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From the Associated Press in Japan comes the story of Yosuke, an African grey parrot with lots of smarts. We'll let the AP tell the tale:
When Yosuke the parrot flew out of his cage and got lost, he did exactly what he had been taught — he recited his name and address to a stranger willing to help. Police rescued the African grey parrot two weeks ago from a neighbor’s roof in the city of Nagareyama, near Tokyo.
After spending a night at the station, he was transferred to a nearby veterinary hospital while police searched for clues, local policeman Shinjiro Uemura said. He kept mum with the cops, but began chatting after a few days with the vet.
"I’m Mr. Yosuke Nakamura," the bird told the veterinarian, according to Uemura. The parrot also provided his full home address, down to the street number, and even entertained the hospital staff by singing songs.
"We checked the address, and what do you know, a Nakamura family really lived there. So we told them we’ve found Yosuke," Uemura said. The Nakamura family told police they had been teaching the bird its name and address for about two years.
But Yosuke apparently wasn’t keen on opening up to police officials. "I tried to be friendly and talked to him, but he completely ignored me," Uemura said. |
Update: It seems that the UNFCCC background page referred to below has changed and the link no longer works – see table of contents.
A response from Justin Wood, writing to me from Australia after my previous post (cited with permission below), has prompted me to write a follow-up on the story of the greenhouse effect (GHE).
I wonder if you’ve seen this terrible description of the greenhouse effect on a UNFCCC background page? http://unfccc.int/essential_background/feeling_the_heat/items/2903.php
It actually says that incoming solar energy is ‘reflected’ by the planet’s surface ‘in the form of a calmer, more slow-moving type of energy called infrared radiation. … Infrared radiation is carried slowly aloft by air currents, and its eventual escape into space is delayed by greenhouse gases’ (emphasis added). Given your recent excellent explanation of the real physics on RC, I thought you might be interested! It’s downright disturbing that this silliness comes from such an important source; and I’ve found it repeated all over the place. (On that RC post, I would humbly suggest that the section on stratospheric cooling could helpfully be expanded to make that clearer?)
I won’t discuss the stratospheric cooling now, but rather try to place recent events (including floods in Niger), which involve the hydrological cycle and atmospheric circulation, into the framework from my previous post ‘A simple recipe for GHE‘.
Again, it can be useful to stop and contemplate whether a simple conceptual framework can provide greater understanding of climate model predictions and the observations we make on the climate system. I think that there are not too many simple descriptions, as Wood pointed out, that are convincing in terms of physics.
Can we use such simple conceptual explanations for events such as the recent spate of extreme rainfall and heat waves then? I want to stress, as we did when discussing tropical cyclones, that single events do not constitute evidence of a climate change. Since climate can be defined as ‘typical weather pattern’ (or weather statistics), then climate change can be that extremes become more or less typical, and such change must start with a few events. This touches the difference between weather and climate, and each of these events can be considered as weather. But there is a connection between these weather events and results obtained from climate models.
There are fascinating as well as disconcerting sides to the fact that global climate models reported in the IPCC AR4 suggest warming in the upper troposphere in the tropics (Figure 1 below). I regard these traits as important clues that may help unveil the secrets of the troposphere; The key into this mystery involves energy conservation, planetary energy balance, and the planetary energy input taking place at its surface while its heat loss mainly occurs at higher levels, as discussed in ‘A simple recipe for GHE‘.
This story is about surface fluxes, a fuzzy connection between energy flow and circulation of water, and physical constraints pin-pointing the solutions. In other words, the hydrological cycle associated with moisture transport is tied to the energy flow associated with moist convection.
Another simple mental picture
I will yet again try to present a simplified physical picture: Our climate includes energy transport both from the equatorial region to the poles as well as a vertical flow from the surface to the height from which it can escape freely into outer space. The story behind mid-to-upper tropospheric warming strongly involves the vertical energy flow, which will be the focus of the discussion. In very simple terms, the laws of physics say there has to be a flow of energy from the planet’s surface, where energy is deposited, to the heights from where the heat loss takes place (see schematic below).
The vertical energy flow can take several forms: radiative, latent, and sensible heat. The radiative energy transfer has a character of diffusion (photon diffusion), and the more opaque the atmosphere, due to increased GHG concentrations, the slower the effective radiative energy transfer. A similar situation is believed to take place in the outer layer of the Sun, in the opaque convective zone, where convection is the main mode of energy transfer (which by the way subsequently play a role in solar activity).
If this were the whole story, then an increase in GHG concentrations would imply a deficit between the rate of energy gained at the surface and heat loss from the upper atmosphere due to hypothetically lowered energy transfer between the two levels: The emission temperature would decline as a result of net heat loss high up, and surface temperature would increase as a result of net gain in energy on the ground.
One consequence of a deficit in the vertical energy flow would be different heating and cooling rates at different heights that subsequently would alter the atmosphere’s vertical structure (lapse rate). The planetary heat loss would drop if the emission temperature were to drop, and the planet would no longer be in energy balance, resulting in energy accumulation. However, planets will eventually reach new equilibrium states where the heat-loss balances the energy input.
Other forms for heat flow between the two levels are expected to compensate for the reduction in radiative energy transfer (despite greater temperature differences) if the planetary energy input and heat loss are to balance. One such candidate is convection, carrying both latent and sensible heat and where the energy transfer takes place in form of heat-carrying vertical motion. Indeed, warming below and cooling aloft give rise to more unstable conditions that favours convection.
Higher temperatures near the surface also cause increased evaporation according to a physical law known as ‘the Clapeyron-Clausius equation‘. Evaporation requires energy so that heat, which otherwise would go to increase temperatures, is instead used to transform water to water vapour (phase change). Differences in the molecular weights of N 2 and H 2 O means that moist air is lighter than dry air. Thus, increased evaporation favours convection, which transports both energy – as sensible (higher temperature) and latent (vapour) heat – and moisture. This is seen occurring naturally, especially in association with warm ocean surface in connection with the El Nino Southern Oscillation. Convection can therefore compensate for reduced radiative transfer if its mean vertical extent reaches the height of the planetary heat loss. Convection also is one of the factors that determines the thickness of the tropopause (Wikipedia on Troposphere: “The word troposphere derives from the Greek: tropos for “turning” or “mixing,” reflecting the fact that turbulent mixing plays an important role in the troposphere’s structure and behavior.”).
Moist convection results in cloud formation: water vapour condenses and form cloud drops. The condensation releases heat and hence increase the temperatures, which subsequently has an effect on the black body radiation. Hence, cloud formation plays a crucial role for the planetary heat loss – in addition to affecting the planetary albedo.
The reason why Figure 9.1 in IPCC AR4 is disconcerting is that the temperature anomaly in the upper tropical atmosphere bears the signature of increased moist convective activity, which means that the hydrological cycle probably gets perturbed by increased GHG forcings, hence affecting rainfall patterns.
There have been some misunderstanding regarding the enhanced warming in the upper troposphere – mistakenly taken as being inconsistent with the climate models, or taken as the “finger print” of GHE, rather than as a plausible consequence predicted for an enhanced GHE due to the perturbation of the hydrological cycle (the “finger print”-misconception assumes that the models are perfect).
Changes in the convective activity also have other repercussions. Air just doesn’t pile up, but if is rises in some places, it means that there is sinking air elsewhere. A typical example of this is the Hadley cell, where the circulation involves rising air near equator associated with low sea level pressure and downward motion poleward of this region – an arid region known as the subtropics with high sea level pressure. A change in convection on a planetary scale, due to compensating a reduction in the vertical radiative energy transport, hence may have a bearing on drought and flooding events – and this is what the global climate models seem to suggest. If a shift in the hydrological cycle were to lower the response in the global mean temperature, there may be a poisonous sting in such a negative feedback: changes in the precipitation patterns.
When GHG concentrations change, there is also a disruption in the vertical energy flow so that the planetary energy balance is perturbed. This is the frequently cited extra forcing estimated at the top of the atmosphere (TOA), and this is where some of the assumptions made above don’t quite hold (the picture is correct for a planet in equilibrium, but during a transition the planet is no longer in an equilibrium) and extra energy is taken up by warming of the oceans and surface.
As a physicist, the key to understanding the relationship between GHE and the hydrological cycle – and indeed the troposphere – is in embedded in the question of what happens with the energy flow between the two levels where the planet receives its energy and where it leaves the planet. For more numbers and details, I’d recommend a number of posts previously published here on RC (here, here, here, here, and here). |
UK PM May faces parliamentary rebellion over refusal to publish Brexit plans
By Kylie MacLellan
LONDON, Dec 6 (Reuters) - British Prime Minister Theresa May faces a rebellion among her own lawmakers when parliament debates whether the government should set out its Brexit plan before triggering formal divorce talks with the European Union.
May, who plans to kick off the exit process by the end of March next year, has said the government will not give a running commentary on its preparations for Brexit as this would damage its negotiating position.
The opposition Labour Party has put forward a motion, to be debated on Wednesday, calling on the government to publish its plan for leaving the bloc before it invokes Article 50 of the EU's Lisbon Treaty to begin the formal Brexit process.
The BBC reported that one former minister had predicted between 20 and 40 lawmakers from May's ruling Conservatives could support the motion, which is not binding on the government but would increase pressure on it to be more open.
"These things are incredibly important. This actually transcends party politics and tribalism. There is nothing in it which I don't agree with," remain-backing Conservative lawmaker Anna Soubry told BBC Radio, referring to the motion.
"The contents of that motion are eminently supportable."
While asking May to commit to publishing the government's Brexit plan, the motion also says there should be "no disclosure of material that could be reasonably judged to damage the UK in any negotiations to depart from the European Union".
"This is a real opportunity to finally get clarity on the government's plan for Brexit," Labour Party Brexit spokesman Keir Starmer, who put forward the motion, said in a statement.
"Parliament and the public need to know the basic terms the government is seeking to achieve from Brexit. This issue is too important to be left mired in uncertainty any longer."
May avoided a parliamentary rebellion in October by agreeing to a motion that parliament would have opportunities to debate Brexit on the condition that it would not undermine her negotiating strategy.
When asked about Wednesday's debate, a spokesman for May said the government would not be setting out its plans before triggering Article 50. |
Iraq's National Theatre Company has cancelled its show at the Impact 15 festival in Kitchener, Ont., because troupe members were denied Canadian visas over fears they'd attempt to seek refugee status, the festival director says.
"After midnight I received an email from the company. The director of the company has received a notice from the embassy denying them entry into Canada," said festival director Majdi Bou-Matar in an interview on CBC Radio's The Morning Edition with Craig Norris.
The letter from the Canadian Embassy in Paris said, in French, that officials weren't convinced the theatre performers would return to Iraq and would instead seek refugee status in Canada. The letter cited concerns over the group's financial situation, property ownership and employment as reasons for denying the visas.
Seven of the nine troupe members live in Iraq and applied to the visa office there. Their applications were forwarded to the Canadian Embassy in Amman, Jordan. The troupe's director, Muhaned Hadi Hendi Al Shafeay, lives in France and so applied through the embassy in Paris, and that embassy responded to all of the applications. The other member of the troupe is a British citizen, and didn't apply for a visa.
The company was scheduled to perform the play Camp, about life as a refugee, on Sept. 26 and Sept. 27. But after weeks of waiting, the company still hadn't received visas permitting the performers to visit the Waterloo Region.
"Shouldn't we ask ourselves why a group of artists who are all well established would not be allowed to come participate in a theatre festival?" said Bou-Matar.
"And they're not even given the courtesy to reply to them in a timely manner."
Bou-Matar said he wanted to include the play in the festival's lineup because its content was timely, looking at the challenges refugees face building a home away from home.
"This show was chosen because it is about connecting [the theatre company] to the large Iraqi population who is living here in our community and who are feeling displaced," said Bou-Matar.
1st time cancelling a performance
Bou-Matar said this is the first time the festival has had to consider cancelling a show, with past companies coming from China, Palestine and Colombia.
Two other international theatre companies will be participating in the festival:
Nous Jouons Pour Les Arts from Morocco
Victoria Hunt of Australia.
Bou-Matar said he will refund tickets for the Iraqi booking, but is also considering holding a Skype conversation with the theatre company from Iraq during the time it was scheduled to perform.
The festival launches Sept. 22 and runs until Sept. 27. |
A Chinese government report published on Friday accused the United States of “serious infringes on human rights.”
Beijing's announcement is widely seen as a response to an earlier U.S. State Department report that expressed concern over abuses of human rights in China.
The Chinese report, titled “The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2013” and released by China’s Information Office of the State Council, decried what it perceived to be human rights abuses by the United States.
“Acting as the world’s judge of human rights, the U.S. made arbitrary attacks and irresponsible remarks on the human rights situation in almost 200 countries and regions," read a brief editorial accompanying the report in Xinhua, the state-run news agency.
“If the United States wants to be the self-claimed human rights judge of the world, though China and most countries do not agree, it first needs to sweep its own doorsteps. Otherwise, its words will not be heard, let alone trusted, by other countries.”
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Qin Gang later chimed in at a daily news briefing.
“The United States always wants to gossip and remark about other countries’ situations, but ignores its own issues. This is a classic double standard.”
The Chinese government was responding to the U.S. State Department’s annual survey of human rights around the world that was released Thursday. Titled “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2013,” the U.S. report painted a largely negative picture of China's approach towards human rights. The report criticized Beijing in areas such as “Respect for the Integrity of the Person”, “Respect for Civil Liberties”, “Respect for Political Rights” and “Corruption and Lack of Transparency in Government.”
China's response was equally broad. It covered such areas as the government’s PRISM surveillance program, military drone strikes, solitary confinement within U.S. prisons, widespread gun violence in America, and high rates of unemployment, homelessness, and child labor. |
Saudi Arabia's break with Iran is widely seen as a symptom of the Saudi fear of an aggressive Tehran and the construction of a "Shiite Crescent" in the Arab Middle East that is encircling the Sunni Muslim-dominated kingdom. But there's also a strong domestic element to the concerns: the desperate desire by the Saudi ruling group to shift attention away from domestic troubles to foreign threats.
The Saudi government, led by nearly octogenarian King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud, is under pressure from numerous home-grown threats. There is stiff opposition to the king himself and his son, Mohammad bin Salman Al Saud, recently appointed Deputy Crown Prince and to other top jobs, thereby placing him in line for eventual kingship.
Reduction of gasoline subsidies hit hard at the poor. Sectarian tension persists, driven by the discontented second-class citizenry of Saudi Arabia's Shiite Muslim minority.
Many younger Saudis think the royal family is a bunch of corrupt degenerates. Large numbers of disaffected youth have gone to Syria to fight alongside the Islamic State. ISIS is an avowed enemy of the Saudi monarchy, which it views as unwilling to engage in a cleansing jihad against foreign and local enemies.
So in some ways, tension with Iran is a useful diversion from an internal crackdown. King Salman sent a tough message to opponents with the execution-by-beheading of 47 people he alleged were terrorists; 46 were Sunni Muslim Saudis. The Saudi Foreign ministry issued a statement to justify this housecleaning, which it said was "based on clear and undisputed physical evidence" of terrorism." Some of the charges dated back more than a decade. The show of brutal domestic scimitar-rattling was a vivid message to highlight just who is in charge.
Despite the clear internal motive for the executions, foreign commentators and government mostly focused on the killing of a single Shiite cleric, Nimer al-Nimer. Iran, a Shiite Islamic republic, which has set itself up as protector of Shiites everywhere, protested. A mob in Tehran trashed and torched the Saudi embassy.
The Saudis responded by cutting off diplomatic relations and got its allies, Kuwait, Bahrain and Sudan to do the same. The United Arab Emirates downgraded its relations.
The Saudi foreign ministry accused Iran of harboring terrorists and of "blatant intervention" in "Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon and Syria, where it has directly interfered through the revolutionary guard and the Shiite militias from Lebanon and other countries of the world, resulting in the killing of more than 250,000 Syrians."
Indeed, Iran's foreign policy worries the Saudis, who featured themselves Arab world leader and successor to historic Sunni Muslim domination of the region. To the north in Syria, the Saudis see Iran as backer of an Alawite minority regime that lords it over a Sunni Muslim majority. To the east, it sees Iran as sponsor of a restive Shiite majority in Sunni-ruled Bahrain. To the south, it regards Houthi Shiite rebels as an Iranian cat's paw fighting a Saudi-installed government. Iran influences a former Saudi client in Palestine, Hamas, with financial support.
And there are other alarming outside factors. The steep decline of oil prices and the feeling that the United States, its main post-World War II ally, has abandoned it. Exhibit A is President Obama's willingness to cut a nuclear deal with Iran without trying to curb Tehran's interventions on Saudi Arabia's doorstep.
The escalation of tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran is the latest episode in a 35-year old low-intensity conflict between the two regional powers. The competition took off in 1979, when the Shiite Islamic revolution triumphed in Iran. The new government solidified its hold on Iran with harsh Islamic moral and social restrictions and began to spread its influence outside by setting itself up as rival to the US, an enemy of Israel and supporter of non-state militias, foremost among them Lebanon's Hezbollah.
Saudi Arabia harbored its own designs for Middle East leadership and reacted by intensifying the spread its ultra-conservative Islamic ideology, Wahhabism. The Saudis funded mosques, trained preachers and supported insurgent and terrorist groups in places as far afield as Palestine and the North Caucasus.
This competition evolved in parallel to intermittent U.S. military and political interventions in the Middle East and the region's chronic instability. Following the disastrous Iraq adventure, the US withdrew from its dominant position in the Middle East, opening the way for regional rivals and secondary outside powers -- especially Russia and Turkey -- to enter the fray.
This tangle of internal and external crises represents a major existential crisis for a country once considered a lynchpin to Middle East stability. No more. Saudi Arabia is shoring up its internal controls in anticipation of a long struggle. |
The MoD is pouring millions of pounds into research on a “quantum compass” that will be far more accurate than GPS and immune to jammers or hackers, with potential applications in everything from nuclear submarines to your next smartphone.
Quantum technology is already being explored in universities and companies worldwide for potential applications in communications and computation, but several UK academic projects backed by cash from the MoD are focusing on how it can be used in sensing and precision timing - both of which could lead to a “game-changing” navigation device. It could also give birth to the most precise clock ever created.
The whole field hinges upon an unusual field of physics called quantum mechanics which explores how particles on a sub-atomic level can act as both a physical particle and an electromagnetic wave at the same time.
Quantum TNS (timing, navigation and sensing) involves cooling atoms down to temperatures a billion times colder than outer space. Unlike GPS, which relies on triangulation from a network of satellites, it very accurately measures movements from a known position to keep track of location.
With the first products expected in the next five years, its potential impact on the electronics, defence and telecommunications could be huge.
Currently submarines use GPS while surfaced but rely on crude accelerometers when underwater to track position with dead reckoning. But spending just one day underwater can lead to inaccuracy of up to a kilometre. With quantum TNS this error could be kept to as little as one metre.
To highlight the potential in this new area of technology a conference is taking place today at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington to showcase 13 new research projects being funded by DSTL to bring the technology to market.
Neil Stansfield, who is tasked with exploring “emerging and disruptive technologies” at the MoD’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, said that defence may be an early adopter of quantum TNS but that the civil market is “potentially enormous” and could see the technology built-in to cars and phones.
“We’ve done quite a lot of looking at the physics, and most of the basics are either proven or we know what needs to be done to prove it. The uncertainty is not ‘can we do it’, but ‘how long will it take’,” he said. “We’re at the beginning of a journey here.
“The size of the equipment we’re building is, if you imagine a shoebox that stretched out to about a metre long. That’s in one axis, so you’d need three of those to do 3D.”
When the first atomic clock was developed at the NPL it was the size of a room, now they are the size of a suitcase. It is hoped that navigation devices using quantum mechanics will follow the same rate of miniaturisation.
The idea is based on a Nobel Prize-winning theory which showed atoms could be frozen with a laser. In the navigation systems now being developed at the DSTL a vacuum container with between one and ten million atoms, all moving at around the speed of a jet aircraft, is hit by lasers and cooled to temperatures a billion times colder than outer space. These atoms at that point become coldest known bodies in the universe.
The atoms are slowed until they are moving at just a few millimetres a second. They can then be unfrozen for precise lengths of time to take exact measurements of how far they moved, therefore allowing precise calculations on how the whole device moved in that time or changes in gravitation. One problem yet to be overcome is that these two possibilities cannot be told apart – a large object to the north of the sensor would give the same reading as acceleration to the south. It is thought that maps showing high-gravitation areas will be able to solve this issue.
The speed with which this quantum TNS is adopted in commercial products is hard to predict, said Stansfield, and largely dependent on consumer demand. But the National Physical Laboratory’s Bob Cockshott said that there was definite potential.
“Maybe six or eight years ago the idea of every phone having GPS in it was ludicrous, now the chipset costs a couple of dollars. I think we'll see the same sort of trajectory here. Perhaps in a number of years these devices could be built-in to all devices,” he said. “The really pressing need now is for something that works when you can’t see the satellite. GPS is never going to tell you what floor of the car park you’re on.”
Cheap and compact laser technology has been developed by the telecoms industry, so much of the building blocks for these quantum TNS devices is ready to go, he said. And there will be applications long before it is minituarised to the extent needed to fit into smartphones: “That metre-long shoebox won’t fit in your pocket, but it certainly will fit in a modest-sized aircraft.” |
We’re still nowhere close to solving the password conundrum. Software solutions, such as password managers, have attempted to solve it by managing and encrypting all of your passwords with a master key. That’s convenient but, like all software, it isn’t a perfect solution but maybe hardware can help.
Mooltipass is a hardware gadget that physically stores your passwords. The Swiss startup has raised over $75,000 on its Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to build its new iteration, the Mooltipass Mini, a palm-sized device that should make carrying your passwords even easier.
The Mooltipass Mini connects to your computer or smartphone and stores your passwords using a PIN-protected smart card. When you get started, the Mooltipass browser extension or smartphone app asks you to enter your password for each account, which it then saves. It also acts as a USB keyboard for adding in passwords manually. After that you’ll only need to log in by connecting the device and hitting its login button. In theory, it cuts out the need to remember and enter passwords each time you login into a site.
mooltipass-login-phone More
The smart card that stores your authentication data is encrypted with AES-256 encryption, meaning multiple cards can be used with the device.
Related: Vaulteq’s physical password manager stores your data at home, not in the cloud
So far Mooltipass only has a Chrome extension, which will generate lengthy and tough passwords for you before saving them to your device. So while the device itself can be used with any OS, you still need to be a Chrome user. If you’re not a Chrome user, the startup says its currently developing and testing a Firefox version.
The successful crowdfunding campaign shows the prototype of the new Mini device and a number of test users have copies. The new funds will be used to advance the development of the device and make it commercially available. It will cost around $70, and has a planned January release.
For now, the appeal of the device is somewhat constrained by its Chrome limitation. It’s kind of reminiscent of Vaulteq, another physical password manager that’s trying to eradicate the password problem with a mini server that connects to your home router. Mooltipass on the other hand is designed for portability, which is a big plus.
Both devices have had successful crowdfunding campaigns. Whether physical password solutions will gain traction beyond the most security-conscious consumers, who have put down their money, remains to be seen. |
Donald Trump, a man who doesn’t know when to stop talking, wishes the US military would stop talking about its plans to help retake the ISIS-held city of Mosul.
During Wednesday's debate, Trump said Gens. George Patton and Douglas MacArthur would be "spinning in their grave" over the Pentagon’s public discussions of the ongoing push to reconquer Mosul, which began earlier this week. Trump has refused to answer any questions about his own strategy for fighting ISIS because he says he wants to maintain the element of surprise. On Wednesday, he said the US had tipped its hand too early, giving ISIS time to get key leaders out of the city and bolster its defenses.
"Why can't they do it quietly? Why can't they do the attack, make it a sneak attack, and after the attack is made, inform the American public that we've knocked out the leaders, we've had a tremendous success?" Trump had asked at an earlier debate. "Why do they have to say we're going to be attacking Mosul within the next four to six weeks?"
On its face, it seems like a reasonable question. The wars we see in movies and on TV tend to involve well-trained troops swooping in at night to overrun enemies who had no idea they were coming. They don’t tend to involve PowerPoint presentations with maps of the areas that will be hit and a rough chronology of how the attack will unfold.
Dig a little deeper, though, and it becomes clear that Trump is wrong on two counts. First, there are legitimate military and political reasons why operations as big as the coming Mosul fight can't be prepared in complete silence. And second, ISIS isn't stupid, and the US hasn't said anything publicly that the group didn't already know.
"An ISIS that didn’t know there’d be an attempt to retake Mosul would be an ISIS that was too stupid to have taken Mosul in the first place," said Stephen Biddle, a professor of political science and international relations at George Washington University. "If ISIS wasn’t already preparing, they’d be guilty of military negligence, and we would be delighted that they’re so incompetent."
Or as Michael Knights of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy put it, "There’s no sneaking up on the other side’s capital. We didn’t sneak up on Berlin in World War II, and we’re not going to do a surprise attack on Mosul either."
The war over the war for Mosul
Trump isn’t the first to accuse the Pentagon of giving away the store.
In February 2015, an unnamed officer from US Central Command, which oversees the war against ISIS, told reporters that the offensive to retake Mosul would begin that April or May and include up to 25,000 Iraqi and Kurdish security forces.
The level of detail — which included the directions the Kurds would attack from and the Pentagon’s plan to use former Mosul police officers in the fight — surprised reporters and prompted Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham to allege that Centcom had "knowingly briefed our own war plans to our enemies" and put US and Iraqi lives at risk.
The briefing also infuriated senior Iraqi officials, who hadn’t been notified in advance that the US planned to share so much. Iraqi Defense Minister Khaled al-Obeidi said at the time that Baghdad, not Washington, would decide when the assault began. "A military official should not reveal the timing of the offensive," Obeidi said.
A lot has changed since then, however. Backed by US airpower and military aid, Iraqi and Kurdish forces have rooted ISIS from its former strongholds in Ramadi and Fallujah and moved steadily closer to Mosul. The US estimates that ISIS has lost 47 percent of the territory it once held in Iraq.
On the ground, meanwhile, tens of thousands of Iraqi troops, Kurdish peshmerga, and Sunni tribal fighters are massing outside Mosul in advance of the attack.
That takes us to a broader point: Preparing to launch a massive military operation to retake Iraq’s second-largest city is not the kind of thing that can be done stealthily. It’s literally not possible to move tens of thousands of troops, heavy artillery, and other equipment to the outskirts of the city a couple of hours before the attack is supposed to begin.
Making matters even harder, the 20,000 to 30,000 troops that will take part in the offensive aren’t part of a central, unified command. Moving fighters from so many different groups — some members of a formal army, some just tribal fighters with minimal training — and all of their weapons and equipment into place around a city as big as Mosul takes a while. And the idea that all that activity would go unnoticed by ISIS fighters in Mosul and the surrounding areas beggars belief.
So even if the Obama administration hadn’t announced that it planned to retake Mosul soon, ISIS would still have known. They’re terrorists, not blind.
And indeed, the US buildup hasn’t gone unnoticed by ISIS, which has spent months fortifying its positions inside Mosul. That’s the other reason Trump is wrong to worry about the US losing the element of surprise. Washington never had it in the first place.
ISIS is already preparing for war — and has been for a long time
It’s been two years since Mosul fell to ISIS, which means that ISIS has had two years to stockpile weapons and build up an extensive network of defensive fortifications. Among them, according to CNN: oil-filled moats ringing the outskirts of the city that can "be set ablaze to obscure the vision of coalition air power."
Other news reports indicate that ISIS is building walls and trenches to make it harder for ground troops to enter Mosul while also digging tunnels so its fighters will be able to wage a guerrilla war inside the densely populated city.
Senior ISIS leaders, meanwhile, have already either fled Mosul or gone into hiding because of the unrelenting US effort to track and kill them from the air. The head of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, gave a triumphant public address after capturing the city in 2014. He hasn’t been seen in Mosul since.
"The idea that Baghdadi would have been hanging out in a cafe in Mosul drinking coffee if we hadn’t telegraphed that we’re coming is just silly," Biddle said.
And that, in a nutshell, is the single biggest problem with Trump’s argument.
There are aspects of the coming Mosul offensive that would without question do real damage if made public. ISIS would benefit from knowing the exact day the offensive will begin, the roads coalition troops will take into Mosul, the radio frequencies they’ll use to communicate, the buildings they plan to target, and other details about how the US and its allies hope to conquer the city.
The US hasn't disclosed any of those things. The Pentagon has hinted that the offensive would begin at the end of October or in early November, given a very broad estimate of the number of troops that will take part, and made the obvious points that the Kurds stationed north of the city would attack from the north while the Iraqi and tribal forces operating south of Mosul would move up from the south. It's hard to imagine the US getting more specific as the fighting draws nearer.
"On a daily basis, we’re using tactical surprise very effectively to kill ISIS leaders," Knights said. "When a basic guided bomb drops out of the air, they get no warning whatsoever. So we’re hardly excessively telegraphing many of the aspects of the campaign."
There’s good reason to talk about invading Mosul before the fighting starts
Announcing that a major military operation to kick ISIS out of one of its most important strongholds is just around the corner also has clear public relations value.
The anti-ISIS coalition runs the gamut from independence-minded Kurds to Sunni tribal fighters wary of what they see as a pro-Iranian government in Baghdad. Keeping them on the same page is easier when there’s tangible progress to point to — and when they can be told that the climactic battle for Mosul is imminent.
Talking up the offensive also offers a morale boost for the civilians trapped inside the city, since they’re now effectively being told, "Hold on a little longer — help is on the way."
Indeed, the US-led coalition has dropped fliers over the city promising the people there that they have not been forgotten and that they will be liberated for this same reason.
And, finally, it serves to counteract ISIS propaganda. ISIS’s Arabic motto translates to "enduring and expanding," and much of its appeal and legitimacy derives from its success on the battlefield and its control of a large swath of territory in Iraq and Syria that it claims is the caliphate reborn.
Defeating the group on the battlefield is hard, but counteracting its propaganda is even harder. That’s what makes the battle for Mosul so important. Taking back the city would deal ISIS a body blow militarily while also making its messages of strength and power ring hollow. And that’s something that would definitely be worth talking about. |
(Timeline 3177)-Portsmouth Class Lance Cruiser: First deployed in 2204, the Portsmouth class Lance Cruiser is among the most advanced warships in Her Majesty's Royal Star Navy. Partical Lance Technology was developed by a Joint Japanese/British program with information give to the US per the treaty of New New York in the 2186. In the 2190s, the Royal Star Navy invested research into minaturization in hopes of allowing smaller craft to be able to make us of this new technology, the end result was the Portsmouth class, putting a partical lance weapon in a cruiser sized warship.
