursday. Senior ministers repeatedly characterised the royal commission decision as “regrettable but necessary” to deal with mounting political pressure and uncertainty for the industry. The Liberal National senator Barry O’Sullivan, whose private member’s bill to establish a commission of inquiry spooked the government into acting on Thursday, has conceded that his bill is now redundant. “We welcome the prime minister’s and treasurer’s announcement,” a spokesman for O’Sullivan said on Thursday. “It’s an important opportunity to address the corporate culture of the finance sector and we look forward to working with colleagues as the royal commission progresses.” Speaking hours after Turnbull’s announcement, Dutton told 2GB radio host Ray Hadley that the royal commission was regrettable. But he said it would provide a good opportunity to investigate industry super funds, “which have union members and whatnot on the board.” “The government’s made a decision,” he said. “So hopefully for some people they can present their cases and there can be some closure around what’s been a difficult situation. “But there’s also another element to it – that is, to have a look at some aspects within the industry super funds which have union members and whatnot on the board. “I think people lose a lot of their super through fees and through donations and all sorts of support for unions. So I think it’s a good opportunity in that sense to have a look at the detail and people can put all of that information forward and we can see the recommendations from the commission.” The Industry Super Australia chief executive, David Whitely, said Dutton’s comments about industry super funds were “deeply surprising” but he would welcome the scrutiny. Banks warned of 'regulatory action' as climate change bites global economy Read more “Let’s be very clear, the bank-owned superannuation funds have on average underperformed industry super funds by 2% per year over the past 15 to 20 years,” he said. “That’s a thing the royal commission would want to definitively answer. Is it down to the governance of bank-owned funds? Is it down to their business model and profit orientation?” The Australian Bankers’ Association said the royal commission was “unwarranted” and failed to recognise that Australia’s banks were currently undergoing “the largest reform program in decades”. But it conceded growing calls for an inquiry were presenting an “unacceptable risk” to the stability of the financial system and the reputation of Australia’s banks. “Australia’s banks have welcomed the prime minister’s decision to take action and provide certainty to the banking industry to the benefit of the national economy and all Australians,” the ABA said in a statement. “Banks will fully cooperate with the royal commission … our banks do not fear scrutiny or accountability.” Mott and Bentvelzen sent a note to clients on Thursday saying the royal commission would likely be “expensive and distracting” for Australia’s banks (costing between $50m-$100m per bank). “It is difficult to predict what the final recommendations will be,” they said. “However, we believe it is in all political parties’ interest for the recommendations to be material and lead to cultural change. Further, in the past the banks have used mortgage repricing to offset regulatory headwinds (higher capital, macro prudential and Bank Levy). We think this will become more challenging in a post royal commission environment.” Treasurer Scott Morrison told the ABC’s 730 program that the decision to establish a royal commission was made after consulting the Reserve Bank governor, Philip Lowe, and the head of the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority, Wayne Byres, this week. He also said he spoken to bank chiefs over the last week and it became clear that a royal commission would be necessary. When asked by ABC host Leigh Sales if he no longer believed a royal commission would be a waste of millions of dollar, as previously stated, Morrison said: “I believe what we’ve decided to do will not be a waste, on the basis that the alternative was far worse.”

Supporters of Bernie Sanders, display banners over a Los Angeles freeway, urging voters to write in Sanders for president on the California ballot, Nov. 3, 2016. (Photo: Mark Ralston, AFP/Getty Images) WASHINGTON — Progressives were calling for a more liberal agenda for the Democratic Party Wednesday as they absorbed the shock of Donald Trump’s presidential win and another two years, at least, of a Republican-controlled Congress. Trump’s win underscored the divide among Democratic centrists and progressives allied with senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton’s former rival for the Democratic presidential nomination. Progressives say election results show the party must embrace economic populism, which many centrists have long considered a political loser. “If the Democratic Party is not clear as crystal on the side of the working man and woman of America, some opportunistic politician is going to pick up that mantle and create confusion,” said Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and a member of the Congressional Black Caucus. “I don’t think anyone can deny that Trump tried to sound like an economic populist.” Moving forward, he said the party can learn from the electoral successes of ballot measures to increase the minimum wage in Arizona, Colorado, Maine and Washington state — along with Trump’s emphasis on how the current trade model hurts working people. Democrats should call for a “full life cycle economic program,” from investments in education and college affordability to protecting American’s retirement security. “We need to address the needs of people who have been living in stagnation,” he said. Stephanie Taylor, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, said progressives have repeatedly warned that Republicans could “outflank” Democrats on trade, jobs, Wall Street reform and “corporate greed.” “This race should not have been so close, and Democrats will lose in the future — over and over — if they don't go through a serious ideological shift and follow Elizabeth Warren’s lead, fighting against the rigged economy in a truly authentic and real way,” she wrote in a statement. But Matt Bennett, co-founder of the centrist think tank Third Way, disagreed that economic populism would have saved the election for Democrats. The message from voters was that they care about creating more and better jobs — not fairer jobs, he said. "They don't care what rich people make," he said. "If they cared, they would not have elected the guy with the gold-plated plane." Democrats agree anti-establishment sentiment is what powered the electorate, making it hard for an insider like Clinton to convincingly argue that government could solve Americans' problems. The question is which path forward Democrats should take. “We need to do some real soul searching in the Democratic Party about its future,” Sanders’ former campaign manager Jeff Weaver said on CNN Wednesday. “There’s a lack of understanding by people in Washington about what’s going on out in the real world. Until Democrats do that, I think they’re going to have a difficult time.” Progressives point to losses by centrist Senate candidates such as Evan Bayh, a former senator from Indiana, and Rep. Patrick Murphy of Florida as evidence that the "Wall Street wing" of the Democratic Party is on the decline. But Bennett noted that progressive candidates Zephyr Teachout of New York and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin also lost their bids for Congress and the Senate, respectively. "What we don't need right now is a war inside our party or circular firing squads," he said. The race for the next chair of the Democratic National Committee will become a big priority for progressives to ensure the party is capable of building a mass movement to defeat Trump, said Neil Sroka, spokesman for Democracy for America, which endorsed Sanders in the primaries. "The only answer to the incredibly tragic loss yesterday is a massive multi-racial, multi-generational progressive political revolution similar to what Bernie Sanders was calling for," Sroka said. PCCC and Democracy for America vowed to fight a Trump agenda. DFA executive director Charles Chamberlain said his organization “will do everything in our power to obstruct, delay, and halt the attacks on people of color, women, and working families that will emerge from a Trump administration.” But Clinton, while speaking to her supporters Wednesday morning, said Americans owe Trump “an open mind and a chance to lead.” And Warren, who famously sparred with Trump on social media, told the Boston Globe she is willing to put her differences with him aside and work with Trump to rebuild the economy for working people. Ellison said he doesn’t want to prejudge or obstruct, and he wishes Trump success. But progressives and the Congressional Black Caucus won’t abandon their agendas, either. Progressives will push for infrastructure development, increases to the federal minimum wage, an expansion of Social Security, tax reform and tuition-free college at public schools for working class families. And the Congressional Black Caucus will continue to seek to rewrite the Voting Rights Act, a top priority for the caucus. “We’re going to try like hell,” he said. “(Republicans) will get a chance to do the right thing.” Follow @ngaudiano on Twitter. . Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2fDg9sV

Senior Royal Navy officer sexually assaulted nine young men but believed he was 'unassailable' because of his powerful position Joe Mellor A senior Royal Navy officer sexually assaulted nine young men but believed he was ‘unassailable’ because of his powerful position, a court heard on Tuesday. Charles Howeson, 67, sexually assaulted victims while serving with the Navy including groping a junior rating during a man overboard drill, a court was told. A complaint to Navy officials was made but he was let off with a warning and went on to pursue a successful career in the service, it was said. He became a first lieutenant and second-in-command on a ship and felt he was ‘too powerful’ to be affected by complaints against him, a jury heard. Howeson also went on to allegedly abuse young men after he left the Navy and went to work for an environmental organisation. When five men complained they had been assaulted by Howesdon, they were urged by the organisation not to take the matter to court, the jury was told. He is on trial at Bristol Crown Court where he denies twelve historic serious sexual offences, including eleven of indecent assault and one of attempted buggery. The offences happened against nine alleged male victims. Prosecutor Paul Dunkels said: “He was emboldened in his behaviour by the thought he could face off the allegations because of his powerful position.” Mr Dunkels said that the allegations took place between December 1985 and August 1994, He said they relate to three “wholly unrelated” phases of Howeson’s life – the Navy, his private life and at the charity – but all tell a “similar story”. “It is the story of a man who was successful in his careers, both in and after the Royal Navy, and a man who had much to lose,” said Mr Dunkels. “But nevertheless, he was seemingly confident that he was ‘unassailable’ because of his position of power. “Some of his victims complained at the time, but others felt their word would not be believed because of his status relative to them, or that he was ‘too powerful’ to be affected.” The earliest charge was said to have taken place in December 1985, while Howeson, of Plymouth, was employed as an officer in the Royal Navy. He allegedly groped a junior rating on the ship during a man overboard drill, touching the young man’s legs and lower back and his penis and testicles over his clothing. The “shaken and upset” victim reported the incident to a petty officer and the master-at-arms. There was an investigation launched into Howeson’s behaviour following a similar complaint from a ship’s steward, But the court heard the defendant was let off with a warning about his future behaviour – and went on to enjoy a successful Navy career. It was also Howeson was granted a similar ‘escape’ during his subsequent employment at environmental organisation Groundwork Trust in Plymouth, where he was employed as executive director. Six of his 12 victims were allegedly indecently assaulted by Howeson between April 1992 and February 1993, during his time working at the Trust. The court heard he would take them individually to an isolated place and make up some excuse to lift them up – for instance, checking the cabling in the lights – before touching their penis and testicles, either inside or outside their clothing. But in February 1993, when some workers realised they were not alone and complained to senior management, they were urged not to take the matter to court. Mr Dunkels said: “Five separate employees individually reported what the defendant had done. But they were told it was pointless taking the matter to court, as negative publicity could destroy the Groundwork Trust. “The Trust did not take the matter to police, and instead, five days after the complaints were made, the defendant resigned with immediate effect for ‘health reasons’.” Mr Dunkels said Howeson’s behaviour only came to light two years ago, in 2015, when a separate victim came forward and accused Howeson of the one count of attempted buggery. The court heard that Howeson had laid on top of the young victim, who was under the age of 21, whilst pretending to teach him how to shoot an air rifle, whilst he was living at a previous address in Plymouth in 1987. Howeson is alleged to have pulled down the victim’s trousers and attempted, unsuccessfully, to penetrate the teen’s anus with his penis. He was arrested and quizzed by police in March 2016 for the charge, which he denied. The trial continues.

How did the marriage of political Islam and the Left come to be? Look first to the West’s progressive media, academics and agenda-driven elites — the standard coterie of cultural engineers who oppose free speech, spurn history’s lessons and defame all who disagree “Literature always anticipates life,” Oscar Wilde opined in his essay “The Decay of Lying”; “It does not copy it but moulds it to its purpose.” Recent developments in British politics seem to confirm Oscar’s aphorism. In 2015, Michel Houellebecq published his political fiction Submission, anticipating the democratic rise to power in Europe of the Muslim Brotherhood. Widely dismissed as “Islamophobic”, his dystopian novel, set in France in 2022, identifies how Europe’s political elites abandoned the Enlightenment project, alienated the masses and created the conditions for the emergence of a new extremist politics on both the Left and the Right. The novel’s protagonist, François, an alienated Sorbonne professor, observes that mainstream political parties had created “a chasm between the people and those who claimed to speak for them, the politicians and journalists”. The latter, “who had lived and prospered under a given social system”, could not “imagine the point of view of those who feel it offers them nothing, and who can contemplate its destruction without any particular dismay”. In this context, the political system “might suddenly explode”. In France the explosion takes the form of a run-off in the second round of voting for the French Presidency, between Marine Le Pen of the right-wing National Front and the recently emerged Muslim Brotherhood Party’s representative, the charismatic, but fictional, Ben Abbes. To avoid a far-Right victory, both mainstream socialist and conservative parties, eliminated in the first round of the French election process, give their support to Ben Abbes, who becomes the first democratically elected Muslim President of the Republic. From the outset, the new President distances himself from jihadi fanaticism. Instead, Abbes, a disciple of Machiavelli as well as Mohammed, sees Europe “ripe for absorption into the Dar al Islam”. Subsequently, the Republic runs along sharia-approved but moderate Islamic lines. The University of Paris becomes an Islamic university, polygamy is approved and generous family payments allow women to give up work. Unemployment falls, education is privatised and Islamised through charitable donations, and small business is encouraged. The old elites convert to the faith and France rediscovers the joys of patriarchy and a sense of political purpose. Although France now has a small Democratic Muslim Party, the least convincing aspect of Houellebecq’s fiction concerns the Muslim Brotherhood Party’s rapid rise to power. It is here that political life, taking its cue from art, has intervened, and not in France, but in the UK, where the electoral system has proved far more accommodating to the rise of a non-violent form of political Islam. Transposing Houellebecq to London and fiction into political reality, recent local elections saw Labour Party candidate Sadiq Khan succeed Boris Johnson as the first elected Muslim Mayor of London. Predictably the British, American and Australian media applauded the result as a victory for tolerance and multiculturalism. Nikki Gemmell, writing in the Australian, positively contrasted London’s election, emblematic of the city’s dynamic “open, and embracing energy”, with Australia’s parochial and “paranoid defensiveness”. In the media’s enthusiastic embrace of Khan, no commentator paused to reflect whether the result in fact demonstrates a new and significant stage in the slow-motion Islamisation of the British political process. “Life copies art,” Wilde argued, and Sadiq Khan, like Ben Abbes, is charismatic, opportunistic, politically astute and media-friendly. He easily saw off his Conservative opponent Zac Goldsmith’s attempt to brand him as an Islamist fellow traveller. The son of a Pakistani bus driver, Khan studied law at North London University, and joined a left-leaning legal practice. He rapidly rose through the Labour ranks from the London Assembly, to MP for Tooting in 2005, and a Minister of State for Transport in Gordon Brown’s government. From 2010, a close ally of former Labour leader Ed Miliband, he served as opposition Shadow Chancellor. Ostensibly a left-leaning democrat who formally dissociates himself from Islamist ideology, he has nevertheless been a close associate to the former left-wing Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, and retains links to the pro-Palestinian tendency on the Labour Left that, under Jeremy Corbyn, has captured the party leadership. In the context of post-Blairite Labour’s embrace of anti-Zionism and its appeasement of jihadi-inspired violence in Europe and the Middle East, Khan’s political emergence is particularly noteworthy. In 2004, he chaired the Muslim Council of Britain’s legal affairs committee that defended the visit of Muslim Salafist scholar Dr Yusuf Al-Qaradawi to London. Al-Qaradawi wrote The Lawful and Prohibited in Islam, which justified wife-beating and condoned “martyrdom operations” against Israeli civilians. In Khan’s eyes, however, Al-Qaradawi was not an “extremist”. Two years later, Khan was one of the signatories of a letter to the Guardian that blamed terrorist incidents, such as the July 2005 attacks in London, on British foreign policy, particularly Britain’s support for Israel. In his politically adroit campaign for the mayoralty, Khan distanced himself from Ken Livingstone and the Labour Left’s anti-Zionist and pro-Palestine tendency, emphasising in his manifesto his London roots and his commitment to “tackle the spread of extremism”. His apparent tolerance of Israel, however, is of recent vintage. Rather than question Khan’s political chameleonism, a compliant media instead dismissed any attempt to draw attention to his former Islamist associations as “Islamophobic”. Sadiq Khan, in fact, represents the acceptable face of a wider and little-noticed Islamification of progressive politics in the UK. The number of Muslim MPs sitting in parliament almost doubled between 2012 and 2015 from eight to thirteen. Local council elections in May returned 277 Muslim councillors, 6.5 per cent of the total, overwhelmingly representing Labour wards. The rise of Muslim Labour coincides with a dramatic rise in the Muslim population, which doubled between 2001 and 2011. According to the Pew Center, the Muslim population of the UK was almost 3 million or 4.8 per cent of the overall population in 2015. This increase also coincided with Tony Blair’s New Labour strategy to re-engineer and diversify the composition of the UK population after 1997. Andrew Neather, a former Blair adviser, proudly observed that Labour presided over a policy of mass migration to make the country “truly multicultural” and “rub the Right’s noses in diversity”. The policy succeeded perhaps too well and not in a way that New Labour foresaw. The dramatic rise in the Muslim population between 2001 and 2009 overlapped with the emergence after 2003 of an anti-Zionist, anti-US and anti-capitalist tendency on the Left of the Labour Party. Correlation is not necessarily cause, yet while Sadiq Khan is notably emollient in his multicultural message, others in the post-Blairite Labour Party are not. They include Naz Shah, the Labour MP for Bradford West, who thinks Israel should “relocate” to the United States. Here again political reality imitates Houellebecq’s fiction. Under the influence of Respect Party Leader, and former Bradford West MP George Galloway, support for Palestine has become central to the politics of this northern mill town, home to 215,000 Muslims or 25 per cent of the town’s population. Naz Shah’s views on Israel are relatively moderate compared to those of her former mentor, Galloway, whom she fell out with and defeated in the 2015 general election, or Galloway’s ally on the militant Left, Ken Livingstone. Ironically, the Blair government’s attempt to modernise and diversify British democracy by altering the Representation of the People Act (2000) and permitting postal ballots on demand, enabled Islamists and their fellow travellers on the Left to manipulate the Muslim vote. In 2014 the Electoral Commissioner, Richard Mawrey QC, found that the misuse of the postal ballot had facilitated electoral corruption in the UK’s second city, Birmingham, on a scale that would “disgrace a banana republic”. Mawrey subsequently found former Labour leader of the East London borough of Tower Hamlets, Luffur Rahman, guilty of electoral fraud on “an industrial scale”. Rahman had links to the fundamentalist Islamic Forum for Europe. Galloway and Livingstone, predictably, labelled Mawrey’s findings “racist”. How, we might wonder, did this curious political amalgamation between political Islam and the multicultural anti-capitalist Left evolve, and why have the mainstream media, the political class and academe condoned or ignored the Islamic tendency in UK politics? Three related factors account for this development and its deleterious implications for secular liberal democracy. First, the transnational Left, in the UK and elsewhere, experienced what Nick Cohen identified as a “dark liberation” after 2003. From this post-Iraq perspective, the United States and its allies function as the neo-liberal, imperial enemy, whilst Israel plays a special role as its demonic accomplice. Imbued with theories of Zionist world conspiracy, notes Cohen, “dark liberation” excuses even the most “brutal theocratic-fascist regime, as long as they oppose the United States and the capitalist status quo”. The post-Iraq utopian Left, comprising transnational networks of NGOs, sympathetic academics, radical pacifists, indigenous peoples and environmental activists, seeks to overthrow the neo-liberal empire. Those committed to this anti-capitalist worldview now lead hundreds of activist groups and NGOs, conduct seminars and receive support from Western governments and eleemosynary institutions, enjoy various despots as their cheerleaders, are woven into the workings of the UN and the EU, and subscribe to a coherent though by no means uniform ideology. Crucially, this ideology redescribes the recourse to jihad, not as a violent attempt to impose Islamist values, but as a form of emancipatory “resistance”, perpetrated by a small, alienated Muslim minority. A further consequence of this world-purifying utopianism thus considers home-grown terrorists as the victims of an oppressive capitalist social order. Whether it’s Michael Adeybolajo and Michael Adobelawaye murdering Lee Rigby in Woolwich in May 2013 or the Kouachi brothers and Ahmedy Coulibaly attacking the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris in January 2015, the transnational Left considers home-grown jihadis the inevitable product of a fractured society. Whether it’s the Parisian radical feminist and film-maker Rokhaya Diallo, or Jeremy Corbyn adviser and former Guardian columnist Seamus Milne, it’s liberal secular democracy and Western foreign policy, not the Koran, that creates Islamic State and jihadism in the West. Advancing this zombie-Left worldview, therefore, requires the active compliance of the West’s progressive media to reinforce this perverse interpretation of secular free-market democracy. Its distinctive rhetoric favours speech acts that limit debate, conceal and prevent thought, and label pejoratively those who identify the totalitarianism implicit in Islamism’s political religion. “By naming things wrongly,” Albert Camus observed, “we add to the misfortunes of the world.” The BBC’s current editorial guidelines, which counsel journalists to describe terrorists as “militants” and always refer to the “so-called Islamic State”, are perhaps the most obvious examples of this developing political language. More troubling still is the acceptance into common usage of the pejorative noun “Islamophobia”. Shiite propagandists first coined the term in the wake of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1979 revolution in Iran. Later, in London, those campaigning against Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses realised they had more to gain by transforming their status from assassins implementing the Ayatollah’s fatwa to victims of Islamophobia. In the 1990s, the Runnymede Trust and the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC), a London-based, UN-recognised NGO, promoted the term’s use. The IHRC’s founder, Massoud Shadjareh, hands out annual awards for Islamophobe of the year. (The 2015 ceremony, held less than two months after the Paris attack, awarded the international prize to Charlie Hebdo.) To those who cry “Islamophobia!” any criticism of Islamic fanaticism, or, as we have seen, the legitimate investigation of the former political associations of a figure like Sadiq Khan, is a form of racism against Muslims. It elides racist attacks on mosques or Muslims with liberal criticism of sharia law, the treatment of women or religious violence. “Islamophobia” operates as a semantic signifier deterring all criticism of Islam and foreclosing debate. It also features as a key term in the double-think of prominent Muslim public intellectuals like Tariq Ramadan, grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and holder of the Saudi-endowed Sheikh Hanafi bin Khalifa al Khari chair in Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford. Ramadan and his fellow travellers, such as the Trotskyite owner of the French journal Mediapart, Edwy Plenel, present European Muslims as misunderstood and marginalised, and Islamism as a form of resistance to Islamophobic colonialism and racism. As the French feminist Caroline Fourest observes, “If words are weapons this is one designed to hurt secularists while feigning to target racists.” In the evolving political accommodation of political Islam, the Anglosphere media’s Olympian pursuit of balance and cultural sensitivity has proved seminal. In the wake of the massacre of Charlie Hebdo journalists, Sky News, the BBC, CNN, NBC and ABC refused to show the satirical journal’s cartoons, thus taking balance and “responsibility” to absurd lengths. More worrying still, it is often only the apologists for fundamentalism that are permitted a voice in the “ethically responsible” UK press. Somewhat predictably, the Guardian refused to publish a piece it commissioned from Michael Goldfarb that exposed the equivocation and distortion in Islamist political rhetoric of the Ramadan variety. New global media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Google and Twitter reinforce the anti-secular relativism of the Guardian model, blocking videos mocking terrorists, whilst messages calling for the murder of apostates or beating up Islamophobes on social networks are rarely withdrawn. The liberal dread of being labelled Islamophobic, a penchant for tolerating the intolerant, combined with the fear of provoking violence, has effectively silenced intelligent debate about the rise of political Islam in Europe and its impact on secular democratic politics. Over the past decade, not only the media but also the art world has opted for collusion and self-censorship. The combination of Islamophobia, balance and the omnipresent threat of violence means that it has become impossible to organise a conference or even a debate on political Islam and freedom of expression on a British or Australian campus. The preoccupation with “safe spaces” on Western campuses, along with the fact that the Gulf States endow chairs in Islamic Studies at Oxford, Princeton and Griffith University in Australia further inhibits discussion. Of 198 member states of the UN, ninety-four have blasphemy laws and the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation regularly pushes for the UN Human Rights Council to recognise the defamation of religion. The rising price of political freedom, it seems, is too high for many Western governments to pay. The long war for cultural freedom which began in 1989 is in serious danger of being lost. As Karl Popper observed of an earlier totalitarian threat to the open society, “If we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.” We should therefore claim “in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant”. Unfortunately, this argument does not gets much air-time, let alone political support. The UK media and the national student union now consider any mention of inconvenient facts about vote rigging in Asian, primarily Muslim communities, or the imposition of sharia law in some UK communities, as “Islamophobic”. Thus the Guardian, the BBC and academe ignore or condone the profound change in the character and conduct of UK politics that the resistible rise of Sadiq Khan and Naz Shah intimates. “Life imitates art, far more than art imitates life,” Oscar concluded his essay on lying. Yet the slow-motion collision of mainstream Islam with the multicultural transnational Left has led to a Ben Abbes-style transformation of liberal democratic London into a progressively illiberal, Islamophile Londonistan that exceeds even Houellebecq’s fervid imagination.