The Portsmouth class is fairly lightly armored, but possesses heavy defensive screens. They are also somewhat ungainly for their level of armoring, being able to out accelerate a heavy cruiser but being outclassed by light cruisers and most battlecruisers. Despite this, it is quite heavily armed. It has a considerable point defense arsenal for a ship of it's size. Portsmouth class Cruisers have eight battleship level energy cannons and has sugnifigant capacator space. This means that it can fire off several fairly powerful broadsides in quick sucession before going down to a much slower recylce rate. It also can fire off six long range torpedos at once, but they have limited magazine space. The Lance itself is a weapon which must be used carfully, it takse a considerable amount of time to fully power and once fired, it leaves the ship with minimal acceleration, no screens and no power for it's heavy turrets for several minutes. As such, it is only to be used in scenarios where the Cruiser has considerable support or the destuction of the enemy warship is assured. It also carries a complement of 8 Fighters. This power does come at a price, however, as the Portsmouth class Lance Cruiser is among the most expensive ships in her class to produce. |
Inskeep Explores Growing Pains Of An 'Instant City'
Instant City Life and Death in Karachi by Steve Inskeep Hardcover, 284 pages | purchase close overlay Buy Featured Book Your purchase helps support NPR programming. How?
Pakistan's port city of Karachi is 30 times larger now than it was at the end of World War II. That tremendous growth caught the interest of NPR's Morning Edition co-host Steve Inskeep, who has made numerous reporting trips to Pakistan over the past decade. In his new book, Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi, Inskeep explores the growing pains — and the vitality — of a city experiencing explosive population growth.
"Karachi is an example of something that is happening all around the world," Inskeep tells Michele Norris on All Things Considered. "There's been an incredible growth of urban areas since the end of World War II even in the United States. [Metropolitan] Los Angeles is more than three times larger than it was. ... Houston is six times larger. Istanbul is 10 times larger. ... We could go around the world like this."
Inskeep set out to explore what happens when a city experiences this sort of rapid population expansion. "It's not just the birth rate; it's mass migration," he explains. "And that means it is different kinds of people coming together and clashing in this landscape that, for all of them, is entirely new. The city as we see it today didn't really exist 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago."
'Full Of Incredible Life'
When the partition of India took place in 1947, Karachi was a colonial port city of about 400,000 people. It's now grown into a crowded, industrial, polluted city of more than 13 million people, Inskeep says. "There are red streams going down the streets that people say are pollution from tanneries. There's raw sewage going into the harbor. But at the same time, it's a city full of incredible life and incredible improvisation."
Real estate around the city is often taken illegally. Building, buying and selling houses often revolves around bribes. "In many ways, it's a city that lives beyond the law, but it's a city that lives and a city that has a vibrancy to it that's hard to find elsewhere," Inskeep says.
Enlarge this image toggle caption Linda Fittante/Penguin Group Steve Inskeep is co-host of NPR's Morning Edition. Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi is his first book. Linda Fittante/Penguin Group
In Instant City, Inskeep makes the counterintuitive argument that as Karachi becomes a less diverse place, it actually becomes a more dangerous place. When India and Pakistan were divided into two separate countries in 1947, one was meant to be majority Hindu and the other majority Muslim.
"There was a mass exodus of people who found themselves on the wrong side of the dividing lines," Inskeep says. "Hindus left Karachi by the hundreds of thousands, and even more Muslims came. You would think that would make it more stable. It actually became less stable over time."
A Place Of Opportunity
In a city that has grown so fast over a relatively short period of time, growing pains are acute; local conflicts over power, money and land lead to violence, Inskeep says. But in many ways, the city benefited from its instant and explosive growth — it has become resilient and vital.
"People come to this place that we think of as being terrible and polluted and poor, because it's actually rich," Inskeep says. "There's a lot of money to be made in Karachi even though there are a lot of poor people, and people will come from the countryside seeking jobs ... seeking education."
Better urban planning would help, but it's been hard to achieve. In Karachi and in other fast-growing cities around the world, when urban planners have attempted to manage growth, the cities have continued to expand beyond the capacity.
To people in the West, "instant cities" like Karachi are often seen as teeming metropolises that are plagued by poverty and blight. But for those who come from places where the poverty is even worse, these huge metropolises are shining cities, full of promise and potential.
"There are shining glass towers in Karachi," Inskeep says. "Not as many as people would like there to have been by this point, but there are some. You do have people who ... see the city as a glittering opportunity, an opportunity for jobs, for connections, for a future."
A Barometer For The Region
Inskeep sees many possibilities for the future of Karachi, a city situated in one of the most troubled parts of the world. "Pakistan has real demons to wrestle with," Inskeep says. "Pakistan has been facing year after year after year of bad news."
Karachi's great growth is in some ways a symbol of deep distress, although it is also a symbol of hope, because it is people still driving to make their lives better.
The rise of militant and extremist Islamic groups has troubled the citizens of a country that was once safer and more tolerant, says Inkseep: "You'll hear people saying, 'I don't recognize the country that I once knew.' "
The population growth in Karachi is a "barometer," Inkseep believes, for what's happening elsewhere in the country. "The more trouble there is in Pakistan — whether it's political, religious violence, the climate events like the ... disastrous floods the last couple of years — each one of these kinds of events tends to drive people toward a city where they have a little better chance of improving their lot, a little better chance of getting an education, finding a job."
So the tremendous growth Karachi has seen can be seen in two ways — a negative push or a positive pull. "Karachi's great growth is in some ways a symbol of deep distress," Inskeep says, but "it is also a symbol of hope, because it is people still driving to make their lives better." |
Costco, the US-based chain of warehouse stores, opened its first branch in Iceland on May 23. This year.
To call this a big event in Iceland’s consumer landscape is an understatement. One in eight Icelanders had already signed up for membership by the time doors opened in a Reykjavik suburb. Units from the country’s famed search and rescue teams were called in to manage crowd control on opening day.
A Facebook group called Keypt í Costco Ísl.—Myndir og verð (Bought in Costco Iceland— Pictures and prices) has more than 62,000 members, one-fifth the national population of 334,000. There, members compare breathless notes on the prices of big screen TVs, multi-packs of frozen Indian samosas, mixed-nut canisters the size of small dogs, and toilet paper.
It’s not just about the nuts. For many shoppers, the opening of a chain like Costco is a chance to stick it to a really unpopular group in Iceland: other chain stores.
“People are excited about [Costco] because it is a chance to boycott the big chains that control all the prices and show that people will not have it any longer,” one Iceland native now living in California told Quartz.
Prices for food and other consumer goods in Iceland are more than 70% higher than US equivalents. Gasoline prices are among the highest in Europe. Price comparison is something of a national obsession. Neytandinn, an app that lets users compare consumer purchase receipts, is the number one app in Iceland for both Android and iOS, a local news site reported. Users jumped by one-third in the days after Costco opened.
Several factors keep prices high, notably the costs of labor and shipping. But another key reason identified in a 2015 OECD report is lack of competition. Many of the Facebook group’s post are less complimentary of Costco than they are critical of Bónus, Krónan and Nettó, the country’s three main grocery chains.
Costco’s relatively inexpensive gasoline, now the cheapest available in Iceland, has led to criticism of the country’s fuel suppliers, long suspected of collaborating to keep prices high. The new Costco charges 169.9 Icelandic krónur per liter, the equivalent of $6.40 per US gallon. A liter of gas at a typical non-Costco pump is 198.9 krónur, or $7.50 per gallon.
“It’s great to see that we’re getting some real competition on this market,” Runólfur Ólafsson, managing director of Iceland’s auto association told a local news source. Local fuel companies, he said, “owe an explanation to Icelandic consumers.” |
LOS ANGELES -- When Los Angeles Clippers coach Doc Rivers called his son Austin and asked if he wanted to play for him, the younger Rivers said he needed time to think about it and make a phone call.
"The first thing I did was call my mom," Austin Rivers said. "She's going to have to deal with this. She was a wreck the first night. She was calling me, 'What if this happens and what if that happens?' I was like, 'Mom, it's not on anybody but me and him.' At the end of the day, my job is to play and compete and that's it. It's not like in the last second of the game I'm going to have the ball in my hands. I know my role here. I know Chris [Paul] and Blake [Griffin] are the leaders."
Editor's Picks Pelton: Clippers get F for Rivers deal Kevin Pelton serves up his grades for the three-team trade in which the Los Angeles Clippers got Austin Rivers.
It was never Austin's dream to play for his dad, and it was never Doc's dream to coach his son. In fact, both of them have been on the record in the past saying they would like to stay in their separate lanes. But when Austin became available at the same time the Clippers were looking for a defensive-minded guard to help spark the second unit, Doc and particularly those around him couldn't ignore the opportunity, regardless of the unique circumstances.
"The group around me, our coaches, [general manager] Dave Wohl and [vice president of basketball operations] Kevin Eastman said he fits our team," Doc said. "For me I was like, 'I don't know,' but at the end of the day my job is to do what I think is best for the team, not what's best for me or what's comfortable for me. We felt like this was. That probably swayed me more than the father part swayed me, I can tell you that. I was probably on the other way that way, but as far as an executive I had to think of it in those terms, and it made sense for us."
Doc still had to discuss the deal with Austin -- who had been traded from New Orleans to Boston in a three-team deal last week -- and see if he was willing to play for his father.
"He's always done his thing and I've done mine, and to be honest I never thought something like this would happen," Austin said. "He called me up and asked me, 'Is this something you might be interested in because we need you.' When I heard that it was one of those things I had to think. I had to take a day to myself and think could this work, and it does."
Rivers came into the game without any practice, having spent the last four days in New Orleans waiting for the trade to be finalized.
A father had never coached his son in an NBA game before Friday, until Austin made his Clippers debut in the first quarter of Friday night's 126-121 loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers. He shot 0-for-4 from the field and 0-for-2 from 3-point range with one assist and one turnover in 12 minutes of action.
"I was thinking too much," he said afterward. "I was trying to be perfect and please everybody."
And while it would appear to be difficult waters to navigate for any parent and a child, Austin said before the game that his relationship with his father makes it easier than most.
Austin was raised in Orlando, Florida, went to Duke, and was drafted by New Orleans while Doc coached the Boston Celtics from 2004 to '13.
"The relationship I have with him is already basketball-oriented," Austin said. "He was in Boston and I grew up in Orlando. It's not so much like father-son, it's coach-player. Off the court, we deal with that a different way."
Austin Rivers slaps hands with father Doc during his Clippers debut Friday night in Los Angeles. AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill
Off the court, Austin wasn't just dealing with his mother and father; he was getting calls from his brother, Spencer, a freshman at UC Irvine; his other brother, Jeremiah; and sister, Callie, who all live in Los Angeles. They all wanted him to come there.
"My brother plays out here and he said come so you can watch my games, I don't even think he was thinking for me, he was thinking for himself," Austin said. "My sister works out here, too, and I don't really get to see them that much. It was one of things when the decision happened, I called my mom first and then after that my brothers and my friends called me and said I should do it. Not just because of my father but because it's a good opportunity to help a team that's right there. When I look at it that way there's no reason not to come here."
Rivers was averaging 6.8 points, 2.5 assists and 1.9 rebounds this season in 35 games in 22.1 minutes before being traded. Rivers has started only three games this season and seven over the past two seasons. He is shooting just 38.7 percent from the field and 28 percent from 3-point range in 2014-15.
New Orleans drafted Austin with the No. 10 pick in the 2012 draft, which the team had acquired from the Clippers as part of the trade for Chris Paul. Rivers, 22, entered the draft after just one year in college. He would currently be in the midst of his senior year at Duke had he stayed in school.
Austin was born in Santa Monica, California, and lived in Southern California for two years while his father was a player for the Clippers during the 1991-92 season.
Austin dismissed any notion that his father would give him preferential treatment regardless of how he is playing.
"My dad is too focused on his thing for that to even be an issue; that's almost a disrespectful thing to my dad," Austin said. "My dad would never, ever play me over somebody because I'm his son. If I'm not playing well, I'm sitting on the bench. He wants to win. My dad's the type of guy when I was 5 years old, we played checkers and he would not let me win. That's just how he is. He's not doing any favors for me."
Doc and Austin didn't foresee any chemistry issues in the locker room after the trade, and Austin believes the players already in the locker room will actually make the transition easier for him.
"I have to earn everything here, and the guys know that," Austin said. "If we didn't have high-character guys here I don't think he would have made the move, but they're all high-character guys and they know I will play because I should play, and if I shouldn't, I won't. I'm just here to have a good attitude and help the team."
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report. |
NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) - Most women would marry for love over money — unless the man is unemployed, according to a new survey.
A man puts an engagement ring on a woman's finger during a photo opportunity at a jewellery store in Tokyo June 2, 2009. REUTERS/Yuriko Nakao
Three out of four women said they would not wed someone without a job, and 65 percent would feel uncomfortable tying the knot if they themselves were jobless.
But more than 91 percent of single women said they would marry for love over money.
“It is ironic that women place more weight on love than money, yet won’t marry if they or their potential suitor is unemployed,” said Meghan Casserly, of ForbesWoman which conducted the survey with the website YourTango.com.
Even more telling, she said, is that 77 percent of women surveyed believe they can have it all — a fulfilling relationship and family life, as well as a successful career.
But 63 percent of women said they work 40-59 hours, and 62 percent of women in a relationship said they spend just three waking hours or less with their partner during the work week.
“The career is really taking the No. 1 position for working women,” Casserly said. “It’s pretty ironic that this number of women believe they can have everything. How? When?”
Two out of five women in a relationship said their job was most likely to keep them up at night, according to the poll of 625 women. Job responsibilities and love life tied as the factors most likely to keep single women awake.
Thirty-two percent of women said they make more money than their partner and half said they would marry someone who earned significantly less than them, while 41 percent wouldn’t.
Fifty-five percent of women said they would give up their career to take care of children if their partner asked them to do so. But only 28 percent would ask the same of their partner.
If women could find an extra hour in each day, 42 percent would spend it by themselves, instead of with their partner, friends or family or on work.
The survey results are available here and here |
Actress Angelina Jolie leaves Lancaster House after attending the G8 Foreign Minsters' conference on April 11, 2013 in London, England. - Oli Scarff/Getty Images
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Update: This story has been updated with a comment from Myriad Genetics.
Angelina Jolie wrote an Op-Ed in today's New York Times about her decision to have a double mastectomy. The actress didn't have breast cancer, but tests showed she had almost a 90 percent chance of developing it. The key was finding a mutation in a gene known as BRCA-1, and Jolie appealed for the test to be made more accessible to women around the world.
At the moment, if you want to get tested for a mutation on your BRCA-1 or BRCA-2 genes, you will have to turn to Myriad Genetics. That's the company that discovered the link between those mutations and an elevated risk cancer -- and it patented the BRCA-1 and BRCA-2 genes.
The price tag on a BRCA-1 and BRCA -2 test? More than $4,000.
"Because Myriad has a monopoly on the genetic testing, they determine the cost of that test," says Sandra Park, senior staff attorney at the ACLU's Women's Rights Project. Park argued before the Supreme Court last month that Myriad shouldn’t be able to patent a gene and control research.
One of the main arguments against gene patents is that they hamper scientific progress.
"The charge has been that patents reduce the willingness of researchers to explore in the same genetic area, because they have to pay fees," says Art Caplan, director of medical ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center.
Biotech companies say they need patents to help fund research. Myriad spent $500 million developing its BRCA tests. The company declined to comment to Marketplace before deadline. Myriad subsequently issued a statement saying its diagnostic tests can reduce illness and potentially lower health-care costs by preventing cancer treatments. It added that more than one million women have been tested, and thanks to health insurance, their average cost was about $100.
The BRCA gene tests account for more than 80 percent of Myriad's sales. That revenue would be at risk if the Supreme Court rules against the company next month.
"Let me tell you, it would be problematic for Myriad," says Les Funtleyder, a health-care strategist for investment firm Poliwogg.
Still, Funtleyder says, most biotech companies don’t rely on patenting a certain gene, so the Supreme Court decision is unlikely to have a huge impact on the industry.
"It might put a damper on things," he says, "but I don't think it's going to be a deal-breaker for genetic analysis."
For now, though, Myriad is riding high. Thanks in part to Angelina Jolie’s New York Times Op-Ed, shares of Myriad rose three percent today.
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The rift between President Obama and FBI Director James B. Comey over the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement deepened Thursday, with the White House again disputing Mr. Comey’s assertion that it’s the cause of spiking crime in major cities.
“We just need to make sure that our policy approach to addressing this situation is rooted in evidence and facts,” said White House press secretary Josh Earnest. “It’s clear that we don’t have enough evidence at this point.”
For the second time in recent months, Mr. Comey said Wednesday that he believes a spike in violent crime in many cities may be due to officers’ fears of appearing on Internet videos confronting suspects. He told reporters that a “viral video effect” is leading to less aggressive policing that “could well be at the heart” of an increase in murders in many cities.
“There’s a perception that police are less likely to do the marginal additional policing that suppresses crime — the getting out of your car at two in the morning and saying to a group of guys, ‘Hey, what are you doing here?’” Mr. Comey said.
Although violent crime rates nationwide are near historic lows, a surge in more than 40 big cities is causing concern across government agencies trying to understand and respond. Crime rates have risen in those cities in the first three months of 2016, according to a briefing the FBI director received on Wednesday.
He said two cities that stood out especially in the latest tallies were Las Vegas and Chicago. In Chicago murders are up 54 percent and shootings up 70 percent over the same period last year.
“I don’t know what the answer is, but holy cow do we have a problem,” he said. “It’s a complicated, hard issue, but the stakes couldn’t be higher. A whole lot of people are dying.”
Last fall, Mr. Comey referred to the trend as “the Ferguson effect,” a reference to the Missouri city where a white officer shot unarmed black teen Michael Brown, sparking the Black Lives Matter movement, with which the president has expressed support.
Mr. Earnest said Mr. Obama last year directed the Justice Department to work with communities affected by the surge in violent crime, resulting in a program to capture more violent fugitives.
“That six-week initiative resulted in the arrest of more than 8,000 gang members, sex offenders and other violent criminals,” Mr. Earnest said. “That is an indication of the important role that federal law enforcement can play in supporting the work of local law enforcement in these communities.”
But he said Mr. Comey really doesn’t know the reasons for the surge in urban crime.
“The FBI director actually made clear that he didn’t know exactly what was going on either,” Mr. Earnest said. “The president’s point is we need to make policy decisions that are based on facts and evidence and not anecdotes. There is still no evidence to substantiate the claim that the increase in violent crime is related to an unwillingness of police officers to do their job.”
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission. |
File sharing services are not as popular today as they were four years ago. It’s not that people are sharing any less. Rather, they just found easier ways to do it. Would you upload a funny video from a friend’s email to any of those services or would you search for it on Youtube and share only the link? Would you upload an MP3 file in order to share with whomever, or would you search for it online, grab the link and then share it? And finally, would you use a file-sharing app just to share a picture on Facebook when you can do it directly from your desktop to your Facebook profile? Of course, you wouldn’t!
So why would you use an file-sharing app anyway? Actually for many reasons: for larger files, for privacy, multiple files, file format support, and more.
In this post, I compare 16 file-sharing services. I took three main issues under consideration when creating the comprehensive app list below: Free, Fast, and Useful . . .
Most of the services suggested require no registration. None of them will ask you to download anything to your computer, and all of them are easy to use, and worth using. It is actually great to see services, such as Yousendit, MailBigFile, and Rapidshare, that are still relevant and are good choices, but if I had to pick one it would be Mediafire.
Don’t get confused now. This is not a list of services that let you store all your files in the cloud, organizes them, or allows you to collaborate with friends. It’s more focused on file-sharing only, in the richest capacity—well, okay, you be the judge of that.
Box.net is probably the most commonly-known site featured here. But I couldn’t keep it from the list because it’s really a good one and despite all its features, it’s actually simple to use. The light version is not so attractive though. Here’s what you get: File uploads up to 25MB/file (OK, that’s pretty lame). 5 collaboration folders, 1GB storage, mobile access, public file sharing, folder widget, and a few more options. The other plans are far richer, but for personal use, the free one is enough (except for the lame file uploads limit). One thing that bothered me is that you can’t upload a file without signing up. That’s the old fashion way, don’t you think?
Rapidshare is lacking in features & design, but if you’re looking for a one-click file host, you came to the right place. Founded in 2006, the service is the twelfth most visited homepage in the world. With Rapidshare, users can upload big files (200MB) in one step and subsequently make them available to friends and family via the download link. Premium accounts offer additional convenience, through TrafficShare that provides the option to make files available for direct downloading. The recipient of the file can access it instantaneously even if he/she is not a premium account member of RapidShare. A file can be downloaded 10 times, and will be deleted after 90 days.
I always liked drop.io and even now with much more usage than before, it is still simple to understand. No need to sign up in order to quickly send a private link with your file(s). Maximum file upload is 100MB, but there are three different packages that will give you a whole lot more. Back to the free service; you can share, collaborate, and present music, videos, documents, audio, in a private drop, through email, web, phone, fax, and more. Additionally, you’ll be able to privately chat with the people you share a file with, in real-time.
Filedropper aims to give the most basic file hosting service that enables you to share stuff quickly. Therefore, there’s nothing complicated here, just upload the file, and share it. Simple as that. Filedropper says you can upload up to 5GB per file, which looks a bit odd to me – after all, who needs that (unless you are transferring HD videos, I guess)? Very similar to Filedropper, is FileSavr, which offers you the same package completely, with a slight change: uploads up to 10GB per file…
I actually marked this one as a favorite: Wikisend – an elegant and simple interface that helps you share files quickly. Share files with your friends using email, social networks, your blog, forums and so on. You can also protect the file with a password and choose the range of the file’s lifetime up to 90 days (max)
You can use Driveway even without registration and send up to 500MB max for each upload. Signing up for a free account offers several advantages: A registered user can upload up to 2 GB of data to the Driveway account. Additionally, you can upload, manage and create widgets for files and folders and search for files/folders within your account.
With the free plan of Send6, you can send files up to 100MB size, which you can store in your 250MB free space. Send6 also has a free plug-in for Outlook that allows you to send large files directly from your Desktop. Please note that you don’t need to register to send files to friends. Sharing is done via email only.
Zshare is mainly used to share files that are too big to be sent via e-mail. With Zshare you can host files, images, videos, audio and flash in the same place, and as long as they remain active they can be downloaded limitlessly. Zshare lets you upload files up to 1GB, and if you register for the service (still free), you’ll be able to share them privately. Premium members get faster downloads (like most of the services here) and the ability to upload up to 2GB per each upload. Multiple files are allowed in both free and premium lines.
Overall, 2large2email has a nice and comfortable email-like interface for sharing large files. How large? 100MB in the free plan. However, if you’re looking for something good and free, 2larg2email is not your answer. The service won’t give you any additional features but password protection, and your files can be downloaded up to 7 times, will be saved for only 7 days, and will expire after that. For more features, you’ll have to pay, or move and chose another service. BTW, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t pay for premium services, but if there are other services for personal use, that offer you more for less, you may want to check them out first.
For busy people, Senduit is the best choice there is! It’s a one-page platform that generates a private link from the file you upload (100MB Max) for easy sharing. You can send the link via email through Senduit’s page directly, or copy-paste the link to any other communication channel (IM, Social networks, etc.). You get to choose when the link will expire—from 30 min. to 1 week.
I couldn’t find the exact amount that you can upload per file to Flyupload, but the service looks great. Flyupload allows you to store, access, share and backup your digital documents, photographs, and music easily with complete privacy online. Registered users get extra features like 2GB space of files, Multi-uploads with an upload progress bar. You can also upload large files via FTP or create folders and keep track of files and Images. Additionally, Flyupload lets you share files from your database, to your Twitter account with a side tool called: Flyontwit.
If I had to choose one service only from this list, Mediafire would be it. The service has a good looking UI, with some great usability. It lets you share files even when you’re not logged in and gives you a set of tools to complete this experience. For individual use, you can freely share files up to 100MB with unlimited uploads, unlimited downloads, unlimited bandwidth, and unlimited storage. This is why you might choose Mediafire over 2large2email, for example. When signing up, Mediafire enables you to organize your files in folders, search and view your files, and email/share/embed with others. It’s the best service that you can get for free.
I was surprised to see that underneath the new layout of DivShare is the same great service from three years ago. And, even more surprised to discover some files I had stored 3 years ago in the service are still there! DivShare is a file management service that not only lets you share files, but also saves them for later (for an unlimited period of time). The maximum size per file is 200MB and you have 5GB space for free to start. After the upload, you’ll be able to embed your videos, audio and slide shows on any web site or profile. Diveshare has an iPhone and Facebook applications, a WordPress plug-in and an open API, if you want to build something yourself.
Back when I tried MailBigFile in 2005, I thought this was a great service that offered a convenient solution to sending larger files. I still think it’s a good service. You don’t need to sign up, but if you choose to this is the best pro account for your dollar. Even though, you can use the service for free and as long as you want to send up to 200MB per file via email (but with no additional features). MailBigFile has the best price for a pro account – $15/year with an impressive list of features.
Last but not least is good old Yousendit, which has never plummeted in its presence online. A reliable and secure service since 2004 that offers the ability to send free 100MB files with a maximum number of 100 downloads allowed per file. You use it just like an email, choose a recipient, send it directly to a person’s inbox, and you get a notification when your file is downloaded.
Sharing files, large or small, should be a simple act, in my opinion—not something that should require a major effort or thought process on your behalf or make you create a complicated profile/account to use it. The options I listed here will help you explore the diverse file-sharing opportunities currently available. Whether you need to send a file privately or publicly, small or big, temporary or permanent, the options are all in this list, you just need to find the best match for your needs.
(Folder graphic by Photoxpress) |
"The drink which enables a man to magnify his joy, and his happiness."
There’s little in life better than pouring a double whiskey and sitting down to relax after a long day.
Whether you drink Scotch, rye, or bourbon, you are in the company of some of the world’s finest minds and characters. Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, and James Joyce all enjoyed a dram, and they had no reservations about speaking publicly on the subject.
To help inspire your deeper investigation of whiskey (or your next whiskey bar outing), we’ve put together a list of the romantic, funny, and even wistful things that celebrated wits, writers, politicians, and even athletes have said about their beloved booze.
Scroll down to read our favorite whiskey-related musings.
Mark Twain
In three words: Besuited American humorist
Thoughts on whiskey: “Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whiskey is barely enough.”
“Give an Irishman lager for a month, and he’s a dead man. An Irishman is lined with copper, and the beer corrodes it. But whiskey polishes the copper and is the saving of him.”
Raymond Chandler
In three words: Novelist and screenwriter
Thoughts on whiskey: “There is no bad whiskey. There are only some whiskeys that aren’t as good as others.”
Winston Churchill
In three words: British Prime Minister
Thoughts on whiskey: “The water was not fit to drink. To make it palatable, we had to add whisky. By diligent effort, I learned to like it.”
Tommy Cooper
In three words: British prop comedian
Thoughts on whiskey: “I’m on a whisky diet. I’ve lost three days already.”
Humphrey Bogart
In three words: American actor, Casablanca
Thoughts on whiskey: His last words were, “I should never have switched from Scotch to Martinis.”
Johnny Carson
In three words: Late Night host
Thoughts on whiskey: “Happiness is having a rare steak, a bottle of whisky, and a dog to eat the rare steak.”
Joel Rosenberg
In three words: American author, strategist
Thoughts on whiskey: “I’m a simple man. All I want is enough sleep for two normal men, enough whiskey for three, and enough women for four.”
Abraham Lincoln
In three words: 16th U.S. president
Thoughts on whiskey: “Tell me what brand of whiskey that Grant drinks. I would like to send a barrel of it to my other generals.”
Tug McGraw
In three words: MLB relief pitcher
Thoughts on whiskey: “Ninety percent I’ll spend on good times, women, and Irish Whiskey. The other ten percent I’ll probably waste.”
Alexander Fleming
In three words: Scottish inventor, penicillin
Thoughts on whiskey: “A good gulp of hot whiskey at bedtime—it’s not very scientific, but it helps.”
Errol Flynn
In three words: Swashbuckling movie star
Thoughts on whiskey: “I like my whisky old and my women young.”
Compton MacKenzie
In three words: Proud Scotsman, writer
Thoughts on whiskey: “Love makes the world go round? Not at all. Whiskey makes it go round twice as fast.”
Nguyen Cao Ky
In three words: Vietnamese political leader
Thoughts on whiskey: “Americans are big boys. You can talk them into almost anything. Just sit with them for half an hour over a bottle of whiskey and be a nice guy.”
Ava Gardner
In three words: Glamorous movie star
Thoughts on whiskey: ”I wish to live to 150 years old, but the day I die, I wish it to be with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of whiskey in the other.”
Haruki Murakami
In three words: Japanese bestselling author
Thoughts on whiskey: “Whiskey, like a beautiful woman, demands appreciation. You gaze first, then it’s time to drink.”
George Bernard Shaw
In three words: Irish playwright, Pygmalion
Thoughts on whiskey: “Whisky is liquid sunshine.”
W.C. Fields
In three words: American funnyman, actor
Thoughts on whiskey: “Always carry a flagon of whiskey in case of snakebite and furthermore always carry a small snake.”
“Drown in a cold vat of whiskey? Death, where is thy sting?”
Andrew Jackson
In three words: Wild 7th president
Thoughts on whiskey: “I have never in my life seen a Kentuckian who didn’t have a gun, a pack of cards, and a jug of whiskey.”
William Faulkner
In three words: Celebrated Southern author
Thoughts on whiskey: “My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.”
James Joyce
In three words: Dubliners and Ulysses
Thoughts on whiskey: “The light music of whiskey falling into a glass—an agreeable interlude.”
Igor Stravinsky
In three words: Russian pianist, composer
Thoughts on whiskey: “My God, so much I like to drink Scotch that sometimes I think my name is Igor Stra-whiskey.”
Noah “Soggy” Sweat
In three words: Southern legislator, judge
Thoughts on whiskey: Sweat gave his famous “If-by-whiskey” speech to the Mississippi legislature in 1953. Author John Grisham’s reading begins at 5:04 in the clip below.
“I had not intended to discuss this controversial subject at this particular time. However, I want you to know that I do not shun controversy. On the contrary, I will take a stand on any issue at any time, regardless of how fraught with controversy it might be. You have asked me how I feel about whiskey. All right, here is how I feel about whiskey.
If when you say whiskey you mean the devil’s brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster, that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home, creates misery and poverty, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children; if you mean the evil drink that topples the Christian man and woman from the pinnacle of righteous, gracious living into the bottomless pit of degradation, and despair, and shame and helplessness, and hopelessness, then certainly I am against it.
But; If when you say whiskey you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the ale that is consumed when good fellows get together, that puts a song in their hearts and laughter on their lips, and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes; if you mean Christmas cheer; if you mean the stimulating drink that puts the spring in the old gentleman’s step on a frosty, crispy morning; if you mean the drink which enables a man to magnify his joy, and his happiness, and to forget, if only for a little while, life’s great tragedies, and heartaches, and sorrows; if you mean that drink, the sale of which pours into our treasuries untold millions of dollars, which are used to provide tender care for our little crippled children, our blind, our deaf, our dumb, our pitiful aged and infirm; to build highways and hospitals and schools, then certainly I am for it.