In February, Sonia Furstenau from the Green Party of BC visited Brentwood for an afternoon to speak to Mr. Cowie’s Socials 10 class. She came to talk about her opinions on Canadian politics, her role in the Green Party, and shared some personal stories about her family in WWII and the Cold War. As the CVRD Area Director of the Cowichan Valley and BC Green Party candidate, she has a very strong voice on many local issues. She has done many things for her community and has admirably supported and protected the voices of her residents. Sonia talked to us about her values and everything that has led her to become active in public life. She has provided clarity and leadership for the Cowichan Valley District and also taken on roles fighting against contaminated soil dumping in the Shawnigan Lake watershed. To represent the values of her constituents as strongly as she can, she works across jurisdictions and agencies in British Columbia. Being educated and having connections, along with caring for her community and environment, is what helps her be a proud candidate for the Green Party in the Cowichan Valley. Sonia’s father came to Canada from Germany in 1959. He didn’t speak any English prior to coming to Canada and spent the whole voyage learning the language from an English newspaper and an English-to-German dictionary. By the time he arrived it wasn’t perfect, but he did know enough to get around and his speaking improved over time. He studied at UVIC and joined the school’s first graduating class ever in 1963. After graduation, he went on to be a professor, then set up a transfer programme in Edmonton. In 1980, Sonia’s father took her to East Germany with him because he thought as as a German citizen, if he brought his Canadian daughter with him, that it would be easier to get back into Canada. Sonia said her memories of their visit to East Germany are “all in black and white”. It appeared as though the war had happened within the last year, (rather than decades before) due to the fact that no one had bothered to clean up the mess. There were still tanks and piles of concrete from knocked down buildings lying around. This left Sonia with a very unsettling feeling knowing how hard it is for a country to move on after a tragedy this great, and she would never want that to happen to Canada. Later on, seeing Germany helped her to motivate herself to protect her country and fight for what’s right for British Columbia. Having Furstenau come speak to our class has answered a bunch of our questions related to topics we are learing in class such as politics and the Cold War. We thank her for coming in to talk to us and wish her the best of luck in the May BC Provincial election. Maddie B, Hope ‘19

Favourites 11th Doctor, Amy, and Rory I've been asking myself the same question. LetsSaveTheUniverse 328 DW- Sophisticated Scribbles Barukurii 2,014 Advertisement Advertisement Pterodactyls are vermin sign caycowa 240 Doctor Who - Honeymoon echidnite 1,078 Space and Time-Luthiean71 urasei 143 The Fez Triumphant LissyStrata 967 ALL THE COOL - Doctor Who Girl-on-the-Moon 4,198 9.10.11 Nadiezda 3,941 Doctor Who- Double rainbow dangerpro 1,118 11 Sonic Screwdriver Scarf harelquin-demon 41 Doctor Who - Piggyback Oelm 261 Waiting for Homecoming inklou 2,139 The Doctor's Wife lortay 4,058 new who doctor day Blue-Fox 1,870 Meanwhile, like a Boss . . . truemouse 155 Fez Dispenser the-only-halo 68 i wear a shark now Blue-Fox 1,360 the oncoming storm Blue-Fox 2,503 come on then, sexy Blue-Fox 2,835 Adventures are cool Malicious-Alice 844 New Who janey-jane 12,561 Booty Shorts are Cool dana-redde 97 Marty McFly and Rory Williams CeeNot 668 The last C e n t u r i o n pinkwater1211 159

1970 soundtrack album by Ron Geesin and Roger Waters Music from The Body is the soundtrack album to Roy Battersby's 1970 documentary film The Body,[3] about human biology, narrated by Vanessa Redgrave and Frank Finlay. History [ edit ] The music was composed in collaboration between Pink Floyd member Roger Waters and Ron Geesin, the same year they worked together on Atom Heart Mother[3] and employs biomusic, including sounds made by the human body (slaps, breathing, laughing, whispering, flatulence, etc.),[3] in addition to more traditional guitar, piano and stringed instruments. The album's final track, "Give Birth to a Smile", features all four members of Pink Floyd, plus Geesin on piano, although David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Richard Wright are uncredited.[3] The child heard on opening track is Ron's son Joe Geesin. The LP features a different track listing to the original film soundtrack, and a 3 sided acetate does exist of the full version[citation needed]. The cover of the album features a Transparent Anatomical Manikin (TAM).[4] Waters would not release another album outside of Pink Floyd until 1984's The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking.[3] Track listing [ edit ] All songs written by Ron Geesin, except where noted:[3] Side One "Our Song" (Geesin/Waters) – 1:24 "Sea Shell and Stone" (Waters) – 2:17 "Red Stuff Writhe" – 1:11 "A Gentle Breeze Blew Through Life" – 1:19 "Lick Your Partners" – 0:35 "Bridge Passage for Three Plastic Teeth" – 0:35 "Chain of Life" (Waters) – 3:59 "The Womb Bit" (Geesin/Waters) – 2:06 "Embryo Thought" – 0:39 "March Past of the Embryos" – 1:08 "More Than Seven Dwarfs in Penis-Land" – 2:03 "Dance of the Red Corpuscles" – 2:04 Side Two "Body Transport" (Geesin/Waters) – 3:16 "Hand Dance — Full Evening Dress" – 1:01 "Breathe" (Waters) – 2:53 "Old Folks Ascension" – 3:47 "Bed-Time-Dream-Clime" – 2:02 "Piddle in Perspex" – 0:57 "Embryonic Womb-Walk" – 1:14 "Mrs. Throat Goes Walking" – 2:05 "Sea Shell and Soft Stone" (Geesin/Waters) – 2:05 "Give Birth to a Smile" (Waters) – 2:49 Personnel [ edit ]

Description Learn how to breach wireless network security w/ 60+ hours of training Understand how to handle digital evidence within legal standards Use Access Data’s Forensic Toolkit, EnCase, & other special steps to review data whilst leaving all evidence intact Learn how to implement an Info Risk Assessment Process & integrate enterprise business objectives w/ info security policies Discover IT Strategy & information systems maintenance practices Develop a comprehensive suite of skills that will ensure you are more productive and efficient at work Receive free technical support 24/5 via email, telephone or online chat There is a huge demand for ethical hackers, tech professionals specially hired to hack a company or organization's network in order to expose security flaws. This course will give you the material and training you need to pass any of five professional hacker certifications that will look great on a resume and may even help you score a high-paying IT job.

India will be a far easier place to do business if the country adopted the practices and processes that Gujarat follows, World Bank said on Wednesday, in what could be seen a thumbs up for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s much-touted Gujarat model of governance. World Bank group president Jim Yong Kim, who is on a three-day visit to India, said that India can leap-frog at least 50 notches from its current 134th position in the bank’s Ease of Doing Buisness survey if all states followed the Gujarat model. “We have looked at this (the ease of doing business)…if India was to be ranked based just on the Gujarat model, it would improve 50 places… we now hope that it would scale up,” Kim said. Gujarat is among India’s hottest business destinations that has earned praise from business leaders for easy norms, transparent procedures and rapid approvals. In India, government approvals and cumbersome administrative processes often delay start of business and push up costs. For instance, Indian businesses have to pay a total number of 33 taxes on an average compared to seven in China. “From my discussions with Prime Minister Modi and minister Jaitley, it is clear that they are committed to increasing India’s economic growth…I was exteremely impressed with his (Modi’s) sense of urgency ..his intention is to grow the economy quickly,” Kim said after his meeting with Modi which lasted for 50 minutes. Kim’s visit to India comes shortly after the five Brics nations — Brazil, Russia, India China and South Africa — have decided to create a new development bank in what analysts see as a direct challenge to the World Bank for aids and financing. World Bank group’s aid to India will go up to $18 billion in the next three years, he added. India is the highest cumulative borrower of the World Bank, with a current portfolio of 85 projects with a total commitment of $24.12 billion from both International Bank for Reconstruction and Development accounting for $12.86 billion and International Development Association, which is the soft loan window accounting for $11.16 billion in active projects. First Published: Jul 23, 2014 23:46 IST

Preview | Recap | Notebook Suns-Trail Blazers Preview By JEFF BARTL Posted Jan 26 2012 4:16PM A road-heavy portion of the schedule wasn't kind to the Portland Trail Blazers. A visit from the struggling Phoenix Suns may help them improve their status as one of the NBA's best home teams. Portland seeks its sixth straight home victory over Phoenix when the teams meet Friday night. The Trail Blazers (11-8) are coming off a stretch of playing seven of nine on the road after losing 101-93 at Golden State on Wednesday. They went 2-5 away from home during that span and fell to 3-7 on the road. LaMarcus Aldridge scored a team-high 18 points and Marcus Camby added 16 rebounds for Portland, which nearly rallied from a 20-point deficit. "As a team, we did not play well. As a unit, we need to play better," coach Nate McMillan said. "We're not going to single anybody out. There are some things that we all needed to do better." The Blazers' first meeting with the Suns came in Phoenix, a 102-77 loss Jan. 6 which contributed to their averages of 90.4 points and 40.9 percent shooting on the road. The numbers are stark contrasts to those at the Rose Garden, where they're averaging 103.4 points - fifth-best in the league - and shooting 45.8 percent while going 8-1. Portland is averaging 114.0 points during its five-game home winning streak against Phoenix, which has lost seven of 10 since beating the Blazers earlier this month. The Suns (6-11) dropped their second straight Tuesday, 99-96 to Toronto. Marcin Gortat had 21 points and 12 rebounds to record his ninth straight double-double, and Steve Nash added 17 points and 14 assists for Phoenix, which led by 14 at one point. "Obviously we were struggling for energy and I think that was the key, especially in that third quarter," Nash said. "They beat us on all the second-effort plays. They made a lot more of the plays, hustling for loose balls or running the floor, little things like that." The Suns will play without backup center Robin Lopez, who was suspended for one game following an altercation with a referee Tuesday. Lopez was ejected after making contact with an official after disputing a foul call. No matter who is in the lineup, the recent high-scoring Suns teams seem to be a thing of the past. Phoenix is averaging 89.7 points while going 3-6 on the road, where it has yet to crack the 100-point mark. Nash's 31.9 minutes per game are his fewest since averaging 31.7 for Dallas during the 1998-99 season, and his 10.4 assists per game are his least since 2008-09. Nash had 17 points and nine assists in the first meeting with Portland, when Jared Dudley led six Suns in double figures with 18 points. Aldridge was the only Blazers starter in double figures with 14 points. Phoenix has won consecutive meetings for the first time since taking 11 straight in the series March 23, 2006-Nov. 22, 2008. It hasn't won in Portland since a 111-98 victory March 18, 2008. Copyright 2012 by STATS LLC and Associated Press. Any commercial use or distribution without the express written consent of STATS LLC and Associated Press is strictly prohibited Copyright 2012 by STATS LLC and Associated Press. Any commercial use or distribution without the express written consent of STATS LLC and Associated Press is strictly prohibited Aldridge leads Blazers past Suns 109-71 Posted Jan 28 2012 1:34AM PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) The Portland Trail Blazers had their worst defeat of the season at Phoenix earlier this month. They returned the favor on Friday night. LaMarcus Aldridge had 23 points and seven rebounds and the Trail Blazers blew out the Suns 109-71 for their sixth straight win at home. "They looked like we did when we went to Phoenix," Blazers coach Nate McMillan said. "I think crowds and your home court certainly motivates you and brings energy to your building." Gerald Wallace added 17 points, Wesley Matthews had 16 and Nicolas Batum added 14 for the Blazers. Marcus Camby had 20 rebounds and was the only Blazers player who didn't score on a night when both benches were emptied early. Grant Hill had 12 points for Phoenix, which was held to a season-low in scoring and suffered the third-worst defeat in its history. Sebastian Telfair had 10 and Hakim Warrick had nine. The Suns shot just 32.8 percent from the field, made four of 13 3-pointers and were 9 of 18 from the free-throw line. Portland has been a much different team at the Rose Garden than out on the road this season. The Blazers are 9-1 at home, tying them with San Antonio for the best home record in the Western Conference. Portland is 3-7 on the road, including a loss Wednesday at Golden State, when the Blazers struggled against Stephen Curry's 32 points and seven assists. "To take that next step, we've got to bottle this up," said Jamal Crawford, who finished with nine points and 10 rebounds for Portland. "There's no way around it, no tip-toeing around it. To be a really good team, you have to win on the road." Phoenix has lost four in a row and was coming off a 99-96 defeat against Toronto. The Suns led after the first quarter, but fell way behind after a horrid second quarter in which they made just four of 19 shots and scored just nine points. Portland took a 47-33 lead into halftime. It just got worse for Phoenix in the second half, which had the feel of a Blazers scrimmage - full of alley-oops, breakaway dunks and cross-court passes. The Suns scored only 12 points in the third and the Blazers breezed their way to a 35-point lead before the end of the quarter. "The thing that was surprising was that I thought we kind of folded," Hill said. "We stopped competing there as soon as they came out and hit us hard." Phoenix coach Alvin Gentry sat his starters for much of the second half, including Steve Nash, Hill and Marcin Gorat. Both teams played bench players almost exclusively in the fourth quarter. Nash finished with five points and seven assists in 24 minutes. He could have passed Mark Price to become the NBA career leader in free-throw percentage but went 1 of 3 from the line. Gorat finished with eight points and 10 rebounds. "Tonight was one of those nights where they revealed that we have our deficiencies," Nash said. "We have to keep digging and find some different ways to score." Notes: Phoenix C Robin Lopez sat out after being suspended by the league for bumping an official in Tuesday's game. ... Portland recorded a season-high 58 rebounds, a season-high 28 assists and a season-high 62 second-half points... The Blazers have won the last seven meetings with the Suns in Portland. ... Phoenix is 0-11 this season when trailing at halftime. Copyright 2012 by STATS LLC and Associated Press. Any commercial use or distribution without the express written consent of STATS LLC and Associated Press is strictly prohibited Copyright 2012 by STATS LLC and Associated Press. Any commercial use or distribution without the express written consent of STATS LLC and Associated Press is strictly prohibited