This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise.”
RELATED: How to Make Your Own Fireball Whiskey
[via Whisky Recommender, Goodreads] |
Gander Mountain closing 3 Houston-area stores as it files for bankruptcy
File photo of a Gander Mountain grand opening in Laredo. File photo of a Gander Mountain grand opening in Laredo. Image 1 of / 60 Caption Close Gander Mountain closing 3 Houston-area stores as it files for bankruptcy 1 / 60 Back to Gallery
Gander Mountain filed for bankruptcy Friday and said it expects to attract a buyer as the company lowers its operating costs as part of its restructuring.
The company expects to close 10 of its 22 stores in Texas. In the Houston area, that includes stores at 13441 Westheimer Road, 19820 Hempstead Highway and 19890 Southwest Freeway in Sugar Land
In all the St. Paul, Minn.-based chain of 162 stores in 26 states is closing 32 stores over the next several weeks.
Gander Mountain said it is in active discussions with a number of parties interested in a going-concern sale and expects to solicit bids prior to an auction to be held in late April. The company expects to submit the winning bid to the bankruptcy court for approval in early May and anticipates a completing the sale by May 15.
Here's a list of store closings:
Texas (10) - Houston, Killeen, Laredo, Lubbock, Round Rock, San Antonio, Sugar Land, Texarkana, Waco, West Houston
Alabama (4) - Gadsden, Mobile, Montgomery, Tuscaloosa
Georgia (3) - Augusta, McDonough, Snellville
Illinois (3) - Champaign, Algonquin, Springfield
Indiana (2) - Merrillville, Greenfield
Minnesota (3) - Rogers, Mankato, Woodbury
New York (1) - New Hartford
North Carolina (2) - Raleigh, South Charlotte
Tennessee (1) - Chattanooga
West Virginia (1) - Charleston
Wisconsin (2) - Eau Claire, Germantown |
NBC's "Constantine" isn't hitting small screens until October, but already the show has fans agitated. The drama, based on the DC comics franchises "Hellblazer" and "Constantine," centers on the adventures of con man and supernatural detective John Constantine. Some fans are concerned about the accuracy of the character, not because of the costume or the powers, but because of the title character's sexuality.
In the "Hellblazer" comic books, John Constantine is shown as having both male and female lovers, though his sexuality is never explicitly labeled. NBC's version, however, has only planned female love interests for the character. Executive producer Daniel Cerone told Entertainment Weekly at the Television Critics Association’s press tour on Sunday that the character's sexuality was not integral to the character, stating, "In those comic books, John Constantine aged in real time. Within this tome of three decades [of comics] there might have been one or two issues where he’s seen getting out of bed with a man. So [maybe] 20 years from now? But there are no immediate plans.”
While it is true that the majority of Constantine's conquests have been female, many fans feel that this is straight-washing, or changing a LGBTQ character into a straight one. Voicing their concerns on social media over the past few days, comic fans have argued that bisexual men are an underrepresented group in the media and changing the sexuality of a queer character is erasure. Fans have flooded Tumblr and Twitter with the hashtag #BiBlazer, calling for people to contact NBC on their social media pages and request that Constantine be written as bisexual.
The character's sexuality hasn't been a big plot point in his latest solo series, "Constantine." But there are at least two instances from Constantine's decades-long history that seem hard to ignore. The first is in "Hellblazer" issue #51, in which Constantine thinks to himself (in this panel), "Girlfriends, the odd boyfriend... they all have a nasty habit of walking out on me." The other is a sexual relationship between Constantine and wizard S.W. Manor that occurs during the "Hellblazer: Highwater" arc (though Constantine was conning the wizard at the time). The 2005 film "Constantine," starring Keanu Reeves, does not explicitly state the character's sexuality. |
PORT WASHINGTON, N.Y. (MarketWatch) -- What's plaguing the financial markets these days is not a lack of liquidity but a lack of confidence and this won't be restored unless and until policymakers address its root cause: falling home prices.
As I have said many times before, policymakers are treating the symptoms when instead they should be trying to cure the disease.
The Federal Reserve's offer to swap Treasury securities for certain types of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) is the latest example.
This arrangement may temporarily boost prices of these MBSs by taking some of the supply off the market, but it won't last for two reasons: (1) the central bank plans to hold these securities for only 28 days and (2) the home values that form the basis for these securities are still declining.
Until home prices stop falling, MBS values won't stabilize. And until MBS values do stabilize, lenders will continue to be wary since they will remain unsure of this and just about every other form of collateral save for the safest Treasuries.
To stabilize home prices, I suggested in my column of Feb. 4 that the government step in and split the difference between prices sellers are charging and those that buyers are willing to pay. See related column.
While the notion of stabilizing home prices has been accepted, my suggestion has been criticized for a number of reasons. Either it was misunderstood, was viewed as unattractive politically, or was seen as a bailout for sellers.
To address these issues, I have come up with another idea. Washington should form an agency akin to the Home Owners' Loan Corporation of the 1930s, an agency that refinanced homes during the Great Depression in an effort to prevent foreclosures.
While some people were able to hang onto their homes, many defaulted and the HOLC wound up owning these homes. However, it sold them and by the time this agency closed its doors in the early 1950s, it actually returned a small profit to the government.
I envision HOLC II offering to buy all houses for sale at a price not more than three times the median household income in each market. It would then offer to sell these homes to prospective buyers.
This could not be construed as a bailout, since many sellers would take a loss -- how much depending on when they bought and how overheated their particular market became.
Also, it would not rescue homeowners who bought more house than they should have or took out one home-equity loan too many and are now "upside down" (they owe more than their house is worth).
But by returning home prices to a more normal ratio relative to incomes, it would make housing affordable once again. This would get buyers back into the game, but even more important, it would establish a basis for valuing the plethora of mortgage-backed securities that have permeated the financial markets.
The markets might be able to do this on their own, but as we saw this week, it could be painful -- not to say prolonged -- and it runs the risk of overshooting.
For this gambit to work, HOLC II would not have to buy every house that's up for sale. Indeed, its very offer to buy might be sufficient to end housing's downward spiral -- even with the large number of unsold homes still overhanging the market.
And if the lower price this agency does offer causes demand to exceed supply, HOLC II, like its predecessor, might even be able to make a profit for the government.
Who says history doesn't repeat itself? |
Update, Jan. 11, 5:00PM: Mark Zuckerman, a federal prosecutor in the New Hampshire U.S. Attorney’s Office, told TPM he recently became aware of the Project Veritas video and was reviewing it but hadn’t formed any opinion on whether it presented an issue.
It was one of the few — if not the only — coordinated efforts to attempt in-person voter fraud, and it was pulled off by affiliates of conservative activist James O’Keefe at polling places in New Hampshire Tuesday night. All of it part of an attempt to prove the need for voter ID laws that voting rights experts say have a unfair impact on minority voters.
Now election law experts tell TPM that O’Keefe’s allies could face criminal charges on both the federal and state level for procuring ballots under false names, and that his undercover sting doesn’t demonstrate a need for voter ID laws at all.Federal law bans not only the casting of, but the “procurement” of ballots “that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under the laws of the State in which the election is held.”
Hamline University law professor David Schultz told TPM that there’s “no doubt” that O’Keefe’s investigators violated the law.
“In either case, if they were intentionally going in and trying to fraudulently obtain a ballot, they violated the law,” Schultz said. “So right off the bat, what they did violated the law.”
Election law expert Rick Hasen, who writes the Election Law Blog, joked in an email to TPM that O’Keefe’s team should “next show how easy it is to rob a bank with a plastic gun.”
“Who in their right mind would risk a felony conviction for this? And who would be able to do this in large enough numbers to (1) affect the outcome of the election and (2) remain undetected?” Hasen wrote.
Other election experts agreed that the video doesn’t change the substance of the debate over whether the minimal threat of in-person voter fraud is worth the impact that such laws can have on minority and poor voters.
“The fact that activists can engage in a stunt is not a reason for reform,” Samuel Issacharoff, a professor of constitutional law at New York University Law School, told TPM. “It means nothing. Why would anybody want to do this? It proves that they don’t update their dead voter information as quickly as they might, but so what? To pull this off on a large scale, you’d need coordination, and presumably somebody would have heard about it.”
Someone did, in fact, catch on to the scheme when a man dressed in a suit and tie tried to vote as a dead man known to the poll watcher. The man left before police arrived and said the poll watcher would “soon find out” why he tried to vote under a fake name, the Boston Herald reported Tuesday night.
Henry Brady of the University of California told TPM that O’Keefe’s video showed that what his team did was “possible” but said that was never really a question. He also said that other techniques short of voter ID — like asking voters to sign a roll when they receive their ballot — would stop the type of fraud O’Keefe’s allies were attempting.
“Yes, this shows it’s possible to do what they did but you have to ask yourself… how many illegal immigrants would risk a jail term to vote illegally?” Brady said. “What they didn’t tell us, were they ever stopped and asked what’s going on here.”
John Samples of Cato told TPM that this would be a political issue and that O’Keefe was “pushing on an open door” because voter ID is politically popular. But he questioned whether it was worth the risk for O’Keefe.
“This is illegal, right? This is fraud and you would think he would actually get into trouble for doing this,” Samples told TPM.
Samples said that O’Keefe’s video could have an impact in the political fight over voter ID laws but “in the judicial fights — and the fight amongst wonks — it wouldn’t change much. The big question for policy always was what was the extent of it, and this doesn’t solve that question.”
The video, first obtained by the Daily Caller, is embedded below.
Late update: Richard Head of the New Hampshire Attorney General’s office issued this statement to TPM: “We became aware of the issue yesterday on election day, and immediately began conducting an investigation. In addition, based upon the information we received yesterday and the information in the video, we’ve initiated a comprehensive review of voting procedures with the Secretary of State.” |
The Army on Friday released the name of a soldier who died Saturday from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Maj. Troy Donn Wayman, 44, was found in his home in Nolanville, Texas, near Fort Hood. He was pronounced dead by Bell County Justice of the Peace Bill Cooke shortly after 10 p.m. Saturday, according to the statement from First Army Division West officials.
Wayman's death has been ruled a suicide, according to the death report prepared by the Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences in Dallas. The report was released to Army Times via an open records request.
Wayman, who was from Lincoln, Nebraska, began his career in the Nebraska Army National Guard, joining in August 1989 as an armor cannon crewman. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant and entered active-duty service in May 1998. He had been assigned to First Army Division West, on Fort Hood, since October 2014.
"This is a terrible loss, and we are grieving the loss of this valued teammate," said Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Colt, commanding general of First Army Division West, in a statement. "We remain fully committed to supporting Maj. Wayman's family and friends and want to reinforce no one should ever feel like they're alone or without our support."
Wayman served two tours in Saudi Arabia, including during Desert Shield and Desert Storm. He also deployed twice to Iraq and once to Kosovo. |
David Koch speaks at an Americans for Prosperity Foundation event in 2013. The Libre Initiative, one of the group's newest campaigns, is on track to make contact with more than 100,000 Hispanic households this year on school choice. | Phelan M. Ebenhack/AP Photo How the Kochs are trying to shake up public schools, one state at a time The push by Libre represents a new front in the fight by targeting Hispanic families.
With school choice efforts stalled in Washington, the billionaire Koch brothers’ network is engaged in state-by-state battles with teachers’ unions, politicians and parent groups to push for public funding of private and charter schools.
One of the newest campaigns is the Libre Initiative, a grassroots drive targeting Hispanic families in 11 states so far, under the umbrella of the Charles and David Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, a powerful conservative and libertarian advocacy group.
Story Continued Below
While the Koch network has long been involved in school choice battles, the push by Libre represents a new front in the fight by targeting Hispanic families — and a recognition that with Congress gridlocked, it’s on the ground at the state level where the network can disrupt the educational status quo. The Koch message on schools is shared by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, a longtime ally.
“Across the [Koch] network, there’s a greater commitment to advancing this because we do see it as critical to advancing a free and open society,” Libre’s Executive Director Jorge Lima told POLITICO.
The group has had some initial success — for instance, helping to thwart a moratorium on charter school expansion in New Mexico. But it’s also created bitter divisions in the Latino community and led to accusations the Kochs are trying to undermine public education — and even in some cases, to subvert the Democratic process.
“Don’t let so-called Hispanic organizations such as the Libre Initiative deceive you ...” Geoconda Arguello-Kline, secretary-treasurer of the Culinary Union, wrote last year in a guest column published in the Las Vegas Sun. “Libre is not looking out for Nevadans’ best interest; it is working to benefit its billionaire Koch funders.”
Despite such criticism, the group is hunkering down for the long haul in states it views as ripe for change even as it eyes new states for expansion. Lima says it’s on track to make contact with more than 100,000 Hispanic households this year on school choice.
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Besides Nevada and New Mexico, Libre is organizing in Arizona, Colorado, Virginia, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin. Its recent efforts, with other Koch-backed groups, include:
— A planned “six-figure” spend in Nevada on “deep canvassing” in Hispanic neighborhoods to build support for educational savings accounts, which enable families to use state tax dollars to pay for private school. Although such a program was passed by the Nevada Legislature in 2015, it never took effect after the funding mechanism was ruled unconstitutional.
— A lawsuit brought by Americans for Prosperity, among others, aimed at stopping a 2018 Arizona referendum asking voters whether they want to keep a school choice law passed earlier this year. The law would expand the availability of education savings accounts to more than 30,000 families — a move that public school supporters fear would divert millions of dollars from financially stretched public schools.
— A “six-figure” Libre and Americans for Prosperity campaign in Colorado this summer to promote charter schools and education savings accounts and another ahead of a Nov. 7 school board race by the Americans for Prosperity Foundation to push choice-friendly issues.
— A seven-figure investment In Virginia’s gubernatorial race by Americans for Prosperity that includes a video criticizing Virginia Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, for his opposition to education savings accounts.
— Mailings in Spanish and English supporting a Florida law that encourages charter schools in communities with low-performing schools. After Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, signed it into law, the state Democratic Party said he’d “declared war on our public schools.”
Mike Petrilli, president of the conservative-leaning Thomas B. Fordham Institute, said it’s noteworthy the Koch network has singled out school choice.
"It’s telling us they have good reason to believe this is an issue that’s resonating with Latino families,” he said.
He also gave the initiatives strong odds at changing at least some state policies.
“Most of these states have had very active school choice movements with other organizations on the ground trying to expand programs,” Petrilli said. “ … It could be enough to put some of these ideas over the top.”
The state tug of wars come as a federal push for school choice has slowed, with Congress balking at the few private school-choice expansion measures that DeVos has sent to Capitol Hill.
The Trump administration’s budget called for a $250 million private school choice program and an initiative that would have allowed Title I funds to follow students to a new school — both ideas that were rejected by House and Senate appropriators. The House and Senate bills did boost funding for charter schools — but not by the $500 million the administration sought.
Nonetheless, Koch organizers view DeVos as a national booster for their cause. Americans for Prosperity has long worked in tandem with the school choice advocacy group that DeVos cofounded and previously chaired, the American Federation for Children — even sponsoring its annual conference. Libre also endorsed her as secretary.
“It does help to have someone like Secretary DeVos as leading this conversation on such a national level, so that when we knock on that door it literally is not the first time that they heard about charter schools or education savings accounts,” Lima said.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers union and a fierce critic of the Kochs and DeVos, said the Koch-funded push is about destabilizing public schools. She said she thinks austerity efforts to drastically cut school spending in states like Kansas backfired, so the Kochs are emphasizing private school choice instead.
“They and Betsy DeVos are twins,” Weingarten said. “They are about destroying public education and destroying the foundations of opportunity for working folk.”
Like DeVos, Koch organizers insist the push isn’t about dissolving public education, but about making more options available to Hispanic and other families.
And like DeVos and her husband, Charles Koch has been a longtime supporter of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, which has advocated for state laws that encourage private school choice expansion.
The Charles Koch Foundation is also a donor to Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, which recently hosted a school choice conference featuring DeVos as the keynote speaker.
It’s unclear what, if any, coordination might exist between the Education Department and the Koch network. An Education Department spokeswoman did not respond when asked for comment. Lima said Libre is in contact with the department, but the group’s direction stems from polls and conversations with Hispanic families, who say they care deeply about education.
Hispanic families want more options for their children, he said, and the “only thing that’s really changing the game right now” is giving parents a say in “having greater access.”
Achievement gaps for Hispanic students persist. Even as they’ve made gains, there are still gaps with their non-Hispanic white peers hovering around 20 points on the National Assessment of Educational Progress test known as the “nation’s report card.” The graduation rate for Hispanic students is 78 percent, compared to the national rate of 83 percent.
In many ways, Lima suggests, Libre is playing a long game.
In Arizona, the referendum vote set for 2018 would ask voters to decide whether they want to keep a law that expands education savings accounts. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, backed the law and said this summer during a three-day Koch donor retreat in Colorado Springs that, “I need the power of the network” to get it passed, the Denver Post reported.
Oral arguments on the referendum challenge are scheduled to be heard Dec. 1 in Maricopa County Superior Court.
Dawn Penich-Thacker, a spokeswoman for Save Our Schools, a parent group that helped collect the signatures to challenge the Arizona law, said the push by Libre in her state is disingenuous.
She said that families aren’t told there are financial limits to what would be available to them for private school tuition, which would be around $5,000.
She said many families would be surprised to learn that might not cover all the costs of their kids’ private schooling, especially when the students get to middle or high school.
She also said Libre is participating in a “systemic degrading” of public schools, and stirring fear.
It makes families feel like participating in a private school program “is the only good thing I can do for my children,” Penich-Thacker said.
In Nevada, after now-Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) came out in opposition to education savings accounts last year when she was state attorney general, Libre ran digital ads accusing her of “lining up against Latino families and in support of special interests.”
“Hispanic children are trapped in overcrowded and failing schools as a result of the system Cortez Masto is defending,” the group said.
Others in the Latino community, including Arguello-Kline of the Culinary Union, came to Cortez-Masto’s defense.
“We absolutely do not support the Koch brothers coming into Nevada,” said Ruben Murillo, president of the Nevada State Education Association teachers’ union, saying education savings accounts would siphon millions from public education.
“Our message to the Latino community is, what guarantee do you have that you’re gonna have good quality schools where they are accepted and where they are able to work with them on their individual needs?” Murillo said.
In Colorado, the site of the pro-charter school drive, the term “school choice” is being used by Americans for Prosperity “to push a movement to divert public dollars from public schools and undermines the public’s confidence in our public schools,” said Susan Meek, communications director at Great Education Colorado, a group that backs public education in Colorado.
Meek said that not all “school choice” is the same, and this “strategic decision to use this term has been highly effective in hiding the privatization movement behind the guise of charter schools.”
DeVos has not publicly weighed in on any of the Koch-backed initiatives, but she emphasized the action in the states in her recent Kennedy School speech.
“Washington, and in particular the U.S. Department of Education, just needs to get out of the way,” she said. “That's because the real future of choice is in states. It's their futures to shape. And it's already underway today.” |
It was going to happen sooner or later: Playboy’s plans to open clubs in Goa are facing opposition from local politicians.
Michael Lobo, a member of the state assembly for Goa’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, is leading the crusade against Playboy, saying he will go on hunger strike if the local government gives the adult entertainment brand a green light to open clubs in his home state.
"Playboy is nothing but a glorified dance bar or a glorified prostitution joint," an enraged Mr. Lobo told India Real Time. He is worried the Playboy Clubs will somewhat turn Goa – already popular with partygoers from around the world – into a “sex tourism destination.”
If the clubs open, "families won't come here," he said.
As many as 120 Playboy-branded clubs, hotels, fashion bars and cafés are set to open in India over the next 10 years, starting with clubs in Goa at some point this year. The location for the first Playboy Club is Calangute – the Goa constituency Mr. Lobo is from.
Mounting political opposition to Playboy may thwart these plans.
Wilfred Mesquita, a spokesman for the BJP in Goa, said: “Anything which affects the morality and culture of Goa will be opposed by the party. If this Playboy is the same Playboy which is abroad, then we will definitely oppose it." He added his party is looking into what form the Playboy Clubs would take in India, and respond accordingly.
Subhash Shirodkar, a senior member of the rival Congress party in Goa, said his party is opposed to Playboy Clubs.
Adult entertainment is widely frowned upon in India. This is the key reason why Playboy magazine isn't even permitted on local newsstands.
In keeping with local cultural sensitivities, the Playboy brand has been significantly toned down in India.
For instance, Playboy bunnies in India will show less skin, says Sanjay Gupta, chief executive officer of PB Lifestyle Ltd., a Mumbai-based company that has an exclusive license to market Playboy merchandise and to set up and manage clubs here.
The original bunny suit – the outfit worn by waitresses in Playboy Clubs– has been modified to suit Indian sensibilities.
"Playboy bunnies are integral to Playboy clubs and we have told them that we have toned down the bunny outfit," Mr. Gupta told India Real Time. In India the so-called “bunnies” will wear full-length sheer skirts and tube tops.
"We filed an affidavit to the government categorically stating that as far as our club format goes, there is definitely no vulgarity," Mr. Gupta told India Real Time. PB Lifestyle is unrelated to the empire of Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner.
Failure to secure a license from Goa’s tourism department has already delayed the opening of the first club by several months. But Mr. Gupta is confident that the company will secure the license it needs from Goa’s tourism department.
Dilip Parulekar, Goa’s tourism minister, told India Real Time he will discuss the Playboy license this weekend with chief minister Manohar Parrikar.
Previously, Mr. Lobo has crusaded against dance bars in his constituency. He said he got 14 dance bars, a front for prostitution which is illegal in India, to shut down.
Follow India Real Time on Twitter @indiarealtime.
Playboy CEO Discusses the Future of Playboy
Hugh Hefner on His Girlfriends, Son and Movie |
Solar Cash Grant Extension to be in Saturday’s Tax Cuts Vote!
December 3rd, 2010 by Susan Kraemer
Tomorrow a vote is to be held on continuing the middle class cuts (while letting millionaires now scrape by on a tax cut on merely the bottom $250,000 of their income) and into this bill, Senator Baucus has slipped some goodies for us climate hawks who love clean energy solutions.
The Hill is reporting that Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus has an amendment within the tax bill, to extend Section 1603, the cash grants for renewable projects.
Amendment 4727 will extend the hugely popular and effective Section 1603 cash grants for renewable projects that was to have expired at the end of this year.
The 30% cash grants from the stimulus bill (The Recovery Act of 2009) have fueled unprecedented growth of renewable development in the US (as much as in the entire last 30 years combined; putting an estimated 16 Gigawatts of renewable energy on the grid.)
But they were to have expired on December 31st, 2010, on the assumption that the economy would have righted itself by now after the Great Recession of 2008. But that is not the case, and at least 11 Gigawatts has to make it by then, or turn into a pumpkin.
I have noted before that Senator Baucus has a history of quietly slipping in amendments favorable to renewable energy into other bills. In 2008, when the Bush bank bailout had to be passed, (remember how Wall St dropped 700 points in a day) he quietly slipped in the PTC extension.
Here’s what’s in tomorrow’s amendment.
Domestic energy manufacturing. The bill provides an additional $2.5 billion in funding for the Section 48C advanced manufacturing tax credit. Section 48C was established in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to provide a 30% investment tax credit for facilities engaged in the manufacture of advanced energy property. Credits are available only for projects certified by the Secretary of Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of Energy, through a competitive bidding process.
Payment in lieu of production and investment credits. The bill codifies the direct payment in lieu of tax credit program that was initially created by Section 1603 of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and extends the program through December 31, 2011.
There is lots more good stuff too. Worth a read! Amendment 4727 (PDF). Here’s where to find the vote tomorrow, live on C-Span2at 7 AM PST.
Image: Streets Blog
Susan Kraemer@Twitter |
CRANBERRY TWP — A father and son who are avid bikers have a few issues with the township police and claim the officers have little idea of what the bike laws are.
Jack and Brendan Linton talked to the township supervisors Nov. 19 about their concerns.
Brendan Linton said he and his father share the same enjoyment of cycling and combined they ride an excess of 3,000 miles per year, mostly in the township.
“At no time do my father and I — and at no time will we — ask for special treatment. That is not why we are here. We are asking for equal treatment from our police department,” Brendan Linton said. “Our goal and our families’ goal is to have us return home safely.”
Since the spring of 2007, Brendan Linton claims he and his father have had several instances where they have had interactions with police. While some of these interactions have been good, many of them have not, he said.
Brendan Linton said he and his father learned few officers know the bicycle laws but fewer know the proper enforcement of them.
“I have to be honest. I’ve worked with other police departments in various counties and hate to use this language, but Cranberry Township’s Police Department is clueless on the bicycle laws. They have absolutely no idea,” Brendan Linton said.
Jack Linton said over time other incidents have happened where motor vehicles have cause collisions with them, two of which resulted in charges being filed against Brendan Linton.
In 2014, Brendan Linton’s path was interfered with by a motorist on Haine School Road, Jack Linton said. Brendan Linton and the vehicle driver had an argument.
According to Jack Linton, the vehicle operator repeatedly threatened to assault him. In self-defense, Brendan Linton advised the operator that he would be pepper sprayed if he continued that.
Both the driver and Brendan were cited with disorderly conduct, Jack Linton said. A citation was not issued to the operator for encroaching on the 4 foot clearance that cyclists are supposed to have or for the threat of assault, Jack Linton said.
Brendan Linton was found guilty of disorderly conduct by District Judge David Kovach, but the driver was found guilty of nothing, Jack Linton said.
In May, Brendan Linton was riding on Haine School Road and was hit a passing vehicle’s side mirror, which broke when Brendan Linton pushed off the vehicle, Jack Linton said. A charge of criminal mischief/damage property was filed against Brendan Linton.
“When questioned at the summary trial, officer (Victor) Korol stated that he has not been trained in the bicycle laws at any time during the past year or during the past five years,” Jack Linton said.
Brendan Linton was found guilty of criminal mischief/damage property by District Judge Kovach in July, according to court documents.
Jack Linton said in an appeal to Butler County Court, Brendan Linton was found not guilty.
According to court documents, on Oct. 28 Brendan Linton was found not guilty by agreement of the parties of the charge of criminal mischief.
“Exactly the same as the previous two collisions, the motor vehicle operator was never cited,” Jack Linton said.
Jack Linton said an assistant district attorney told him that he approved the charge of criminal mischief because he was told by officers that Brendan Linton “followed the driver to the next intersection and broke the mirror in a fit of rage.”
He noted the video evidence from the cameras on the front and rear of the bikes showed otherwise.
Brendan Linton said there are clear issues with the police department.
“The enforcement of the laws is inconsistent. The actions of several officers is unprofessional and in some cases unlawful,” he said.
“The police have not cited the proper individuals in the incidents and filed citations against me based on facts or allegations that are later proven to be completely false,” Brendan Linton said.
Brendan said that he and his father have talked to law firms explaining their experiences.
“Each has advised us to take the same steps of action and our first step is this presentation,” Brendan Linton said.
Brendan Linton said they are asking the supervisors and staff members to work together and take action to correct the issues.
Township manager Jerry Andree said, “We respect and appreciate the passion Jack and Brendan have concerning bicycles. They have been helpful to us in developing our bicycle programs and trying to become a more bicycle friendly community.”
There are conflicts between bicyclists and motorists, said Jeffrey Schueler, director of public safety.
“We get very few bicyclist complaints, but when we do, it’s a conflict between the driver and the bicyclist.”
Schueler said he encourages the public to look at and understand the bicycle laws. “Because bicyclists do have a right to the roadway and we all have to share the roadway with each other and we have got to be good neighbors,” Schueler said.
“We want people to be safe on our roads and that is what the police officers are focused on,” he said.
Andree said the state mandates exactly what the officers are taught.
“Every year to continue to be a police officer you have to go to training. It is 16 hours of training every year,” Schueler said. “The state determines what that training is and part of the training is updates in criminal law, updates in traffic laws, so they’re briefed on anything new that has come up.”
Andree said when the bicycle laws changed three years ago, the state put one slide into the presentation that talked about bikeways.
“The state has not educated the police officers on anything additional for the last two years,” Andree said.
Andree said he has no concerns with the training of the officers.
“We are very confident that the training meets or exceeds all state standards,” Andree said. |
I’ve been reading a book titled Drive. Its goal is to discuss what motivates us, yet it is one of those books that isn’t particularly well written or entertaining. But alas, it is a book that gets you thinking in a more concrete fashion about things you have always known. It reminds me of a college book—not interesting enough to make it really enjoyable, but meaningful enough that you keep going back to it until you finally finish.
The book basically boils motivation down to three essential ingredients: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Or in an even simpler form, what gets you up in the morning or keeps you up at night?
Related: 70 photos of hard-working beef producers
I try to apply every business book I read to my business, my family and my relationships with the hope of making them better. My world view tends to be like a typical economist. Profit is the motivator, profit is the goal, profit is the purpose.
Yet, I think that is one of the reasons I have always admired ranchers so much. Their primary purpose and goals are rarely about profits. Profits are a good thing; they are essential to the survival of a business, but also a very good way of measuring whether or not the business is achieving its greater purpose.
Related: 12 Reasons You Should Be Proud To Be A Hard Worker
The concepts in this book seem almost intuitive at a personal or business level, if not always easy to implement. But it also got me to thinking about these concepts from an industry perspective. Our industry is an endless story of passionate, hard-working people and businesses striving to build a legacy. But from an industry perspective, we morph into metrics like profitability, beef demand, or market share.
There’s nothing wrong with that. After all, the industry is not sustainable without them. However, they are a lot like selection indexes—they are a great way to measure your progress, but you improve them by improving the individual components that make up the index.
We achieve our goals as an industry by increasing consumers’ connection with our product, creating more memorable and enjoyable eating experiences and providing more value. It isn’t prices we receive or advertising dollars we spend. We tend to focus on the comfortable instead of the important.
The artificial insemination (AI) business is a great microcosm of this. Only 3-5% of the cows in this country are AI’d. So a 2% increase in that number would increase the size of the business by 40%-60% and profitability by even greater margins. Yet, the industry as a whole spends very little time growing AI acceptance. Instead of growing the size of the pie, they fight ferociously every day to increase the size of their slice of the pie.
Everyone benefits from a growing industry and everyone is harmed by a shrinking industry. Yet, we spend precious little time and capital on growing our industry. Truth be known, most of the time spent on the big aggregate things are more designed to preserve what we have or to stop the decline rather than truly grow it.
I always thought that the great disadvantage our industry had to overcome was being a commodity market. That has been and continues to be an impediment, even as the industry attempts to transition toward a differentiated value-based marketing structure.
As I get older, however, I’m starting to realize that the problem is dwarfed by our segmented business model. Everyone does a great job, but unlike other businesses there is no clear individual responsibility for meeting and building the demands of consumers or addressing competitive concerns. The result is a mad race for efficiency and grabbing market share, not from an overall market perspective but from a narrowly focused segment mentality.
As crazy as it might sound, I think the checkoff has even contributed to the problem. Yes, it saved us from the precipice and helps to keep us from going the way of the lamb industry, but it also gave us as individuals an excuse to abdicate our responsibility to grow our industry.
The other ironic factor is that we have been let off the hook for growing our industry because our product simply tastes a lot better than our competitors. They have had to innovate, improve their product offerings and invest greatly in marketing, efficiency, and product development. We haven’t.
We look at the aggregate numbers our industry spends and think it is significant dollars, but that’s a warped perspective. Imagine you are selling 10 bred heifers and I gave you $10 to promote them. The average fed animal grosses several thousand dollars and yet we are invested $1 per animal to promote the consumer products it produces.
For a little perspective, the average company spends 2% of its revenue on advertising. In contested markets, that number is even higher. For example, Ford sells about 2 million cars per year and they spend $4 billion advertising. And no, that doesn’t count the billions of dollars its dealers spend as well. Even Microsoft, which enjoys a dominant market share position and limited competition, spends nearly 3% of its revenues on advertising.
The beef industry on a retail equivalent is a $105 billion industry. It is hard to fathom, but if we were a company, we would be investing several billion dollars a year in advertising! The marketing, research and development numbers are equally as disturbing.
We should be debating if $15 or $20 per head is a more appropriate number. Instead, we are talking about whether or not we can raise it to $2. It is like our politicians who talk about reducing our nearly $20 trillion debt by eliminating a $1 million budget line item. While it is true that we must start somewhere, a solution that is wholly inadequate to address the problem is always going to be a tough sale. |
The Senate Judiciary Committee is launching a probe into an allegation that Hillary Clinton's State Department threatened a foreign government.
"Clinton Cash" author Peter Schweizer said Clinton pressured Bangladeshi Prime Minister Hasina Wazed to drop an investigation of a Clinton Foundation donor.
He said the State Department pressured Wazed to dismiss a corruption investigation of businessman Mohammad Yunnus.
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"If they didn't do that, they would have the IRS audit her son," Schweizer said.
Sajeeb Wazed Joy has lived in the United States for about 20 years.
If the allegations prove true, Schweizer said "siccing the IRS on foreign government officials and their families is beyond the pale."
"[This] fits the pattern of behavior of the Clintons," he said.
Watch the clip above.
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Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Ala.) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) unveiled a new bill this week requiring all groups that spend money independently of campaigns, candidates, or parties to influence a federal election or nomination to disclose their donors. Although we have concerns with the bill, the senators' hearts are certainly in the right place, and they should be applauded for actively soliciting input during the drafting process from interested parties on all sides of the debate.
The "Follow the Money" Act does several things better than competing proposals like the DISCLOSE Act. For instance, it removes the disclosure requirements for ads that simply mention a candidate close to an election or primary. It also raises the threshold for reporting of direct contributions to candidates from the exceedingly low $200 to $1,000 and creates two options for groups looking to preserve donor anonymity, which are similar to existing law. Groups can either create a safe harbor account seeded by donations below $1,000 (donors to which stay anonymous), or they can create a separate account for covered spending (and only contributors to that account have to be disclosed).
Unfortunately, like all of the recent disclosure proposals, the Wyden-Murkowski bill fatally fails to clearly define the type of expenditure that would trigger disclosure. The heart of the bill is the creation of a new definition of "independent federal election-related activity expenditure," which I'm going to imaginatively call an IFERAE.
IFERAEs are defined as any expenditure that "considering the facts and circumstances, a reasonable person would conclude is made solely or substantially for the purpose of influencing or attempting to influence the nomination or election of any individual to any Federal office." The definition is not, as is usually the case, limited to just advertising and could cover independent polling, research, or messaging.
If you make IFERAEs over $10,000—no matter what—you automatically have to disclose all your donors. The only exceptions are the separate account options I mentioned above, which are certainly welcome but may not be feasible for smaller or single issue advocacy groups who often have to rely on large donations from fewer contributors. There is also a waiver for donors who contribute less than $5,000, which may be hard for groups to secure in practice.
The vagueness of the IFERAE definition creates two main problems. First, this bill is going to cover a lot more political activity and speech. It almost certainly will sweep in pure "issue ads" by groups like the ACLU, the Sierra Club or the Humane Society. For instance, a similarly vague provision in the 1971 campaign finance law was cited in the decision by the New York Times to refuse to publish an advertisement by the ACLU in the New York Times criticizing President Nixon for his position on busing. The ad itself did not call for Nixon's defeat, but the Times feared that its harsh tone would open it to liability for publishing an illegal campaign ad.
Second, the bill is going to open the door to selective enforcement. Groups critical of the government or who support unpopular causes will find that their expenditures are more likely to be covered by the definition.
There is no question the public has a legitimate interest in knowing who is corruptly spending scads of cash trying to influence voters and lawmakers. But the public should also be able to anonymously support advocacy organizations that engage on the issues of the day, even if they praise or criticize candidates or nominees for their positions on those issues. Absent anonymity, some donors—on both the left and the right—will simply not donate out of the legitimate fear they will be harassed or retaliated against for their advocacy.
Importantly, it's not clear—and it needs to be clear—that anonymous political donations to independent issue advocacy groups are actually corrupting. During the last election cycle, there was significant outcry over so-called "dark" money: political expenditures by groups that do not publicly disclose their donors. But, when you look at the facts, dark money made up a relatively small percentage of all outside spending, and even groups that support expanded disclosure find that it had little concrete effect on the ground. In many tight Senate races, for instance, it was actually the incumbency advantage in direct fundraising by Democrats that made the difference. Before we vastly expand disclosure requirements for issue advocacy, we need a record of real harm, which we just don't have right now.
The campaign finance issue is hard because reform is actually being pushed in response to a real problem: large, self-interested agglomerations of wealth that can and do wield an outsized influence in the political process. That's something that we need to address, but the real question is how. As Justice Brandeis famously said, "[t]he greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding." In other words, sometimes the urge to just "do something" about a problem results in serious unintended consequences. Donor disclosure is one of the areas where we need to be very careful of those consequences.
Learn more about campaign finance reform and other civil liberty issues: Sign up for breaking news alerts, follow us on Twitter, and like us on Facebook. |
The followers of Muqtada al-Sadr, who form a king-making bloc in the next Iraqi government, have confirmed they will not accept Prime Minister Nour al-Maliki's candidacy for a second term as leader.
The move effectively ends the career of the US-backed incumbent. The Sadrists' stance comes after a five-month political stalemate that threatens to leave Iraq leaderless, as the remaining 15,000 or so US forces leave the country ahead of a 31 August deadline.
The move is seen as a potential breakthrough in the destabilising deadlock that many believe has led to a steady increase in violence. The decision was confirmed today by the head of the Sadrist political bloc, Nassar al-Rubaie. He said he had told Maliki that he would have to leave his post in order for the Sadrists to maintain support for his party in an eventual coalition government.
Without the support of the Sadrists, who are led by the exiled anti-western cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, neither of the two biggest rival political blocs would be unlikely to be able to form a government. This includes the head of the Iraqiya Alliance, Iyad Allawi, who last month courted al-Sadr's support in a public meeting in the Syrian capital, Damascus.
However, al-Rubaie indicated that the Damascus summit has not led the Sadrists to split from the largely Shia Islamic bloc that threatens to sidelineAllawi's cross-sectarian alliance.
Al-Rubaie revealed that the 40-strong bloc of MPs in an eventual new parliament had thrown their support behind former transitional prime minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, who led Iraq throughout 2005, on the eve of the breakout of full-blown sectarian chaos.
"Maliki eventually isolated all around him by his behaviour," said al-Rubaie. "This includes all members of his alliance. In the end, it was only his Dawa party that had influence that spread throughout all branches of government.
The Sadrists have had a strained recent history with Maliki whom they accuse of allowing US jets to bomb Sadr City in Baghdad in 2007 and 2008 and of reneging on a pledge to release up to 400 Sadrist prisoners who were handed over by US forces late last year.
"Whenever we asked him anything, he would say yes, yes, yes, then not keep any one of his pledges," said al-Rubaie.
The move against Maliki was announced yesterday by former deputy prime minister, Ahmed Chalabi, whose Iraqi National Congress Party has allied with the Sadrists and the main party in their bloc.
Both Chalabi and al-Jafari remain deeply unpopular with the US government. They accuse Chalabi of providing false information that helped make a case for the 2003 invasion. The US gripe with al-Jafari, however, is that he failed to safeguard the country from a slide into sectarian crisis.
Iraqi officials said yesterday that July marked the highest nationwide death toll of any month since the same period in 2008. They said 535 people were killed and 1,043 wounded during violent attacks.
However, the US military later refuted that figure, claiming only 222 people were killed last month, less than half the number compiled by Iraq. US officials have dreaded a scenario of Iraq remaining without a new government after their combat forces have left by the end of the month. The US have been equally sensitive to claims that violence is increasing and that services have barely improved throughout over the past seven years. |
North Korea’s nuclear test site has experienced several post-test tremors since the rogue regime detonated a staged thermonuclear bomb in September.
The occurrence of multiple earthquakes in the aftermath of North Korea’s sixth and largest nuclear test to date triggered speculation that North Korea may have severely damaged its nuclear test site, possibly rendering it unsuitable for future testing.
North Korea tested a suspected hydrogen bomb in early September, and the bomb is believed to have produced a powerful explosive yield around or potentially well in excess of 250 kilotons. The resulting tremors led some to conclude that Mt. Manhap, where the Punggye-ri test site is located, may be suffering from a case of Tired Mountain Syndrome, a condition in which the rock becomes fractured and permeable as a result of repeated underground nuclear testing.
But, leading experts Frank Pabian and Jack Liu argue in a report for 38 North, a North Korea research and monitoring site, that post-test tremors are not unusual, pointing to the occurrence of such tremors after American nuclear tests at the Nevada Test Site.
The two scholars point to a 1969 study, which asserts that “increases in seismic activity in the Nevada region were common following underground nuclear explosions at the US Nevada Test Site,” and some of the post-test earthquakes had magnitudes significantly larger than those of the quakes that followed North Korea’s latest test.
“Despite the numerous post-test earthquakes, the Nevada Test Site was not abandoned for nuclear test purposes,” Pabian and Liu explain, noting that North Korea is unlikely to abandon its Punggye-ri nuclear test site. While there is some evidence that the North Portal may have sustained damage during the most recent nuclear test, there are still two unused tunnel complexes.
38 North researchers actually detected new activity outside the South and West tunnel in the aftermath of the North’s sixth nuclear test.
“For the time being, however, given the presence of additional test portals, we see no reason that the Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Site as a whole has or will be abandoned for future underground nuclear testing,” Pabian and Liu conclude in their report.
At the same time, North Korea has hinted that it is interested in conducting an atmospheric nuclear test over the Pacific Ocean, but it does not mean the North does not intend to carry out additional underground testing at the Punggye-ri test site.
Pabian and Liu argue that North Korea has not yet nuked itself out of a nuclear test site, as some outlets claimed.
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Mindless Self Indulgence fans rejoice. PINK, the long-rumored, elusive “lost” album from your favorite electro-punk anarchists will finally see the light of day on September 18th through Metropolis Records. Serving as a “prequel” to all you know about the band, this retro 1990’s album fills in the blanks of MSI’s mysterious early days.
PINK contains nineteen tracks which includes fifteen never-before-heard MSI songs plus four tracks off the self-titled EP. The album also features wild versions of Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus” and Duran Duran’s “Girls On Film”, a hidden song, plus an audio diary from 22 year-old Jimmy Urine, a picture anatomy of what you need to make an MSI song, retro 90’s album art, and finally – after 20 years – the reveal of the origin of the name of the band.
“Before there was Rebel… before there was Frankenstein Girls… before there was Tight… there was Pink! The MSI prequel to it all,” said the band’s supreme leader Jimmy Urine. “This album was written by twenty-something Little Jimmy Urine and produced by forty-something Little Jimmy Urine, and its the lost puzzle piece in the formation of the unique MSI sound that would eventually piss off millions of people. The songs on this record are not in chronological order because I don’t know what the word ‘chronological’ means so I just put them in order of ‘what Jimmy likes the fucking best’! And now the lost record you begged for is the reality you will regret…”
PINK can be pre-ordered NOW in all formats including a limited edition, 500-piece run of pink vinyl.
About MSI
Mindless Self Indulgence formed in New York City in 1997 and quickly made their mark with an inflammatory, indefinable hybrid sound that portended a lot of rock music to come. MSI has released five studio albums to date, cracked the Top 5 on Billboard’s Dance chart seven times (with four #1’s!) performed with the likes of Rammstein, Linkin Park, System of a Down, My Chemical Romance and The Dresden Dolls, and maintains one of the most devout and intense global fan bases in music through constant international touring and energetic live performances. MSI returned to the spotlight in 2013 with their first album in five years, the epic How I Learned To Stop Giving A Shit And Love Mindless Self Indulgence, and last year released the remix collection Fuck Machine.
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The Daily is proud to announce its upcoming book, “Rags to Roses: The Rise of Stanford Football,” by Joseph Beyda, George Chen and Sam Fisher. The book will be sold electronically starting on July 15, and we will publish several excerpts in the coming weeks, beginning with today’s installment, the book’s preface. Visit www.stanforddaily.com/ragstoroses to sign up for updates on ordering information and future excerpts. Those using the mobile version of the site can scroll down to the bottom of the preface to sign up.
The Beyda family’s remote control was very busy that night.
Versus, ESPN, Fox Sports Net, local news, rinse, repeat. Stanford had just upset No. 1 USC, and there was no way we could get enough of it.
Not after five years of suffering through Buddy Ball and quick kicks, five years spent with neither the Axe nor travel plans for bowl season. Not after 1-11.
Hour after hour, station after station, we watched the next round of highlights. And each time, when Mark Bradford jumped up and caught Tavita Pritchard’s lob to put the Cardinal ahead 24-23, one thing became a little clearer: We would never, ever forget October 6, 2007.
Five and a half years later, Pritchard draws the play up for me on a whiteboard in the quarterbacks meeting area in the Arrillaga Family Sports Center. On the other side of the building, the Axe rests safely in its true home for a third straight offseason. Down the hall sits a 2013 Rose Bowl trophy that not even the most biased Stanford fan — and I rank up there — could have imagined before 2007. Outside stands the skeleton of a new, 28,350-square-foot addition that will serve as the new home of the burgeoning football offices.
But it all began here, one Sunday half a decade ago, when a fearless young quarterback rushed to this very same room to watch film on the Trojans. Pritchard had six days to prepare for his first career start, on the road, for a 41-point underdog facing the best defense in the country.
Boy, the world wasn’t ready.
We found that out early on, when Versus announcer Ron Thulin screamed, “Touchdown USC!” on Bradford’s game-winning catch. In the five years that followed, every ounce of progress by the Stanford football program was met with a half-ton of skepticism. The Cardinal couldn’t retain its physical identity in 2010 after the loss of its workhorse, Heisman Trophy runner-up Toby Gerhart. It couldn’t find the character for another BCS push in 2011 after its fiery leader, head coach Jim Harbaugh, was replaced by the calm David Shaw. It couldn’t compete for the 2012 Pac-12 title after the graduation of the best player in school history, Andrew Luck.
But Stanford did all of those things, culminating in the Rose Bowl win this past January that Cardinal fans had been waiting for since 1972. And this offseason, the rhetoric has changed dramatically. Despite the loss of Stepfan Taylor, the top rusher in Stanford history, the 2013 Cardinal has been dubbed a preseason top-five team by ESPN, Sports Illustrated and CBSSports, is seen by many as a favorite to defend its conference title and is projected to be in the running for (dare I say it?) a national title this fall. Anything less than a fourth straight BCS bowl appearance would be a clear step back.
Those expectations are the result of one of the most remarkable transformations in college football history — at one of the most remarkable times in college football history. In the era of the spread, a finesse offense reinvented itself as a physically imposing, run-first attack that used more tight ends and fullbacks on a single drive than most of its opponents had on their rosters; in the era of short college careers followed by lucrative professional ones, a once-in-a-generation quarterback stayed the course for a third shot at a conference title; in the era of recruiting violations at USC, improper benefits at Ohio State, a lack of institutional control at Miami and altered grades at Auburn, a team at an elite university that had never gone to four consecutive bowls or won 11 games (and was on the heels of the worst season in school history) decided to become one of the most confident — and most successful — programs in the country.
It’s a story that we at The Stanford Daily believe is unique in the world of sports, which is why George Chen, Sam Fisher and I embarked on this project, “Rags to Roses: The Rise of Stanford Football,” this offseason. We have talked to more than 20 current and former players and coaches, spanning four coaching staffs, eight graduating classes and every position group on the field.
In part, this book is about the men who dominated the quarterbacks room in the years since Pritchard’s first film session as a starter: Harbaugh, Luck and Shaw. But it’s also about Shannon Turley, the man who dominated the weight room one floor below. It’s about Gerhart and Taylor, the mild-mannered running backs who rushed for a combined 7,822 yards at Stanford, but it’s also about Alex Fletcher, Chris Marinelli and James McGillicuddy, the cocky, trash-talking linemen who stood up to an out-of-touch coaching staff and became the heart and soul of a beaten-down team. It’s about Owen Marecic, the player who could seemingly do anything, but it’s also about Jordan Williamson, the player whose one task eluded him in the biggest of moments — and then served as his redemption a year later in a game that meant even more.
Each carries his own tale, and they have told them well; our interview total is rapidly approaching 24 hours as we enter our last round of phone calls and post-workout sit-downs. But what has surprised us most of all is just how eager the former members of the program are to explain Stanford’s ascendance. There is no doubting their pride.
“You always felt like it was the right thing,” Harbaugh told us. “You can be great at football and be a top-notch student. You can achieve in the classroom and achieve on the field. And that model could be successful, when many said it couldn’t.”
For George, Sam and me, “Rags to Roses” has become the 10-unit class we never planned to take. For you, we hope it serves not only as a celebration of Stanford football’s recent accomplishments, but as the story of the men who brought this program back to life — and then took it to new heights.
Contact Joseph, George and Sam at ragstoroses@stanforddaily.com. Learn more about the authors. |
As kids, who among us never dreamed of growing up to be a sailor? After we go to space, naturally. This arcade game was created for those who never forgot their childhood dreams. And so, you are now looking through the periscope of a submarine and the enemy ships are sailing audaciously across the horizon, back and forth. Press “Start” and the green point representing a moving torpedo rushes towards the enemy vessel. The rest depends on the accuracy of the player-sniper.
Moscow
Kuznecky most, 12
Real gamers are welcome to play every day: Monday through Sunday from 11 till 9 p.m.
Saint-Petersburg
Konyushennaya sq., 2b
Real gamers are welcome to play every day: Monday through Sunday from 11 till 8 p.m.
By the way
We are three years old!
Come visit us and throw a coin for luck (into the machine)! |
How Balanced Automates Testing and Continuously Deploys
As a payments company, we have very little room for error. Our customers count on us to be up and running constantly, since if we’re not up, they can’t do business. They also count on us to be innovative, to release new features that make their lives easier. These goals sometimes come into conflict with each other, since any time we have a new feature to release, or another deploy to make, there’s an inherent risk of breakage. To mitigate that risk, we’ve devised a few ways to minimize our chances of introducing bugs or regressions.
Tests. Lots of tests.
From the very beginning, Balanced has had extensive unit tests. We follow the Model-View-Controller pattern, and each of these sets of components has its own set of unit tests. When taken all together, these tests provide a good baseline level of confidence that our application works the way we think it should. However…
Unit tests are not enough!
Balanced (the company) runs a number of separate services internally – mostly written in Python, of which Balanced (the service) is just one. This service has to interact with our fraud services, our vaulting services, our dashboard service, and so on, and all these interactions need to be tested. Unit tests alone are not sufficient to verify all these interactions.
For example, our fraud system may include a field called csc_check in its responses, containing information about whether the card security code provided on a transaction was a match. Balanced may have examples of this response in its unit tests, making sure that it can handle all the values it may receive, and life is good.
Suppose we decide that a better name for this field is security_code_check . Since the CSC check can go by many names this should be fine, right? So we update our fraud system with the new name everywhere, its unit tests all pass, and we deploy it. However, since we forgot to update the Balanced service, it has no idea that this field has a new name. Consequently, Balanced (the service) doesn’t know how to get the information it needs and we start returning internal server errors to all of our clients (and filling our own emails with system warnings). Our unit tests were not sufficient to tell us that this small change to our fraud system was potentially a breaking change to our system as a whole.
Even if services are well-tested in isolation, this does not address the interactions between them. These service-level interactions need coverage. This was the problem that we set out to solve.
The process
We use Jenkins for automating our testing and deployment. We have a number of jobs configured, each one performing a specific function.
Jenkins listens for commits to the release branch of our various services. When a commit is pushed, it begins the testing and deployment process, and runs through a number of jobs.
This diagram represents the various stages of testing that our Balanced service must go through in order to be deployed to our production environment. Our other services follow similar paths.
Unit tests The first step any deploy must go through is running the unit tests that belong to that service. The engineer committing the changes to be deployed theoretically should have ensured that these tests pass before committing, since no one likes the guy (or gal) who commits broken code, but sometimes people are forgetful, and sometimes what works on one engineer’s machine doesn’t work on another’s. A common mistake is to install some new library manually, but forget to update the requirements file – unit tests would pass on the committer’s machine, but fail when run elsewhere. Running unit tests in a fresh environment catches this type of problem. After setting up our environment, we run our tests in a manner similar to this: # Unit tests nosetests -sv --with-id --with-xunit --with-xcoverage \ --cover-package=balanced_service --cover-erase # Pylint python -c "import sys, pylint.lint; pylint.lint.Run(sys.argv[1:])" \ --output-format=parseable --include-ids=y --reports=n \ balanced_service/ | tee pylint.out # Pep8 find balanced_service -name \*.py | xargs pep8 | tee pep8.out We use Nose as our test runner and we leverage a number of plugins to help streamline the testing process. We wrote a small plugin, nose-setenv, to help us configure our tests for the environments we run them in and we leverage the Xunit plugin to produce an XML output file containing the results of the unit tests, which Jenkins uses to create graphs like this: As you can see, our tests are mostly stable, with an occasional failure that necessitates a quick fix. Build #806 shows what happens when requirements aren’t updated properly – every single test fails due to a bad import statement, and the engineer who forgot to update the requirements file sheepishly commits a one-line fix. We also run Pep8 and Pylint over our code, to track violations of style and good Python practices. Jenkins’ Violations plugin can fail the build if code quality falls below a certain threshhold, but we use this for informational purposes only. We run our unit tests using nosexcover, which gives us an XML coverage report file. This is used by the Cobertura Jenkins plugin to generate coverage graphs like this: The coverage output is also passed to the next step… Coverage enforcement As code in a project is added or changed, the tendency can sometimes be for the number and quality of tests to fall behind. An engineer adding a simple new feature or fixing a bug may reason that the workings are so clear, or the change so minor, that testing is superfluous and skip adding a test. Over time this can lead to a lack of coverage by unit tests, so they don’t provide as much confidence as they once did. This step measures the coverage of the unit tests performed in the previous step, and aborts the build if coverage drops below a minimum threshold. For instance, for the Balanced service, we require that all models and controllers have at least 95% test coverage, which means that unit tests must exercise at least 95% of the code for the build to continue. Every engineer here has felt the pain of committing code and receiving an email stating that the coverage level has dropped to 94.47%, and then having to hunker down and write more tests, but this ensures that unit test coverage remains comprehensive. (Jenkins’ Cobertura plugin also enforces coverage levels, but at a granularity that wasn’t sufficient for us.) Staging deploy After the self-contained unit tests have passed and been found to provide sufficient test coverage, we deploy the service to our internal staging environment. This is a test in and of itself – if after the deploy the service fails to start up properly, it may indicate that a server setting has been misconfigured, and this code isn’t ready for the production environment. Here is also where we test any database migrations on a duplicate of our production database – for instance, if a constraint is added such that a previously NULLable column is now NOT NULL, but old rows haven’t been backfilled appropriately, the migration fails and the build is aborted. Since this is tested on a copy of the actual production database, we can be reasonably sure that a migration won’t miss any tricky edge cases. Once the staging deploy job has completed, we use Jenkins’ Join plugin to run the next series of jobs simultaneously, and only proceed further if they all succeed. Acceptance/suite tests Once the code is running in our staging environment, we can run a battery of tests against it to test the integration with other services. Each of our various clients comes with a suite of tests (e.g., our balanced-python and balanced-java suites), which are all run against the staging server to ensure that the server behaves in a way that the client is expecting. Most of these tests depend on the correct interaction of Balanced with our other services, but we take it a step farther with our acceptance suite, which consists of two more jobs. acceptance server runs a suite of tests designed to go all the way through our stack, onto our banking partners’ test environments. For instance, we can pass test card data on to our acquiring bank and verify that they receive well-formed requests from us, as well as verifying that we can properly handle their responses. acceptance runs many of the same tests as acceptance server , but uses the Werkzeug test client and patches Python’s requests library to allow us to run all our servers in the same in-memory context. This allows us to set arbitrary breakpoints and to patch/mock different objects at various points throughout the request lifecycle, all the way down through our stack, to assert that what is actually happening matches our understanding. Running all servers in-memory also makes it trivially easy to use nosexcover and the Cobertura plugin again, this time to measure coverage of our test suite throughout the entire stack. If the Balanced service is well-tested by the acceptance suite, but the fraud system isn’t being exercised enough, it’s easy to see this here. Production deploy Once all these tests have passed, we’re confident that the new code hasn’t introduced any regressions and is ready to be deployed. To reduce the chance of operator error, our testing server performs deploys for us as well. We use Fabric and run a deploy task that pulls the code from our GitHub repo, removes an instance of the app from our load balancer (HAProxy), loads the new code, and puts the app back into HAProxy, for each machine running our code.
Confidence in quality
From start to finish, a deploy of Balanced takes about 10 minutes. During that time, we run over 950 unit tests, and another 200-300 integration and acceptance tests. We often deploy upwards of ten times a day, over multiple services.
Deploys do occasionally become blocked due to a failing test. Every time this happens, we calmly fix the cause of the failure and start the process again – there’s no rushing to fix a bug that’s suddenly made it out into the wild, because it never got a chance to make it out of our staging environment.
This freedom to iterate quickly without fear of breaking things is a huge win for us. This testing architecture is the result of a concerted effort we made to ensure that we have a consistently high level of quality, and it pays enormous dividends. It has made deploys much more risk-free, and greatly increased our ability to move quickly and introduce new features while minimizing the introduction of new bugs.
Final Thoughts
Balanced still has a long way to go. This solution works for now, but we’re always looking for ways to improve. We have to deal with a level of quality that catches problems early to let us move fast and break things, just not in a catastrophic way.
If these kinds of problems interest you and you’re looking for a real challenge, contact us! We’re always looking for sharp and talented individuals that can make an impact.
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We’re discussing this post on HN |
Andy Blatchford, The Canadian Press
OTTAWA -- Canada served up two unsavoury batches of economic numbers Friday as the latest trade and jobs figures provided further evidence of the country's struggles.
On employment, Statistics Canada's labour force survey said the market lost 31,200 net jobs in July, an unexpectedly steep decline that included the biggest one-month drop in full-time work in nearly five years.
On trade, the fresh figures showed Canada's deficit with the world -- the balance between imports and exports -- ballooned to a record level of $3.6 billion in June.
"The overall story here is the Canadian economy is barely growing," BMO chief economist Doug Porter said Friday.
"And the drag on the economy is in the export sector, the one area of the economy where I think there were very high hopes. We're basically still incredibly dependent on consumer spending and housing to keep pulling the economy along."
Combined, Porter said the disappointing jobs and trade numbers increase the likelihood that the Bank of Canada will decrease its already-low benchmark interest rate before the end of the year to help boost the economy.
After Friday's releases, Porter said he thinks the chances of a rate cut before January are 25 per cent, up from 10 per cent.
Looking at the labour data, Statistics Canada's survey found the national unemployment rate for July crept up to 6.9 per cent from 6.8 per cent the previous month.
The country shed 71,400 net full-time jobs in July -- a number partly offset by an increase of 40,200 in less desirable, part-time positions. Statistics Canada said full-time work hadn't suffered a one-month blow that big since it lost 80,300 positions in October 2011.
Public sector work plummeted by 42,000 positions, compared to the labour force's addition of 13,600 private sector jobs.
The survey also found that paid employee positions fell by 28,400 last month, while self-employed work -- often considered more precarious -- declined by 2,700.
But Porter said the performance of the overall labour force may not have been quite as negative as the headline number suggests.
Pointing to the July drop of 24,200 public administration jobs, he said the decline could have been directly tied to the roughly 25,000 temporary positions created in April and May for the census.
Porter also underlined another possible "quirk" in the employment data. He noted that Ontario showed a drop last month of 37,800 positions in educational services, which could be due to a seasonal adjustment involving teachers that he has seen reflected in the data in the past.
He expects those numbers to recover over the coming months.
With the July decline in educational services jobs, Ontario suffered the biggest loss of any province. Its labour market lost 36,100 net positions, 18,900 of which were full time.
In Alberta, where the economy has been hit hard by low oil prices and May wildfires that temporarily shuttered some crude production, the unemployment rate rose 0.7 percentage points to 8.6 per cent. The rate reached its highest mark since September 1994.
Overall, the Canadian labour market had 0.4 per cent more jobs than 12 months earlier. During that same period, however, full-time work dropped 0.2 per cent while part-time jobs climbed 3.1 per cent.
"Looking at it from a very big picture, the reality is that we've had very modest job growth over the last 12 months," said Porter, who thought the trade numbers were even more "disturbing."
Statistics Canada said exports fell 4.7 per cent in the second quarter to $124 billion, the steepest slide since the second quarter of 2009 during the Great Recession.
"The extent of the drop -- that's a bit surprising," said Krishen Rangasamy, a National Bank senior economist.
As a result, Canada's quarterly trade deficit expanded to a record $10.7 billion in the second quarter, up from $6.4 billion in the first quarter.
"Basically, what that means is that trade is going to subtract from growth in the second quarter and is basically reinforcing our view that Canadian GDP actually contracted about 1.5 per cent annualized in the second quarter," he said.
Rangasamy, however, is predicting a "strong rebound" in exports in the second half of 2016, thanks to the strengthening United States economy and the still-weak Canadian dollar.