Tom Cotton, a Senate candidate in Arkansas who has made the Islamic State sound like a batch of G.I. Joe villains. Photo via Flickr user Gage Skidmore "I believe that the Islamic State is an imminent threat to our nation." Thus proclaimed Colorado Republican Senate candidate Cory Gardner in a televised debate Wednesday night. Gardner apparently felt no need to provide evidence for this assertion, as if the reality of the imminence of an IS attack on the United States homeland should have been manifestly obvious to all viewers. Naturally, his opponent, Democratic Senator Mark Udall, didn't bother to challenge the claim, presumably because doing so could've opened him up to charges of displaying insufficient aggression toward the Big New Scary Terrorist Group. The moment passed essentially unnoticed; after all, why would anyone question the idea that Colorodans might die in a terroristic fireball at any moment? And so continued the national trend of politicians hailing from rural America trumping up the danger supposedly posed by the Islamic State to farmers, ranchers, small business owners, and other denizens of the heartland. After watching a slew of US Senate debates for the upcoming midterm elections-an activity I recommend to no sane person-I've concluded that candidates running for office in places extremely unlikely to ever be targeted by jihadists seem to be the ones most riled up about the Islamic State. Perhaps because these candidates often are laughably unschooled in the realm of foreign policy, being local legislators and such, they typically have no damned idea what they're talking about. (Such rhetoric doesn't appear to be nearly as heated in places like New York City or Washington, DC, which are presumably more at risk for a terrorist attack.) Republican Senate candidate Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Congressman who routinely touts his military service in Iraq-and is one of the few Republicans still willing to openly praise George W. Bush's incomprehensibly stupid war as "just and noble"-has taken to portraying IS as basically Cobra from G.I. Joe. "They're the most well financed organization potentially in modern times," Cotton declared this week on the debate stage, dubbing the group a "terrorist army." Now, the Islamic State has certainly demonstrated the capacity to wreak destruction on Kurds, Yazidis, Christians, Shiites, and others, and its fighters are undoubtedly fierce, but Cotton's implication-that these men with guns two continents away are somehow a danger to the security of average Americans-is patently absurd. For good measure, Cotton threw in a jab at his opponent, Democratic Senator Mark Pryor, for supposedly neglecting to safeguard the public from Ebola; a classic one-two scaremongering punch. These guys know exactly what they're doing, as if following a sordid script. Political science literature shows that people generally become more conservative when they perceive their community to be under threat from foreign infiltration, whether by terrorists or communicable disease. So when Pat Roberts, the geriatric Republican Senator from Kansas, said that he "stood up to the president, keeping terrorists out of Kansas," you could practically hear the dog-whistle cry of I'm the only one who can keep the Big Scary Terrorists from suicide-bombing your cattle. Never mind that he was likely referring to his ludicrous effort, in 2009, to prevent Guantánamo detainees from being transferred to Fort Leavenworth, one of the military's securest facilities. (Guantánamo remains open due in part to the work of Roberts and his colleagues.) Across the nation, cynical candidates-mostly Republicans, but not exclusively-have taken to tailoring the amorphous Islamic State threat to fit their localized political needs. Mike McFadden, a hapless Minnesota GOPer almost certain to lose to incumbent senator and former comedian Al Franken, announced, "In Minnesota, we've become the number-one recruiting area for terrorists." What does this mean, exactly? Who cares! All McFadden wants is for voters to believe that there's some undefined terrorist danger out there, and Franken hasn't done enough to aggressively combat it. (Franken has engaged in a bit of anti-terrorist chest-thumping himself, having written a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder last month calling for an investigation into possible Islamic State recruitment activities in Minnesota.) The most ridiculous terrorist-related ballyhoo, however, has come from Thom Tillis, the Republican trying for Senator Kay Hagan's seat in North Carolina. In a recent debate, Tillis alleged that President Obama "gives strength to the terrorists" by way of his wayward foreign policy-a charge that enlivens elements of the electorate which already suspect that Barack Hussein Obama harbors some bizarre ulterior motives in his dealings with the Islamic State. Tillis needs these folks to come out to the polls. Hagan responded by positioning herself as even more stalwartly anti-terrorist than Tillis, deriding him as "spineless" with respect to this foreign menace, and being insufficiently "decisive about taking out [the Islamic State]." Hagan then went a step further, accusing Tillis of also failing to recognize the danger of what she termed "the Khorosan." Hagan was referring to "the Khorosan group," a much-hyped but now discredited threat lurking in Syria-and not only did she get the name wrong, she acted like it's still a Serious Thing long after it was revealed to be more or less a fabrication. Clearly, better to get your facts wrong while banging the drums for war than risk coming off as a wuss. Last on this tour of terror is Iowa, where Republican state senator and former National Guard Lieutenant Colonel Joni Ernst outlined her criteria for what constitutes an acceptable US military intervention. Such an endeavor would require a "clearly defined mission, credible threat, and what is the withdrawal plan [sic]." Ernst went on to declare her support for the current anti-Islamic State campaign. The problem is that the campaign fails to meet her stated criteria. There is no "clearly defined mission" other than to "degrade and destroy" IS-so we'll know we win when we win, or something-and there's no withdrawal plan. In fact, US officials are fairly open about the war entailing an open-ended, multi-year commitment. Ernst's rhetoric unravels upon even the slightest examination. Her Democratic opponent, Bruce Braley, hasn't been much more reasoned. "Any time American citizens are attacked by a terrorist group, they need to be brought to justice or to the grave," he inveighed, which makes no sense. Americans are regularly assaulted the world over by people who might be characterized as "terrorists," but that doesn't mean the US all the sudden goes to war against them. Americans have been attacked by vicious Mexican drug cartels without a full-scale military conflict breaking out. Israeli Police reportedly beat an American teenager over the summer, but this didn't lead to a war against Israel. And so on and so forth. As usual, with an election coming up soon, logic has been tossed aside in favor of doing whatever it takes to seize power. IS using Ebola as a weapon against America? Sure, why not. The only thing that's impossible to suggest in our present political climate is that we end this idiotic war. Follow Michael Tracey on Twitter. Register to Vote on VICE

Where Did You Get That Statistic? A Bibliography and Resource Guide for Advocates Working to Reduce Gun Death and Injury Table of Contents Firearms Violence - General Firearms Homicide Firearm Deaths of Children Nonfatal Firearm-Related Injuries Costs of Firearms Violence Firearms and Crime Firearms Ownership, Concealed Carrying, Self-Defense Use, and Gun Buy-Backs Analyses of Pro-Gun Self-Defense Studies The Gun Lobby - Firearms Industry and Organizations Appendix Two: Understanding and Using Statistics This is the full text of the January 2000 Violence Policy Center study Where Did You Get That Statistic?�A Bibliography and Resource Guide for Advocates Working to Reduce Gun Death and Injury. For information on how to order a hard copy of the study from the Violence Policy Center, please return to the publications page. This resource guide is designed to allow advocates working to reduce firearms violence to easily identify and locate those studies and articles that are the sources for the most commonly referenced statistics on firearms violence in the United States. You will notice that separate studies on the same topic will sometimes generate distinctly different numerical results. This reflects the gaps in reliable and comprehensive data that exist regarding gun violence, as well as the different sources of data�including the methodologies of the researchers. With this in mind, one should be cautious about treating any single study or statistic as the final word on the subject. Information about how to obtain the referenced article or study is included in each citation. Many of the publications in this guide are free. A list of organizations and agencies active in the firearms issue is provided in Appendix One. Appendix Two contains a short primer about understanding and using statistics. Comments about this guide are welcomed.

Not to be confused with Cardinal Roberto de' Nobili (1541-59). Roberto de Nobili Roberto de Nobili (1577 – 16 January 1656) was an Italian Jesuit missionary to Southern India. He used a novel method of adaptation (accommodatio) to preach Christianity, adopting many local customs of India which were, in his view, not contrary to Christianity. India [ edit ] Born in Montepulciano, Tuscany in September 1577, Roberto De Nobili arrived in Goa in western India on 20 May 1605. It is probable that he met here Fr Thomas Stephens, SJ, who had arrived in Goa in 1579, and was probably in the process of composing his Khristapurana.[1] After a short stay in Cochin at Kerala, he took up residence in Madurai in Tamil Nadu in November 1606. He soon called himself a "teacher of wisdom" (தத்துவ போதகர்), and began to dress like a Sannyasin. Claiming noble parentage he approached high-caste people, and eagerly engaged in dialogue with Hindu scholars about the truths of Christianity. De Nobili mastered Sanskrit, Telugu and Tamil languages and literature, with the help of his teacher, Shivadharma. As he expounded the Christian doctrine in Tamil he coined several words to communicate his message. He used the word "kovil" (கோவில்) for a place of worship, "arul" (அருள்) and "prasadam" (பிரசாதம்) for grace, "guru" (குரு) for priest or teacher, "Vedam" (வேதம்) for the Bible, "poosai" (பூசை) for Mass, etc. He adopted also local Indian customs, such as shaving one's head and keeping only a tiny tuft. He wore a white dhoti and wooden sandals, to don the look of a sanyasin. Another symbol he embraced was the wearing of a three-stringed thread across the chest. He interpreted the three-stringed thread as representing the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. He was one of the first Europeans to gain a deep understanding of Sanskrit and Tamil. He composed Catechisms, apologetic works and philosophic discourses in Tamil, and contributed greatly to the development of modern Tamil prose writing. Controversies about his method [ edit ] His method raised a fierce controversy among his fellow Jesuits and with the Archbishop of Goa Cristóvão de Sá e Lisboa. The dispute was settled by Pope Gregory XV with the Constitution Romanæ Sedis Antistes issued on 31 January 1623. The customs of the three-stringed thread, the tuft, the use of sandalwood paste on the forefront and baths were allowed, inasmuch they did not imply any superstitious ritual. The Pope invited the Indian neophytes to overcome their caste sensitivity and their contempt of the pariahs. The Dharmic thinker Rajiv Malhotra calls this method Inculturation. By adopting native culture, he made Christianity appear less alien to natives and hence easier to adopt. His adoption of native culture came from respect and was guided by his missionary zeal to spread Christianity.[2] The Ezourvedam [ edit ] Some have alleged that Roberto de Nobili was the author of a forged document written in French and purported to be a translation of an ancient Sanskrit scripture by the name of Ezourvedam. Max Mueller, a great Orientalist who edited the series The Sacred Books of the East has concluded convincingly that de Nobili did not author the forged work.[3] Ludo Rocher has published a detailed study about the Ezourvedam which shows that the author of this text must have been a French missionary. He offered several names: The question who the French Jesuit author of the EzV [Ezour-vedam] was we can only speculate on. Calmette was very much involved in the search for the Vedas; Mosac is a definite possibility; there may by some truth to Maudave’s information on Martin; there is no way of verifying the references to de Villette and Bouchet. The author of the EzV may be one of these, but he may also be one of their many more or less well known confreres. In the present state of our knowledge, we cannot go any further than that.[4] Urs App recently offered new evidence for the authorship of Jean Calmette (1692–1740).[5] Father Roberto de Nobili died in Mylapore near Chennai in Tamil Nadu on 16 January 1656 at the age of 79. Legacy [ edit ] In Fall of 2013, Loyola University Chicago opened a residence hall called de Nobili Hall at its Lake Shore campus. This five-story building houses approximately 200 first year students, the international learning community, and features a 350-seat dining hall. [6] Ekaveera, a Telugu historical novel written by Jnanpith Award laureate Viswanatha Satyanarayana portrays a character based on Robert de Nobili. His character depicted in accordance to the closest historical evidences of Nobili's life. Robert de Nobili alias Tattvabodhaka swami preaching Christianity in the Hindu sanyasi attire and style of living will have a discourse and debate with one of the protagonists Ekaveera and loses it. [7] In Jharkhand, India there are 8 schools named after him as De Nobili School which is run by Jesuits. The schools are affiliated to the Council for Indian Certificate of Secondary Education (CISCE), New Delhi. See also [ edit ] Primary sources [ edit ] Preaching wisdom to the wise: three treatises . Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2000. . Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2000. Nittiya cīvan̲a callāpam, Kaṭavuḷ nirn̲ayam. Tamil̲ Ilakkiyak Kal̲akam, 1964. Tamil̲ Ilakkiyak Kal̲akam, 1964. Ñān̲ōpateca kur̲ippiṭamum irupatteṭṭu piracaṅkaṅkāḷum. Tamil̲ Ilakkiyak Kal̲akam, 1965. Tamil̲ Ilakkiyak Kal̲akam, 1965. Tūṣaṇat tikkāram. Tamil̲ Ilakkiyak Kal̲akam, 1964. Tamil̲ Ilakkiyak Kal̲akam, 1964. Ñāṉōpatēcam. Tamil̲ Ilakkiyak Kal̲akam, 1963. Secondary sources [ edit ] References [ edit ]

Here’s a thought: Don’t be a pedophile. Here’s another thought: If you are one, don’t tell the cops “the Bible did not set limits on the age between two partners.” (Actually, wait, I take that last one back. Go ahead and say it because it makes it that much easier to lock you up.) Timothy Morgan Butler said the statement to cops in Layton, Utah last year after he was arrested: According to charging documents after his arrest, Butler admitted to watching pornography with a 5- or 6-year-old girl in the room and also admitted to inappropriately touching the girl, but it was to “show her love.” He also told the police officer, “the Bible did not set limits on the age between two partners,” documents said. Butler provided police with a written statement that said the girl was not “getting love at home, so he gave it to her,” according to the document. Butler also wrote he was not receiving any “love from my wife, so I decided to get love and share love” with the child. With the new allegation, Butler is charged with two counts of sodomy upon a child, three counts of aggravated sexual abuse of a child, two counts of dealing in material harmful to a minor, and one count of possession of marijuana. It’s unclear to me if his statement about the Bible was the cause or rationalization for his actions. Since his arrest, another sexual abuse accusation has been added to his charges. The reason Butler is back in the news now is because he’s been declared mentally competent to stand trial. His trial is set for early October. If he takes the stand, he’ll likely swear on the same Bible he thinks gives him license to “share love” with a child. (Image via Standard-Examiner video. Thanks to Bob for the link)

Texas megachurch pastor John Hagee has successfully worked with copyright lawyers to get more than 120 videos featuring him removed from YouTube. The development was reported by The Huffington Post, whose blogger Max Blumenthal discovered that a video he had made at Hagee's Christians United for Israel conference last year was among those removed from the popular video website. Juda Engelmayer, a spokesman for Hagee, confirmed that the videos had been removed. "They were anything that contained clips of sermons, clips of activities happening at CUFI or John Hagee Ministries events," he said. Hagee is the outspoken pastor of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio. After his controversial comments about the Holocaust and Catholics were carried on the Internet, Sen. John McCain rejected Hagee's endorsement of his presidential race. Blumenthal criticized the move as "a naked exercise in news suppression." Engelmayer would not respond directly to the comments of Huffington Post writers but said the removal of videos followed particular criteria. "It wasn't done on a targeted basis," he said. "It was done strictly on a formulaic basis of whether it fit certain criteria." He said the removal was not timed to the upcoming annual summit of Christians United for Israel, July 21-24 in Washington. Rather, he said Hagee's daughter read a story about a studio that had successfully challenged YouTube and had material removed, sparking the work by lawyers several months ago. Blumenthal wrote in a Huffington Post blog that his "Rapture Ready" mini-documentary "contained no copyrighted material whatsoever." Asked about that complaint, Engelmayer said, "I have not studied the video, so I can't speak to his video at all."