A quick look at July unemployment (previous month in brackets):
Unemployment rate: 6.9 per cent (6.8)
Employment rate: 60.9 per cent (61.0)
Labour force participation rate: 65.4 per cent (65.5)
Number unemployed: 1,344,800 (1,326,300)
Number working: 18,023,300 (18,054,500)
Youth (15-24 years) unemployment rate: 13.3 per cent (13.0)
Men (25 plus) unemployment rate: 6.3 per cent (6.3)
Women (25 plus) unemployment rate: 5.4 per cent (5.3)
Here are the jobless rates last month by province (previous month in brackets):
Newfoundland and Labrador 12.8 per cent (12.0)
Prince Edward Island 9.6 (11.0)
Nova Scotia 8.4 (8.2)
New Brunswick 9.7 (10.3)
Quebec 7.0 (7.0)
Ontario 6.4 (6.4)
Manitoba 6.2 (6.1)
Saskatchewan 6.3 (6.1)
Alberta 8.6 (7.9)
British Columbia 5.6 (5.9)
Statistics Canada also released seasonally adjusted, three-month moving average unemployment rates for major cities but cautions the figures may fluctuate widely because they are based on small statistical samples. (Previous month in brackets.) |
At first, it was tough to convince others that running and drinking beer — almost simultaneously — isn’t a bizarre thing to do. But once Tej Sandhu and Dan Grant found their voice on social media, membership in their “running crew” took off, they say, swelling in the last six months from 10 runners to 900.
Tej Sandhu, an advertising executive, sits in Tequila Bookworm at Portland St. and Queen St. W. He and Dan Grant, a beer writer, founded Run T.O. Beer, which organizes runs to, you guessed it, beer. ( Chris So / Toronto Star ) The Night Terrors, seen here on an early October outing, are just one of many, many running crews across the city. ( Andrew Francis Wallace / Toronto Star )
Even the beer companies have come onside — sponsoring free pints at the end of each jaunt. “It’s been crazy,” says Sandhu, co-founder of the aptly named Run T.O. Beer, which meets about twice monthly. “It got so popular.” Just like the activity as a whole.
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Society is in the throes of a running boom, experts say. And, running “crews” in particular are on the rise (FYI, you 40-somethings: “group” and “club” are not cool words anymore). Seems millennials (this includes people in their mid 20s to mid 30s), particularly those who live downtown in big cities, are taking to running like rappers to Nikes and hipsters to tight jeans. Joining “crews,” is how this younger set — who consider Trinity Bellwoods Park their backyard and prefer public to private space — have decided to take up the sport. A desired result is to get fit and healthier, of course, but they’re not just running to lose weight, says Alan Brookes, race director for the Canada Running Series, which includes the Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Marathon on Oct. 18. They’re running for all kinds of reasons: to escape a tiny, urban condo, connect with people and make new friends, explore the city, discover their own neighbourhoods and even make them better. “They seem committed with their values to a friendlier, more caring city,” Brookes says. “It’s about a search for community and building community and having a say in the kind of community you want.” It’s also about self improvement. Steven Artemiw, 34, co-founder of the Parkdale Roadrunners, one of the largest crews in the city, commanding up to 150 runners on their weekly Tuesday night jaunts, says he started running when he gave up drugs.
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As a 26-year-old nightclub promoter, he made bad choices, he says, until one day he laced up his runners and felt better, noticing changes in his mood, sleep, physique and confidence. But he couldn’t keep it up all alone, he says. Hence, the need for a crew — supportive, like-minded people who have grown into a de-facto family. One that runs together, but also goes for brunch afterwards at a trendy restaurant and then does yoga at a stylish gym. Or visits a gallery before heading home to shower. That’s why Artemiw won’t run in a pair of ratty pants with a hole in the crotch, he says. And why at each Parkdale Roadrunners run there’s always someone who sticks at the “back of pack” — because running, and joining a crew, he says, doesn’t have to be about qualifying for Boston (the city’s annual marathon is considered that golden ring). “It’s about inclusion,” Artemiw says. “It’s about just discovering better versions of yourself every day. That’s what it’s built upon.”
The Night Terrors, seen here on an early October outing, are just one of many, many running crews across the city. ( Andrew Francis Wallace )
That attitude is fast trickling down to all kinds of people who may not have taken up running a few years ago, says William Chaupiz, 42, Toronto crew captain of Night Terrors, another enormous — and entirely non-threatening — running crew that runs primarily in the city’s west end, mostly in the evenings. Once upon a time, he says, running was about being fast, finishing a race and being competitive. You’d run alone, Chaupiz says, if you felt slow and self-conscious about “holding up the group.” More and more, urban running is now about embracing an active lifestyle in and of itself. If you want to be competitive, there are crews for that. But running is now something everyone of any and all speeds, can have in common, Sandhu says. And, it’s probably one of the most accessible sports around — all you need is “a pair of shoes, shorts and a T-shirt.” The T.O. crews Running crews are usually tied to neighbourhoods — and even though they’ll arrange runs to different pubs or clubs or restaurants all over the city, participants stay close to their hoods. Find them on social media. Join anytime. Most are free; some have a nominal fee. Parkdale Roadrunners: In the summer of 2010 a bunch of ballsy “non-runner” friends maDe a bet about who could sprint a 10K the fastest. By the time their race day came a few months later, almost everyone was injured — except for two people. They started running together, wearing T-shirts that read “I’d rather be smoking.” That got a lot of people asking, “When do you meet?” Today, more than 150 people join in their weekly runs.
Members of the running group Night Terrors take to Toronto's streets on an early October night. ( Andrew Francis Wallace )
Night Terrors Run Club (NRTC): When a MuchMusic employee couldn’t find a gym open late enough to burn off her post-shift energy one night, she decided to run through the city streets with a bunch of friends. Those shenanigans turned into a crew that runs to “cool places” such as festivals, murals, historical buildings, nature trails and “food spots you wouldn’t normally visit.”
Tej Sandhu, left, and Dan Grant run to beer during an outing to Queen St. W.'s Tequila Bookworm. ( Chris So )
Run T.O Beer: It all started with a tweet. Beer writer Dan Grant was looking for a buddy, someone to join him on a run — and then a trip to the bar. Tej Sandhu replied, the two met for a jaunt and pint on a miserable March night in 2014 — and the rest is history. Runs are short — either three, five or 10 kilometres with shorter distance runners joining in along the route — and always rewarded with brew. Since beer companies have been quick to join this party, every run ends with a free drink. Nike + Run Club: Sometimes, 200 eager runners turn out. Head coach Rejean Chiasson, 32, says that in the last couple of years there’s been a surge of runners from all kinds of different backgrounds and skill levels. The more serious — those with defined goals — can join Chiasson’s other crew, Pace & Mind, where participants can pay $100 to $120 a month for customized programs. BlackToe Running Inc.: This trendy Bathurst St. store has partnered with Dr. Jack Daniels (no, not that JD), a former Olympian and coach, who makes all its training programs. The cost is $25 a month and the crew goes on four evening runs a week and for a long run on Sunday mornings, says BlackToe owner Mike Anderson. After that, they usually take over a local restaurant for brunch. Correction – October 15, 2015: This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly referred to William Chaupiz as the co-founder of Night Terrors. |
The widening wealth gap in the United States is a worrisome sign that millions of families nationwide do not have enough in assets to offer better opportunities for future generations. Wealth allows families to make investments in homes, in education, and in business creation. On the basis of data collected using the National Asset Scorecard for Communities of Color (NASCC) survey, we report that, when analyzed by race, wealth accumulation is vastly unequal. By means of the NASCC survey, researchers have collected, for the first time, detailed data on assets and debts among subpopulations, according to race, ethnicity, and country of origin—granular detail ordinarily unavailable in public datasets. In this analysis we focus on estimates for U.S. born blacks, Caribbean blacks, Cape Verdeans, Puerto Ricans, and Dominicans in the Boston Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA). Our analysis shows that with respect to types and size of assets and debt held, the data collected on white households and nonwhite households exhibit large differences. The result is that the net worth of whites as compared with nonwhites is staggeringly divergent. |
A 70-kDa galactose-specific lectin was purified from the tubers of Dioscorea opposita cv. nagaimo. The purification involved three chromatographic steps: anion exchange chromatography on a Q-Sepharose column, FPLC-anion exchange chromatography on a Mono Q column, and FPLC-gel filtration on a Superdex 75 column. The purified nagaimo lectin presented as a single 35-kDa band in reducing SDS-PAGE while it exhibited a 70-kDa single band in non-reducing SDS-PAGE suggesting its dimeric nature. Nagaimo lectin displayed moderate thermostability, retaining full hemagglutinating activity after heating up to 62°C for 30 minutes. It also manifested stability over a wide pH range from pH 2 to 13. Nagaimo lectin was a galactose-specific lectin, as evidenced by binding with galactose and galactose-containing sugars such as lactose and raffinose. The minimum concentration of galactose, lactose and raffinose required to exert an inhibitory effect on hemagglutinating activity of nagaimo lectin was 20 mM, 5 mM and 40 mM, respectively. Nagaimo lectin inhibited the growth of some cancer cell lines including breast cancer MCF7 cells, hepatoma HepG2 cells and nasopharyngeal carcinoma CNE2 cells, with IC 50 values of 3.71 µM, 7.12 µM and 19.79 µM, respectively, after 24 hour treatment with nagaimo lectin. The induction of phosphatidylserine externalization and mitochondrial depolarization indicated that nagaimo lectin evoked apoptosis in MCF7 cells. However, the anti-proliferative activity of nagaimo lectin was not blocked by application of galactose, signifying that the activity was not related to the carbohydrate binding specificity of the lectin.
Copyright: © 2013 Chan, Ng. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Nagaimo is a Japanese mountain yam, which is a cultivar of Dioscorea opposita. Unlike tubers from other yams, D. opposita tubers are generally non-toxic that can be eaten raw after neutralization of oxalate crystals on the tuber skins. D. opposita tubers are used in many Japanese cuisines. Some of the tubers were utilized in traditional Chinese medicine, revealing their therapeutic potentials [21] . Although hemagglutinating activity was found in some types of yam tubers, there were very few investigations on the yam lectins. Also, none of the studies involving D. opposita tubers focused on the lectin. In a preliminary experiment, we detected the presence of a lectin in nagaimo (D. opposita) tubers that have not been examined before. We have therefore isolated the lectin, and studied its properties as well as biological activities. The study may help to shed light on the role of lectin in yam used in traditional Chinese medicine. It may also provide insights for possible therapeutic uses of the isolated nagaimo lectin.
Yam encompasses a number of species in the genus Dioscorea. Some examples of the major members are D. alata (purple yam), D. bulbifera (air potato), D. cayenensis (yellow yam), D. dumetorum, (bitter yam), D. rotundata (white yam), D. opposita (Chinese yam) and D. trifida (cush-cush yam). They are characterized by the possession of edible tubers that are rich in starch, some ions and vitamins. However, most of the yam tubers have to be cooked before consumption, in order to remove the toxic compounds present [19] , [20] .
Lectins are a group of proteins or glycoproteins possessing carbohydrate binding capability. In the past, lectins are classified in accordance with their carbohydrate specificities: mannose binding [1] , mannose and glucose binding [2] , galactose binding [3] , etc. As more lectins with diverse sugar-binding specificities were identified, the old system was no longer feasible, and other classification systems were proposed. Animal lectins are classified into families of evolutionary related carbohydrate recognition domains (CRDs). Some major families include calnexins [4] , M-type, L-type, P-type, R-type, S-type [5] , I-type [6] and C-type [7] lectins. On the other hand, Van Damme et al. introduced another classification system of lectins, based on the structure of lectins, in which were classified into merolectins, hololectins, chimerolectins and superlectins [8] . They have also classified plant lectins into 12 groups according to their structural and evolutionary relationships, such as legume lectins, jacalins, amaranthins [9] , [10] . Both animal and plant lectins exhibit a variety of biological activities. Some of them exert immuno-modulatory activities [11] , [12] , while others elicit anti-tumor, anti-bacterial, anti-fungal, anti-viral and anti-insect effects [13] , [14] . The physiological functions and mechanisms of various animal lectins have been studied precisely [15] – [18] . However, those of plant lectins have not been clarified. There are still numerous plant lectins yet to be identified and studied. Plant storage organs are rich in proteins. They are one of the best targets for identification and isolation of new plant lectins with a large yield, allowing extensive characterization of the lectins, helping to reveal their biological potentials (e.g. anti-tumor activities).
About 5×10 5 MCF7 cells were seeded on a 6-well plate overnight, and were treated with different concentrations of nagaimo lectin with or without the presence of 100 mM galactose for 24 hours. The cells were trypsinized, centrifuged down at 2000 g for 4 min, and then washed with PBS for three times. For Annexin V-FITC and PI staining, the cell pellets were resuspended in 250 µl binding buffer (0.01 M HEPES, pH 7.4, containing 140 mM NaCl and 25 mM CaCl 2 ) containing 2.5 µl Annexin V-FITC (BD Phamingen, CA, USA) and 0.5 µl PI (6 mg/ml) (Sigma). The cells were incubated at room temperature in the dark for 20 min. For JC-1 staining, the cell pellets were resuspended in 500 µl plain RPMI medium containing 2.5 µg/ml JC-1, and were incubated at 37°C in the dark for 15 min. The cells were analyzed using a BD LSRFortessa cell analyzer (BD Biosciences). The signal was detected by BD LSRFortessa Blue Laser (FITC: ex 494 nm/em 519 nm, PE-Texas Red: ex 488 nm/em 615 nm, PerCP-Cy5.5: ex 482 nm/em 695 nm). Data analysis was conducted by using the program Fortessa FASDiva Program Version 6.1.3. Compensation analysis was performed by using concanavalin A as positive control for treatment of MCF7 cells [28] , [29] .
Suspensions of human breast cancer (MCF7), hepatoma (HepG2) and nasopharyngeal carcinoma (CNE2) cells from American Type Culture Collection were adjusted to 5×10 4 cells/ml in RPMI medium. In a 96-well plate, 100 µl cells were seeded and incubated overnight. Then, the cells were treated with different concentrations of nagaimo lectin for 24 hours. After incubation, the medium was discarded. The wells were washed with PBS, 25 µl of 3-(4, 5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2, 5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide (MTT) (5 mg/ml in PBS) were then added and further incubated for 4 hours. Then 150 µl of dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) were added. The absorbance at 590 nm was measured using a microplate reader within 10 min. Percentage inhibition of the cells by nagaimo lectin was calculated by: [(OD 590 nm of the control – OD 590 nm of a culture exposed to a particular lectin concentration)/OD 590 nm of the control]×100% [27] .
In the carbohydrate test, lyophilized nagaimo lectin was dissolved in different carbohydrate solutions, all at 500 mM concentration in PBS. Assay of hemagglutinating activity was performed as mentioned above, but the carbohydrate solutions were used for serial dilution of the hemagglutinin instead of PBS. After identifying the carbohydrate specific for the lectin, a test was conducted to determine the minimal concentration of the carbohydrate for reduction of hemagglutinating activity of the lectin. The powder of nagaimo lectin was dissolved in solutions containing the specific carbohydrate at different concentrations in PBS. Assay of hemagglutinating activity was performed using the carbohydrate solutions of their particular concentrations for serial two-fold dilution instead of PBS [26] .
In the test for pH stability, the powder of nagaimo lectin was dissolved in solutions at different pH values: pH 0–1: HCl; pH 2–5: NH 4 OAc; pH 6–10: Tris-HCl; pH 11–12: NaHCO 3; and pH 13–14: NaOH. After incubation at room temperature for 30 min, the solution was neutralized, and assay of hemagglutinating activity was performed as mentioned above. Percentage of residual hemagglutinating activity was calculated by dividing the hemagglutinating activity of the sample by the maximal hemagglutinating activity×100% [24] .
Reducing SDS-PAGE involved treatment of the protein sample with loading buffer containing the reducing agent, β-mercaptoethanol, while in non-reducing SDS-PAGE, β-mercaptoethanol was not added to the loading buffer. SDS-PAGE was performed at a constant voltage of 120 V using a 15% separating gel and a 5% stacking gel. Then the gel was stained with Commassie brilliant blue for 1 hour, and destained with 10% acetic acid overnight [23] .
In a 96-well microtiter U plate, a serial dilution of a 50 µl test sample was performed using phosphate-buffered saline (PBS) (pH 7.2). Then, 50 µl of a 2% rabbit red blood cell suspension in PBS was added. The plate was incubated at room temperature until the red blood cells in the blank (with no protein sample added) had fully sedimented at the bottom of the well and appeared as a red spot. Formation of plaques of agglutinated red blood cells indicated hemagglutinating activity. Specific activity of the lectin is the reciprocal of the highest dilution of the protein sample inducing hemagglutination per mg protein [22] .
The powder was resuspended in 20 mM NaCl in 10 mM Tris-HCl buffer (pH 7.6) at a concentration of 5 mg/ml, and then subjected to FPLC-gel filtration on a Superdex 75 10/300 GL column (GE Healthcare) using an AKTA Purifier. The first major absorbance peak contained purified nagaimo lectin.
The powder was resuspended in 10 mM Tris-HCl buffer (pH 7.6) at a concentration of 15 mg/ml, and then subjected to FPLC-anion exchange chromatography on a Mono Q column (GE Healthcare) using an AKTA Purifier (GE Healthcare). Adsorbed materials were eluted using a 0–1 M NaCl gradient. The second peak containing adsorbed materials was collected, dialyzed extensively and lyophilized.
Nagaimo tubers were purchased from a local Japanese supermarket. The skin of nagaimo tubers was peeled off. Then the flesh was cut into small pieces of dimensions around 0.5 cm×0.5 cm. One hundred grams of the slices of nagaimo were soaked in 600 ml 10 mM Tris-HCl buffer (pH 7.6), and then homogenized in a Waring blender. The slurry was centrifuged at 30000 g, 4°C for 25 minutes. The supernatant was filtered using filter paper to yield the crude extract. Tris-HCl buffer (10 mM, pH 7.6) was added to the crude extract to adjust the volume to 1 L before loading onto an 18 cm×5 cm Q-Sepharose (GE Healthcare) column pre-equilibrated with 10 mM Tris-HCl buffer (pH 7.6). Unadsorbed materials were eluted with the starting buffer and discarded. Adsorbed materials were eluted with 1 M NaCl in 10 mM Tris-HCl buffer (pH 7.6). The fraction containing adsorbed materials was dialyzed extensively against double distilled water at 4°C, and lyophilized into powder form.
With the presence of 100 mM galactose, nagaimo lectin still could induce PS externalization and mitochondrial depolarization in the MCF7 cells ( Fig. 7B , Fig. 8B ). Occupation of carbohydrate binding sites of nagaimo lectin could not diminish the pro-apoptotic effect of the lectin on MCF7 cells.
In JC-1 staining, a slight shift of MCF7 cells from the upper left region toward the lower right region was observed ( Fig. 8A ). The cell shifting showed an increase in the proportion of MCF7 cells experiencing mitochondrial depolarization and undergoing cell death.
Flow cytometry analysis was used for further studies on nagaimo lectin-induced anti-proliferative effects on MCF7 cells. After Annexin V-FITC and propidium iodide (PI) staining, the MCF7 cells at the lower left quadrant of the profile shifted toward the lower right quadrant as nagaimo lectin concentration increased ( Fig. 7A ). The shifting indicated phosphatidylserine (PS) externalization in the MCF7 cells which were undergoing the early stage of apoptosis. The proportion of cells located at the upper right quadrant had also increased slightly at increasing nagaimo lectin concentrations, justifying that more MCF7 cells entered the late stage of apoptosis.
These suggested that nagaimo lectin interacted with the cancer cells through a domain other than the sugar binding site of the lectin. The blockage of sugar binding sites by galactose did not hinder the interaction between the domain on nagaimo lectin and the cancer cells, with the consequence that the anti-proliferative activity remained intact.
On the other hand, anti-proliferative activity of nagaimo lectin on MCF7 cells had declined after extreme pH treatments ( Fig. 6B ). The activity was not affected at pH 2, 4 and 10. At pH 0, 12 and 14, the IC 50 on MCF7 cells had raised by over 110% to around 8 µM, indicating reduction of anti-proliferative activity of nagaimo lectin. Hemagglutinating activity of nagaimo lectin was stable at pH 2 to 13. Anti-proliferative activity of nagaimo lectin was more vulnerable in alkaline pH, as observed by activity loss at pH 12.
Similarly, heat treatment on nagaimo lectin failed to abolish its anti-proliferative activity on the MCF7 cells ( Fig. 6A ). Unlike the hemagglutinating activity which had diminished since 64°C and vanished at 80°C, full anti-proliferative activity of nagaimo lectin was retained even the lectin was heated at 80°C and 100°C for 30 minutes.
Co-treatment with 100 mM galactose, the specific binding sugar of nagaimo lectin, failed to diminish the anti-proliferative activity of nagaimo lectin on the MCF7 and HepG2 cells ( Fig. 5 ). In the test of inhibitory effects of carbohydrates on hemagglutinating activity of nagaimo lectin, 100 mM galactose could lower the activity by about 80%, however, such inhibitory action of galactose was not observed on the anti-proliferative activity of nagaimo lectin.
Nagaimo lectin also exhibited anti-proliferative activity. Results of the MTT assay disclosed that treatment with nagaimo lectin for 24 hours strongly inhibited the growth of MCF7 and HepG2 cells, with IC 50 of 3.71 µM and 7.12 µM, respectively. It also slightly inhibited growth of CNE2 cells, with an IC 50 of 19.79 µM ( Fig. 4 ).
In the carbohydrate specificity test of nagaimo lectin, the lectin did not interact with glucose, mannose, glucosamine, glucuronic acid, galactonic acid, xylose, xylitol, mannitol and arabinose. In addition of galactose, nagaimo lectin also interacted with galactose-containing carbohydrates including lactose (glucose+galactose) and raffinose (glucose+fructose+galactose), as indicated by reduction in hemagglutinating activity of the lectin ( Fig. 3C ). The minimal concentration of galactose, lactose and raffinose required for reduction of nagaimo lectin hemagglutinating activity was 20 mM, 5 mM and 40 mM, respectively. The inhibitory effect of lactose on nagaimo lectin was the strongest, indicating the lectin has a high tendency to interact with β-galactosides. The carbohydrate specificity of nagaimo lectin was not limited to β-galactosides, since it also interacted with α-galactosides (raffinose) and galactose alone.
Nagaimo lectin had moderate thermostability. It retained full hemagglutinating activity up to 62°C, but the activity dropped abruptly when the temperature was elevated from 64°C to 70°C, and vanished at 80°C ( Fig. 3A ). On the other hand, nagaimo lectin showed fairly high pH stability. Hemagglutinating activity was preserved at pH 2 to 13, while the activity was halved at pH 0–1 and totally eliminated at pH 14 ( Fig. 3B ).
The first 12 amino acids at the N-terminus of nagaimo lectin were NPFVFFVAINNP. Protein BLAST was applied to seek homologous proteins in the GenBank Database. The proteins with highest scores are listed in Table 2 . They are highly different proteins with different sizes and present in different origins. However, none of them seem to be related to lectins. The N-terminal amino acid sequence of nagaimo lectin could not match any plant lectins, nor any types of Dioscorea proteins.
In non-reducing SDS-PAGE, without treatment with β-mercaptoethanol, the nagaimo lectin appeared as a single 70-kDa band instead ( Fig. 2 ). In FPLC-gel filtration on a Superdex 75 10/300 GL column, nagaimo lectin was eluted in the 10 th ml. Based on the calibration curve for the column, the molecular mass of nagaimo lectin was 70-kDa. This showed that nagaimo lectin is a 70-kDa dimeric protein with two 35-kDa subunits.
SDS-PAGE of (A) crude nagaimo tuber extract, (B) Fraction II from Q-Sepharose, (C) Fraction V from Mono Q, (D) Purified nagaimo lectin from Superdex 75, and (E) Purified nagaimo lectin without addition of the reducing agent, β-mercaptoethanol. Lane 1 of each panel: Molecular weight markers (GE Healthcare) including phosphorylase b (97 kDa), bovine serum albumin (66 kDa), ovalbumin (45 kDa), carbonic anhydrase (30 kDa), soybean trypsin inhibitor (20 kDa) and α-lactalbumin (14.4 kDa). Lane 2 of each panel: nagaimo protein samples.
A protocol with three chromatographic steps was used in lectin purification from nagaimo tubers. The first step, cation exchange chromatography on Q-Sepharose, yielded an unabsorbed fraction (Fraction I in Fig. 1A ) and a sharp adsorbed fraction (Fraction II in Fig. 1A ). The latter fraction was collected and subjected to the second step, FPLC-cation exchange chromatography on Mono Q. This step yielded one unadsorbed fraction (Fraction III in Fig. 1B ), and two major adsorbed peaks (Fraction IV and V in Fig. 1B ) and one minor adsorbed peak (Fraction VI in Fig. 1B ). Hemagglutinating activity resided in Fraction V. This fraction was subjected to the third step, FPLC-gel filtration on Superdex 75. The first, major peak (Fraction VII in Fig. 1C ) showed hemagglutinating activity but not the two minor peaks (Fraction VIII and IX in Fig. 1C ). Fraction VII contained purified nagaimo lectin that appeared as a single 35-kDa band in SDS-PAGE ( Fig. 2 ). The protocol contributed to purification of nagaimo lectin by approximately 33.4 folds ( Table 1 ).
Discussion
Lectins have been identified in various Dioscorea species, including D. alata, D. cayenesis, D. polygonoides, D. rotundata [30], [31] and D. batatas [32]. However, very few of them have been investigated in great detail. D. batatas lectins were the best studied Dioscorea lectins. D. batatas produced three lectins with distinct characteristics, DB1, DB2 and DB3. DB1 was a 20-kDa mannose-binding insecticidal lectin with two 10-kDa subunits. DB2 was a 31-kDa maltose binding lectin which served as the major storage protein in D. batatas. DB3 was a 128-kDa maltose binding lectin compsed of a 66-kDa subunit and two 31-kDa subunits [32], [33].
Studies on the three lectins from D. batatas were comprehensive [32], [33]. The isolation of multiple lectins was elegantly performed. Differences in the molecular size, amino acid sequence, heat and pH stability, and sugar binding specificity among the three lectins have been demonstrated. The variations in the composition of the three lectins also helped to illustrate the physiological roles of these lectins in the yam tubers. DB2 had N-terminal amino acid sequence resembling Dioscorea dioscorins that act as yam storage proteins. However, unlike dioscorins, DB2 did not exhibit carbonic anhydrase activity [32].
In contrast, the lectin that we purified from nagaimo (D. opposita) did not resemble any of aforementioned Dioscorea lectins. In contrast to the multiplicity of lectins in D. batatas [32], [33], nagaimo yielded only a single 70-kDa lectin. None of the other chromatographic fractions acquired during the course of nagaimo lectin purification manifested hemagglutinating activity. This suggested that no other lectin was present in nagaimo tubers except nagaimo lectin. DB2 in D. batatas acted as the major storage protein in the tubers, but not nagaimo lectin in nagaimo tubers. SDS-PAGE of the crude extract of nagaimo tubers revealed that the 35-kDa band representing the lectin was only one of the major protein bands. It deserves mention that some Phaseolus species and Phaseolus vulgaris cultivars have only a solitary defense protein [34]–[37] whereas other Phaseolus species and Phaseolus vulgaris cultivars produce two or more defense proteins [38]–[39].
The N-terminal amino acid sequence of nagaimo lectin was NPFVFFVAINNP. The sequence did not resemble any of the lectins in D. batatas [32]. Structurally disparate straw mushroom (Volvariella volvacea) lectins have been reported from different research laboratories [40], [41]. Also, the sequence of nagaimo lectin did not show homology to the Dioscorea dioscorins found in the GenBank Database. Dioscorins are one of the major storage proteins in yams. With no resemblance in sequence, it seems that nagaimo lectin is another storage protein in D. opposita tubers other than dioscorins. The results from the Protein BLAST search in GenBank Database even showed that the N-terminal sequence of nagaimo lectin did not resemble the sequence of any plant lectins. The most homologous sequence from the database was an Omp121 family outer membrane protein from Flavobacterium psychrophilum, a gram-negative bacteria, with around 75% identity within the sequence (Table 2). However, it has a much larger size (1060 amino acids), and the sequence is located near the C-terminus (987th to 997th amino acids) instead. It is unlikely to be related to nagaimo lectin. Nagaimo lectin is probably a new plant lectin with a distinct N-terminal amino acid sequence.
Nagaimo lectin displayed higher thermostability and pH stability than D. batatas lectins [32], [33]. Nagaimo lectin was heat-stable up to 62°C, while DB1 and DB3 started to lose hemagglutinating activity after heating at 50°C. Nagaimo lectin was stable over a wider pH range (pH 2–13) than DB1 (pH 7–9) and DB3 (pH 3–9). Besides, the carbohydrate binding specificity was also distinctly different. Nagaimo lectin was specific to galactosides and also interacted with galactose, while the lectins from D. opposita were mannose- and maltose-specific. Even though they belong to the same genus, they produce totally dissimilar lectins.
The investigations on biological activities of lectins from D. batatas were focused on their insecticidal activity [33], A study on anti-tumor activity was not included. Also, none of the other Dioscorea lectins have been reported to have anti-proliferative activity. The present study constituted the first report of a Dioscorea lectin possessing anti-proliferative activity on tumor cells. Nagaimo lectin from D. opposita exhibited anti-proliferative activity on several types of tumor cells, comprising breast cancer MCF7 cells, hepatoma HepG2 cells and nasopharyngeal carcinoma CNE2 cells. The inhibitory activity on MCF7 and HepG2 cells was more potent than that on CNE2, with over 2.5-fold difference in IC 50 values (IC 50 of MCF7 cells: 3.71 µM, HepG2 cells: 7.12 µM, CNE2 cells: 19.79 µM). The ability of nagaimo lectin to potently interfere with the proliferation of several types of cancer cells is noteworthy in view of the reports that some lectins/hemagglutinins are devoid of anti-proliferative activity [37]. Flow cytometry analysis of nagaimo lectin-treated MCF7 cells revealed that the lectin induced apoptosis which brought about phosphatidylserine externalization and mitochondrial depolarization.
Many reports have shown that lectins induce apoptosis in tumor cells through their carbohydrate binding capability [42]–[47]. For example, artinM, a d-mannose-binding lectin from jackfruit, bound onto and induces apoptosis in myeloid leukemia NB 4 cells, and the activity was abolished in the presence of Manα1-3[Manα1-6]Man [45]. In contrast, nagaimo lectin seemed to make use of other domains instead of its galactose-binding domain to interact with tumor cells. The application of galactose could not suppress the anti-proliferative effect of nagaimo lectin on tumor cells. This observation is reminiscent of an analogous finding regarding the glucose-mannose binding Canavalia gladiata lectin. Its anti-proliferative activity was not attenuated in the presence of glucose [48].
Unlike the hemagglutinating activity of nagaimo lectin, the anti-proliferative activity was not affected by galactose. Similarly, heating could not destroy the anti-proliferative activity of nagaimo lectin but the hemagglutinating activity. On the other hand, the anti-proliferative activity of nagaimo lectin was more vulnerable to alkaline pHs than the hemagglutinating activity. All these observations support that, two distinct domains are responsible for the two kinds of activity, i.e. the carbohydrate binding domain is independent of the anti-proliferative activity. Not limited to inhibition of MCF7 cell proliferation, nagaimo lectin also induced apoptosis on them. This was indicated by the ability of nagaimo lectin to induce PS externalization and mitochondrial depolarization on the cells. Same as the anti-proliferative activity, the apoptosis-inducing effects of nagaimo lectin was not suppressed by galactose. The initiation of apoptosis was also independent of the carbohydrate binding capacity of the lectin.
The hemagglutinating activity of nagaimo lectin was attenuated by galactosides and also galactose. The hemagglutinating activity of lectins is one of the major obstacles in the application of lectins for therapeutic purposes. A number of lectins exhibit anti-tumor and hemagglutinating activities at the same time through their carbohydrate binding activity [46], [47]. The hemagglutinating activity of lectins would constitute a side effect that leads to red blood cell agglutination in patients when applying lectins for cancer treatment. Nagaimo lectin probably did not depend on its carbohydrate binding capability to induce apoptosis in tumor cells. It is possible to introduce galactose and galactose-containing sugars to block the hemagglutinating effect of the lectin, while not hindering its anti-tumor activity. This suggests that nagaimo lectin has the potential to be the first Dioscorea lectin in therapeutic application.
Some [36], [49], [50] but not other [34]–[37], [48] lectins demonstrate antifungal activity. Nagaimo lectin is destitute of antifungal activity. In fact, antifungal and trypsin inhibitory activities which are found in the tubers of other species, are lacking in nagaimo tubers (data not shown).
This report adds to the meager literature on bioactive proteins in the yam tuber. Nagaimo lectin isolated in the present investigation is distinctive in certain aspects. It possesses a molecular mass, N-terminal sequence, sugar specificity, pH stability and thermostability distinct from previously reported yam lectins. It exhibits potent anti-proliferative activity toward several cancer cell lines.
Information pertaining to the ability of constituents of tubers, rhizomes and seeds, especially proteinaceous components, to inhibit the growth of breast cancer cells, is meager [51]–[55]. The compound dioscorealide B from Dioscorea membranacea is active against breast cancer cells [56]. Contamination of nagaimo lectin with small molecules like dioscorealide B is highly unlikely due to the vast difference in their molecular masses and also the use of extensive dialysis between the chromatographic steps.
Breast cancer is one of the most prevalent and severe gynecologic diseases [57]. Globally, the incidence was 0.641 million cases in 1980 and it soared to 1.643 million cases in 2010 [58]. There were 425 000 women who died of breast cancer in 2010 [28]. Nagaimo lectin is potentially exploitable for the treatment of this formidable disease. |
U.S. military uniforms aren't known for being trendy, despite the fashion industry's occasional embrace of camo. But unbeknownst to us non-military folks, the Army and Navy have been mandating hipster fashion for years in the form of Birth Control Glasses.
According to news reports, the U.S. military has been issuing the S9, brown, chunky, plastic-rimmed prescription glasses, for years. Soldiers who needed to wear glasses had no other choice but to wear the ugly frames.
But they were so nerdy that they became known military-wide as Birth Control Glasses, or BCGs (the army loves its abbreviations).
"The standard issue spectacles are so ugly that some troops stuff them in their trunks as soon as they leave training," said NPR's Robert Siegel. So the military has finally decided to upgrade to something a bit hipper, more rectangular black frames called the 5A.
Except the military has forgotten one crucial fact: Birth Control Glasses are actually cool. Fashion blogger Leandra Medine, a.k.a. The Man Repeller, has been calling her geek-chic specs "birth control glasses" since she started her blog. Whole neighborhoods in Brooklyn are filled with hipsters wearing S9 replicas.
In fact, if the military is looking to dump the remaining S9 frames, we recommend they simply sell them on eBay and Etsy. That'd be one way to close the budget deficit.
Check them out below and hear more about the switch from BCGs to less geeky specs on NPR.org.
PHOTO: |
On Wednesday's New Day, Chris Cuomo was displaying his liberal bias over and over again during discussions of President Donald Trump's decision to end the DACA program. The CNN host's commentary ranged from accusing Trump of "feeding fear and anger," to trying to give cover to former President Barack Obama by declaring that "Obama did not invent 'Dreamers."
Eventually, one Republican guest did manage to get Cuomo to admit that "there's no question that it's been legally dubious from jump" before he still argued that "This is a moral argument, not just a legal one."
Shortly before 7:00 p.m., as Ohio Republican Rep. and Freedom Caucus member Jim Jordan appeared on the show, Cuomo at one point tried to shield Obama as he argued:
The reason that Obama -- Obama didn't create "Dreamers." He didn't even create the law. You guys -- and not you per se -- but Congress had been fighting over this since before 9/11. You couldn't get it done -- you wouldn't get it done. And, in fact, you got worse at it over time. That's how we got here. Now it seems like we're going to revisit the whole process.
The Republican congressman pointed out: "That doesn't justify Obama doing something he said he couldn't do -- doing something that is unconstitutional."
At 7:15 a.m. ET, during another discussion segment, Cuomo complained:
<<< Please support MRC's NewsBusters team with a tax-deductible contribution today. >>>
This is about feeding something else. Let's just be honest what it's about. This feeds the fear and the anger of a part of his base. This "Dreamers" -- immigration is a metaphor for us versus them and what is America.
In his response, CNN political analyst David Gregory griped about "the conservative right" that supposedly "sprang up" around 2004 to 2005 and derailed President George W. Bush from passing a left-leaning amnesty bill for illegal immigrants as the CNN commentator asserted that Bush "had this issue right." Gregory:
You were talking to Jim Jordan. I mean, that is -- that is the conservative right that sprang up really in 2004, 2005, and that's what President Bush couldn't contend with. And I always maintained, President Bush, border governor of Texas, knew this issue, had this issue right, but the politics moved away from him
Moments later, liberal CNN political commentator and Daily Beast editor John Avlon found it "sinister" that young DACA beneficiaries might be deported in the near future:
And they are facing deportation after they gave their information and their addresses to the federal government. And, all of a sudden now, Jeff Sessions -- who was trotted yesterday, who is has been a long-standing hobby horse of his -- is in a position to weaponize that data and go after these "Dreamers" in a way that could be incredibly ugly in six months and is sinister.
Later in the hour at 7:43 a.m. as he reviewed the history of how DACA was developed, Cuomo again made a point of giving cover to Obama as he recounted that the plan was originally written by members of Congress in 2001:
DACA is not new, and Obama did not invent "Dreamers." I know you hear he did -- it isn't true. The DREAM Act -- Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors -- started life in 2001 before 9/11.
At about 8:20 a.m. ET, during a segment in which he debated Justice Department official Sarah Isgur Flores, Cuomo admitted that DACA was "legally dubious" after his guest recalled the Obama administration's history of being overruled by the courts: |
Mens Winners Photo by ASP Red Bull
Last weekend saw the start to the Boulder World Cup 2010 in Switzerland, with some exciting bouldering taking place. Kilian Fischhuber managed to surpass Adam Ondra after a good semi-final run which lead him to first place after the two were neck and neck. Bronze was handed to Christian Core followed by Cedric Lachat in forth place.
Fischhuber had some troubles on the second problem in the finals, though flashed both problem 1 and 3. Odra managed to get three tops in the first three problems during the finals, the first problem required 3 tries before he managed to top it, while the other two he managed to nail. At this stage both Fischhuber and Odra were tied in regards to the finals, though Fischhuber had a better semi-final run and was slightly ahead in that regard. For Odra to stand a chance at winning he would need to flash the final problem and hope Kilian Fischhuber wouldn't be able to follow suit....
Odra does it! Flashing the final problem and leaving everything up to Fischhuber. Kilian would need to flash the problem if he were to win the title, and that he did. After the neck and neck battle between the two Kilian managed to pull it out from Odra with a flash on the final problem and a leading score in the semi-final, making him the winner of the mens section.
The United States were also representing in the form of Alex Johnson, who won the womens title after some very close competition with the other competitors. The competition was just as, if not even more tight in the womens section where Alex managed to just inch past her fellow competitors in claiming first place by a difference of only 1 attempt.
Mens Results
1. Kilian Fischhuber AUT
2. Adam Ondra CZE
3. Christian Core ITA
4. Cédric Lachat SUI
5. Klemen Becan SLO
Womens Results
1. Alex Johnson USA
2. Akiyo Noguchi JPN
3. Chloé Graftiaux BEL
4. Cecile Avezou FRA
5. Katharina Saurwein AUT
Full Results Full List of IFSC Results
The next stage of the IFSC Bouldering World Cup will be held in Vienna on 28-30/05/2010. |
Playboy magazine today crowned the University of Colorado the nation’s No. 1 party school, citing the Boulder campus’ annual 4/20 smokeout, as well as the city’s numerous medical-marijuana dispensaries and its status as “a beer drinker’s paradise.”
According to Playboy’s website , CU received the party school crown because:
“CU-Boulder is home to reefer madness. Not only does Boulder have 50 medical-marijuana dispensaries within its city limits, but every April nearly half the university’s 24,000-plus undergrads turn out for the annual 4/20 smoke-out on school grounds. Boulder is also a beer drinker’s paradise, with four breweries in town. ‘There are a lot of distractions from school-snowboarding, mountain biking, super hot girls,’ says one alum. Literally dozens of world-class ski resorts are a drive away. You know Boulder is a party school because whenever you tell someone that you went there, the first thing they ask is, ‘Did you graduate?'”
Get more Boulder news at DailyCamera.com. |
According to a post on Maxconsole, a court in Paris has just dismissed a lawsuit filed by Nintendo over the use of flash carts on the DS. Apparently, the gamemaker was attempting to halt the use of the cartridges due to their ability to circumvent copy protection and allow for pirating of software, but a judge in France took a decidedly different view. As the carts are often used for homebrew and DIY projects, the court holds that owners of the console should be able to develop software much as a license holder of Windows might. Furthermore, the article claims that the court also deemed Nintendo's strict control of development "illegal" (Maxconsole's words), and said that development of software for the system shouldn't be hamstrung by the need for proprietary kits. This ruling follows a recent Spanish case in which the court dismissed Nintendo's lawsuit over flash carts claiming that while the add-ons do violate DRM, they also legitimately extend the functionality of the console. |
Drivers have called for Supercars to change the Safety Car restart procedure following the high profile incident in Race 17 at Sydney Motorsport Park.
The regulations were thrust into the spotlight when a contentious restart triggered contact between Shane van Gisbergen and Scott McLaughlin, which then led to the latter turning around the Red Bull driver at Turn 2.
A host of drivers believe the incident should prompt the championship to make changes to the rules.
Current regulations state that, although overtaking is not permitted before the control line, drivers can overlap once past the apex of the final turn and the green flag is displayed.
However, with a long approach to pit lane, and the late withdrawal of the Safety Car at Sydney Motorsport Park, the race leader was unable to accelerate out of the final corner.
“We had all that drama yesterday and did exactly the same thing on Sunday. The leader couldn’t go at the last corner,” said Sunday race winner Jamie Whincup.
“I don’t know why they didn’t just let (the Safety Car) go.
“We had this issue two or three years ago and learned from that. And I feel we would have learned from yesterday but we’ve made the same mistake
“The issue is letting us go early.”
The feeling was echoed by team-mate van Gisbergen, who copped a 33-second penalty for overlapping before the green flags were displayed, prior to contact with McLaughlin in Race 17.
“I think we can do a better job as a series for that,” van Gisbergen added.
“Our rules are really good when it is done right, but when it’s bad and there’s overlap, it’s just things can be better.
“We knew we were going green that lap but they still held the Safety Car until well after the last sector started. It could have been a little better, especially after seeing what it caused the day before.”
David Reynolds was among the victims of Race 17, Turn 2 melee triggered by the Safety Car restart.
The Erebus Motorsport driver believes the overlapping rule should be scrapped altogether, simplifying the process and thereby reducing the risk of a similar incident in future.
“When the Safety Car was released, the overlapping, technically you’re not allowed to pass but overlapping is passing,” Reynolds told Speedcafe.com.
“There should be no overlapping, no passing until the control line; then that eliminates all that.
“Once again, very confused just on the rules.”
It’s a sentiment shared by Nissan Motorsport’s Michael Caruso, who believes Supercars needs to amend the rule sooner rather than later.
“I think sometimes we just try to overcomplicate our rulebook,” Caruso told Speedcafe.com.
“I mean, we’ve all been racing forever, why allow the overlap before the start finish line?
“At the end of the day you have a Safety Car because there’s an accident or what have you on the track.
“I think let’s just get the race going again and let everybody race it out, rather than everybody’s focussing on what they’re doing coming out of the last corner.
“You see it the last few times with cars fanning out. It doesn’t look good.
“There’s going to be a big accident one day, and for what; for a Safety Car restart.” |
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has slammed the ABC, accusing the national broadcaster of breaching their own code of practice.
Assange said he should have been asked for a response to comments made about him by Hillary Clinton during an interview which aired in Australia on Monday.
The WikiLeaks founder's criticism comes as Four Corners interviewer Sarah Ferguson revealed on radio she thought Hillary Clinton 'has been through enough'.
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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (pictured) has slammed the ABC, accusing the national broadcaster of breaching their own code of practice
Assange said he should have been asked for a response to comments made about him by Hillary Clinton (pictured) during an interview which aired in Australia on Monday
In response to a retweet (pictured) by Four Corners producer Sally Neighbour, Assange said it was 'pathetic' and showed the 'extreme unprofessionality' of the ABC
'A sad day for Four Corners,' Assange told Daily Mail Australia, 'WikiLeaks has a pristine record for accuracy. Clinton stands alone in suggesting otherwise.'
'There was no push back on Clinton's ridiculous conspiracy theories or use of weasel words. The single greatest contributor to Clinton's downfall was not brought up: her strategy to elevate Donald Trump. We were not contacted to rebut.'
After first attacking Clinton for calling him a 'tool of Russian intelligence' and a 'nihilistic opportunist', Assange then took aim at the taypayer-funded broadcaster.
In response to a retweet by Four Corners producer Sally Neighbour, Assange said it was 'pathetic' and showed the 'extreme unprofessionality' of the ABC.
The retweet, since deleted, was a link to the Four Corners interview captioned 'Assange is Putins (sic) b****. We all know it!'
Assange cited the ABC's own code of practice, which states: 'Where allegations are made about a person or organisation, make reasonable efforts in the circumstances to provide a fair opportunity to respond.'
After first attacking Clinton for calling him a 'tool of Russian intelligence' and a 'nihilistic opportunist', Assange then took aim at the taypayer-funded broadcaster (pictured is Four Corners producer Sally Neighbour)
Describing himself as an 'Australian political refugee', Assange first hit back at Clinton's claims in the interview.
He called Clinton a 'notorious liar' and her statements 'defamatory', disputing her claims about the timing of WikiLeaks releases during the election.
Interviewer Sarah Ferguson appeared on radio on Monday, where she revealed she deliberately avoided asking Hillary about Bill Clinton.
'I reckon she's been through enough,' she said when asked whether the pair discussed Bill Clinton's infidelity by Jonesy and Amanda on WSFM.
'You know it's a very interesting relationship. It's a very interesting marriage, but I don't think every time she sits in a chair she needs to be asked about her husband.'
Interviewer Sarah Ferguson (pictured) appeared on radio on Monday, where she revealed she deliberately avoided asking Hillary about Bill Clinton
Earlier in the interview Ms Ferguson mentioned Bill's opposition to her recent book What Happened, and his desire to change her schedule at the end of her campaign.
Ms Ferguson was then asked whether she raised those issues with Hillary Clinton, or whether she mentioned Bill's cheating.
Former Labor leader Mark Latham said Ms Ferguson's refusal to ask Clinton about her husband is evidence of left wing bias at the broadcaster.
'This interview with the far left journalist Sarah Ferguson tells you everything you need to know about the fake news media and the massive decline in journalistic ethics,' said Mr Latham.
In response to a retweet by Four Corners producer Sally Neighbour, Assange said it was 'pathetic' and showed the 'extreme unprofessionality' of the ABC (pictured)
Assange cited the ABC's own code of practice, which states: 'Where allegations are made about a person or organisation, make reasonable efforts in the circumstances to provide a fair opportunity to respond' (pictured)
In response to Assange's remarks on social media, Ms Neighbour called the offensive tweet 'a mistake, since undone' and offered him full right of reply.
'We're not going to reward the ABC for breaching its own code of conduct,' said Assange.
'It's a typical yellow journalism tactic to defame someone who won't give you an interview -- then to offer them a 'right of reply'.'
Ms Neighbour then claimed an interview request was made on September 19, to which Assange said that request was not an opportunity for right of reply.
Assange has been living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London since 2012, and has been a vocal critic of Hillary Clinton.
In response to Assange's remarks on social media, Ms Neighbour called the offensive tweet 'a mistake, since undone' and offered him full right of reply (pictured)
After the Four Corners interview aired Assange tweeted a link to it captioned: 'There's something wrong with Hillary Clinton'.
'It is not just her constant lying. It is not just that she throws off menacing glares and seethes thwarted entitlement'.
'Something much darker rides along with it. A cold creepiness rarely seen' he said.
WikiLeaks released emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 US presidential election.
Assange has consistently denied accusations the releases were made on behalf of the Russian government, and has said the Russians were not the source of the leaks.
Ms Neighbour then claimed an interview request was made on September 19, to which Assange said that request was not an opportunity for right of reply (pictured)
Clinton has claimed WikiLeaks has never released anything about Russia, but Assange claims his organisation has published hundreds of thousands of documents pertaining to that nation.
An ABC spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia: 'As Sally Neighbour stated on Twitter straight away, the retweet was a mistake and quickly undone.
'The program contacted Julian Assange regarding an interview well in advance, and the offer remains open.
'Hillary Clinton has spoken a lot about issues relating to her marriage over the past decades — Sarah Ferguson had a lot of fresh ground to cover in her interview, which was more relevant to the news cycle.' |
Baseball players are the world's biggest meatheads. A player admires his home run? Throw a ball at his face. An athlete in a totally different sport talks trash? Throw a ball at his face. A fellow union member files a lawsuit in a last-ditch effort to salvage $25 million? THROW A BALL AT HIS FACE. RESPECT THE GAME.
Yahoo's Jeff Passan and Tim Brown have the inside story of the MLB Players' Association representatives' response to Alex Rodriguez suing the union, and it's pretty much what you'd expect.
"When [Rodriguez] gets up to bat, you can hit him and hit him hard," one player on the conference call told Yahoo Sports. "That's what I'd do. He sued us. Jhonny Peralta and Nelson Cruz screwed up. You know what? They owned up to it. They took their medicine. "[Rodriguez] needs to be scared of coming back and facing people he sued. If he can't fear the wrath of getting kicked out or not being included, he's going to be forced out."
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Keep in mind that this is Plan B.
Plan A, with near unanimous backing among union reps on the Jan. 13 conference call, was to kick Rodriguez out of the union. According to Yahoo, the idea was raised by the very first player to speak, and even after being told by executives that wasn't an option, more and more players threw their support behind it.
"That's what everyone was thinking," the player said. "We wanted to get on this call and not let him back. [To say,] 'This is our game and we don't want you in it.'"
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I get why they're angry. Alex Rodriguez is scorching the earth in his attempt to overturn the most serious PED punishment in baseball history, handed down via a process that he argues was capricious and unfair. (He also believes the union didn't do much on his behalf, and he's probably right on that count.)
But suing the MLBPA wasn't personal. As Craig Calcaterra noted last week, labor law requires a plaintiff to name the union as a defendant when he sues his employer for breach of contract. THROW A BALL AT HIS FACE ANYWAY.
Sources: MLB Players Association would expel Alex Rodriguez – if it could [Yahoo] |
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— State health officials reported Thursday that a resident who recently traveled to the Caribbean has the first confirmed case in North Carolina of chikungunya, a virus transmitted through the bite of an infected mosquito.
There are no documented cases of the virus being acquired in North Carolina or the continental United States, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. But the Asian tiger mosquito, which is common in North Carolina, could transmit the virus.
Infected persons usually experience the sudden onset of fever and severe joint pain in the hands and feet. The pain typically improves within a week, but it may last for months or years in some patients.
Vulnerable groups, including newborns, those over 65 and those with chronic illness, risk a more severe form of the disease. In rare cases, patients have died.
The state did not give the gender, age, location or condition of the infected person in North Carolina.
Health officials said chikunguya was first found in East Africa, India, the Indian Ocean and western Pacific. It made its way to the Caribbean last December through travelers returning from affected areas.
As of June 6, more than 130,000 people in the Caribbean have become ill with the virus, according to the World Health Organization. There are 27 confirmed cases in the United States.
"With North Carolina residents traveling to and from the Caribbean and other affected areas, we have been monitoring for possible imported cases," State Epidemiologist Dr. Megan Davies said. "Anyone experiencing symptoms of chikungunya should contact a physician and minimize exposure to mosquitoes to reduce the risk of transmitting the virus to others. Travelers who visit countries where chikungunya is widespread should take extra precaution against mosquito bites."
The Division of Public Health is advising residents to discourage breeding of the Asian tiger mosquito, which is aggressive in daylight and can breed in small water containers. Residents should remove outside containers that can hold water, frequently change water in bird baths and pet bowls, repair leaky outdoor faucets, tightly cover rain barrels, keep gutters clean and use screens on windows and doors. |
Paralyzed Graffiti Artist Draws With His Eyes
Enlarge this image toggle caption EyeWriter.org EyeWriter.org
A group of artists and hackers have crafted a gadget that lets a paralyzed graffiti artist continue making art using only his eyes. And it costs about as much as an iPod shuffle.
Zach Lieberman of the Graffiti Research Lab started working on the EyeWriter with one man in mind: Los Angeles-based graffiti artist Tony Quan. In 2003, Quan was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease, leaving virtually every muscle in his body paralyzed except for his eyes. Lieberman and developers from Free Art and Technology, OpenFrameworks and the Ebeling Group were inspired to create low-cost, open-source hardware and software for eye-tracking to help Quan draw again.
Eye-tracking technology, in which computers and small cameras harness eye movements for writing, highlighting Web site text and other tasks, has led to digital tools for users with disabilities. However, as Lieberman tells NPR’s Liane Hansen, those devices usually have hefty price tags.
Web Resources More About The EyeWriter
"Commercial eye-trackers, to get a device is $10,000-$15,000," he says. The EyeWriter is estimated to cost about $50. He and his hacker colleagues have a do-it-yourself kit for building an EyeWriter that starts with a pair of sunglasses. For Lieberman’s prototype, he bought a pair from a vendor at Venice Beach.
"Then we assembled a kind of wire frame that holds a Web cam, a small camera that we've mounted close to the eye," he explains. "We've written software that tracks the eye, and then we calibrate with [Quan's] eye movements and the computer screen."
Quan can draw lines and color within them, though graffiti-writing with the EyeWriter is nowhere near as fast as shaking up a can of spray paint and drawing by hand.
"But he can plot points. And from plotting points, create letters. And from creating letters, create words. And then color the words, shade the words, extrude them in 3-D, add different features," Lieberman says.
Enlarge this image toggle caption EyeWriter.org EyeWriter.org
The artist-hacker team studied Quan's art and his love of letter forms in order to produce the most effective software for him. They've just won a FutureEverything Award for innovation. That honor includes a cash prize, but Lieberman says he and the developers aren't interested in following the stereotypical storyline for a tech start-up: splashy launch, market saturation, initial public offering, high-priced sale. They want to help people who could use the EyeWriter to communicate, whether by graffiti or much simpler written words.
"There are people who have loved ones who have ALS or locked-in syndrome ... or other diseases, where having that option, at least, of a kind of device that you can build for somebody in need is really important and really necessary," he says. "We're not in it to make money. This is really coming from the heart." |
Dear Reader, As you can imagine, more people are reading The Jerusalem Post than ever before. Nevertheless, traditional business models are no longer sustainable and high-quality publications, like ours, are being forced to look for new ways to keep going. Unlike many other news organizations, we have not put up a paywall. We want to keep our journalism open and accessible and be able to keep providing you with news and analysis from the frontlines of Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World.
Israel on Thursday lodged an official complaint with the United Nations about the rocket fire into southern Israel from the Gaza Strip over the past several days.
Ambassador to the UN Ron Prosor complained to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that “the lives of about a million Israelis are paralyzed” by the projectiles.
Three rockets were fired into Israel on Thursday night, one of which was intercepted by the Iron Dome rocket-defense system. They marked the first such attacks since early Thursday morning when seven missiles hit Israel, in addition to one that was intercepted by the Iron Dome near Ashkelon. The IDF said that 130 rockets were fired into Israel since Monday.Prosor stated that “as long as Israel’s southern communities will not know quiet, it will not be quiet in Gaza.”He added that Israel fully cooperates with the UN, allowing civilian material and humanitarian aid into Gaza, “and in exchange weapons continue to flow into the Strip and rockets are fired into Israel.”On Thursday afternoon, the IDF raised the level of alert along the Egyptian border and ordered residents of communities located near Sinai to remain in their homes and lock their doors. Rapid response teams hurried to the towns and the army reinforced nearby forces out of concern that terrorists were planning another attack from the Sinai Peninsula.By the evening, the IDF lowered the level of alert but kept Road 12 – along the border – closed due to a general concern over attacks.On Wednesday, the air force attacked a motorbike in Rafah, seriously wounding a top global jihad operative who the army said was planning another assault on Israel from Sinai.Also on Thursday, the IDF said that it had noticed an increase in the use of cellular phones to detonate roadside bombs in the West Bank. The use of phones, the military said, had declined in recent years but suddenly picked up again in late 2011. The IDF said it also noticed an improvement in the camouflage used to hide the bombs.The most recent attack with cellular detonation was in April, when a bomb exploded next to an IDF vehicle close to Yatta, south of Hebron.No one was injured. Last week, two residents of Yatta were indicted for manufacturing bombs and planting them in the Hebron area.
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Alex Salmond’s reaction to being paid more than any other politician for appearing in the latest series of the satirical quiz show Have I Got News For You may have owed something to the “Because I’m Worth It” slogan of the L’Oréal cosmetic brand.
A payment of £1,800 Mr Salmond listed in his register of MPs interests as his fee for appearing on the show last month was £300 higher than that recorded by the five other senior UK politicians who featured in the same series.
“They must be operating a payment by results scheme”, Mr Salmond said when explaining why he had received a bigger sum than the other political guests on the flagship BBC panel show.
Perhaps Mr Salmond felt the additional £300 was in recognition of a “Scottish weighting” fee over and above the recorded sums of £1,500 handed to Labour’s London mayoral candidate Sadiq Khan, shadow minister Diane Abbott, Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron and Tory backbencher Jacob Rees-Mogg.
But Mr Salmond’s fee of £1,800 may have left Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson feeling shortchanged after she was paid £1,500, despite receiving praise for her performance in an episode of the show hosted by the actor Michael Sheen.
Conservative MSP Murdo Fraser said: “Only in Alex Salmond’s mind was he head and shoulders above the rest.”
Programme maker Hat Trick Productions said the reason Mr Salmond’s appearance money stood at £1,800 was because it had to make an additional payment of £300 in VAT as he was paid via a company that he uses for earnings outside politics.
A spokeswoman for Hat Trick said the £300 went to the tax authorities and did not directly go to Mr Salmond.
Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie criticised Mr Salmond’s claims about his performance in the episode, which was hosted by the actor and presenter Alexander Armstrong.
Mr Rennie said: “This payment is more a reflection of the size of his ego then the quality of his performance.” |
A slew of recent norovirus outbreaks on passenger cruises, including two on the same ship, have prompted the Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention to investigate, according to a report by CNN.
Several passengers aboard Royal Caribbean’s Grandeur of the Seas began experiencing symptoms of the disease, which causes vomiting and diarrhea. About 105 of the approximately 3000 passengers and crewmembers onboard were said to be impacted during the ship’s April 5 – 12 cruise.
The week before, another breakout of the disease afflicted 117 passengers and crew members, the CDC said in a news release. The ship docked in Baltimore to allow to health officers and an epidemiologist to board and conduct and initiate and investigation.
Another 152 people were affected by an outbreak aboard Princess Cruises' Crown Princess that ended Saturday in Los Angeles affected. A CDC health officer will evaluate the situation on that ship.
Read the full report here. |
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Wednesday laid out a list of Democratic demands following the ouster of James Comey a day earlier as FBI director.
On the Senate floor, the New York Democrat laid out three conditions that he said his caucus agreed on during a closed-door meeting earlier in the day.
First, Schumer said that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein should not be the one to appoint a special prosecutor. He said that responsibility should go to the highest-ranking civil servant at the Department of Justice. Second, Schumer said that Democrats agree that Comey is "needed more than ever to testify before the Senate." And third, Schumer again called on Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Rosenstein to brief all senators separately on the situation and in a classified setting if necessary.
"They should do it soon because the questions are just swirling about every day and almost every hour," Schumer said.
Schumer said that Senate Democrats plan to pursue several things in the coming weeks, but didn't elaborate. Senate Democrats already began on Wednesday to slow things down by postponing hearings. He added that the "overwhelming view" of his caucus is that a special prosecutor be appointed, claiming that serious doubts have been cast on Rosenstein's impartiality.
Schumer noted reports that Comey met with Rosenstein last week to request more resources for the FBI's investigation into Russia.
"That would make the timing of this firing even more suspect," Schumer said.
He said the only thing Democrats are seeking "are assurances that this investigation is carried out in an impartial, independent way."
"...That we get to the facts, that we get to the bottom of it," he said.
He praised the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee for inviting Comey to appear before their panel next Tuesday. As of Wednesday afternoon, they hadn't heard back from him.
While Democrats are adamant about the need for a special prosecutor to be appointed, Republicans would like to wait and see and want to learn more before calling taking such action. White House deputy spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Wednesday, "We don't think it's necessary." |
Half brother to North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong Un, Kim Jong Nam was attacked in the shopping concourse of Kuala Lumpur’s airport on Monday. He approached an information desk to report he felt dizzy after being assaulted and was rushed to the hospital, but died on the way.
The Guardian reports that local police official Fadzil Ahmat said Kim Jong Nam described the assault to the info desk workers, saying it “felt like someone grabbed or held his face from behind.” Three people were arrested in connection with the attack, and one of them is alleging that she thought she was participating in a prank for a TV show.
Police General Tito Karnavian told reporters that the women were instructed to convince men to close their eyes, then spray water on them. One of the women arrested was a mother named Siti Aisyah, who had traveled from Indonesia for work. She told authorities she was paid to participate in the “prank”:
“Such an action was done three or four times and they were given a few dollars for it, and with the last target, Kim Jong-nam, allegedly there were dangerous materials in the sprayer,” Karnavian said. “She was not aware that it was an assassination attempt by alleged foreign agents.”