I sit down across from Laura Cisneros, Doppler Labs’ resident Spanish speaker, and put in the company’s early-prototype earbuds. Between us is a landscape of open circuitry—Bluetooth transmitters and circuit boards. Under the table sits a suitcase packed with two computers and a nest of wiring. Cisneros starts to speak to me in Spanish. About half a second after she begins talking, I hear a translation in English. It’s difficult to describe hearing someone speak in another language, and immediately understanding what they’ve said. It feels like being kicked in the chest by the future. I can’t help but smile, seeing a crack in the language barrier that no text-based translator or even translated Skype chat could replicate. The Amazon Echo has proven audio’s power to be the medium through which we interact with our devices, but people still underestimate the power of putting computers in your ears. Smarter hearing could automatically make a conversation in a loud bar more understandable, a commute quieter, or, eventually, a real-time dialogue across languages entirely possible. Earbuds capable of doing all this would make life noticeably and immediately better for any average person—at least that’s Doppler’s pitch. Quartz/ Dave Gershgorn Inside the Doppler Labs lab. Launched in 2013, Doppler Labs spent two years on research and development before launching a Kickstarter in 2015 for the Here Active Listening System. Aimed at audiophiles and musicians, the Active Listening System didn’t actually play music, but instead altered the sounds of the world around you. Doppler is now working to ship that system’s successor: Here One, wireless earbuds for regular consumers that intelligently augment hearing, play music, and facilitate interaction with a smartphone’s virtual assistant. The company is capitalizing on a gap in the market—well-designed, high-quality wireless earbuds that don’t make you look like an early-aughts Bluetooth dad. But Doppler is also vying to redefine the way we hear, and by extension how we interact with the world around us, by giving our ears their own assistants. The silicon ear These kinds of grand ambitions wouldn’t have been feasible even five years ago. As we sit down to discuss the computers I’ve just wedged into my ears, Doppler executive chairman and AI guru Fritz Lanman recites a familiar Silicon Valley prayer: “Thanks to Google for open-sourcing Tensorflow, thanks to Moore’s Law, thanks to the fact that we can collect this data at scale, thanks to the fact that the phones are powerful enough to run some of these models locally so we don’t have to rely on server clusters for everything,” he intones. “From an engineering standpoint, it’s just a really great time to be working on this, because it’s finally possible.” Doppler’s proposition—that it can sell you ears better than the ones attached to your head—rests on having built a custom brain to control those ears. While the Here Active Listening System focused on tweaking musical performances and sound stages, the Here One earbuds (delayed until February) will be able to cut out or amplify the noise around you. More ambitious prototypes, like the translation system, reside in a moonshot-like lab, showcasing the tech’s long-term potential. “If you can actually do this right, this really becomes a personal system,” says Doppler CEO Noah Kraft. “Because your ears are different than everyone else’s, and your preferences for what you want to hear is different than everyone else’s.” “Babies are ridiculously variable—wide-band and unpredictable and unique.” To augment or muffle the sounds around us, Doppler’s software must be able to do a few things within milliseconds: Identify a specific noise, understand the characteristics of that noise, and then alter the noise without distorting it. These ambitions all rely on machine learning, a still-nascent field in which algorithms are taught to find patterns in data. It goes without saying, but there are a lot of sounds in the world. To develop one algorithm to identify every noise wouldn’t make sense—the whole algorithm would have to run every time, which wastes space, memory, and battery life. It would be like sending the whole fire department, every ambulance, and a dozen police officers to discover that a cat got stuck in a tree. Instead, the Doppler team is developing hundreds of highly specialized algorithms to identify every sound you might encounter during your day—clinking silverware, a car horn, an airplane passing overhead. Some of those algorithms, like sirens, are pretty straightforward (although the team has different algorithms for American and European sirens). Others are more difficult to pin down. “Babies are ridiculously variable,” Lanman says. “[They’re] wide-band and unpredictable and unique.” The world’s soundtrack Despite all the recent successes in artificial-intelligence research, AI still fails when it encounters something it’s never seen (or heard) before. And so like anybody in the deep learning game, Doppler needs data—lots of it. The team realized early on that the audio they needed—hundreds of thousands of recordings; of crowds in different cities, water, traffic, chatter, church bells, rustling leaves, boat horns—didn’t exist, or at least didn’t exist in the quality and abundance required. So they hired a field audio team to document the sounds of the modern world. To ensure the algorithms know which sounds they’re learning, Doppler is also labeling all of this information manually: They have about 100,000 samples labelled so far. The six-person team is based out of four major cities—New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Shanghai—and two members also roam from country to country. Together they’ve amassed more than 1 million recordings from 60-plus locations on five continents. Doppler Labs Doppler Labs’ director of audio and DSP engineering, Gints Klimanis, records in Shuri Castle, Okinawa. The field team captures noise in two ways: high-end microphones worn in the ear like earbuds, to document sound the way the brain would hear it; and also with their smartphones. (While the Here Ones each have a processor, right now Doppler relies on users’ smartphones to listen for noises.) With these two sets of audio, Doppler can accurately predict and counteract—or boost—real-world sounds for the buds, and then make those models work on the Here One. 999,999 crying babies Unlike headphones and even most computers, the Here One itself isn’t the most important part of the user’s experience. What really matters are the algorithms running on the buds. It’s much like Tesla’s model for their self-driving Autopilot feature, which is consistently updated to perform better. “We want to ship a piece of hardware, and utilize software to make it continuously better,” Kraft says. “The true north here is Tesla.” Just like Tesla’s Autopilot captures data to make every other car better, Doppler’s algorithms will learn from whatever users are hearing. Every time someone with Here One earbuds activates a noise filter, the buds will capture a snapshot of data about the noises they hear—audio qualities like frequency, bandwidth, location, and time. Since the algorithms rely on these qualities, rather than the raw audio itself, the data furthers Doppler’s understanding of what the world sounds like. To illustrate the real-time usefulness of such data, Doppler’s machine-learning lead, Jacob Meacham, describes a scenario where two Here One users go to the same restaurant. One goes there regularly, turning down the volume by 20 decibels each time because the restaurant is loud. The other has never been there. Based on the first person’s experiences, the second Here One user will hear a prompt asking if they want to turn the noise down. Says Lanman, “It’s like contributing to Google Maps or Waze.” Once Doppler has these products on the street, they’ll have a constant stream of detailed information about the way the world sounds. Not having enough data will cease to be an issue. “If you’re the millionth customer, then there’s 999,999 other customers who have been collecting baby samples,” says Meacham. “So when you encounter a baby, it’s going to be great.” The sound of silence Imagine your earbuds telling you that your baby is crying, before you can even hear it yourself. Meacham and his colleague, Matthew Sills, joined Doppler from Palantir, the secretive data-mining company contracted by governments and large corporations. Their work at Doppler, in addition to building models of sound, is to ensure that all this highly sensitive user data never sees the light of day. The two engineers have worked to decentralize user information from the data itself, which is just incredibly long strings of numbers that describe certain sounds. During our conversation, they theorized about how they might crack their own system. “You’d have to get access to the data, then the files that tell you how to put them together, and then the situation that the data was used in. Even then you wouldn’t get anything intelligible,” Meacham says. And they’ve tried. The team recorded the sound of someone speaking, ran it through their system, and then tried to turn it back into understandable speech. Says Meacham, “It definitely wasn’t English.” White whale The Here One earbuds are expected to start shipping next month. For $299, you’ll be able to listen in a certain direction—i.e. point your hearing forward to cut out chatter at a busy restaurant, or use “eavesdrop mode” to listen in behind you. You’ll also be able to cut out planes, trains, and automobiles during your daily commute, or turn the volume down on noisy coworkers. Doppler Labs The Here One earbuds, Doppler Lab’s first mainstream consumer product. But Doppler Labs’ real white whale is speaker detection: training the earbuds to identify a specific person’s voice and boost it above the din. Imagine your earbuds telling you that your baby is crying, before you can even hear it yourself. Or being able to mute someone entirely. Lanman says Doppler will involve the user in those types of developments: “It would be creepy if the system just suddenly went, ‘Fritz, do you want to amplify or suppress your wife?'” Among other challenges, speaker detection requires the AI to work with just a few bits of training data, which is still one of machine learning’s biggest obstacles. “It would be creepy if the system just suddenly went, ‘Fritz, do you want to amplify or suppress your wife?'” If you have an Amazon Echo, or have trained Siri or Google Assistant to the sound of your voice, you’re familiar with this principle: Say a few very specific phrases, and the AI learns to recognize your voice with more accuracy. But while the Echo typically sits in a quiet home, Doppler’s AI would have to work in a vast range of circumstances: loud bars, concerts, and around a bunch of other people with potentially similar voices. By bye buy True speaker detection is far off, as is the automatic translation I experienced. On the hardware side, the processing power for translation is currently too much for the buds or a smartphone to handle. Both conversationalists would have to carry some sort of external language pack, a system that right now would need its own carry-on suitcase. On the AI side, Doppler’s translation algorithms—though based on systems built by a third party that also builds systems for the CIA—are still working through basic language questions. “By, bye, buy. Or in Spanish, si and sí with an accent on the ‘i’ are ‘if’ and ‘yes,'” says Jeff Baker, Doppler’s vice president of R&D. “How in the world do you tell those apart?” That’s a seminal question for Doppler Labs. It’s the crux of their technology, and the raison d’être for earbuds capable of identifying, understanding, mollifying, or augmenting sound. Earbuds that could make sound personalized, and help build a model of how every single user prefers to hear the world. “It gets to this really interesting philosophical sci-fi debate,” Lanman says. “Isn’t it kind of weird that everyone is going to have their own subjective reality for what the world sounds like?”

(CBS) — A suburban teen is getting a little hero treatment at home these days, for helping to save the life of another child. Earlier this week, a young boy fell through the ice on a retention pond in Oswego. Zac Thomas decided he needed to help the boy himself. CBS 2’s Mike Parker reports. “The first thing that went through my mind was to get him out,” the 14-year-old says. Zac had seen a fourth-grade boy who had fallen through the ice and was crying for help. The 9-year-old dropped into the brutally cold water almost to his neck. “I ran down there, and I stood on the grass and I reached out and I grabbed his hand and I pulled him out,” Zac says. His little brother, Ryan, watched the rescue. Zac walked the cold, thoroughly soaked boy home to his waiting sisters. He says his Boy Scout training prepared him for the emergency. “He’s a just a great kid. He’s growing up fast and making good decisions on a daily basis,” mother Angela Prusinski says. As for the little boy who went through the ice, he’s apparently OK. His mother says she is tremendously grateful to Zac.

Voting stickers are seen as voters cast their ballots for the Ohio primary at Saint Columba Social Hall in Youngstown, Ohio March 15, 2016. REUTERS/Aaron P. Bernstein CLEVELAND (Reuters) - A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that Ohio’s secretary of state was within his rights to strip thousands of inactive voters from the rolls, rejecting a legal challenge by civil liberties activists who claimed that the purge disenfranchised minorities and the poor. The decision by U.S. District Judge George C. Smith in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union could impact the presidential race in Ohio, a key swing state seen as potentially pivotal in the Nov. 8 election. No Republican has won the White House without carrying Ohio. The ACLU charged in its lawsuit that Ohio Secretary of State John Husted’s policy of removing from the rolls voters deemed inactive over a six-year period violated the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 because it targets minorities and lower-income voters who tend to favor Democrats. Smith disagreed, finding that the policy was not illegal because it removed voters from the rolls only after they failed to vote and then did not respond to a change of address confirmation. “Ohio’s procedures of maintaining the voter registration rolls ensure the integrity of the election process,” Smith wrote. Husted has said that the policy has been in place since the 1990s under both Republican and Democratic secretaries of state. “While today’s ruling reaffirms that the process Ohio has used for over two decades is constitutional and in line with state and federal law, the best news is that we can put another wasteful lawsuit behind us and focus on the important work of running elections in Ohio,” Husted said in a statement.

Judging by all the winning and dancing that’s been going on at Clemson this season, it looks like Tigers head coach Dabo Swinney is pretty happy where he is right now. But that doesn’t necessarily mean he will spend the rest of his coaching career at Clemson. In a recent interview with CBS Sports’ Jon Solomon, Swinney was asked hypothetically whether he would consider coaching at his alma mater, Alabama, where he played wide receiver and spent seven years as an assistant coach. Per CBS Sports: Article continues below ... “You don’t ever say never. You don’t ever know what the circumstances would be at any given time. First of all, Alabama may never, ever call me and I would never have a problem with that. They’ve got to do what they’ve got to do. My deal is to be great where I’m at. I had opportunities to leave Alabama. I had opportunities to leave Clemson. But I’ve just never been that guy about the next job. I’m about the job I’ve got.” So far this season Swinney has guided the Tigers (10-0, 7-0 ACC) to a No. 1 ranking in all three polls and an ACC Atlantic Division title. Clemson will be back in action this Saturday when it hosts Wake Forest (3-7, 1-5) at 3:30 p.m. (EST). Alabama (9-1), the No. 2 ranked team in the College Football Playoff Poll, will host Charleston Southern (9-1) at 4 p.m. (h/t CBS Sports)

BENAULIM (GOA): China blocked India's attempts to include the names of terror groups like JeM and LeT in the BRICS' Goa Declaration but what has hurt the government more, as sources said, is Russia's disinclination to argue India's case. The result, of course, was a declaration which failed to address India's core concern of the issue of state-sponsored terrorism.What compounded the matter for India was Russia's recent military flirtation with Pakistan in the name of anti-terror exercise. In current global power play, Russia is seen increasingly as needing China more than the other way round, but Moscow's submission to the Chinese position on an issue related to India's security still has come as a revelation to the Indian authorities.While Russia did not help India name-check JeM, which perpetrated both Pathankot and Uri attacks, in the Goa Declaration, it ensured that Syria-based Jabhat al-Nusra figured in it. As it seeks to bolster the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, Russia has continued to target al-Nusra, which it accuses of seeking a Caliphate through barbaric methods, in the country. Like the Nusra, JeM and LeT too are proscribed by the UN. Russia called for "relentless pursuit'' of al-Nusra in the declaration.As strategic affairs expert Brahma Chellaney said, Moscow appeared willing to accommodate India's concerns in the Goa Declaration but, in the face of Chinese opposition, shied away from supporting India's case."The result was that the declaration failed to mention the most potent form of terrorism in the world, which is state-sponsored. And while citing groups like ISIS and al-Nusra, the declaration conveniently omitted any mention of the Pakistan-based organizations that the UN has designated as terrorist entities," he said, adding that the "anodyne" declaration called into question the utility of Brics for India.With Russia doing precious little for India, China could shield Pakistani terrorism not only at the UN Security Council but also at a multilateral summit on Indian soil. In doing so, as Chellaney said, China rode roughshod over Indian concerns and showed itself culpable in the killing of 26 Indian soldiers at Uri and Pathankot.While Russia itself has been the clear winner in terms of BRICS' focus on security related issues, China continues to call the shots on financial issues, leading to questions about the utility of Brics for India."China uses BRICS to advance its economic and political interests, including dominating the two financial mechanisms that the grouping has set up. But what does India get from BRICS?" said Chellaney."Goa showed that while China manages to get its own way, even at India's expense, Indian officials do little other than put on a brave face. Even earlier, when China secured the right instead of India to host the Brics' New Development Bank, Indian officials were left flaunting a consolation prize -- an Indian to be the Bank's first president," he added.The Goa Declaration came just a day after President Vladimir Putin assured PM Narendra Modi in their summit meeting that Russia would do nothing to hurt India's interests. As MEA secretary Amar Sinha admitted, there was no consensus on naming Pakistan-based terror groups because other countries are not affected by their actions.Moscow also had its full say on Syria as the declaration called upon all parties involved to work for a comprehensive and peaceful resolution of the conflict taking into account the legitimate aspirations of the people of Syria, through inclusive national dialogue and a Syrian-led political process."While continuing the relentless pursuit against terrorist groups so designated by the UN Security Council, including ISIL, Jabhat al-Nusra, and other terrorist organisations designated by the UN Security Council,'' said the declaration.

INDIANAPOLIS -- There's a definite air of optimism surrounding the IndyCar Series. Whether it was from drivers passing through INDYCAR's headquarters across 16th Street from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for preseason physicals and media activities, or from promoters gathered in St. Petersburg, Florida, to share plans for the upcoming campaign, the expressed message was the same: Indy car racing has momentum, and it's only going to increase moving forward. "I think there's no doubt it's on the upswing," said second-generation star Graham Rahal. "And what I like about what we have going on here is there's no fake news out there. The entire organization here has done a great job. And there's no doubt it's headed in the right direction." While NASCAR has suffered double-digit declines in attendance and television ratings in the U.S., and Formula One has experienced similar difficulties on an international basis, IndyCar is making small gains. Editor's Picks IndyCar charts its near-term future As the IndyCar Series charts its course for the near future, car design is front and center. Also on everyone's mind? Costs and television deals. The overall numbers don't look like what they did in the early 1990s, but the way IndyCar is trending positive in what is generally a negative market for auto racing is encouraging. And with a re-bodied car coming in 2018 that is expected to invoke visions of sleeker cars from the sport's most popular era, the potential for continued growth is plain to see. "It appears we have some really good momentum," said Jay Frye, president of competition and operations for INDYCAR. "We've been very transparent with the plan that we've come up with and we've caught the power of the paddock -- all the teams, stakeholders and OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] have been involved, and I think we're all pointing in the same direction -- which is really good, obviously." Several tracks reported record crowds in 2016, including a modern-era record for the 100th running of the Indianapolis 500. Indianapolis Motor Speedway president Doug Boles said that ticket renewals for the Indy 500 are occurring at the fastest rate of the past 15 years, and he won't rule out the possibility of another sellout of the grandstands for the 101st running in May. But what really has people involved with the series excited is the "Back to the Future" philosophy being applied to the design of the 2018 car. INDYCAR recently announced plans to abandon the wings and body parts designed by engine manufacturers Chevrolet and Honda next year after an expensive and mostly pointless three-year "aero kit" era. Sketches of the styling cues being discussed harken memories of the sleeker Indy cars that raced in the CART-sanctioned series in the 1990s, along with the Panoz DP01 used by the Champ Car World Series for a single season in 2007. "I'm really looking forward to seeing the 2018 car -- hopefully we can nail that design," said 2012 IndyCar Series champion Ryan Hunter-Reay. "We're still working with the same [Dallara] chassis, the same tub, but hopefully we can make it something that when you look at it, you're like, 'Wow! That's a race car!' "There needs to be something a younger audience can latch on to, the same thing that made me latch on to IndyCar when I was a kid," Hunter-Reay added. "I saw guys driving these cars that just sounded amazing and looked amazing. They were awe-inspiring, and I thought of the guys in the cars as heroes. We need to tap that." Simon Pagenaud said he can improve upon his championship 2016 season. Jonathan Ferrey/Getty Images The new bodywork won't come on line until 2018, though Frye said INDYCAR is likely to reveal official drawings prior to the March 12 season opener at St. Petersburg and hopes to show a prototype at Indianapolis in May. For 2017, INDYCAR has frozen the Chevrolet and Honda aero kits in their final 2016 form, but there's a pretty good chance that the season will be more closely fought than recent campaigns. Chevrolet has won the INDYCAR manufacturer's championship the past five years, but the movement of Chip Ganassi Racing from Chevrolet back to Honda should make the competitive balance of the series a bit more equal. "For the good of the sport, I think it's good maybe to get two marquee teams with different pieces," said four-time IndyCar Series champion Scott Dixon. "I think for us as a team it's a better fit, too. Personally, I think it's better for us to have a different package." Team Penske won 10 of 17 races in 2016, with Simon Pagenaud emerging as champion. With Josef Newgarden replacing Juan Pablo Montoya in Penske's No. 2 Chevrolet entry this year, Penske starts the season with the drivers who finished 1-2-3-4 in the 2016 standings. Pagenaud announced this week that he will run the champion's No. 1 in 2016 (his usual number is 22), and nobody doubts the Frenchman will be even tougher to beat this year. "There's still a lot to iron out," said Pagenaud, who scored half of Penske's 10 wins last year. "It's only our second year together, so we still have a lot to improve, and that's what's exciting for 2017. "It's easy to relax after you've won one time, but it's about being disciplined," he added. "Myself, it's to reflect on '16 and see how I can improve myself physically, mentally, all the aspects of driving -- the craft, basically. I can definitely improve on a lot of those things." In terms of public perception, Indy car racing isn't what it was a few decades ago, and the IndyCar Series still suffers from a lack of attention and respect from mainstream media. But it is quietly bucking the overall trend of auto racing's decline in popularity. "I think when people see the new car, they are going to really like it," said Rahal. "I mean, you've got your passionate haters out there that are going to continue to just do that. But in general, what I really enjoy is I do see the series has so much potential and is headed, without a doubt, in the right direction. "And I don't see that that's going to stop anytime soon."

Every March, as St. Patrick’s Day approaches and Yeats and stout and the Undertones and other Irish matters are on my mind, I recall a conversation I often have. A friend is about to go to Ireland for the first time and asks me for recommendations. Inevitably, the first thing I say is: ‘‘Don’t skip the North.’’ This advice is usually met with skepticism. Memories of news about Northern Ireland during the Troubles — the 30-year period of conflict during which violence frequently flared up — still linger long after the Good Friday agreement of 1998, and many people remain wary of visiting. That’s a real shame, because Northern Ireland is home to some of that green island’s most spectacular scenery, and its capital, Belfast, is among my all-time-favorite drinking cities. Belfast is compact and brimming with distinctive bars full of character, particularly in the Cathedral Quarter, an arty district with St. Anne’s Cathedral at its heart. On a business trip in 2010, I was staying in the Quarter at the elegant Merchant Hotel, mostly because I had heard great things about its cocktail bar. I knew nothing about the Spaniard, a bar across the street from the Merchant, but decided to check it out. Appealingly cozy and dark, with most of its surfaces taken up by pictures and knickknacks, it felt like the sort of place where an unusually well-mannered pirate might make himself at home. I arrived with a sore throat, for which the quick-thinking barman prescribed an excellent hot whiskey (I later discovered the bar’s winning way with rum cocktails). A local woman — an off-duty constable — struck up a conversation. I mentioned that I was a writer, and she insisted that I next join her and her friends at the John Hewitt, a bar named for a Belfast poet and activist. When we got there, a folk trio was playing, and playing well. A fire burned in a small hearth. I drank a pint of rich porter from a local brewery and was swept up in convivial chatter by everyone around me. Reading the fine print on the menu, I learned that the bar is operated by the Belfast Unemployed Resource Center and that its profits benefit the organization. I thought it was an ingenious model, and I knew the Hewitt would become a bar I’d return to on every trip to Belfast.

West Ham and Tottenham to battle for Newcastle ace London rivals West Ham and Tottenham could go head-to-head in the race for Newcastle’s wantaway midfielder Hatem Ben Arfa, according to London24. The 27-year-old is expected to leave St. James’ Park this summer after falling out with manager Alan Pardew towards the end of last season. And it has been reported the Frenchman has turned down a mega-money move to Qatar in order to remain in Europe, sparking increased interest from the likes of West Ham and Tottenham. WANT MORE? >> West Ham transfer news | Tottenham transfer news Ben Arfa’s agent Michel Ouazine told the French media: “This is false [a move to Qatar.] “He remains on a one-year contract at Newcastle and Hatem has the intention to continue to play in Europe.” Monaco, Everton and Borussia Dortmund are also reportedly interested in the midfielder, who could be available for as little as £5million this summer.