The other two arrested were Aisyah’s boyfriend and an unnamed woman with a Vietnamese passport, according to CBS News. South Korea was quick to accuse North Korea of planning the murder of Kim Jong Nam, but has not shared any evidence. Kim Jong Nam had been on the outs with his half brother since 2001, when he was “caught trying to enter Japan on a false passport to visit Tokyo Disneyland.” He has also in the past been critical of the family’s regime and believed in “a democratic process,” according to Japanese journalist Yoji Gomi. Gomi told Yahoo News that Kim Jong Nam seemed to have anxiety about his family and North Korea:
“He must have been aware of the danger, but I believe he still wanted to convey his views to Pyongyang via the media,” Gomi said. “He was sweating all over his body, and seemed very uncomfortable when he responded to my questions. He was probably worried about the impact of his comments and expressions. The thought now gives me a pain in my heart.”
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North Korean diplomats demanded Kim Jong Nam’s body, but didn’t file a formal complaint, so Malaysian authorities conducted an autopsy. He supposedly had several children, but none have come forward to claim him. |
If you don’t live within an hour of the Village of Lake Placid in the Adirondack North Country, then you’d better hurry up and get in your car or on your bike. Now. This haste is required if you want to catch the free Rusted Root concert scheduled for 7:00 p.m. tonight on Mirror Lake in Lake Placid.
Tonight’s concert is part of the Songs at Mirror Lake Music Series, a seven week summer concert series highlighting an array of local, regional, and national musical talent hosted at the scenic setting of Mids Park, on the shore of Mirror Lake, Main Street in Lake Placid.
Songs at Mirror Lake is a volunteer, not for profit organization that features emerging artists in a variety of musical genres. The concerts are held on Tuesday evenings from 7:00-9:00pm during July and August and all are free to the public.
Oh and we’ll need you to chant, “Rain, rain, go away!” so the concert can be held outside as planned. |
“It is tails", said Ranjan Madugalle, the match referee, on 23 March 2003, to resounding cheers from the Johannesburg crowd. Sourav Ganguly now had the chance to decide what the Indian team should be doing after winning the toss against the Australians in the World cup final.
The same Indian team had folded for 125 against the Aussies in the group stage match, and there was some effigy burning; the same Aussies, who had crushed every opponent so far, had not been beaten in a World Cup fixture since their loss to Pakistan in a group stage match in 1999.
There was some context to India’s batting collapse in the earlier match: on the preceding tour to New Zealand, the much-vaunted Indian batting lineup couldn’t muster more than 219 runs in over 11 international innings on severely underprepared pitches. Understandably, they were sorely in need of confidence when they landed on South African shores. On the upside, the Indian fast bowlers had a spring in their step after bowling on green tops.
After the debilitating loss against Australia, the Indian team turned a corner, won eight matches on the trot, and reached the final. Did they have a chance against the invincible Aussies?
“Sourav you’ve won the toss. What will you be doing?" boomed Michael Holding in his Jamaican accent.
Fans could barely hear “We’ll have a bowl" in the midst of the din, already having assumed that the result of winning the toss was a foregone conclusion. Wait, what did he just say?
“Why is that?" asked Holding, thrusting the microphone towards Ganguly.
“Because it’s, it’s a bit damp… Uhhh, it’s because of the rain in the morning. We’ll have a go at this first."
This was like turkeys voting for Christmas, so to speak. Was the earlier result playing on his mind?
“So, you’re hoping that your fast bowlers will get a bit of purchase on this surface and you’ll get a couple of early wickets?"
“I definitely think so if they can put the ball in the right place the way they’ve bowled…we’ll definitely get some purchase".
Why did he have to think? All he had to say was “Bat". One syllable. Was it so difficult to say?
“Ricky, would you have done anything different?" asked Holding of the Australian captain, who was barely able to conceal his delight.
“No, would’ve had a bat, actually. It’s always nice to bat in big games in finals; I think so we would’ve had a bat."
See! He was thinking straight. Why couldn’t Ganguly think more like him?
Sure, Ganguly might have had some grounds for bowling first; but, what did the numbers suggest, in the manner of successful chasing teams?
If scores of scarred Indian fans haven’t minimized this window by now, they would recall that India failed to chase 360 in the final. Back in 2003, 360 was an unassailable target. In an article on ESPNcricinfo in January, the metamorphosis of the ODI game has been captured in a snapshot: a first innings score of 300-324 guaranteed victory before 2001 (and this included 60-over games) 9 times out of 10; since 2013, the corresponding figure has slipped to less than 3 times out of 4. The par score has increased from ~225 to ~270 as well.
These results aren’t surprising, considering the evolution of the ODI game. Like the previous article about teams chasing, if we were to demarcate ODIs into nine eras, the increase in strike rate (runs/100 balls) for batsmen (1-7) follow a similar upward trend, with the latest era batsmen scoring at 20 percentage-point higher rates (compared to ~65 in era 1).
However, there are various nuances across the batting order. In general, the effectiveness of an ODI batsman is determined by factors such as how fast one can score his runs (strike rate), his ability to not get dismissed (not out %), and his propensity to score a big number of runs. Like the last time, here too, we will be examining the trends of these factors before moving on to take a look at the top batsmen who were proficient in the first ODI innings.
Ever since Martin Crowe’s team revolutionized ODI batting with Greatbatch’s fireworks at the top of the order in 1992, the role of the ODI opener has never been the same since. The strike rate of the opening batsmen (1-2) has steadily risen over the years, with the greatest bump happening in the era post-1992. The strike rates of no. 4 and no. 6 batsmen have taken a drastic upward turn in the latest era, probably due to the effect of fielding restrictions in the middle overs.
The Not Out percentage shows some unusual patterns; the probability of an opener staying not out is still minuscule, but batting later has its benefits. Of particular interest is the no. 4 (no. 5 as well) during the 2002-2004 era. Probably, teams were trying to emulate the Michael Bevan template of batting through to the end (observe the strike rate in the same era being lower than the opener or no. 6). Understandably, the Not Out percentage is much less when compared to the chasing values (~20%) for middle order batsmen (4-6), since teams batting first have a different mandate (maximizing their resources) compared to while chasing (staying in touch with the required run rate, while conserving wickets).
The propensity of making big scores is a bit different as well. Batsmen batting in the top 4 have had the best chance to register a 50+ score (~1 in 4 innings). Due to increased strike rates, the batsmen at number 6 have had greater opportunities to chip in with big scores recently.
The occurrence of 100+ scores across the batting order shows some unusual trends; the percentage of innings resulting in a 100 increased till 02-04, decreased subsequently, and then rose sharply in the last 2-3 eras. In fact, the 13-16 era was the most productive in terms of individual 100 scores. No doubt, the tinkering of the fielding restrictions in the middle overs has helped some of the middle-order batsmen to amass big scores.
The overall evolution of the ODI game can be deduced by observing the Batting Index benchmark (BI). For the uninitiated reader, it is a product of the batting average (runs/dismissal) and the strike rate (runs/100 balls), divided by 100. For a batsman, the ability to score more runs before getting dismissed, and in a lesser number of balls is highly prized. Since it is a multiplication product, a high BI value implies that the constituent factors are high as well.
The progression of ODI batting can be observed by cursorily glancing through the BI values across the batting order in different eras. Batting was easier at numbers 3 and 4 in the first two eras, before the openers caught up in the post-Greatbatch eras. The numbers have been fairly stable among the top 6 overall, and have tailed off at number 7. The effect of four fielders in the middle overs is there to be seen in the latest era; numbers 3 and 4 have the highest BI values in the table.
A simple way to understand the differences in batting indices while setting a target and chasing a target would be to compare the two. The above table shows the percentage variation of BI (chasing) with BI (setting) as a reference. The positive and negative differences are shown in green and red, respectively. For instance, BI (chasing) was ~15% higher than the corresponding BI (setting value) for openers in the 71-84 era. Of late, BI (chasing) has taken a beating across the batting order.
From the statistics seen so far, we can conclude that batting first and batting second are two different ball games; the lower order batsmen (6-7) suffer comparatively while chasing. The opening batsmen have had a greater influence in the chase compared to batting first. Hence, for a chase, the top 5 batsmen influence it more often than not; and, while batting first, the top 6 influence most games.
In this article, the overall BI (batting positions 1 to 7) has been taken as the baseline. This may cause an under-representation of lower-order batsmen since their BI is not at the same level. However, a universal baseline is much easier to apply across the board and hence will be used in this analysis as well. Similar minimum runs based cutoffs have been chosen (minimum 500 before era 3, and 750 runs for all eras post 1988) with respect to batsmen batting between positions 1-7 while setting a target in different eras.
Once the bar has been set, the identity top-20 batsmen by BI ratios (w.r.t. the 1-7 BI setting baselines) can be easily found out independent of the match context. Since the BI is a temporally dynamic index, comparing different batsmen across eras is also taken care of to some extent.
In the first two eras, Vivian Richards was the master blaster in the first innings. It is also worth recalling that he was top chasing batsman in these two eras as well. Other West Indian greats such as Haynes, Greenidge, and Lloyd are also in the top-20. All-rounders such as Imran Khan and Kapil Dev feature in this list, despite their low batting positions. In the second era, the Aussies dominate the table with Steve Waugh, Jones, Boon and Marsh. Other players who did well batting first were Zaheer Abbas, Gower, Lamb, and Inzamam. It can be seen that the top-10 has been dominated by middle-order batsmen.
Over the next three eras, opening batsmen started to feature a lot more in the higher positions: Lara, Tendulkar, Ganguly, Kirsten, Gilchrist, Jayasuriya, Mark Waugh—all registered good BI ratio values. Other ODI regulars such as Bevan, Ponting, Ranatunga, Aravinda de Silva, Jacques Kallis, Mohd. Yousuf are present as well. Pakistan’s Abdul Razzaq makes an appearance in the top 3 of era 6, despite him batting lower down the order.
In the last three eras, the middle order batsmen have made a comeback: Dhoni, Hussey, de Villiers, Duminy, Pietersen, Sangakkara, Taylor and Yuvraj Singh. The presence of Ireland’s Paul Stirling amongst the familiar names is a big achievement.
Overall, the lists have been dominated by batsmen who have batted in the top 5 positions. The presence of Kapil Dev, Boucher, Razzaq, Imran Khan, Oram, Flintoff and Symmonds in the top-20 show that it is easier for a lower-order batsman to make an impact while setting a target as compared to in a chase. Nevertheless, a small tweak to the index must be formulated to take care of the representation of the lower-order batmen.
From the above tables, Viv Richards’ BI ratio of ~3.17 towers over everyone else. Many batsmen, such as Tendulkar, Sehwag, Amla, de Villiers, and Abbas, have crossed the 2.5 mark. It must also be noted that the spread of BI ratio is not the same across eras; for instance, the top batsman in era 1 has a BI ratio of ~3.17, but the corresponding top batsman in era 6 is only at ~1.99.
In order to take care of this, a BI ratio cutoff of 1.40 can be applied across the board. The choice of the 1.40 BI ratio benchmark is specific, as it narrows the list of elite batsmen to at least 8 players. This ratio of 1.40 represents a 40% better performance, vis-à-vis an average batsman (1-7), while setting a target.
How did these wonderful batsmen fare across different eras?
Only a few players have been able to consistently outperform the rest of the field across different eras; this can be highlighted by the number of times these players have featured multiple times in the BI ratio lists. Needless to say, some of the greatest ODI batsmen feature in this list of players who have crossed BI ratios of 1.75 and 1.40 in different eras.
In the above table, the player’s name, and his nth appearance (in parenthesis) have been indicated at different eras. For example, Miandad made his 2nd appearance at a chasing BI ratio>1.40 in the second era (84-89). It must also be noted that a player’s nth appearance in the 1.75 column is not reported in the 1.40 column, even though it is obvious, but for one exception—Sachin Tendulkar. Tendulkar breached the 1.40 barrier in era 4, and remained above the 1.75 level (and 1.40) in the next 4 eras. No other player has been able to sustain that level of performance for 4 eras, let alone 5. However, it must be remembered that the first era is 15 years long.
In the 1.40 list, many players such as Jayasuriya, Kallis, Lamb, Boon, etc. have made their nth appearance across in non-contiguous eras. And, only five players have breached the 1.40 level in more than 3 eras—Tendulkar, Dhoni, Ponting, Jayasuriya and Kallis. AB de Villiers and Amla are active players, and can make it into this elite list if they maintain their present form.
What about the teams then?
Across eras, only 8-18 batsmen have crossed the 1.40 BI ratio level, which indicates the exclusivity of the benchmark. In five eras, one team led the charts in terms of the stockpile of elite players; barring South Africa in the latest era, the top team with the highest number of high quality 1st innings batting personnel has won international tournaments. Of particular interest is Australia’s stranglehold of champion first innings batsmen from 1994 to 2008.
So, could Ganguly have done things any differently in the 2003 World Cup final?
Australia, with its fantastic target-setting batsmen, were the pre-eminent ODI team for five eras. India too, had equivalent resources while batting first between 1998-2001, but couldn’t keep up with the Aussie might in the next era. Wisden wasn’t wrong in its assessment that this team (without Shane Warne, mind you) would have beaten a Rest of World XI. And then there was the small matter of them being a champion chasing team as well.
ALSO READ: How India chased off the run-chase blues
Zaheer Khan might have been overexcited, and conceded 15 runs in the opening over; the two wickets that Ganguly was hoping for due to the purchase off the wicket never came until the 20th over, when the Aussies were comfortable at 125/2; two formidable batsmen, in the form of Ponting and Martyn, familiar with the art of setting a target, stitched together a massive partnership.
That man Ponting would more than compensate for his sedate first 50 off 74 balls—by scoring his second 50 off his next 29 and finishing with 140 off 121, taking Australia to 359. The Indian bowling lineup which had bowled like a dream for most of the tournament were demolished into submission; Srinath, the elder statesman, conceded 87 runs in what was his last ODI game.
What if India had collapsed batting first, like in the group stage game?
While individual predictions about a specific match can’t be made (and this is what makes the sport fun), take a moment to consider this: against the Aussies in their pomp (1 January 1998 to 31 December 2008), India had the best winning record against them while batting first; they only won five out of 27 matches batting second (fifth). After Tendulkar’s twin assaults in Desert Storm™ and Desert Storm Reloaded™, India hadn’t won a single match chasing against Australia until late 2007. No wonder the CB series victory against Australia in 2008 was a watershed moment.
On this basis, India had a better chance to win the match if they had batted first. Sigh. If only…
PaajivsPunter is an anonymous collaborative blog. They seek to write original, well-researched and thought-provoking articles. So far, they’ve written opinion pieces, commentary, perspectives, satire, analytical features and long-form narratives on cricket.
ALSO READ: Is R. Ashwin the all-rounder India has been dreaming of?
Comments are welcome at feedback@livemint.com |
Nearly six years ago, then-Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine was headed to Las Cruces, New Mexico — a battleground state in the 2010 midterms commanding national attention.
The city was less than an hour's drive from El Paso, and at least one staffer, western states director Ed Espinoza, was pushing for Kaine to make a detour to help Linda Chavez-Thompson, the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor. In Espinoza's telling, his bosses balked at the idea, but ultimately the proposal made its way to Kaine's desk.
Kaine chose to go.
"The decision was solely his, and he did it over objections from the staff above me," recalled Espinoza, now the executive director of the liberal group Progress Texas. "It was a time when the state wasn't feeling a lot of love from national Democrats."
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“ There’s still a lifetime in politics, even though it’s less than 100 days. No one can be complacent. You’ve got to work hard. ” — Regina Montoya, Texas fundraiser for Hillary Clinton
It's stories like those that fill Texas Democrats' memories of Kaine, now a U.S. senator, as they prepare to welcome him to the state in a new role: the running mate for their presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. Kaine is headlining the Clinton campaign's first major fundraisers in Texas since she wrapped up the nomination, with events planned Tuesday in Austin and Wednesday in Dallas and Fort Worth.
“To donors, he is a familiar guy, and when he was chair of the DNC, he showed up in Texas," said state Sen. Kirk Watson of Austin, a former mayor of Texas' capital city who has known Kaine since he was the mayor of Richmond, Virginia. "People got to see him, got to know him."
Back in 2010, Kaine went on to attend two events in El Paso, a campaign office opening and a canvass. Chavez-Thompson ultimately lost to GOP incumbent David Dewhurst by a massive margin, but party loyalists like Espinoza did not forget Kaine's help. Two years later, Espinoza was among the Texas Democrats who hosted a fundraiser in Austin for Kaine's Senate campaign.
This time around, the stakes are a bit higher. Clinton may have healthy leads on Trump in national and battleground polls, but her campaign is alerting its senior fundraisers about Trump's $80 million haul in July, including in an internal memo obtained by The Texas Tribune.
"This was far more than anyone expected - and should be a wake up call to all Hillary supporters," Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook wrote in the memo, which was first reported by Politico. "We must redouble our efforts in the coming weeks."
Mook went on to urge fundraisers "to take seriously the threat that Donald Trump could outraise us," warning that his small-donor operation is only getting started and has plenty of room to grow. Mook also noted how Trump, a billionaire, "has the capacity to write his campaign an eight or nine figure check, which could single-handedly tilt things in his favor."
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Clinton's top Texas fundraisers are getting the message.
"There’s still a lifetime in politics, even though it’s less than 100 days," said Dallas lawyer Regina Montoya, who has seen the memo. "No one can be complacent. You’ve got to work hard.”
Montoya is a "Hillblazer" in Texas, or a supporter who has bundled at least $100,000 for the primary and general election. As of June 30, Clinton's campaign was up to 27 Hillblazers in Texas out of a few hundred across the country and some overseas.
Trump has also been busy filling his campaign coffers with Texas dollars. After making a two-day fundraising swing through the state in June that raked in close to $8 million, he is due back Aug. 23 for finance events in Fort Worth and Austin, according to invitations.
Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., spent a day in the state last month in one of his first solo fundraising missions for his dad's campaign. The younger Trump, who raised almost $2 million between two fundraisers in Dallas and Houston, is expected to return before Election Day.
When Kaine touches down Tuesday in Texas, it will not just be to tap the ATM that Texas typically serves as in general elections. He will also hold a semi-public event in Austin to thank Clinton volunteers and promote her jobs plan, a somewhat unusual move that has some Texas Democrats buzzing that campaign sees an opening — however small — in typically beet-red Texas.
"We really feel like their combination, and of course their opponent, could lead to some seismic changes in Texas," said Austin architect Elliot Johnson, another Hillblazer. "I think that also carries over to the fundraising. I think you see a lot of people who weren’t involved in the primary are starting to donate."
“You have a lot of Republicans who really don’t know what to do with Donald Trump, some moderate Republicans," Johnson added.
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Montoya said she has no doubt Kaine can lead the fundraising charge in Texas, especially when it comes to hearing out donors one-on-one. She recalled how Kaine, earlier this year at a Clinton phone bank in Nevada, "spoke in flawless Spanish to everyone there" – including at length with her 92-year-old dad.
"This is a guy that just oozes gentleman-ness," Montoya said, "just oozes the ability to listen to people." |
Sure, downloading songs and movies is easy these days (even when done legally), but what if you don't have a computer or internet connection? "How would I be reading this post, then?" you might ask. Fair point, but there must be dozens of other people out there with portable media players yet no way to fill them, and for this market Sony and Universal have partnered to create POP, the "instant entertainment 24/7" vending machine hitting the UK this holiday season. Unlike other boxes that sell media players, this one sells content to fill them, downloaded straight to a memory card, flash drive, PMP, or other (USB-supporting) portable device. You can also purchase media-based content on DVD and Blu-ray if you like, games too, all of which "pop" out shrink wrapped and in full retail garb. Being able to buy a Blu-ray disc at midnight on a dark corner sounds mildly interesting, but with no mention of file formats or DRM or anything else, you won't find us sticking our memory cards into this thing's slots anytime soon. |
TAMPA — Nine-year-old Lucas White didn't know what to say.
When his mom approached his lemonade stand with a stranger holding a gift bag Friday, Lucas stood quietly as friends correctly guessed what was inside.
Lucas got a new iPod Touch, just like the one that was stolen from him Wednesday when teenagers in a Lutz apartment complex pushed him to the ground and robbed the children's drink stand of all $13.53 in profits.
The stranger, Scott Leckington, bought not only a new iPod, but $30 in iTunes gift cards. He gave Lucas' mother, who was recently laid off from her job, $150. And he gave $75 in Pizza Hut gift cards so Lucas could treat his fellow lemon-squeezers to a pizza party. Leckington delivered another pizza card and an iPod case donated by Pizza Hut and Best Buy.
"I like it," Lucas said as he choked back tears. He threw his arms around Leckington and held on for a few minutes before he went to work putting the iPod in its case. He tried to hand Leckington a cup full of Friday's drink proceeds but the 44-year-old Brandon man wouldn't have it.
Eventually Lucas came to accept the gift with a toothy smile, just like he did for waves of people that day who had traveled for as long as two hours to buy a $1 cup of lemonade or "lime-onade" in a parking lot at the Livingston apartments.
The kids guessed they had made at least $100 but hadn't counted their profits yet.
The lemonade stand heist had been reported in the Tampa Bay Times and on local television news programs.
"When I saw the story, it was just sad to see how two teenagers would take something away from a little 9-year-old," Leckington said. "It was just wrong, and I saw it was an opportunity to give back."
He got in touch with Lucas' mother, Jacqueline Jolly, Thursday night. He, too, had been recently laid off and said he wanted to reach out to the mother who had worked to help her son set up his first lemonade stand even though money was tight. She had bought pizza for the kids who helped out.
Lucas' initial goal was to make $50 selling lemonade to buy toys, but when friends pitched in, he decided to divide the earnings. They decorated a cardboard box, offering balloons with each purchase, and played Eric Church and country songs on his iPod.
About 5 p.m. neighbor Deante Small, 19, and a 16-year-old girl the kids didn't know asked for two glasses of lemonade.
The customers began to argue with the kids that their portions were too small, and Lucas splashed them with water. The girl then pushed him to the ground and grabbed his iPod while Small grabbed the money cup. The two drove away as Jolly called the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office.
Small was arrested Wednesday night and charged with robbery by sudden snatching. The girl, whose name was not released, was charged with battery and petty theft. Small was released Thursday on $2,000 bail.
"It was just one bad decision, but now the kids are seeing that there are consequences when you make a bad decision and there's also good in the world and people who will pitch in to help you when you're down," said Tamika Wright, whose children Nylia-Jane, 9, and Jadin, 10, joined in the lemonade venture from the start. "I know they've learned a lot from this."
Within minutes of setting up shop Friday, a man on a motorcycle came from New Tampa to hand the kids a wad of bills. Workers who came to clean the apartment pool stopped to donate $12 and a 79-year-old woman from Temple Terrace gave $30 for a hug and a drink. As Jolly and other parents and brothers stood outside to keep an eye on the kids, her phone buzzed with emails from people wanting to give money. One sent her $200 on PayPal.
"Once a man gave us a $50 bill and told us to 'keep the change,' and people are giving us money and not even wanting any lemonade," said Nylia-Jane. "We didn't even want any money, we just wanted to help Lucas to be nice, but he's being nice and giving us money."
The best gift, though, was completely unexpected and led Jolly to break down in tears.
She got a call about 1 p.m. from the apartment office that the arrested teen's mother had left a gift for Lucas. It was a new, black folding table, matching folding chairs, a glass beverage dispenser and a juicer so the kids no longer had to squeeze lemons by hand. There was a card from Small's mother containing $20 and an apology. There was also a handwritten letter from the son, known as "Casper" to the kids in the neighborhood, saying he hopes to "dearly apologize" for his actions.
"It's pretty good," Lucas said of the gesture.
"I accept his apology."
Contact Anastasia Dawson at [email protected] or (813) 226-3377. Follow @adawsonwrites. |
V for Vendetta, a thriller film produced in 2005 about a near-future dystopian society, previously censored in China, was aired on China Central Television Station (CCTV) Channel Six on December 14, 2012. Many people are surprised by the screening, in particular the mask of V, which has been used by activists all over the world as a symbol of resistance against government oppression.
Screening of a politically charged film
This video uploaded by youtube user loveforchina is an example showing how activists have made use of the film to protest against the human rights situation in China:
That's why CCTV's gesture soon became a hot topic online on Chinese micro-blogging platform Sina Weibo. A huati [zh], topical discussion, was even set up on the platform, which soon had more than 3469 conversation threads.
Trumpet Micro News (喇叭微新聞's highlights [zh] this popular discussion thread:
NOW！CCTV6正在播出《v字别动队》（又名《V字仇杀队》）。应该算是大陆首播了！
Now! CCTV6 is showing V for Vendetta. This should be the first time the film is on show in mainland China.
The news highlight attracted many to join the conversation:
橐橐：禁播才心里有鬼，放开后发现其实也没什么大不了，也许中国不要中共的领导也不会有什么啦，一切都是猜测。
橐橐：Censorship means that there is a ghost in [the authorities] heart. Once the censorship is lifted, everything is normal. Maybe China does not really need the Chinese Communist Party for leadership, of course this is speculation.
叶孤城蝶恋花：知道CCTV6播V确实是激动了半天，感觉天朝还是有希望的，就是没想通怎么要改成个别动队，求解释
叶孤城蝶恋花：I am so excited about CCTV 6's screening of V and feel that there is hope for the Empire after all. But I don't understand why they changed the film title (from V Revenge Killing Squad” V字仇殺隊）to “V Don't Move Team” （V字別動隊 – or V Commando Team) . Can someone explain?
Less censorship in the future?
Apart from the film title, its content had not been edited, as pointed out by the China Digital Times. LosAngels Angel pointed out [zh] that the State Administration of Radio Film and Television (SARF) is directly responsible for the management of CCTV 6's program, that's why the gesture has political implications:
2月14日晚，大陆央视电影频道首次播放了禁片《V字别动队》，该举动引发了了网友们的热议，很多人甚至在怀疑自己的眼睛或者是电影频道的编审们睡过了头。不过，据圈内人介绍，央视电影频道名义上属央视，但该频道播出与制作分离，行政上由国家广电总局负责，
On the evening of December 14, CCTV aired the censored movie, V for Vendetta for the first time. The move has triggered hot discussion among netizens and some found it unbelievable or said that the channel operators had fallen asleep [at the controls]. However, according to the TV circle, the production and management of CCTV's film channel are separate, the SARF is directly responsible for its administration.
Even Global Times, the state controlled media outlet, highlighted netizens’ reactions on their microblog and attracted some critical comments:
南扉：能不能放，不是由老百姓说了算。制度不改革，老百姓只能旁观是明君还是昏君
南扉：Whether the movie can be aired or not is not decided by the people. If there is no reform within the system, people can only comment on whether the king is good or bad.
我愛壹玖捌柒：该上船的早已经上去了，谁还管你电视放什么电影，既然这样，把那部三个小时的《天安门》也放一下吧。
我愛壹玖捌柒：Those who decided to leave have already gone and no one cares what films are put on air. Why not show the three-hour long movie: Tiananmen?
Cupid_Yes：干脆把局域网也开放点？
Cupid_Yes：Why don't you open up the Great Fire Wall (internet filter)?
静静的粉玫瑰：真心希望这是一个好的信号。其实中国一直是一个有深厚文化底蕴的国度，非常怀念春秋战国时期百家争鸣，各种思想家争相涌现的时代。解放思想，文化多元，这个国家才有希望，才会让脚踏实地地人们学会仰望星空。
静静的粉玫瑰：Really hope that this is a good signal. China is a nation with rich culture. I miss the the Spring and Autumn warring states period where there were so many schools of thought competing with each other. A country has hope when it has liberated thought and diverse culture. Only till then people can look at the starry sky peacefully, while staying on solid ground.
Bridge bloggers were quick to pick up the news. Brendon Connelly also found the screening surprising: |
488 Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: What's with this odd generation? on: February 14, 2010, 06:28:03 AM Quote from: theymos on February 12, 2010, 08:31:52 AM Does the sending client send more BitCoins to account for the fee (so the recipient gets what he's expecting)?
Yes.
Quote from: SmokeTooMuch on February 12, 2010, 01:11:09 PM why do we even need fees ? i thougt the no-fees-feature was one of the advantages of bitcoin ?!
Almost all transactions are free. A transaction is over the maximum size limit if it has to add up more than 500 of the largest payments you've received to make up the amount. A transaction over the size limit can still be sent if a small fee is added.
The average transaction, and anything up to 500 times bigger than average, is free.
It's only when you're sending a really huge transaction that the transaction fee ever comes into play, and even then it only works out to something like 0.002% of the amount. It's not money sucked out of the system, it just goes to other nodes. If you're sad about paying the fee, you could always turn the tables and run a node yourself and maybe someday rake in a 0.44 fee yourself. Yes.Almost all transactions are free. A transaction is over the maximum size limit if it has to add up more than 500 of the largest payments you've received to make up the amount. A transaction over the size limit can still be sent if a small fee is added.The average transaction, and anything up to 500 times bigger than average, is free.It's only when you're sending a really huge transaction that the transaction fee ever comes into play, and even then it only works out to something like 0.002% of the amount. It's not money sucked out of the system, it just goes to other nodes. If you're sad about paying the fee, you could always turn the tables and run a node yourself and maybe someday rake in a 0.44 fee yourself. |
If there’s one thing the British are famous for it’s our ability to politely queue for anything. If it were possible for corpses to form an orderly line you’d be able to take great photos outside of our funeral parlors.
In China there’s no such thing as queuing, it’s a concept that just hasn’t caught on. In Arabia I learned the subtle art of queue jumping from the Arabs, and the apologetic face of “sorry I didn’t know” that allows you to get away with anything up to murder, but that’s wasted here too.
The Chinese solution is to pretend that you are the only person in the room, and that you are the most important person in the world. You angle your elbows out, and simply shove anyone in the way aside.
I’ve seen a young guy drag an elderly couple (both of whom were using walking aids) to the ground, in order to jostle for a better position at the security scanners on the subway. His mistake, as I promptly grabbed him, gave him a loud and noisy bollocking (causing him to lose face) and then dragged him to the back of the throng.
I’d paid my bill in Starbucks one day, to suddenly find the fist of a Chinese man under my nose clutching his money. I’m not sure what he was expecting given that I was clearly waiting for my change, but what he got was grabbed by the arm and flung out of the door. He then came back looking very contrite and mumbling “di bu qi” (sorry in Chinese) at me.
I also watched a very large German guy lose it in a bank one day after he’d waited patiently for an hour to get to the teller window when a tiny Chinese chap darted in front of him. He walked up, picked the guy by his hair, and then carried him to the end of the line. In this case it wasn’t worth it, as he then spent twenty minutes explaining to jittery armed security why he’d done it in broken Mandarin.
There’s no malice in this failure to queue it’s just how it is, and the only way to cope is to learn to do it yourself or accept it whilst rolling your eyes and tutting. In my case that depends on how hung-over I am on the day. |
Bike racks to be installed in downtown El Segundo
Downtown El Segundo is about to become more bike-friendly.
The City Council Tuesday night unanimously approved the installation of 40 bike racks at 25 spots along Main Street and Grand Avenue, with possible later expansion to Richmond Street and El Segundo Beach.