Wilfred Rhodes: 'There's somebody runnin' up and down this wicket. Ah don't know who it is, but there's some-body runnin' up and down this wicket' © The Cricketer The match of the Roses doesn't today arouse the old jealousies or attract the same partisan multitudes. At Old Trafford, in 1926, 78,617 Lancashire and Yorkshire folk paid to watch this annual holiday argument, and consumed almost as many pork pies. Last year not half as many paid at the gates the entire season at Old Trafford. In those years, dwellers in Lancashire and Yorkshire regarded the Roses match second in importance and family pride to none; England v Australia came second. In 1905, no fewer than seven players were chosen to represent England v Australia: MacLaren, JT Tyldesley, FS Jackson, RH Spooner, GH Hirst, W Rhodes, and Walter Brearley. A parson living in the West Riding wrote testily to the press that the England Selection Committee was jeopardising the best interest of cricket `at large' by their insistence on representative games, which obliged county cricketers to be drawn from their `main and primary' duties. Lancashire and Yorkshire folk, men, women and children, took the Roses yearly disputes greatly to heart. For Yorkshire patriots (and who in Yorkshire isn't a patriot?), the most harrowing of all these games occurred at Leeds, in June 1924, Whitsuntide. On the Bank Holiday, Lancashire were bundled out for 74, leaving Yorkshire with a mere 58 to get for victory next day. If it hadn't been for the traffic on Bank Holiday evening I'd have left the match to return to Manchester, leaving to Holmes and Sutcliffe the formalities of putting Lancashire to death. I went to Headingley on the Tuesday merely to kill time. And Yorkshire were skittled out for 33 by Parkin and `Dick' Tyldesley, Lancashire's first win, in Yorkshire, over the ancient enemy, since 1899. As the last Yorkshire wicket fell I rushed out of the ground, eager to get back to Manchester to tell the marvellous news by word of mouth. No taxis to be seen, so I boarded a train. The ticket collector came along: `What 'ave they won by - lose any wickets?' he asked, `Yorkshire did not win,' I replied, `they've lost by 24." "I mean cricket match," he impatiently snapped, obviously thinking I'd been referring to some tiddley-winks tournament. "Yorkshire all out 33," I said, firmly. "Lancashire have won by 24." He suspended business on the spot; he didn't give me a train ticket. He at once conveyed the terrible news to the driver; and the train then proceeded into Leeds more or less by its own volition. In Leeds itself, gloom was already falling on the city, as the tidings became known. My train to Manchester would leave Leeds station at 2.20. I went into the refreshment room. Soon one or two of the small gathering that had witnessed Yorkshire's evil day came drifting into the station, on their way back to Laisterdyke, Huddersfield and such places. One man sat at my table, clearly from Laisterdyke. "It's a reight do," he sighed to me, "Hey dear, fancy 'Erbert and Percy not bein' up to gettin' 57. Hey dear, Ah can't understand it." Ah 'opes thi drops dead before tha gets there Then he looked at me sharply, saying, "Tha doesn't seem to be takin' it very much to 'eart." I explained that as a Lancashire man I couldn't quite share his melancholy reactions to the match. He now looked at me from an entirely different angle. "So, tha's Lancashire, art thi ? 'As coom all way from Manchester to see match ?" I told him that I had. "And, tha's goin' back by this 2.20 train ?" "Yes, I am," I replied. "And tha's feelin' pleased with thisself ?" he reiterated. "Naturally," I said. "And tha's goin' back by this 2.20 train ?" "Yes," I replied, myself rather getting out of patience. "Well," he said, quietly but deliberately, "Ah 'opes thi drops dead before tha gets there." I was not much more than an infant when I watched my first Lancashire and Yorkshire match. On Whit Tuesday, at Old Trafford, Lancashire collapsed for 44, or thereabouts, George Hirst taking nine wickets. After the end, my young heart severely wounded, I lingered about the vacant ground for a while, then got in a carriage on the train at the adjoining rail-way station, bound for Oxford Road, Manchester. And who should come into my compartment, even as the train was moving, but my two gods of cricket, my heroes, my Achilles and Hector - none other than AC MacLaren and Walter Brearley! And as I sat gazing in incredulous wonder and worship, what did I hear them say ? "You're a nice ruddy slip fielder, Archie, I must say!" "Well, why the hell didn't you pitch 'em up and bowl at the wicket?" In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the wicket at Old Trafford was a batsman's dream of heaven. The Lancashire v Yorkshire match was a struggle for first innings points; no more decisive result was practicable. One year Lancashire's first innings total went beyond 500. Leonard Green, Lancashire's splendid captain, was batting when the score stood at 499. To himself he said, "It's not likely that Lancashire ever again will score 500 against Yorkshire, so I'm going to get this single run if it kills me." He pushed a ball from Wilfred Rhodes to the off-side, and ran like the wind. The ball was thrown in vehemently by Emmott Robinson, striking Rhodes on the wrist. Green got home full stretch, by the skin of his teeth. And he heard Rhodes muttering, to nobody in particular, "There's somebody runnin' up and down this wicket. Ah don't know who it is, but there's some-body runnin' up and down this wicket." The operative words in that famous lamentation are, "Ah don't know who it is." But Lancashire and Yorkshire matches were not always dour, though personally I preferred to see them contested that way. (I could watch gallantry at, say, Canterbury.) Before the 1914-1918 War, Lancashire and Yorkshire cricket was represented by men such as MacLaren, Spooner, Jackson, David Denton, J. T. Tyldesley, George Hirst, J. T. Brownstroke-players of brilliance, batsmen of the proud gesture. R. H. Spooner scored 200 in a day (or thereabouts) for Lancashire v Yorkshire, at Old Trafford. What is more, George Hirst, with left arm fast medium in-swingers, employed a close leg-side field; and Spooner repeatedly wristed the ball through the cordon. A sight for all the Immortals of cricket to see - unforgettable. Still, for all these golden (and comic) memories, I am certain that there is skill and character enough in Lancashire and Yorkshire cricket today - if only our cricket writers would look for it, and take their eyes off the seam. © The Cricketer

Wisconsin state Sen. Mary Lazich (Facebook) The sponsor on a bill that would ban abortion after 20 weeks in Wisconsin said this week that medical professionals did not help write the legislation. On Tuesday, lawmakers on the Wisconsin state Joint Health Committee debated a bill that seeks stop all abortions after 20 weeks without any exceptions for rape or incest. State Sen. Mary Lazich (R), however, insisted to colleagues that the measure she was sponsoring was a bill to prevent “children” from feeling pain, an idea that is based on refuted studies claiming fetuses can experience pain after 20 weeks. Democratic state Rep. JoCasta Zamarripa pointed out that the 20-week ban made no exceptions for rape or incest. Lazich suggested that no exceptions were necessary because “rape and incest people tend to deal with that in the very early stages, days, weeks.” “What this bill does is prohibit abortions on children who can feel pain,” she said. “So we don’t differentiate classes of children and say it’s okay to put the pain on some classes of children, and not on other classes of children.” Zamarripa also pointed out that the bill would require doctors to save a mother’s life in the way that was most likely to ensure a child’s survival, which might not be in the best interest of the mother. “It’s a provision that maximizes the survivability of the unborn child with no regard for the impact that it would have on the woman’s life,” Zamarripa said. Rep. Jesse Kremer (R), who co-authored the bill, said that the language was necessary to make sure that physicians were not “intentionally killing a child just to kill a child.” “Why do you think medical groups like the Wisconsin Medical Society oppose the bill?” Zamarripa wondered. Lazich argued that she had spoken to “many” anti-abortion medical doctors who supported the bill. “If you think you have a solid bill here, why do all the medical groups in Wisconsin oppose this bill?” Zamarripa pressed. Lazich replied that she would rather put her life in the hands of doctors who opposed abortion, and instead “take the life-affirming approach.” “Can I ask who wrote the bill and did they have medical training?” Zamarripa asked. “Who wrote the bill? Our drafting attorney wrote the bill,” Lazich smiled. “Do either of you have any medical training,” Zamarripa followed up. “What does that have to do with the bill?” Lazich shot back as the audience gasped. “Do you have medical training?” Zamarripa reminded the Republican lawmaker that her bill was before the Joint Health Committee. “It could put the lives of many, many women in danger,” she observed. “I think that’s an appropriate question.” Watch the video below from Wisconsin Eye, broadcast June 2, 2015.

In a special five-part episode of our Big Shots video series, Los Angeles Editor-in-Chief Mary Melton speaks candidly with Mayor Eric Garcetti. Come back each day this week to hear the mayor’s thoughts on city planning, public education, civic engagement, city identity, poverty, traffic, and much more. Interested in some one-on-one time with Mayor Eric Garcetti? You’re not alone. From Maureen Dowd’s recent New York Times column comparing his mayoralty to that of New York’s Bill De Blasio to a Time magazine profile last week, inky assessments are flowing halfway into Garcetti’s first year on the job. If you’re hoping to better understand the mayor’s big picture for the city, we have something special for you this week at LAmag.com. Recently I spent an hour interviewing the mayor for Los Angeles magazine’s latest Breakfast Conversation, a series in which we invite movers and shakers in L.A. to candidly talk about the city and their role in it. Held at the Public restaurant in the historic Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, this conversation was the first one we’ve filmed as part of our Big Shots video series. The mayor was critical and self-deprecating, funny and thoughtful. He even threw down a swear word, which almost knocked me off my barstool. We cover subjects that ranged from public education to public transit, poverty to the drought. We kick it off today with a question I asked Mayor Garcetti that is at the forefront of all our minds (and at the bottom of our feet) these last two weeks. L.A. is shaking a lot—are we remotely prepared for the big one? What he has to say will surprise you. Come back to the CityThink blog tomorrow for more insights about where L.A. is at—and where it’s going—from the fellow who should know best. Some highlights from today’s segment of the conversation: On the 4.4 magnitude St Patrick’s Day “Shamrock Shake” earthquake and L.A.’s disaster preparedness: “[After the quake,] I got on the phone immediately with Dr. Lucy Jones. The United States Geological Survey has loaned her to Los Angeles for a year…I’ve tasked her with coming up with a plan to strengthen our buildings, our communication and infrastructure, the water supply…Someone asked me, ‘Are we prepared for an earthquake?’ And I said, ‘We’re as prepared for an earthquake as any big city in America [is] for a disaster,’ which is to say we’re wholly unprepared…remember, we live a digital life, and you’re going to have an analog day when a big earthquake hits.” On the issues that keep him up at night: “When I leave town…I think, ‘Is this when something bad is going to happen?’ When I went to Washington DC my second month in, that’s when the Trayvon Martin trial had its verdict, and suddenly people were on the 10 freeway, and I was two hours, three hours from the nearest airport…I had to catch a plane with a minute to spare to come back here knowing that…probably nothing would happen, but if I didn’t come back, the city could explode. That’s part of the tension you have as mayor.” WATCH: Big Shots: Eric Garcetti, Part Two Big Shots: Eric Garcetti, Part Three Big Shots: Eric Garcetti, Part Four Big Shots: Eric Garcetti, Part Five

If you would like to see more articles like this please support our coverage of the space program by becoming a Spaceflight Now Member . If everyone who enjoys our website helps fund it, we can expand and improve our coverage further. CAPE CANAVERAL — Officials have accepted a Friday launch date for a commercial cargo ship to the International Space Station after Range availability scuttled notions of moving up the Atlas 5 flight by a day. The United Launch Alliance booster will haul Orbital ATK’s Cygnus automated resupply freighter into low-Earth orbit from Cape Canaveral. A Thursday launch had been considered, but the Eastern Range was unavailable that day due to unrelated SpaceX mission testing on the Space Coast. Liftoff on Friday will be possible during any of five specific opportunities in a 30-minute launch window, with the rocket’s in-flight steering capabilities employed to guide Cygnus into the station’s orbital plane: Option 1: 9:00 p.m. EDT Option 2: 9:07 p.m. EDT Option 3: 9:15 p.m. EDT Option 4: 9:22 p.m. EDT Option 5: 9:30 p.m. EDT (* exact times down to the second will be determined based on final radar tracking of the station’s orbit on launch day.) It will be the 71st Atlas 5 launch and the third to deploy a Cygnus for the space station. The spacecraft weighs 15,928 pounds, and it is loaded with 7,443 pounds of internal cargo and an 183-pound external deployer for cubesats. Cygnus will take a three-and-a-half-day trek to the orbiting laboratory for rendezvous on March 28. Grapple of the vessel by the station’s robotic arm is planned for 6:40 a.m. EDT (1040 GMT). Weather forecasters predict a 70 percent chance of acceptable conditions for launch, with cumulus clouds and ground winds posing only slight concerns. “Favorable weather over the spaceport through mid-week with high pressure dominating. The next cold (cool) front advances into North Florida overnight Wednesday (Thursday morning) and slowly pushes through the spaceport through the day. Easterly flow develops as the front pushes through with showers associated with the front. High pressure builds in on Friday with breezy east winds,” Air Force meteorologists said this morning. “On launch day, high pressure migrates east as the next system advances into Central and East Texas. Over Central Florida, with the exception of breezy winds, favorable weather is expected with an isolated shower threat. On-shore east winds remain breezy with gusts in the mid-20s during the count and low 20s during the window. The launch time specifics include scattered clouds, good visibility, winds from the east at 18 to 22 knots, a relative humidity of 70 percent and a temperature of 72 degrees F. “In the event of a 24-hour delay, the next cold front pushes into the Central Gulf of Mexico with pre-frontal showers in the Florida panhandle during the afternoon. There is an isolated shower threat during the count as the system pushes east. Winds remain breezy Saturday morning and begin trending down during the afternoon with gusts in the upper teens to 20 knots during the window. The primary concern for launch is cumulus clouds,” forecasters say. There is an 80 percent chance of good launch weather on Saturday night during the 30-minute window that opens at 8:37 p.m. EDT (0037 GMT). See earlier OA-7 Cygnus coverage. Our Atlas archive.

Kirk Cousins Washington Redskins quarterback Kirk Cousins (8) walks off the field after an NFL football game against the Pittsburgh Steelers in Landover, Md., Monday, Sept. 12, 2016. The Pittsburgh Steelers defeated the Washington Redskins 38-16. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky) The 2016 NFL season continues on Sunday, Sept. 25, as the New York Giants travel to meet the Washington Redskins at FedEx Field in Landover, Maryland. Fox will broadcast the game at noon Central (1 p.m. Eastern). Live streaming is available via NFL Game Pass or NFL Sunday Ticket MAX (subscription required). The Giants are 2-0 after beating the New Orleans Saints 16-13 last Sunday. The Redskins are 0-2, having dropped a 27-23 decision to the Dallas Cowboys in Week 2. The Giants are a 3-point favorite to win the game, according to Vegas Insider. Preview While the New York Giants are off to their best start since 2009, the obituaries are seemingly being prepared for the defending NFC East champion Washington Redskins. Jay Gruden's team is 0-2. There have been reports from anonymous sources about frustration in the locker room, much of it directed at quarterback Kirk Cousins' play. The defense is struggling. It's not good. The Redskins will carry that load into MetLife Stadium on Sunday when they face the Giants (2-0) in a game with the added attraction of matching Washington cornerback Josh Norman against New York receiver Odell Beckham Jr. The two tangled a year ago in a game here that resulted with both acting like bullies and Beckham getting a one-game suspension. That's the sideshow. It's pretty much a now-or-never game for the Redskins. Only three teams since 1990 have started the season 0-3 and made the playoffs, the last being the Bills in 1998. Veteran defensive back DeAngelo Hall says there is no secret formula to winning. It's protecting the ball, forcing turnovers, stopping the run and eliminating the stupid mistakes. "We've got a mindset that we want to take the fight to them," he said. "But I mean the plan is the same as it always is. And it's just up to us to go out there and try to execute it and be dominant to the best of our ability." Cousins, who returned with a one-year contract under the franchise tag, said two games don't decide a season. "I'll let the body of work speak for itself at that point," Cousins said . "But, I'm excited about the challenge we have this week, and really I have enough of a challenge that I don't need to look much further forward or further back than just the Giants this Sunday." Cousins will be facing a much-improved New York defense. It has allowed 32 points without forcing a turnover. Eli Manning and the Giants' offense scored three touchdowns in the win over Dallas, but did not get into the end zone against New Orleans. Three fumbles hurt. Manning isn't looking at this game as a chance to bury the Redskins. "Hey, it's the next game," he said. "We're worried about our season and what we've got to do and it's a chance for us to go 3-0 and that's all we are concerned with." Starting 3-0 has its advantages. Ninety nine of the 131 teams that have won their first three games since 1990 have made the playoffs. That's something the Giants have not done since the 2011 season. Here's some things to watch in the game: NOWHERE TO RUN: The Redskins have about as unbalanced an offense as possible, with 89 pass attempts and only a league-low 29 rushes heading into Week 3. This despite a lot of talk from GM Scot McCloughan about how he wanted to be a physical team. "We have not given the running game really an ample opportunity to flourish," coach Jay Gruden said. "That's something we have to look at." WHERE'S THE PRESSURE?: The Giants spent a lot of money to sign Olivier Vernon and Damon Harrison and to re-sign Jason Pierre-Paul for the defensive line. Through two games, New York has two sacks, one by safety Landon Collins and the other from nickel back Leon Hall. STALLING OFFENSE: Among Washington's many problems through two games, two stand out on offense: converting on third down (36 percent) and scoring touchdowns in the red zone (30 percent). In last week's loss to Dallas, Washington took over inside the Cowboys 40 twice in the second half and came away with six points before the worst possession of all, when Cousins threw an interception on third-and-goal from the 6. "Third-down efficiency, we are behind in that category, and red zone has been bad. It really has," Gruden said. "It has been surprisingly bad." WHO'S GOT THE BALL?: With Rashad Jennings dealing with a thumb injury to his left hand, look to see who gets the ball. Jennings insists he can carry the ball with his hand taped. Expect Shane Vereen and Orleans Darkwa to get a few extra carries this week against a Redskins D ranked No. 28 against the run. FADE-HAPPY: Cousins repeatedly tried to throw fade patterns into the end zone in Week 2, with zero success. That doesn't mean the Redskins are ready to give up on that particular play call. "Hindsight, I wish we wouldn't have tried as many," Gruden said, "but we'll throw more fades." WINNING THE CLOSE ONES: New York lost six games last season either late in the fourth quarter or in overtime in missing the playoffs for the fourth straight year. The Giants have won their first two by a total of four points. It is the first time they won consecutive games by a combined margin of four or fewer points since Oct. 22 and Oct. 29, 1939, when they beat the Bears, 16-13, and the Brooklyn Dodgers, 7-6. Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.

Last year I blogged about a new prototype jellyfish aquarium from Cubic in the UK and now it is coming to the states in a matter of months via the new UK distributor Reef-Eden International. Currently US residents only have two options for tanks specifically designed to keep jellyfish: either Jellyfish Art's tank or Sunset Marine Labs' aquarium. Jellyfish Arts tank is a 6-gallon mini-kreisel design whereas Sunset Marine Labs' 10-gallon aquarium is more of your traditional boxy aquarium look but specifically designed to provide optimum flow for jellies. Cubic's jellyfish aquarium is also a kreisel, and features a rounded-corner rectangular system design, which gives it more of a traditional aquarium-like look but with smooth corners to keep jellies from becoming trapped in low-flow areas like traditional square-cornered aquariums. Rendering of how the Cubic aquarium in a household environment. According to Cubic and Reef-Eden International, the aquarium is made out of 10mm acrylic and measures 26" long x 10.2" wide x 23.6" tall yielding a net water volume of 21 gallons. This makes it the largest of the three available jellyfish aquariums on the market and the larger water volume may help with system stability as well. The aquarium comes with: builtin Biomatrix filtration which includes a removable coarse filter media tower and sponge media that is easy to replace. hard plumbed tank outlets ready for attachment to chillers and other devices. a CE-approved electrical system for lighting and filtration, which sits in its own dedicated dry compartment and incorporates water tight connectors where needed. a inbuilt fully functional remote controlled LED lighting system that allows the user to infinitely adjust the lighting using a range of settings yielding any color they wish. Settings includebrightness, static color, color auto transition and translation. Top-down photo of the filtration chamber highlighting the biomedia tower and sponge filtration. A top photo of the multi-color LEDs and remote for the aquarium. When someone purchases one of these aquariums, they will also receive a multi-language instructional CD which contains information about maintaining the aquarium itself in addition to information ranging from jellyfish biology, feeding, to handling advice. They will also have full access to Cubic's jellyfish forum where other Cubic jellyfish keepers can obtain support and advice from Cubic and from other jelly keepers. The price (subject to change) is around 807.23 euros or roughly $1039 according to Simon Garratt of Reef-Eden International. I encourage you to follow both Cubic Aquarium Systems and Reef-Eden International on Facebook (in addition to Advanced Aquarist) to keep up-to-date on this awesome aquarium. We definitely look forward to seeing this new addition to the aquarium market when it becomes available. Below are a couple videos from Cubic's Youtube channel highlighting the new jellyfish aquarium, some of which are from the Aquatics Live exhibition in London a few months back:

A Las Vegas police detective will keep his job despite drawing criticism from colleagues and local activists for his online posts about a “race war” and anti-government rhetoric, the Las Vegas Sun reported. Some of Detective Bobby Kinch’s co-workers reportedly brought the December 2013 Facebook posts to the attention of superiors. Kinch told the Sun that he was the victim of department politics. He was recently allowed to go back on duty following an extended suspension and internal investigation. “Let’s just get this over!” Kinch wrote in one post. “Race war, Civil, Revolution? Bring it! I’m about as fed up as a man (American, Christian, White, Heterosexual) can get!” At least one colleague later compared Kinch’s statements to the kind of posts made by Jerad and Amanda Miller before they shot and killed two LVPD officers in June 2014. “It’s obviously coming to a boiling point! I say ‘F*CK IT’!” Kinch stated in another angry post. “I’m ready now! Sooner or later, I would say sooner than later! Thought I could make a difference, thought it would get better! See the morale fabric of this Country get so trampled I wanna call it! GAME ON! I think we need a cleansing! Just me? What say you?” Several of Kinch’s fellow detectives expressed concern over the posts at the time, with one asking him not to share his views on “this stupid thing called Facebook.” “You’ve lost your mind,” Detective Joe Giannone responded. “This may be the dumbest sh*t you’ve ever posted. That’s saying a lot.” Deputy Chief Gary Schofield, former head of the department’s internal affairs division, alerted the Secret Service the following month regarding his online activity, allegedly saying that “a highly-trained officer in Las Vegas with access to weapons could be a threat to the president.” But former Clark County Sheriff Doug Gillespie stepped in less than an hour before federal officials raided Kinch’s home. “It was about to be a disaster,” one police official told the Sun. “We had 30 minutes until doors were being kicked in.” The Sun also reported that Kinch conducted an investigation in 2007 on his own concerning the death of his mother after a robbery. Kinch reportedly believes a “Black gang” killed her, despite a lack of evidence suggesting that the attacker was either Black or in a gang. A department spokesperson said the case is currently cold. “Everybody liked Bobby,” a fellow officer said. “But whatever happened to his mother affected him to the point where I’m not sure he should be on the street interacting with citizens.” Investigators looking into Kinch’s case also received a photo, taken by an unidentified union official, of Kinch pointing a handgun at a collectible plate with President Barack Obama’s face on it. The plate was reportedly a gag gift from fellow officers. Kinch said that officers with “an ax to grind” targeted him after he complained about union leaders appearing at a election party for new Sheriff Joe Lombardo. The union official, Kinch told the Sun, intentionally held on to the picture before using it to try to discredit him. Kinch also insisted that his posts were taken out of context, and that he would focus future posts on gun-control legislation and the alleged “knockout game” targeting people in New York City. “I didn’t call for a race war,” he said. “I said, ‘If there was going to be one.’ I didn’t want there to be one. That comment had nothing to do with a particular race. I said all races. That’s why it flies in the face of common sense to make that jump.” But one officer who asked to remain anymous told the Sun that keeping Kinch on the job cost the department a chance to “do the right thing.” “It would have been the easiest thing in the world to say, ‘Look, you’re upset with what’s going on in Ferguson? Well, we had an officer here that did this crap, and we fired him,'” the officer said. “But we dropped the ball.” Laura Martin, a member of the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada, also expressed her doubts about Kinch’s ability to serve the public, calling his posts “incredibly scary.” “There are a lot of good cops, but some of them have really bad attitudes [toward minorities],” she said. “They aren’t mentally there. It would be a service to the public if you don’t have a sociopath with weapons going into people’s houses and pulling people over.” [h/t Talking Points Memo]

(ANSA) - Vatican City, September 25 - The Secretariat for Communication of the Holy See has blocked access to a website where it it possible to sign a petition accusing Pope Francis of heresy in his 2016 document Amoris Laetitia - The Joy of Love, sources said Monday. As a result it is not possible to access the page in any language from computers inside the Vatican. The page, www.correctiofilialis.org, can be reached outside the Vatican. The petition is linked to a 25-page letter by conservative Catholics delivered to the pope in August last month issuing him a "filial correction" - a measure they said was being using for the first time since the 14th century - over the document, which opens up the possibility of divorced and civilly remarried Catholics receiving communion. Among the signatories is Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, the former president of the Vatican bank, the IOR. The letter accuses the pope of seven "heretical positions about marriage, the moral life, and the reception of the sacraments, and has caused these heretical opinions to spread in the Catholic Church".

Malan and Jonny Bairstow compiled a partnership of 237 for the fifth wicket in Perth Fourth Ashes Test, Australia v England Venue: Melbourne Cricket Ground Dates: 26-30 December Coverage: Ball-by-ball Test Match Special commentary on BBC Radio 5 live sports extra, Radio 4 LW, online, tablets, mobiles and BBC Sport app. Live text commentary on the BBC Sport website. Dawid Malan says the atmosphere in the England dressing room is "probably the best I've ever played in", despite their Ashes defeat in Australia. The 30-year-old Middlesex batsman struck his maiden Test century in Perth last week, but the tourists trail 3-0 with two matches remaining. The fourth Test at the Melbourne Cricket Ground begins on 26 December. "We desperately want to get our pride back and win," said Malan. "There's no-one sitting in there blaming people." England's Ashes defence was damaged before they even named their squad, when all-rounder Ben Stokes was arrested for his part in an altercation outside a Bristol nightclub in September and told he would not be considered for selection until further notice. The tourists have also had to deal with Jonny Bairstow making the headlines after a reported headbutt on Australia's Cameron Bancroft - which the England wicketkeeper insisted was playful - and batsman Ben Duckett being suspended from the Lions tour after pouring a drink over James Anderson in a bar. Left-hander Malan is England's leading runscorer in the series, and said of his first Ashes experience: "I've thoroughly enjoyed it. I really like Australia, I really enjoy the country. "There have obviously been a few silly things that have happened off the field which has put the tour into a bit of a bad place but - and this not a cliche - the team spirit is probably the best I have ever played in. "We have lost 3-0 and the boys are extremely disappointed but Chris Woakes did 35 miles in the field in their second innings, so it's not through lack of trying. "As long as the guys are giving 100% and not shying away from the challenges, the team spirit will always be good." Four years ago - in a tour that became know as the 'Pomnishambles' - both Jonathan Trott and Graeme Swann flew home early, and Kevin Pietersen fell out of favour. Malan said: "I wasn't involved in that dressing room so I can't really tell what it was like but the guys are already talking about Melbourne. "We hold our hands up where we've been bad and where we need to improve and I'm sure the boys will be going back to the nets this week and working on those things. "None of us are the finished article. Alastair Cook, who has played 150 Tests, is still working at his game - he has two or three extra hits a week." 'We need to be as aggressive as they are' After the Boxing Day Test, the series concludes with the final Test in Sydney, which starts on 4 January. Malan said: "I believe we need to be as aggressive with these guys as they are with us. If you ever take your foot off the gas with these blokes, they seem to really dominate." Malan highlighted the second Test in Adelaide, when England bowled out the hosts for 138 but - after reaching 176-4 - slumped to 233 all out to lose by 120 runs. "It showed when we were aggressive to them in the second innings, they fell away just as we did in certain times," he said. "I think batting, bowling or fielding we have to be aggressive. It doesn't mean you have to chirp and get in people's faces but look to score runs, take wickets, be positive in everything for five days and not just two and a half sessions. "You can look back at all three Test matches and say we were in the driving seat for two or maybe three days, it's just those crucial moments - one session a game we've lost and just fallen away. "It is disappointing we've got nothing to play for in terms of the Ashes but the pride of our players will want to make this 3-2 and we want to show we can perform out here." Listen to 5 live's Ashes review with Phil Tufnell, Mark Butcher and Marcus North How is the Ashes affecting your life? How have you been following the Ashes from afar, and how has it affected your normal sleeping patterns? Have you been able to stay up all night and follow the action? Or have you been listening to TMS under the duvet? Perhaps you have been waking more than usual to check updates on the BBC Sport app? Do you go into work bleary-eyed each morning? How do you juggle day-to-day life with the desire to follow cricket in a distant land? We're keen to hear about your tales of cricket-induced sleep deprivation/batting collapse nightmares. Contact us via this form, and leave your details if you are happy for a journalist from BBC Sport to phone or email you.

Don't tell us that Al Sharpton and MSNBC are hypocrites? Noooo!! The Reverend Al opened his show by praising President Obama's efforts to promote tougher gun control laws. But 28 minutes into the show, a commercial appeared for, of all things . . . Henry Repeating Rifles. Go to Henry Rifle's website and you'll find one rifle described as "big, brutal and beautiful" and noting that it fires ammunition "said to have killed more game, big and small, and more men, good and bad, than any other in existence." Another model offered for sale, the AR-7, is based on a military rifle, Henry emphasizing that given its lightweight design "you can carry a large quantity of ammunition." Oh the horror! View the video after the jump. At first I thought this might have been an ad aired only in my local Texas market. But the ad also appeared on the feed captured by our MRC recorders based in suburban DC--so clearly it was more than local. Hypocrisy, thy name is the Reverend Al Sharpton MSNBC!

Ready to fight back? Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week. Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. Fight Back! Sign up for Take Action Now and we’ll send you three meaningful actions you can take each week. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Sign up for Take Action Now and we’ll send you three meaningful actions you can take each week. Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue Travel With The Nation Be the first to hear about Nation Travels destinations, and explore the world with kindred spirits. Be the first to hear about Nation Travels destinations, and explore the world with kindred spirits. Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine? In August 2014, the municipality of Ferguson, Missouri, erupted onto the national scene. In the wake of the killing of Michael Brown, we learned much about economic and political life in Ferguson and greater St. Louis County. Ad Policy To many, it was no surprise to learn that, for years, African-American residents of municipalities throughout St. Louis County have been disproportionately and illegally stopped for minor offenses. Blacks are far more likely to be stopped, searched, ticketed, fined, and arrested. Many wind up jailed, leading to a cycle of lost jobs, drivers’ licenses, homes, or child custody. Some are beaten, terrorized, or—like Michael Brown—even killed. It was more surprising to learn that in Ferguson, “Driving While Black” isn’t only about racial profiling: it’s also about municipal revenue. Fines and court fees have become the city’s second-largest revenue source, and the over-criminalization of black people has become a strategy for collecting taxes. It is important to understand and address the revenue crisis facing US municipalities. As cities have become unable to pay their bills, they often turn to regressive strategies that disproportionately harm people of color and low-income residents. Ithaca, New York, is like Ferguson. Up until January 2014, residents had to pay for installations and repairs of public sidewalks adjoining their properties—with one notable case in which 28 homeowners were forced to pay a combined $100,000 out of their personal pockets to the city for repairs. Detroit, Michigan, is like Ferguson. After the city filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history, the city’s water department responded to pressures to lower its $90 million portion of the overall $20 billion debt by shutting off crucial water services to mostly black low-income residents who owed over a mere $150 on their water bills. This April, Baltimore followed Detroit’s lead. These cities are like Ferguson because of a common underlying problem: All across America, cities and towns are struggling to maintain enough revenue to provide crucial services to residents. The collateral damage of this revenue crisis—over-criminalization, utility shut-offs, the withdrawal of public services, and slashed budgets for schools—is dire. Local Progress, a national network of progressive municipal elected officials, is working to address inequality from an often overlooked source: municipal budgets. In our new report, Progressive Policies for Raising Municipal Revenue, Local Progress lays out forward-thinking strategies and policy options that cities can pursue to restructure their revenue streams in a way that doesn’t fall disproportionately on the backs of their most vulnerable residents. The roots of the municipal revenue crisis were decades in the making. Following the post-war desegregation of housing and education, and other civil rights victories of the ’50s and ’60s, racial animosity and the conservative backlash against taxation—referred to by historians as the tax revolt—helped to fuel the exodus of higher-income families from urban centers to suburban enclaves. This “white flight” dramatically eroded the tax base of urban centers like Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis—and later of first-ring suburban municipalities like Ferguson. The tax revolt also led directly to policies that dramatically reduced the ability of cities to collect enough revenue through property and other taxes. Most dramatic was the 1976 passage of Prop 13 in California, which contributed heavily to the erosion of California’s public education system and other public services. In 2008, the Great Recession caused the municipal revenue crisis that had been brewing for decades to explode, spurring significant and rapid declines in general fund revenues for municipalities. In order to deal with the impacts of this dramatic shortfall, cities were forced to cut personnel, cancel capital projects (and their much-needed jobs), and slash funding for education, parks, libraries, sanitation, and more. These cuts hit low-income families the hardest. And they are especially harmful to black families because African-Americans are 30 percent more likely to be employed by the public sector than other workers. The strategies that many municipalities adopted to address the crisis hit low-income people of color the hardest. When property tax revenue declined in St. Louis County, fines-and-fees revenue increased in order to maintain revenue. Tickets are issued for everything from failure to cut one’s lawn to sleeping over at someone’s house without being on the occupancy certificate. In nearby Edmundson, the city averages $600 per person per year in court fines, and forecasts increasing revenue from these fines in their future budget proposals—essentially creating a hidden tax on the most vulnerable residents. Black residents throughout the region report feeling “as if their governments see them as little more than sources of revenue.” Many towns have resorted to privatizing formerly public responsibilities such as trash collection, sewage, roads and parks, and introducing new fees to force residents to foot the bill directly. These fees and taxes are often extremely regressive, because as everyone is forced to pay a flat rate, poor people end up paying a higher percentage of their income. A recent study conducted by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that the nationwide average effective state and local tax rates are 10.9 percent for the poorest fifth of taxpayers and 5.4 percent for the wealthiest 1 percent. In fact, in the ten states with the most regressive tax structures, the poorest fifth pay as much as seven times the percentage of their income in taxes and fees as the wealthiest residents do. Addressing the municipal revenue crisis is, therefore, a central barrier to achieving racial and economic justice in our urban centers, and to rebuilding a more democratic, just, and livable America with genuinely shared prosperity. Luckily, there are creative and progressive strategies that municipalities can adopt to generate more revenue in a progressive way, such as: ● Expanding the progressivity of existing local income taxes by creating more tax brackets with greater differences between brackets, and doing the same for property taxes in order to generate more revenue from commercial and high-end development. ● Eliminating corporate tax breaks at the city level, particularly Tax Increment Financing and business improvement districts that come with tax breaks ● Restructuring fines so that residents pay different rates based on income. A $200 traffic ticket has no deterrent effect for a millionaire, but can be devastating for a low wage worker; a more rational fine system, like the one adopted in Finland, would be more fair and generate more revenue. ● Mandating that major tax-exempt institutions like hospitals and universities make genuine and fair payments in lieu of taxes (PILOTs) to help cover the costs of crucial city services that they use. ● Converting city services into municipality-owned utilities when possible, charging utility fees to all users, and applying conservation pricing so lower-income households pay a lower rate while bulk users—such as commercial and industry—pay higher rates ● Forming statewide coalitions of municipal elected officials, grassroots organizations, school boards, and other affected parties to change preemption and revenue policies at the state level. These policy innovations and many more are detailed in our report. Cities are America’s bedrock and its future: both for our country and for the progressive movement. Cities are home to 67 percent of the population, account for 75 percent of our GDP, and house our best public institutions and infrastructure. The policy recommendations laid out by Local Progress in our new report can help municipalities develop progressive revenue solutions—so they can pay for public education, health, and housing programs that help families thrive, invest in the infrastructure of public transportation, climate resilience, parks that sustainable cities need, and stimulate inclusive economic growth that creates good jobs. Through progressive revenue strategies, cities can turn the Ferguson-like cycle of disinvestment and inequality into a cycle of reinvestment and opportunity—and help make sure that our cities can become the models for our vision of a more progressive and prosperous America.

You may have noticed that when you use Google to search for a certain answer to a question, a lot of times you actually get some sort of answer and not just a series of search results. For instance, if you’ve just recently made a terrible decision about changing your go-to barber’s shop and would like to find out how soon the damage will fade away, you might ask Google “how fast does hair grow”, to which the famed oracle of wisdom will give an actual answer, in what we will refer to as an answer box. Of course, it hasn’t come up with the answer on its own, but knowing what to look for is pretty cool in itself. Answer boxes can contain text, graphs, maps, images or even videos. Being on the Google’s answer box will do you a big favor, making you appear on Google’s first page not once, but twice. So it’s not just showing up in the results, it’s showing up in the answer box, which has a different status in the mind of the searcher. Being there can get a lot of SERP “landscape”, especially if you own some important keywords in your niche, as is the case with Tesla cars, which are right now synonymous with electric cars. We will come back to this example a bit later on. Let’s take a look at the example below and see how Google made the website thekitchn.com feel like it won the lottery. It is not the first site that Google recommends for the query “how to boil eggs” but it’s even better than this, it’s above all the results, placed on the answer box. While trying to prepare their breakfast, the “netizens” from all over the world can read a list with helpful instructions about it, right from the answer box, generously filled with information by the thekitchn.com. Now, imagine how great it would be if for a specific query, the information from the answer box would be cited from your site. Imagine the impact that would have on your rankings and authority. And even if it seems it’s a hard to accomplish goal, it’s not impossible. Understanding the way Google makes use of the answer box is primordial in order to reach this goal and reading this article might be the first step to achieve it. Yet, how does Google know what to look for? The answer – or at least part of it – is that: Google actually “gets” you. It knows “what you’re saying’”. Thanks to the Google Hummingbird algorithm, it’s a lot savvier when it comes to interpreting things in context. And if it doesn’t have enough information to figure out what you actually want, like when we’re simply searching for “hummingbird”, it displays the most likely result, with an answer box containing text and images, but also a disambiguation box, right below the answer one, just in case you were thinking about something else. This is all pretty smart and very much related to the knowledge graph concept Google has been toying around with for a while. Why are Google’s Answer Boxes so Important? From a SEO perspective … because you can get a lot of SERP “landscape” if you own this on the important keywords in your niche. Being number 1 in searches no longer means just one thing. Sure, being number 1 in the results for a search is still good, but so is being the site Google gets the answer for its answer box. Or being the source of the first image in an image block result. Or being number 1 for the paid shopping results box. Or having a rated product with a high rating showing up in the first searches. You’ve probably got it: the SERP landscape has changed and being a source for an answer box can get you serious traction. How does Google Extract the Answers? According to some patents from Google it assumes that one element of the search query will be an entity, and the other will be a certain attribute of said entity. For instance, if I were to search “Ukraine’s GDP”, “Ukraine” would be my entity and “GDP” would be the attribute. This is what the algorithm would identify as a “E’s A” type of query . It works similarly with a series of other phrasings, such as “what is the A of E”, “who is the A of E” (e.g.: “who is the husband of angelina jolie”) , “the A of E” or “who is the E’s A”. Google has a database of entities with their potential looked for attributes. This means that you won’t find an answer for every question, but you should find answers for the most popular questions. Similar patents are in place to further searches about specific facts. Google has patents for extracting entities from queries (US80058524 B2) , returning factual answers in response to queries (US8655866 B1) or for retrieval of information items (US8719244 B1). And although they look hard to digest, we will try to simplify the process and explain them. The key elements in these are selecting the representative phrase / search fragment to then match with information and determining whether a certain fragment of the search query is, in fact, a fact query. Google then identifies potential results and ranks them according to an unknown scoring system, presenting you with the highest scoring results in the answer box. So when we asked the classical question “why is the sky blue”, we got an answer not from Wikipedia, as one might expect, but from a page on the Department of Mathematics, University of California, Riverside website. At least one of the things that this site did well to get the highest score was having the question in the title of an article and the answer in the very first paragraph. Belonging to a .edu domain probably helped as well. Another thing that caught our attention and we thought was interesting enough to share with you is that for certain queries, attributes extraction is based on user location. In the screenshot below, we can see that for the search query “how much does a passport cost” in the results we get using a USA IP we’ll have a different answer box than for the same search query with a UK IP. We cannot extrapolate this situation and use it as a general rule regarding how Google extracts the answers but it’s important to mention that Google seems to take into consideration the user’s location. Furthermore, we’ve found another interesting example that enforces this matter. If I search for a conversion from Colombian pesos into dollars (“transformar pesos colombianos a dolares”), Google takes into consideration my IP, so it displays the result adapted to that knowledge. Only now it’s adapted the result so much that it doesn’t really answer my question. It is indeed an evidence of the highly advanced technology that Google uses, but as long as it doesn’t provide an answer for my query it is not much of a help. So the answer box algorithm understands almost all of the 5 Ws: “why”, “who”,“what”,“when” and “where”. It doesn’t always get the right interpretation in the context though. For instance, if you’ve become nostalgic and you’re wondering “when the iPhone was released”, you’ll get June 29, 2007 as the date the iPhone was originally introduced, which is correct. Same if your question is about the latest model. If, however, you’ve suddenly become a more practical, future-oriented person, and want to know“ when the iphone 6 is released”, you’ll only be reminded of the June 29, 2007 date for the introduction of the first iPhone. That’s not very helpful, but maybe Google doesn’t know the exact release date, so it’s understandable. Only that’s not the issue here. If you were to search “when is the new iphone to be released”, you’ll actually get useful results about the iPhone 6 (which is the new one) release date speculations. Does Google not know that the newest version of the iPhone will be the iPhone 6? It is entirely possible. Further testing the search engine by inquiring about iPhone 8 or iPhone 10 seems to greatly confuse the big G and causes it to return incorrect or misguided results. There are a lot of questions that simply go unanswered. While the algorithm is quite impressive, it’s not fully reliable yet. Which is probably why we can assume that Google presents you with an answer if the answer is clear and specific – and therefore if the questions are specific enough. If you’re wondering “how much gold is worth”, you’ll get some search results but no preferred answer. If, however, you’re asking “how much gold is worth per ounce”, then you’ll at least get an estimate in the answer box. The same goes for the price of milk. If you’re simply asking “how much milk costs”, you’ll get a bunch of results, but no preferred answer in the answer box. This changes, however, if you ask “how much does a gallon of milk cost” as this time you get a preferred answer from a page on a news organization website. Where do all these answers come from? A variety of places, really. Two factors seem important:: that the page selected for the answer contains the question in a very similar (if not exact) form, along with the answer, at a short distance from the question (repeating at least some of the words from the question) and that the page selected for the answer belongs to a trustworthy website. So most of the times, if it’s not Wikipedia, it will be a site that it can consider a non biased third party, such as is the case with a lot of “.edu” sites, or news organization websites. That, of course, changes if you are purposefully looking for specific brand information, in which case the most trustworthy information might come straight from that brand’s site. Topical Authority Sites vs Generic Authority Sites It’s reasonable to assume that when it can’t find its answers on an already trusted-and-verified site, Google will try to take some extra precautions by looking for authority sites or sites that it can trust. And here is where Panda 4.0, the Topical Authority Content Update of 2014 joins the game. Let’s look at the examples below and try to understand the way Google is making use of Topical Authority sites and the Generic ones. If we try to figure out what is a quantum computer or back pain, Google will quote from a generic site (wikipedia), giving us an overall idea about the computation device or the unpleasant but yet so common back pain. But what happens when we try to find some info about a headache or a sciatica pain (a condition akin to back pain)? Apparently, we are led to more specialized sites, to some pages that Google considers to be high authority pages. It is well known that Google’s goal is to return the best possible results that match not just based on the exact match query but on the intent of the user doing the query, boosting sites that offer a more in-depth topic covered than a simple article about the problem. There’s a special note to make here, namely that medical terms seem to be filtered. For example, for sensitive terms searches, you are very likely to be instructed by Google to “Consult a doctor if you have a medical concern”. It is possible that the big G may have a self-medication monitoring system, giving different results in the answer box according to the severity of the health condition. Furthermore, the size of a business card or the date of the next solar eclipse are considered to be specific questions that need to be answered by topical sites with high authority in the field. With the risk of redundancy, I bring Panda 4.0 back in discussion as it seems again that sites which bring “additional value” to the web are considered to be topical authority and promoted as such, whether it comes to SERP or answer boxes. Thereby, it seems like that for more specific queries, content based Topical Authority Sites are quoted more in answer boxes compared to sites that only cover the topic briefly (even if the site covering the topic briefly has a lot of generic authority). More articles written on the same topic increase the chances for the site to be treated as a “Topical Authority Content Site” on that specific topic and be listed in the answer box. But what Google considers to be high-quality content might remain a legit question. Commercial Queries and the Google Answer Box If you’re interested in finding out “how much a passport costs”, be advised that the information in the answer box comes from the website of the UK government. We’re not sure whether this is because of the language settings, the IP, the fact that this was the most popular query, or some other factors as well, but even though the source may vary depending on the language settings, it will very likely remain governmental. You can also get an answer for “how much a gallon of milk costs”, though since that price is much more likely to fluctuate, what you actually get in the answer box is information about how the price has changed recently. It seems at least somewhat reasonable to suspect that you will only get an answer box when a significant increase or decrease has taken place. A similar result emerges when you search for the price of a stamp, and this is probably the same for a series of other generic products. Not all unbranded products cost the same though. Even though a medical procedure may be performed roughly the same everywhere, it doesn’t mean it costs the same. If your brand or organization name is entirely associated with an issue, you’re also likely to get an extra advantage from the answer boxes. Looking for “how much an abortion costs” returns an answer from the Compass Care website, which is specifically dedicated to such issues. For them, showing up in the answer box might be more valuable than showing up first in the search results. So, how come did Compass Care manage to climb above the results list, way until the answer box? As we take a look at their website, we begin to understand a bit on the Google’s algorithm on this matter. First of all, our question of interest (how much does an abortion cost?) is clearly written on their website. This way, they really make Google’s job way easier. Secondly, the given definition is not just a random sentence but one that is citing from an authority in the field, Planned Parenthood, a non-profit organization providing reproductive health and maternal health services. Also, the page links back to the same authority, Planned Parenthood. We can conclude that all these factors are good enough to convince the search engine that they are worthy to be in the answer box. If you’re wondering why Google didn’t put the definition directly from the Planned Parenthood site, don’t forget that different answer boxes may be listed for the same search query but for different IPs. Thus, from our research, the answer boxes for the query ” how much an abortion costs” might differ but they all cite from the same high authority Planned Parenthood. But did Google understood that this is a non-profit organization we are talking about? Or the references to high authority sites are those that make them appear in the answer box? Two other aspects come to mind. One is that it really is very difficult to completely be on a “blank page” with Google and that it’s hard to tell what background information may remain available at a certain time, even beyond private browsing. The other aspect is that the answer box function comes with a “Feedback” option at the bottom right of the box, meaning that the battle to stay relevant in the answer box is potentially just as fierce as the battle to stay relevant in the traditional search results. The landscape is fairly clear for generic products. What about products of really big brands? As discussed earlier, it actually makes sense to go to the source when someone is looking for specific information. At least in terms of pricing, the brand owner’s page probably contains the most unbiased information. If you’re giving into the electric car craze and want to find out just “how much a tesla costs”, you will get your answer right at the top, in a special box. You will actually get a price estimate in the answer box, alongside with prices for electric car models from other manufacturers, most likely because Google gathered that you’re not looking just into a Tesla, but into electric cars, more generally. The pricing information is provided for the searched entity and not for the brand itself. Furthermore, all the sites that it takes the information from are third party sites, magazines, news websites and not the official selling car lot. Let’s take a look at the examples below and try to figure out how Google treats the “pricing” issue in the answer box. Whether we are looking for an iphone 5’s price, a google ad or garcinia cambogia weight loss pills, we can get an idea of this item’s prices but not in a direct marketing-selling approach but from some third parties authorities. What is Google actually doing here? It provides the user with a good experience by trying to offer him an answer to his question but, at the same time, it keeps him away from the official advertising sites of these products. None of the sites we are sent to are selling the products in question nor have a direct connection to the marketing strategy of these items. Not even when we ask Google how much a Google ad costs, we are not directed to the AdWords page as expected, but to a unbiased blog post that talks about this matter. This “politically correct” Google attitude makes us have a better understanding of the saying “more catholic than the Pope himself”. Yet, Google doesn’t have the price list for all the products as it gets confused when it is asked “how much a nexus 5 costs” (to be mentioned that Nexus is a Google product) or “how much a macbook costs” (a very well-known product). There is, however, a lot of individual commercial pricing data for various products which will not show up in an answer box. Take an obvious example: “how much is an Audi”. Even though it’s a big brand and one that’s so big, you won’t find your answer in any box at the top of the results page. Things change a bit when you’re inquiring about specific models, but in weird and inconsistent ways. You get answers for “how much is an Audi R8”, but not for “how much is an Audi A1”. Continuing with car-related queries, things seem to be equally unequal. An answer box for Mercedes C63 AMG, none for Mercedes S55, or A180. In both cases, the information comes from automobile magazines websites and refers to models that have only recently been rolled out. So unless the product is fairly new and has only a handful of authorized sellers, it’s more likely that you won’t get your answer in a box. Failures of the Google Answer Box Of course, you could make the case that not getting an answer box might be preferable to getting one with wrong or misguiding information. And you might be right. Let’s look at a couple of examples from our very own field. If you’d like to know, for instance, “what is a SEO company”, the information you’ll get in the definition is about SEO in general. Close enough in this case, but not what I asked. Things get worse down the road if we ask “what is seo company india”. That, you’ll quibble, doesn’t make much sense now, does it? How could we possibly expect to get an answer box for that? Well, we didn’t. But we did get the box anyway. A nonsensical definition from a shady website. In fairness, the definition was nonsensical because it kind of looked like keyword stuffing. And the site looked shady because… well, it was. That wasn’t very fair, we’ll admit, but let’s try a query that does make sense: “what is a seo keyword”. Not only does this make sense, but there should be plenty of reasonable, unbiased definitions lying around. And yet Google picked another slew of stuffed keywords from a shady website. There’s probably a bit of irony in there. One last try: “what is a seo tool”. Again we get an incorrect definition (this one at least is an actual sentence, but not the answer to our query) from a somewhat shady site – or, at the very least, one whose presence in the answer box is shady. There are other examples as well, from a variety of fields, which highlight the fact that the Feedback button at the bottom right of the search box is not merely a courtesy, but a potentially crucial tool, in a community-effort-buildup kind of way, for the development and improvement of the search box. Some Really Interesting Google Answer Boxes If you haven’t done it yet, you will probably do it after you read this: ask Google “who ….is”(to be completed with your name). As I am trying to face Google with some existential problems, trying to figure out who I am, I receive all kinds of references related to my name, even pictures and some YouTube Videos. Yet, no answer box for me. And this is understandable; not even famous pop artists like Michael Jackson or Madonna don’t have an answer box inserted among the page results. The knowledge graph provides us indeed with valuable information about these artists on the right of the result list but not in an answer box. Yet, there are some “who ….is” questions for which Google offers the answer right on the top of the SERP. And one of this answers is for the query “Who is Matt Cutts”. To be mentioned that the head of Google’s spam department is not only listed in an answer box, but also, the generated answer is taken directly from Cutt’s blog, offering us a very friendly and personal presentation of the well known engineer. If the same pattern would have applied, I am curious how the answer box for ” who is Vladimir Putin” or ” who is Barack Obama” would look like. There are several situations when the Google answer box doesn’t seem to have an “inspirational” source at all. It just looks like the search engine already “knows” and it is so sure about the truthfulness of a certain piece of information that doesn’t feel the need of providing the link of where that data are coming from. This is what happens when we try to find out the date of the marriage between Barack Obama and Michelle Obama. Google “knows” this information and generates it in an answer box like an undeniable truth, without any other explanations. Anytime the information is not this specific, but rather general, Google will most often use Wikipedia to extract an answer. That’s what you’ll get, for instance, for queries such as “when did the Titanic sink” or “what is the average IQ”. But as soon as the information gets a bit more specific, the “rule” seems to be that Google extracts data from topical authority trusted sites if there are any for the niche to which the question belongs. Which is why some queries are much more likely to land you one specialized site’s page to get you an answer. Other times it’s rather the phrasing of the query that is beyond the scope of Wikipedia. Searching “how to drive stick shift”, for example, prompts an answer box from a website dedicated to instructions lists for DYI projects. This answer box looks pretty complex, offering not just a general overview of the situation but practical steps of how to manage a car with manual transmission. Yet, we can only hope that people are not searching for this query while they are actual driving… If, however, you were to look for something even more specialized, such as “how to reset an iphone to factory settings”, then the answer box would pick up information from a specialized topical authority site, which in this case is the support page from Apple. Once again, a very handy list of the exact steps that need to be done is generated in the answer box. Although “why we yawn” looks like a pretty generic question, in answering this, Google goes to a children’s health website. Most likely because it’s topical and trustworthy and, if we go to the cited website we will see that the page contains almost the exact same question and the answer right after. How You Could Optimize for the Google’s Answer Boxes So let’s get to the most important question, which unfortunately will not yield an answer box: how can you try to get in on the race to the answer box (without being one of the shady/failure examples)? There’s three steps you need to focus on, mainly: 1.Identify the Keywords that could return answer boxes You’ve seen from the patents but also from the practical examples that there are a few words and phrases that Google associates with “answer-able” queries: “when did”, “where is”, “how much”, “what/who is”, etc. Identify definitions that don’t have answer boxes yet and try to see if you can fill any void. You can even try to find out which specific wording is more likely to be considered by Google. A great tool to generate suggestions is keywordtool.io , a free online keyword research instrument that uses Google Autocomplete to generate suggestions for several keywords. For example, should your page provide an answer for “how much X is” or for “how much does X cost”? Though similar in meaning, they might be treated differently by the search engine. 2.Analyze the keywords Test your conclusions to see if you’ve made the right choice. See what other users are looking for, see what autocomplete you’re likely to trigger by using one phrase or another. The devil is in the details, but that’s where the road to the answer box might be as well. Look at sites that are already in the answer boxes for various terms definitions and see what they did right and what they did wrong. 3.Create Dedicated Landing Pages Build dedicated landing pages where you include clear definitions and you cite the best references for the terms and concepts. Remember the lessons you’ve seen so far: the landing page has to have the question in the title and the answer in the very first paragraph, or at any rate, the question and answer have to be in very close proximity. Quoting trustworthy sources if you don’t feel you’re one yet can also help: get you information first-hand from educational, authority-topical or non profit sources. Just because you’re not the originator of a certain piece of data doesn’t mean you can’t be the provider of the best or most complete version of that data. In addition, make use of the tools and principles you generally rely on: build awareness to each page, bring the social spotlight in and work on creating organic links to expand its popularity. Building on the old adage, “you have to spend money to make money”, just keep in mind that with the answer box, you have to have traffic to make more traffic. And most importantly? Don’t be spammy and provide value to the world wide web. You want to be in our correct examples category, not in the misleading one, otherwise the cutting blade of the Feedback button may take you down sooner than you’ve risen to the top. Conclusion A pretty famous computer scientist said that “the question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.” SERP landscape has changed a lot, that is for sure, and mostly because of the highly technological progress, Artificial Intelligence included, of course. The artificial intelligence process suggests that the line between intelligent machines and people blurs most when a puree is made of that identity. No matter how much we’d like everything to be standardized, in the search industry results are not based directly on exact rules. Answer box is indeed, as Google stated: much of the work on language, speech, translation and visual processing relies on Machine Learning and AI that raises deep scientific and engineering challenges. Contrary to much of current theory and practice, the statistics of the data shifts very rapidly, the features of interest change as well, and the volume of data often precludes the use of standard single-machine training algorithms. It is a learning process we are facing now and in the end the human that programmed the machine does not know the exact output of the program because of the diverse training phases of the algorithms. Everyday, Google search finds more “humane” ways to interact with its users and provide more direct answers. With all the strings attached, answer boxes are a way new level in the search industry and understanding them shouldn’t be just a recreational hobby but a must if you want your site to be known and ranked the best possible.

This article is about the astronomer. For the association footballer, see George Alcock (footballer) George Eric Deacon Alcock, MBE (28 August 1912 Peterborough, Northamptonshire[1]– 15 December 2000) was an English astronomer. He was one of the most successful visual discoverers of novae and comets. Initially, his interest in astronomy involved observation of meteors and meteor showers, but in 1953 he decided to start searching for comets and in 1955 began searching for novae. His technique was to memorize the patterns of thousands of stars, so that he would visually recognize any intruder. In 1959 he discovered comet C/1959 Q1 (Alcock), the first comet discovered in Britain since 1894, and only five days later discovered another, C/1959 Q2 (Alcock). He discovered two more comets in 1963 and 1965. He later discovered his first nova, Nova Delphini 1967 (HR Delphini), which turned out to have an unusual light-curve. He discovered two more novae, LV Vul (in 1968) and V368 Sct (in 1970). He found his fifth and final comet in 1983: C/1983 H1 (IRAS-Araki-Alcock). In 1991 he found the nova V838 Her. Honors and awards [ edit ] Alcock became a Fellow of 3 British societies in 1947: the Royal Astronomical Society, the Royal Geographical Society, and the Royal Meteorological Society. He won the Jackson-Gwilt Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1963. On 7 February 1979, Queen Elizabeth II conferred on him an MBE. In 1981 he received the International Amateur Achievement Award from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.[2] An asteroid, 3174 Alcock is named after him. He also maintained an active interest in meteorology (the study of weather, unrelated to his interest in meteors). His achievements were fairly remarkable, and with the modern invention of CCDs and photometry and automated and computerized search programs that make his visual discovery techniques seem entirely quaint and obsolete, it is unlikely that such achievements will ever be repeated. In 1996, Genesis Publications published a limited edition signed biography, authored by Kay Williams, entitled "Under An English Heaven - The Life of George Alcock". After his death, a plaque was placed in Peterborough Cathedral in his memory.[3] Personal life [ edit ] In 1936 Alcock met a young lady, Mary Green, through their shared interest in astronomy. They were married 7 June 1941, and moved to the village of Farcet from 1955, in a house they called Antares, where Alcock discovered 5 comets and 5 nova[4], they remained devoted to each other until her death on 25 October 1991. References [ edit ]

Once again, the American labor movement is giving the strongest possible support to the Democratic candidate for the White House. For decades, Democrats have relied on labor unions for funding and for get-out-the-vote efforts. Hillary Clinton is no different. Most unions supported her in the Democratic primary. Most unions that supported Bernie Sanders have now endorsed her. A few unions, particularly those representing police and firefighters, have endorsed Donald Trump—as has the National Border Patrol Council. But the vast majority is providing Clinton the logistical support that she will need to win the election. But why do unions do this? What do they get from supporting Democrats? Not only have American unions seen their numbers decline precipitously for the last several decades, but the apparatus of American labor law and regulatory agencies has turned increasingly against workers. Agencies that protect workers’ rights and safety, such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, are routinely underfunded while Republican appointees to a wide variety of agencies housed within the Department of Labor, drawn from the ranks of management, have captured the regulatory process to such an extent that leading American union advocates, including former Communication Workers of America president Larry Cohen, have openly wondered whether labor would be better off scrapping the entirety of American labor law if we cannot make it work to protect union rights. Yet in the last few years, the tenor of American labor regulation has suddenly changed thanks to recent decisions by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that have repeatedly helped improve workers’ rights. The NLRB has reversed a rule that forced so-called “permatemps,” long-term temporary workers, from asking their parent employer’s permission to be included in a bargaining unit for a union election; ruled against employers issuing blanket policies against employees recording violations in the workplace; decided that graduate students at private universities had collective bargaining rights; and reestablished a test to judge whether an employer is hiring permanent replacement workers during strikes. In each of these decisions, President Obama’s NLRB appointees have, arguably, shown a stronger pro-labor record than have those of any President since the agency’s creation in 1935. This is good news for American workers. But it also reflects the extreme partisanship of the modern United States and highlights to what extent workplace rights are increasingly dependent upon labor electing a Democratic President to office. Congressional Republicans have howled over these recent decisions and nearly every Republican who ran for President this election pledged to reverse them, while also promising to curb this supposedly out-of-control agency. This scenario obviously leads to great instability in workplace relations. But a brief examination of the interaction of state and labor in American history suggests that changes to this fundamentally unstable and deeply partisan relationship are unlikely in the near future. More than perhaps in any other western democracy, organized labor in the United States has always needed to rely on state support for success. As the sociologist Kim Voss demonstrated in her study comparing employer responses to unions in the United States, Britain, and France in the late nineteenth century, American employers have long taken a much harder line against unions than have their counterparts in European nations, where employers managed to accept unions as central to management decisions. Even today, German unions have a say in corporate management unheard of in the United States, to the point where they effectively forced Volkswagen to support a union organizing campaign in its Chattanooga, Tennessee factory in 2014. Even so, strong opposition from local elites and plant managers on the shop floor convinced workers to reject the union in that vote. The growth of American industrialization in an era of weak federal government often meant that large corporations had more money than the federal government. The creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 was, in part, motivated by the government begging J.P. Morgan to bail it out. Not surprisingly then, American employers relied on the state to serve as a police force to bust disruptive strikes, as it did most famously during the Great Railroad Strike in 1877 and again during the Pullman Strike in 1894, in the aftermath of which Labor Day emerged. Little of this changed until the Great Depression. The intense economic crisis, and the worker uprisings that ensued, helped elect Franklin D. Roosevelt to the White House. The new President quickly ushered in laws to protect workers’ rights for the first time. It was his National Labor Relations Act, passed in of 1935, that created the National Labor Relations Board. Only state intervention that essentially forced companies to agree to collective bargaining with those workers that had organized into a union—and the vast profits generated in preparation for World War II—could produce the conditions in which companies were ready to acquiesce to the existence of unions. Roosevelt’s advisers intended for the NLRB to be a non-partisan agency; it drew most of its early appointees from government workers. Representing business, labor, and the public equally was in fact a prime goal of many New Deal agencies. The NLRB routinely ruled in favor of unions during these years, leading to conservative members of Congress introducing bills to eliminate the agency. One bill to do so passed the House 258-129 in 1940 before Roosevelt pressured the Senate to kill it. Even with the aim of nonpartisanship, for corporations and conservative politicians, the sheer existence of the agency was an attack on corporate rights. Roosevelt’s vision of a non-partisan board began to slip during the Eisenhower years, however, when the first member of the business community was appointed. Corporations continued to look to the state to represent its interests over that of workers, even if it had far less power than it did before the New Deal. Unions responded by noting that no unionist had ever served on the NLRB. But corporate America had never accepted the legitimacy of unions, particularly not as an equal counterpart. The Kennedy and Johnson Administration soon after reinstated the tradition of appointing members with no ties to either unions or management. This was, however, short-lived as another Republican, Richard Nixon, would, again, see the board as a partisan agency and name management appointees. But, compared to today, this remained relatively muted through the 1970s. The modern era of the truly partisan NLRB began in earnest with Ronald Reagan’s first appointee, who was a union-busting management consultant. This was followed later on by a protégé of the staunchly anti-union North Carolina senator Jesse Helms, who had created and distributed both anti-union videos and pamphlets. This broke the façade of neutrality at the NLRB; the Reagan Administration had simultaneously been seeking to gut labor regulations across the board. Bill Clinton was the first President to name union representatives to the NLRB; he appointed three union lawyers, evening out the score while continuing to entrench partisanship. George W. Bush later tilted things sharply back to the right. Thanks to these developments, by the time Obama took office, the NLRB had become a prime target for congressional Republicans, who chose to filibuster his nominees. It was only after the 2013 break of this filibuster that Obama could finally name his NLRB appointees, who reoriented the agency toward the pro-worker positions that have recently caught headlines. It is unlikely that the now deep-seated partisanship of the Labor Relations Board will change anytime soon. This is a problem that extends well beyond the board itself; nearly the entire apparatus of government has reached levels of partisanship unseen in a century. The NLRB is most definitely less functional as a partial enforcer of either workplace rights or corporate policy than it would be as a neutral arbiter of a broadly accepted set of basic labor standards. But, then again, American employers and the Republican Party have never actually accepted organized labor as equal bargaining partners. As in the late nineteenth century, American corporations continue to be more intransigent on labor rights than those in either Canada or Europe. This means that elected officials, and, indeed, the results of this upcoming election, will continue to play a disproportionate role in whether we are able to uphold labor rights, or if corporate interests once again gain the upper hand.

Women will be allowed to serve as fully-fledged members of front-line U.S. military combat units, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter announced Thursday. “They’ll be allowed to drive tanks, fire mortars, and lead infantry soldiers into combat,” Carter said, so long as they meet the same physical standards as their male comrades. “They’ll be able to serve as Army Rangers and Green Berets, Navy SEALs, Marine Corps infantry, Air Force parajumpers and everything else that was previously open only to men.” Female advocates cheered the change. “It’s a thrilling day for women serving in the military—and for women across the country,” said Nancy Duff Campbell of the National Women’s Law Center. “Thousands of women will now have the opportunity to be all that they can be and our nation’s military will be the stronger for it. Hip, hip, hooray!” The impact of the decision will take some time. “Implementation won’t happen overnight,” Carter said. Women will have to be trained to fill the slots. While some have already undergone such schooling—three women passed the tough Army Ranger course earlier this year, for example—the Pentagon wants to ensure that it achieves a still-unspecified “critical mass” of such women before introducing them into previously all-male units. A senior Army officer has estimated that while half of incoming male recruits want to “go infantry,” for example, only 10% of female recruits share that sentiment. The Brief Newsletter Sign up to receive the top stories you need to know right now. View Sample Sign Up Now The decision comes after decades of allowing women to move ever closer to front-line, direct-ground-combat units: infantry, armor and special operations. While they have been allowed in supporting roles alongside such units—in intelligence and logistics, for example—they were barred by Pentagon policy from standard service in most such outfits. While the Army had recommended to Carter in October that women be allowed to serve in all combat slots, the Marines had recommended against it. Carter’s announcement represents an historic change for the U.S. military. But some of the leeriness accompanying it has been eased by the smooth integration of openly gay men and women into military service. In fact, the Marines also were the service most opposed to allowing them to serve in uniform, saying it would hurt morale and recruiting. Neither has happened in the four years since the ban was lifted. There has been opposition to the change even inside the Army. “The average fighting load is 35% of average man’s bodyweight but half the bodyweight of an average Army woman,” William Gregor, a retired 23-year Army officer now at the service’s School of Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., wrote in 2011. “Keeping the men and women together can only diminish the training benefit received by men because the load or the march rate or both must be kept within the range of strength and endurance of the women.” The Marines steadily built a case that their front-line units should remain all-male. “To move forward in expanding opportunities for our female service members without considering the timeless, brutal, physical and absolutely unforgiving nature of close combat is a prescription for failure,” an internal Marine study completed in August concluded. “Those who choose to turn a blind eye to those immutable realities do so at the expense of our Corps’ war-fighting capability and, in turn, the security of the nation.” Gregory Newbold, a retired Marine lieutenant general, says physical strength is only part of the combat calculus. “It’s the fighting power of the unit that’s more relevant, and when you interject things that are corrosive, then you degrade fighting power,” he says. “It’s the sexual dynamic that’s important here—somebody has to get up early to clean the urinals and pick up trash, and Johnny says `Well Suzy isn’t doing it because they like Suzy,’ or Suzy says `I’m doing it because they hate me.’ That’s human nature, and it’s corrosive in small combat units.” But an internal Marine report disputes that. “Any initial detrimental effects on cohesion can eventually be mitigated with good training and solid leadership, it concluded. Instead of simply setting physical requirements for individual Marines, the corps pitted all-male squads against mixed-gender units. “The majority of the operationally relevant differences occurred in the most physically demanding tasks, such as casualty evacuations, long hikes under load, and negotiating obstacles,” one internal Marine assessment said. “We have seen numerous cases of compensation during physically demanding tasks, in which males have shifted positions to take over certain aspects of the tasks from females, such as loading ammo into trucks or heaving loaded packs on top of a wall.” The corps has pointed out that the more than 400 female Marines who earned combat decorations in Afghanistan and Iraq earned them in what might be called combat-lite. “None of those awards reflected a female Marine having to `locate, close with and destroy the enemy’ in deliberate offensive combat operations,” a recent Marine report said. “Rather, these actions were all in response to enemy action in the form of IED strikes, enemy attacks on convoys or friendly bases, or attacks on female Marines” assigned to all-female units designed to screen and interview foreign females. True enough, but hardly surprising: female Marines have been barred from “deliberate offensive combat operations.” The advance of women toward the front lines has been a long time coming, and female trailblazers recall the challenges. Ann Dunwoody, the first four-star general in the U.S. military, recalls the Army banning barrettes and bobby pins to keep hair in place under jump-school helmets, claiming they were hazardous while parachuting. “It was an attempt to get us to cut our hair, and look manly,” says Dunwoody, who retired in 2012. She refused to go along. “I taped my hair to my head with masking tape—it looked ridiculous.” Eventually, the Army relented. Darlene Iskra, who became one of the Navy’s first female divers in 1980, recalls the grueling physical harassment instructors would mete out during six weeks of scuba training. They’d yank off trainees’ masks and turn off their air supply, to ensure the fledgling divers were ready for dangerous undersea missions. Iskra spent her first three weeks in the pool with a female partner before each was paired with a male partner for the rest of the course. “We noticed after we got our new buddies that the pool harassment went down by about half,” says Iskra, who went on to become the first woman to command a Navy ship in 1990. “But our new male buddies said the harassment had gone up about half.” In a perfect world, everyone wearing a U.S. military uniform would be an asexual brute with a stunningly high IQ who doesn’t eat much, is adept at following orders and leery of challenging authority. Given that such a creature has never existed, the nation has spent more than 200 years building its military, one compromise at a time. The Pentagon just made its biggest compromise ever about who can serve on the front lines in a U.S. military uniform. Contact us at editors@time.com.

On a recent episode of the 100 Words Or Less Podcast, Senses Fail vocalist/brainchild Buddy Nielsen gave the most tell-all interview of his career. In the interview, Nielsen opens up about his sexuality, which isn’t exactly easy to define. The singer describes a time in his life when he struggled with sexual addiction and frequently paid for prostitutes—both male and transsexual. Nielsen admits he did it at home, on tour and spent thousands of dollars. He doesn’t identify as gay, though, as he has only had long-term relationships with women, like his current girlfriend, who he plans on spending his life with. (It’s honestly better to listen to him explain it on the podcast.) Nielsen also dives into his past dependence on alcohol, saying he essentially drank everyday for nine years. All of this seems to stem from his problems with anxiety and panic attacks, which appear to have been triggered by a traumatic childhood event that Nielsen has mentally blocked out. It’s an extremely brave and honest interview that Nielsen gives—and it’s definitely worth a listen. Check it out here, and let us know your thoughts. Nielsen wrote about the episode: “For those that have followed Senses Fail you have come to know some of my struggles with anxiety, depression and substances abuse. In this podcast I wanted to dive deeper into the origin of these issues, as well as share some deeper, more personal topics that I have never spoken about publicly or in our music.” “For over 9 years I suffered in a cycle of shame over my sexuality, substance abuse, sexual addiction, anxiety, depression, grief and self loathing. I fell into a pit of despair and did a lot of damage to myself and to people around me. Through most of it I kept a pretty clean and convincing sheet over the messiness of my life, which in turn caused even more pain. I did a lot of things that were very dangerous and put myself into situations where I was putting myself and others at risk Over the coarse of the last year I have been able to find a level of peace that I did not know existed. In turning towards the very things I feared, I was able to learn to be with them and ultimately have compassion for them.” “While the above paints the overall tone and picture of what I am discussing, there are a couple of pieces I want to make sure come across. I am coming out and saying that I have struggled with alcohol dependance and abuse, that I have also battled with sexual addiction and that I do not identify as straight but I fall somewhere on the spectrum of sexuality closer to the middle, yet do not feel I identify with a specific label.” “I believe that a lot of what drove me to some of these addictions and behaviors was a mistrust and fear of my sexual orientation. I do not identity as straight or gay or bi and that left me feeling very isolated and shameful. In many ways I felt that my sexuality was wrong, disruptive and needed to be secluded. I feel that if I had been more comfortable with who I was inside and more accepting of my sexuality I could have avoided a lot of suffering. A lot of my sexual addiction was fueled by want and need to experiment sexually but doing so in a container of shame and guilt left me stuck in dangerous self destructive behavior. Acting out sexually and then shaming myself for it, led to deeper stronger levels of self hatred.” “I want to come out so that other people know, there are people like them. I know there are people out there right now struggling with their sexual orientation, sexual identity or gender, wether they know in their heart of hearts they fall into a label or not, it doesn’t matter, what matters is that we cultivate a world where people can feel safe to be themselves. Our human sexuality is not limited to the extremes of two poles, two genders or a even a middle ground, the range of our emotions and need to connect are much larger than that and the box we are trying to create for people is much to small and limiting. There are so many of us that do not fall into the box and trying to fit into it, creates an unbearable amount of pain and many times suicide.” “We have made a lot of amazing strides towards LGBTQ rights in this country over the last few years but I feel there is so much more that needs to be done. The safety net for people that fall into the LGBTQ world needs to grow, one way it can do that is for people like myself to have the courage to come out and truly be authentic with who they are and to demand that the conversation grow and continue to move forward. I want to encourage radical acceptance and radical inclusion on a level that far exceeds where we are at right now.” “I want to thank all the people before me who have walked this path in much more perilous times, enduring intense isolation, backlash and violence. I want to thank all the people that have walked this path with me through these struggles and beautiful self realizations. I appreciate you for taking the time to read, listen and share my story. “ In Peace, Buddy Nielsen P.S. Please excuse me if I offend anyone in this letter or in the podcast. I am just learning to discuss these topics openly and am just becoming comfortable with the proper words and politically correct ways to explain things. I do not wish to cause anyone any harm, or marginalize anyone. I wish for this to be inclusive and inviting to anyone that has ever suffered any level of addiction, pain, anxiety, depression or any amount of unwanted stress that was caused by feeling isolated for any reason.

Since I last wrote, we’ve made great progress with the work on the Parallel JS and Typed Objects (nee Binary Data) implementation. In particular, as of this morning, preliminary support for typed objects has landed in Mozilla Nightly, although what’s currently checked in is not fully conformant with the current version of the standard (for this reason, support is limited to Nightly and not available in Aurora or Beta builds). Meanwhile, we’ve been fixing small bugs in the existing Parallel JS support code and also working on a prototype of the new API. There is still some amount of work left to do with typed objects before we can eliminate the old ParallelArray code entirely: in particular, we have to implement handles and make further progress on the JIT integration. We’ve also been working hard with the Rivertrail team at Intel on figuring out what the final API will look like. My prior post sketched out the basic design we’ve been working with. But the devil’s in the details, so the latest work has been trying to figure out precisely what the methods look like and so forth. One of the recent shifts that looks like it will be necessary is to change how the return types from PJs methods are specified. This is due to a non-obvious interaction with typed object prototypes that I want to describe in this post. Type objects and prototypes To begin, let me briefly explain how the typed objects API works with prototypes. Whenever you create a new type object – that is, a descriptor for a type – it has an associated prototype. This can be used to add methods to the instances of the type object in the usual way: var ColorType1 = new StructType ({ r : uint8 , g : uint8 , b : uint8 }); ColorType1 . prototype . average = function () { return ( this . r + this . g + this . b ) / 3 ; } var white1 = new ColorType1 ({ r : 255 , g : 255 , b : 255 }); var avg = white1 . average (); // returns 255 If I go off and define an equivalent struct type somewhere else, it will nonetheless have a distinct prototype and therefore a distinct set of methods: var ColorType2 = new StructType ({ r : uint8 , g : uint8 , b : uint8 }); var white2 = new ColorType2 ({ r : 255 , g : 255 , b : 255 }); var avg = white2 . average (); // ERROR Implications for the PJs API The fact that otherwise equivalent type objects have distinct prototypes has concrete implications for our PJs API design. We had originally been contemplating an API in which users provided the component types and we would synthesize them into a final type. For example, if you have an array of pixels and you want to map it into an array of doubles, you might have written code like: var ColorType = new StructType ({ r : uint8 , g : uint8 , b : uint8 }); var ImageType = new ArrayType ( ColorType , 1024 * 768 ); var myImage = new ImageType (); var averages = myImage . mapPar ( c => ( c . r + c . g + c . b ) / 3 , uint8 ); The interesting line is the final one, which maps from an array of pixels into an array of uint8 . The second argument to map here specified the return type of the closure (this argument is optional; if you omit it, we would use the type specification any , meaning any kind of value can be returned). In this style of API, the type of the value returned from map would then by (internally) created as new ArrayType(uint8, 1024*768) . This is fine if equivalent types all behave in exactly the same way. But what if the user wanted to add methods to the prototype of the returned value? Since mapPar would presumably be creating a fresh type object, each result would also have a fresh prototype, which would be both expensive (many objects being allocated) and not useful (no way to add methods). So instead we should take an approach where we always specify the final return type of the function. That means that the code above would be changed slightly to read like so: var ColorType = new StructType ({ r : uint8 , g : uint8 , b : uint8 }); var ImageType = new ArrayType ( ColorType , 1024 * 768 ); var AverageType = new ArrayType ( uint8 , 1024 * 768 ); var myImage = new ImageType (); var averages = myImage . mapPar ( c => ( c . r + c . g + c . b ) / 3 , AverageType );