Meredith Petit, the city’s recreation superintendent, told the council that the idea grew out of a request from a downtown business owner. As city staff surveyed existing bike racks, they realized that racks were few and far between – and quite old.
“These bike racks are outdated, unsightly, and certainly lack consistency in the look or design,” Petit told the council.
City analyst Vina Ramos was able to find and successfully apply for $9,700 in funding from Metro to pay for the racks. Installation will be undertaken in an estimated 40 to 65 days by public works staff.
Petit said the advantages of the racks extend beyond the obvious convenience for bicyclists. Some of the black metal racks will be emblazoned with a city logo to better brand downtown El Segundo, while the increased accessibility of the area to bicycles – in conjunction with the South Bay Bicycle Master Plan, which will add more than 200 miles of bike trails and lanes – is expected to reduce traffic congestion.
“It could encourage bicycling as an alternate mode of transportation in terms of being economically viable and environmentally responsible,” Petit said.
Councilwoman Marie Fellhauer suggested possibly working the El Segundo Blue Butterfly into the logo. “Not that I’ve ever seen a Blue Butterfly,” she said. “But that is our town symbol.”
Mayor Bill Fisher applauded the project, which has involved the public works, planning and building safety, and recreation and parks departments. He said downtown businesses have likewise contacted him about the lack of racks, in particular one businessman who cycles to work but can’t find a place to lock his bike.
“I think it’s great,” Fisher said. “This helps our downtown businesses…and goes towards all sorts of things, health and getting folks into downtown.” |
Melissa Jeltsen/The Huffington Post Lorena Bobbitt cut off her husband's penis in 1993. Now she runs a charity that helps domestic violence victims like herself.
HAYMARKET, VIRGINIA ― On a recent trip to Target, Lorena Bobbitt struggled to use the computer at the digital photo center. She was trying, unsuccessfully, to put her 11-year-old daughter’s picture on a Christmas card. A young male employee came over to help. When they were done and she was typing in her first name for payment, he audibly gasped.
“I thought the machine must be broken,” she recalled. “But he said, ‘I know who you are!’”
These days, getting recognized by strangers happens far less often. Her long hair is now a shimmery pale blonde (as a licensed cosmetologist, she sometimes highlights it herself), and 23 years have passed since her face was plastered on the front of major newspapers and magazines across the country.
Still, each new acquaintance she makes eventually puts two and two together, even when she uses her maiden name, Gallo. It is an inescapable part of her life, a fact she has accepted with remarkable poise. She grew used to the guffaws and the stares a long time ago.
“All the jokes, it hurt at first,” she said. “Now, I don’t care. I laugh, too.”
According to her telling of the story, in the early hours of June 23, 1993, her husband, former Marine John Wayne Bobbitt, came home drunk and raped her. He was frequently violent with her, she said, and forced her into sex whenever he liked. (John Wayne denies raping her, and he was acquitted of marital sexual assault in a separate trial in November 1993.)
Something in her broke that morning, Lorena said. She grabbed a knife from the kitchen and sliced off her husband’s penis as he slept. Then she fled the apartment, tossing his penis out the car window as she drove away. (It was later recovered by police and reattached in an operation lasting nine and a half hours.)
Almost overnight, the case became an international sensation. It was the original clickbait: An amputated penis. A young and pretty Latina woman. An all-American husband. Accusations of rape and assault. Love, sex and violence. The names, too, were gold. “John Wayne,” the archetypal alpha male, and the all-too-evocative “Bobbitt.”
In 1993, the country was still one year away from the O.J. Simpson case and the passage of the Violence Against Women Act. There had not yet been a national conversation about domestic violence, even though the leaders of the women’s rights movement were trying hard to launch one.
In an alternate version of history, the sad and horrible story of Lorena and John Wayne Bobbitt would have served as the perfect opportunity to start the dialogue. That year, an estimated 2,160 women were killed by their intimate partners, according to data collected by James Alan Fox, a criminology professor at Northeastern University.
There was a desperate need to improve services for victims, to raise funds and, crucially, to change the culture that enabled abusers to beat their families in private with impunity.
Instead, the story descended into a joke, with Lorena Bobbitt as the punchline.
“They wanted to talk about his penis, not my story,” she said with a shrug. “Maybe it looked like a reality show from the outside, but we were not in a cast. It was real life.”
JENNIFER YOUNG/AFP/Getty Images John Wayne Bobbitt arrives at the courthouse in Manassas, Virginia, for the fifth day of his wife's trial.
On a recent December morning, Lorena Bobbitt, now 47, was organizing Christmas presents inside her home in a gated community in suburban Virginia, as her dog Ringo, a 12-year-old bichon with thinning white hair, scampered under foot. She lives with her longtime partner, Dave Bellinger, and their only child.
As she does each year, Bobbitt had collected gifts for children in domestic violence shelters around the state. Board games, dolls and stuffed animals in various stages of gift-wrapping were scattered across a long table in her living room. Some were marked with the ages and genders of prospective recipients.
For kids living in a shelter, Bobbitt explained, the holidays can be especially hard. They may not have a Christmas tree or get to share a special meal with their extended family. But at least they would have a present to open.
She didn’t know about shelters back when she was married to John Wayne. It wasn’t until she went to trial that she learned there was any help available for people like her.
These days, Bobbitt lives a 20-minute drive from the two-story brick courthouse in downtown Manassas, Virginia, where she stood trial all those years ago. She never left the county, let alone the country. Why would she?
“I would have been recognized anywhere, and I liked it here,” she said.
Bobbitt, who was born in Ecuador and raised in Caracas, Venezuela, said she fell in love with Virginia when she first visited as a teenager. After graduating from high school, she moved to the U.S. and took classes at a community college. She thought perhaps she would become a dentist, like her father.
To support herself while in school, she took a job as a nanny. Later, she trained to be a manicurist and worked in a salon. As she describes it, her aspirations were simple: She wanted to marry and start a family.
She met John Wayne at a bar on the Quantico Marine Corps base. Her English wasn’t great, so they danced more than they talked. He became her first boyfriend, she said, and she enjoyed the courtship. They would see movies, go out to dinner and eat ice cream at Friendly’s, always with a chaperone.
She was a bit naive, she admits now.
“I was 19, but I was a young 19,” she said.
When she was 20, they married and moved in together. She was a virgin, she said.
Not long after, she said, the violence started. First, it was just verbal abuse, ugly name-calling and yelling. Then, she said, her husband began to hit, push and strangle her. It’s worth noting that strangulation, a common and frightening tactic used by abusers, is considered a serious risk factor for future lethal violence and is now treated as a felony offense in many states.
Prince William County police told ABC’s “20/20” that they responded to complaints of domestic violence at the Bobbitt residence half a dozen times, arresting John Wayne on one occasion for hitting Lorena in the face.
After four years of marriage, the couple were planning to divorce. Their story ― an average tale of abuse, awfully familiar to many ― would have remained within their personal circles. Except that on the night of June 23, 1993, she cut off John Wayne’s penis.
Honestly, the way I see it, it happened to all of us … all women who were abused. Lorena Bobbitt
Bobbitt was charged with malicious wounding, which carried a possible 20-year sentence. During the eight-day trial in January 1994, her defense attorneys argued that she was driven into a temporary fit of insanity after suffering years of rape and physical violence by her husband.
A parade of witnesses supported her story of domestic abuse, saying they had observed her with bruises on her wrists, arms, shoulders and head. Others recalled seeing him hit and shove her for minor transgressions, such as how she cooked. An educational pamphlet on rape, given to her by her neighbor shortly before the incident, was discovered on the couple’s dresser by police.
She doesn’t like to dwell on the details of the battering now, but Bobbitt said she is surprised that she made it out.
“I don’t know how I survived,” she said.
In photos and video from that time, she is a whisper of a person, painfully thin, with dark hair framing her lean face.
The scene outside the courthouse, with one radio station giving away Slice soda and cocktail wienies, was macabre. Baltimore Sun reporter Wiley Hall described it as a “grotesque carnival” and expressed shock at the crowd’s overt hostility toward Bobbitt and women in general.
The public was transfixed by the case. As the cover of People magazine declared, it was “the cut felt around the world.”
A Newsweek poll found that 60 percent of the country followed her trial. CNN provided live coverage to spellbound viewers, while NBC and ABC televised live reports every night. Gay Talese was there too, on assignment for The New Yorker and would later chronicle the experience in his book A Writer’s Life.
Much of the media portrayed Bobbitt as a crazed, vengeful woman who had perpetrated every man’s worst nightmare. Details of the incident became fodder for late-night comedians. The public made up their own jokes and songs about the sordid circumstances.
It didn’t matter there was overwhelming evidence that John Wayne was abusive, with even the prosecution’s own experts concluding that he had beaten and raped her. (In the years since, John Wayne has been arrested five times and convicted twice for domestic violence offenses involving two different women.)
Kim Gandy, then-executive vice president of the National Organization for Women, recalled the media circus eclipsing any meaningful examination of violence against women.
“Domestic violence organizations tried to have the conversation, women’s organizations tried to have the conversation, but the media wasn’t having any of it,” Gandy said. “I just remember feeling that there wasn’t any traction on the domestic violence part of it.”
The nature of the act Bobbitt committed ― cutting off a penis ― took over the discourse completely, said Jackson Katz, an activist who was working to engage men in preventing gender-based violence at the time.
“The fact that she was a victim of marital rape or domestic violence was a secondary aspect to the story,” he said. “It immediately became a story about his victimization at her hands.”
The jury deliberated for just over six hours before acquitting Bobbitt by reason of temporary insanity. In a statement read aloud by the owner of the nail salon where she had worked, Bobbitt encouraged other abused women to seek help.
“She did once and will again seek her American dream when she is able, and if the publicity of her abuse can help one person find freedom, then all of this is not in vain,” the statement said.
Before she could go home, she was required to spend 45 days in a psychiatric hospital for evaluation. It wasn’t a nice place, she said, but it felt good to ditch the media who were tailing her every move.
Finally, it was quiet.
Jeffrey Markowitz/Sygma via Getty Images Lorena Bobbitt was acquitted by reason of temporary insanity in January 1994.
If there’s one mantra that Bobbitt adheres to, it is “stay positive.”
She is relentlessly optimistic and has an aversion to lingering long in the past.
“In the beginning, I’d say, ‘Why me?’” she said. “But honestly, the way I see it, it happened to all of us … all women who were abused. I just happened to be the Lorena, but I’m not in the fight by myself. I’m in it for all women who have been victimized or will be victimized.”
In the years since her acquittal, she has worked quietly to help other victims of domestic violence.
Around nine years ago, she launched Lorena’s Red Wagon, a charity to help domestic violence victims and their children. When I met with her, she was busy planning a toy drive at a local restaurant. Patrons could drop off gifts for kids throughout the month of December. For one evening, a percentage of all restaurant sales would also be donated to domestic violence victims.
“I realized I may as well make a good thing out of a bad thing,” she said.
Bobbitt has trained to be a domestic violence advocate, occasionally helping to facilitate a 15-week educational and support group with abused women in her county.
Once in a while, she appears on television to talk about her notorious case. She has made a shrewd calculation: The host may tell jokes at her expense, but she’ll get the chance to raise awareness about domestic violence. It’s a sacrifice she is willing to make.
“Trust me, this skin is very strong,” she said and then added, “That doesn’t mean I’m a woman of steel or anything.”
Three times a week, Bobbitt takes a Zumba class. It’s a Latin-inspired cardio-dance workout, incorporating moves from hip hop, salsa, merengue, samba and mambo, and it’s her favorite form of exercise.
At the studio near her home recently, she greeted her Zumba classmates, mostly older women, with a characteristically warm smile, and they smiled back. They were all clearly regulars.
For an hour, she bopped, shimmied, bounced and jived in royal blue leggings. She rolled her hips, tapped her feet. Her hair, pulled high into a ponytail, flew around her face as she spun with abandon. She was happy.
“I am fine. I am very well aware of who I am. I accept myself,” Bobbitt said. “I believe I have a purpose in life. I won’t be stuck in the past.”
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Melissa Jeltsen covers domestic violence and other issues related to women’s health, safety and security. Tips? Feedback? Send an email or follow her on Twitter.
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Tennessee State Rep. Rick Womick (R-Murfreesboro) is facing growing criticism for his comments, first reported by ThinkProgress, calling for a purge of all Muslims from the U.S. military.
Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam (R) told The Nashville Scene, “I don’t think I would agree with Rick on that.” But when pressed to denounce Womick’s comments, as Muslim community groups have been urging, Haslam came up short, saying “I don’t know that’s my role. I would just say that on that issue I don’t agree with Rick.”
Haslam might be slow to denounce Womick’s comments that Muslims should be forced out of the military, but Womick is finding few defenders in his party.
The Murfreesboro Daily News Journal contacted Republican State Reps. Joe Carr, Pat Marsh, Bill Ketron, Jim Tracy and Mike Sparks for contact but none of them chose to comment on the controversy surrounding Womick.
Advertisement
While Republicans remain silent about Womick’s decision to denounce all Muslims in the U.S. military on Veterans Day, Muslim community groups are calling on Womick to issue an apology and for Tennessee politicians to publicly rebuke Womick’s anti-Muslim statements.
Islamic Center of Tennessee educator Abdul Rahman Chao told Nashville’s News Channel 5:
I think what he says has great implications, and I think he should not only retract what he said but also apologize to all people who are Muslims who are serving the military as well as all Muslims in the United States of America, because that bigotry only leads people to alienation and hate.
Watch it:
The Council on American Islamic-Relations (CAIR) issued a statement calling on the Tennessee General Assembly to formally rebuke Womick for “defaming all members of the military.” |
Posted: March 26, 2014 by Armando Orozco
Last updated: March 31, 2016
Coin mining is a key component for digital currencies like Bitcoin and Dogecoin. The mining creates new coins and helps keep them secure.
Malware authors have targeted the cryptocurrencies from different angles and one way is distributing ‘miners’ to unsuspecting users.
Android has had some reported occurrences of coin miners being distributed outside Google’s Play Store, but now some have managed to make their way in.
Security Company Trend Micro has uncovered two apps containing code to mine Dogecoin, together having more than one million installs.
The apps aren’t described as coin miners but as a song manager and shopping app.
Coin mining is resource intensive, so running on a mobile device could drain a battery quickly. The developers of these apps are aware of this and built-in functionality for the mining to take place when the device is charging.
Trend Micro reported these apps to Google and at this time they are still available in the Play Store.
It would be interesting to hear Google’s stance on these apps, I would think coin mining is acceptable, but failing to mention the mining behaviors isn’t.
One of the apps, Songs, has already updated and removed the mining code. Although they’re removed the code, I would not trust this app or developer. They could easily update again reintroducing the code.
Malwarebytes Anti-Malware Mobile detects Android/Trojan.BitCoinMiner.p. Although, they don’t have the traditional Trojan behaviors, functionality is hidden from users. |
How birds’ beaks evolved characteristic shapes to eat different food is a classic example of evolution by natural selection.
However, new research from the Universities of Bristol, Sheffield, Madrid and York, published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found this does not apply to all species, and that raptors in particular have not enjoyed this evolutionary flexibility.
Lead author of the study, Dr Jen Bright, of the University of Sheffield, said: “Our results show that in birds of prey such as eagles and falcons, the shapes of the skulls change in a predictable way as species increase or decrease in size. The shape of the beak is linked to the shape of the skull, and these birds can’t change one without changing the other.
“We think that being able to break this constraint – letting the beak evolve independently from the braincase, may have been a key factor in enabling the rapid and explosive evolution of the thousands of species of songbirds such as Darwin’s finches and Hawaiian honeycreepers”.
The researchers used a method that allowed them to statistically quantify variation in the shape of predatory bird skulls and see how this shape variation compared with size, what the birds ate and how they are related to each other.
“Our research does not cast doubt on Darwin’s ideas, far from it,” said project lead Professor Emily Rayfield, of the University of Bristol. “Instead it demonstrates how evolution has constrained raptor skulls to a particular range of shapes.”
“Basically, if you’re a bird of prey and you’re small, you look like a tiny falcon, and if you’re a bird of prey and you’re large, your skull looks like a vulture,” said co-author Jesus Marugán-Lobón, of the Autonomous University of Madrid.
The team are now keen to extend and test their ideas in other groups of birds. Project lead Dr Sam Cobb, of the University of York said: “Our results are important because they may help us identify one of the driving factors behind the outstanding diversity of bird species we see in the modern world.”
Paper
‘The shapes of bird beaks are highly controlled by nondietary factors’ by Jen A. Bright, Jesús Marugán-Lobón, Samuel N. Cobb and Emily J. Rayfield in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. |
by
María Paula Mejía, one of Colombia’s first Gardasil victims?
Her name is María Paula Mejía. She is a college student. Since receiving three doses of Gardasil her health has deteriorated considerably. She now suffers from constant pain throughout her body, muscle weakness, and bleeding from the nose and gums. She has so much pain in her left knee and ankle that she must walk with a cane, and cannot continue her college education. Paula is one of the first in Colombia to report a serious new medical conditions occurring after the use of Gardasil.
Lloyd Phillips, an American researcher of infectious diseases and genetics, has studied the adverse effects of Gardasil for five years. His work has revealed how Gardasil works differently in different people. He has documented related and biologically plausible mechanisms of action which could cause the many serious and life-threatening side effects which are being reported by girls and young women around the world after receiving the HPV vaccine.
In Colombia we have a potential crisis of major proportions resulting from the use of Gardasil because it is “free and compulsory” by “Law of the Republic”. It is assumed that this HPV vaccine is effective when used to combat cervical cancer, which can be caused by human papilloma virus. However, this vaccine has been hotly debated internationally for allegedly being dangerous and ineffective. It is currently being administered in Colombia without obtaining informed consent from young girls and their parents as to the potential and unknown risks of use.
The director of vaccination at MOH (Ministry of Health), Alejandro Garcia, says the government is “confident in the report of the World Health Organization,” which gives the go-ahead to the vaccine and assures that there is no association between the developments of illness and application of the vaccine.
Lina Trujillo of the Colombian Cancer Institute says that the vaccine protects exclusively against HPV and “does not remove the possibility of having other diseases, and adolescence is the time at which diseases such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis start to appear,” and that “the only contraindication is ‘pregnancy’ and specialists have no hesitation in recommending the vaccine.”
However, neither the director of the Ministry of Health nor Lina Trujillo, from the Colombian Cancer Institute seem to be informed about how the vaccine is produced, and much less about the potential side effects of Gardasil.
The World Health Organization, whose reports are practically the Bible of the Gardasil vaccination policy in Colombia, has been suggested to be complicit with the pharmaceutical industry in general and the Gardasil manufacturer in particular in urging promotion of HPV vaccination campaigns. Relying on the pharmaceutical industry to self-regulate has historically been a losing proposition for the public when companies are left to weigh profits against transparency.
The María Paula Mejía case is illustrative in this regard. She had a third dose of the vaccine, even though she had experienced adverse symptoms after the first two injections. The third injection is when her serious symptoms began.
Interviewed via Skype, with visible signs of pain and discomfort from the effort of sitting upright in a chair, she told us the symptoms she experienced after the third dose of vaccine.
During the first 15 days after her third injection she experienced fever, vomiting, diarrhea, bone pain, joint pain, migraines, tingling, electrical “zaps” on her hip and back, and neck pain. One day she was unable to move for 2 hours, and continues to suffer from insomnia and dizziness. María Paula had every expectation that the symptoms would abate or at least become less intense, but instead they progressed in severity.
At her medical appointments, during which she was subjected to more than 40 laboratory tests, the medical diagnosis was unanimous: All tests were perfectly “normal”, she had nothing … while her symptoms worsened.
The symptoms she was already experiencing were followed by more severe ones, which included progressively spreading joint and bone pain, worsened neck pain, scalp pain, continuing severe hip, back, and knee pain. She began to suffer loss of strength in the left leg, wrist pain, dizziness, neuralgia throughout the body, painful spinal “zaps” as well as continuation of the “zaps” in her hips and limbs. She began to suffer difficulty breathing at certain times of day, chest pain, bleeding in the nose and gums, deviation of the left knee and left ankle, and new complications from older problems.
Through all these symptoms, medical observations and tests were useless in arriving at a diagnosis until a doctor thought to ask: “Has she been recently vaccinated?”
It was then that María Paula first made the association between the vaccine and her new medical condition. And she was not mistaken.
She is currently overwhelmed by pain, has difficulty walking and feels her health is deteriorating more and more. Her symptoms are consistent with those being reported after Gardasil around the world. Although not all are affected equally, of all girls who are vaccinated, a percentage of them will suffer severe effects from Gardasil, which can lead to paralysis and even death.
Neither Merck, the manufacturer, nor the Colombian government agrees that the vaccine is causing these severe symptoms. Both simply raise an accusatory finger at those who denounce this situation, as if the victims did not exist.
The reproductive health of girls and Colombian youth’s rights are being denied to those injected with Gardasil. This is not acceptable, particularly since government support for HPV vaccines has been withdrawn in other countries, such as Japan, for example, because of concerns about serious adverse reactions including infertility.
What’s more, says researcher Lloyd Phillips, if a girl who already has HPV is vaccinated, her risk of getting cancer could substantially increase.
Colombian doctors do NOT know, or refuse to accept, the risks of this vaccine. Treatment for victims is nonexistent.
This is what the U.S. researcher Lloyd Phillips explained to me about Gardasil:
The vaccine uses an aluminum adjuvant because in 1920 a man named Glinny discovered that aluminum stimulated the immune system. A Frenchman named Ramón then discovered that if the aluminum-containing vaccine was given to a horse that had an infection, the immune system produced an even greater amount of antibodies.
Phillips found that aluminum remaining in the system after Gardasil injections can cause an enhanced and extended immune response against infections and illnesses that occurred long ago.
This enhanced response can cause inflammation in the body, especially in the digestive system, and can cause the immune system to wrongfully identify food proteins as foreign. The body then begins to produce histamine to combat what it perceives as a food allergy, causing stomach pain and dilating blood vessels, which can cause dizziness and excessive heart pounding upon standing up.
The result, according to Phillips, is that the more inflamed a digestive tract becomes, the more its ability to absorb nutrients needed to maintain the chemical cycles in the body can become impaired, which can lead to fatal consequences.
Phillips also notes that the body cannot distinguish between inflammation and fear, either of which can trigger the “fight or flight response” which forces the person to excrete magnesium, causing a deficiency. This deficiency has many symptoms, such as muscle spasms, pain, irritability, cardiac arrhythmias, headaches, brittle bones, and more.
In short, says the researcher, this type of vaccine was made for people with “a genetically perfect immune system,” which does not exist in reality.
Gardasil can produce all of these symptoms to varying degrees according to the genetic make-up and medical condition of the person who receives the vaccine, which can vary from hour to hour. This is something neither Merck, nor the Colombian government is telling the public.
In the case of María Paula, as she will recount, when she received the first dose, she was never warned that any of the symptoms she is now suffering were possible. She says:
“They told me that I could have pain in my arm for a week and that I had to wait 15 minutes before leaving the Cancer League, because some girls fainted and the next week was going to be uncomfortable, but that it was normal because of the vaccine… I received the second dose and the second dose hurt a little more … the next few months I began to experience fatigue and back pain, but I thought it was because of my daily activities … I had pain in the lower back and neck … I received the third dose on 20 January of this year and the pain was much greater than in the previous two doses … I began to experience several things … immediately after being vaccinated I began to experience dizziness, I wanted to throw up, obviously my arm really hurt … they warned me about the dizziness, and the urge to vomit and the arm pain and that the next day my arm was also going to hurt, but the following week I had fever, vomiting, diarrhea, extremely strong migraines that lasted 15 days with vomiting, and diarrhea…, I went to the doctor and was told that that there was a virus going around… one night I sat on the couch in my house and then I lay down; I started feeling really bad, very feverish, until I realized that I could not get up from the couch “…
María Paula’s symptoms seem to get worse with each passing day. For the moment, the only hope she has of improving is going to the U.S. to receive treatment.
In Colombia there is no protocol to treat these cases. The government says they do not exist.
And what is the role of Merck, the manufacturer of the vaccine?
According to Lloyd Phillips, company profits are what motivates the existence of this vaccine and its advertising campaigns, due to lawsuits against Merck as a result of VIOXX, a drug that caused 27,000 heart attacks. A single dose of Gardasil may cost about 68 cents to produce (about $ 1360 pesos), and in Colombia obtaining it privately costs the equivalent of $60 (roughly $120 thousand pesos) and in the USA up to $ 200 (about 400 thousand pesos).
The Colombian government has spent $300 million on a questionable vaccine that is already starting to claim apparent victims in Colombia. Following Lloyd Phillips’ statistics, of the $300 million paid by Colombia, $ 298.98 million (nearly $299 million) was profit for Merck.
Colombia is purchasing the HPV vaccine at a hugely inflated price. This vaccine can not only ruin lives, but can cost thousands of dollars to bring a single victim back to health. Families may have to spend thousands of dollars trying to restore their daughters’ health, without having prevented any cancer as promised, and instead causing a number of illnesses that did not exist before using this ‘miracle’ vaccine.
We are then faced with a health emergency induced by a vaccine that has never been proven to prevent any cancer and that is ravaging the children and youth around the world, against which there have been million-dollar awards for HPV vaccine injury in the U.S. (The U.S. government has already paid more than six million dollars to victims) and the vaccine has been rejected in several countries, for example in India and Japan.
But in Colombia, Gardasil will continue to claim more casualties unless an immediate halt to its “free and compulsory” status is granted.
The Colombian government is exposing itself to millions of dollars in lawsuits for its actions in making this vaccine mandatory to Colombian girls and women without informing them of the grave risks already known worldwide.
Does the government of Colombia intend to ignore medical consumers’ right to informed consent, despite knowing the consequences?
MARIO LAMO JIMÉNEZ is a founding member of the Colombian Alliance of Writers and Journalists and coeditor of its publication “La Hojarasca“. He can be reached at admin@escritoresyperiodistas.com. |
An Army veteran is being credited with saving a bald eagle by shooting it out of a tree.
Jason Galvin was driving near his home in Minnesota when he saw the bird hanging upside down by a rope about 75 feet up.
SEE ALSO: 75-year-old Army veteran saves 16 children from library attack
After telling his wife Jackie, the couple decided something needed to be done so they started calling local officials.
According to Jackie, all of them gave the same answer, the bird had been stuck there for 2 and a half days and it was dead.
The Galvins believed the eagle was alive so Jackie encouraged her husband to shoot the rope the bird was tangled in.
Jason had to be careful since killing a bald eagle is a crime. He borrowed a neighbor's rifle and after an hour and a half and 150 bullets, the bird was loose. Galvin, who served 2 tours in Afghanistan, didn't hit the eagle once.
The couple named the bird Freedom, wrapped it in a blanket and it was taken to the Raptor Center where it's expected to make a full recovery.
Mission accomplished!
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Serving up Mad Style Coat Porn:
Mad Men cast members Elisabeth Moss, John Slattery, Christina Hendricks, January Jones and Jon Hamm with show creator, writer and executive producer Matthew Weiner at THE DRAPER BENCH, a semi-permanent art installation at the Time & Life Plaza, 1271 Avenue of the Americas, home of Sterling Cooper & Partners Advertising Agency in the iconic series at Time & Life Building in New York City.
How ridiculously cool is that bench? How many tens of thousands of tourists are going to take their picture on that? How adorable are those socks?
They all look so cute here. We don’t think we’ve ever seen the cast all look that good at the same time. There’s usually one or two total WTFs, when you’ve got Hendricks, Jones, and Moss to contend with. God bless them all, but they’ve each had a somewhat contentious relationship with the red carpet.
Ironically, given the quintessentially New York flavor of the show, it’s fun and refreshing to see them all dressed up like, well, New Yorkers. Really glamorous and good-looking ones, to be sure.
That is just plain awesome, but it makes us really sad, in a way. We’re looking at a long mourning period ahead of us.
[Photo Credit: Getty Images, Dara Kushner/INFphoto.com, Kristin Callahan/ACE/INFphoto.com, GG/FAMEFLYNET PICTURES] |
Demand For Quinoa A Boon For Bolivian Farmers
Enlarge this image toggle caption Juan Karita/AP Juan Karita/AP
Quinoa, once a staple of the Incas, is now increasingly popular in the U.S. It's high in protein and iron, and much of it comes from the windswept, high-altitude plains of Bolivia, known as the altiplano.
The Bolivian altiplano doesn't look like good farmland. It doesn't even look fertile. Everything is covered in bleached-out scrub and rocks. Llamas graze on the barren landscape amid occasional whirls of dust.
But this seemingly hostile environment has ideal conditions for quinoa: It's about 2 miles above sea level, sandy and arid. The nearby Uyuni salt flat provides the right minerals, and dung from herds of grazing llamas and sheep means good fertilizer.
Lives Transformed
Farmer Ernesto Choquetopa admires the soil. He says quinoa's recent popularity is changing the lives of farmers.
"Before people didn't go to study," he says. "They were born, they grew up, and that was it. They went on to herd sheep and llamas. Nothing more.
"Now people here, we think about doing something with our lives."
Thanks to his earnings from quinoa, Choquetopa's oldest daughter is now in medical school.
The dark-green quinoa plants have cone-shaped flowers, filled with the edible seeds, and look like a cross between broccoli and lupines. Once ready for harvest, they'll turn gold, deep red, even purple.
Choquetopa is part of an association of organic farmers. His harvest will go to their processing plant where it is cleaned, rinsed, packaged and bought by exporters like Fabricio Nunez, general manager of Andean Naturals, which sources quinoa to stores such as Whole Foods and Trader Joe's.
"Once we promoted it and the product was on the shelves, it started flying off," Nunez said. "People are still looking for quinoa and we're not able to supply as fast as they want it."
Rising Cost
But for all the health benefits, and the way sales support small farmers, popularity abroad is pushing up prices and gradually making it harder for Bolivians to buy.
Nunez says a few years ago, 16 ounces of Andean Naturals quinoa retailed for $2 at Trader Joe's. It's now $4. And if prices keep climbing, quinoa could stop showing up in traditional soups and porridges in Bolivia.
But on the street corners of downtown La Paz, quinoa remains a popular breakfast: The delicate, curly seeds are served with hot milk and sugar, as a thick drink. At about 30 cents for an 8-ounce cup, it's still cheap even by Bolivian standards.
The Bolivian government is backing quinoa, supporting loans to small farmers and promoting internal consumption by giving rations to pregnant women and young children.
Dr. Margarita Flores, who works for Bolivia's Ministry of Health and oversees the program, says that a drop in production would worry the government because Bolivia has obligations at home and abroad to produce quinoa, and because it's part of the country's strategy to fight malnutrition.
The challenge is striking a balance. In spite of growing prosperity, many quinoa farmers are concerned about the environment. In fact, in Choquetapo's community, people who use chemical fertilizers or uproot native grasses around quinoa fields are fined, or even punished.
"We want to keep the production sustainable," Choquetapo says. "We don't want to exploit every bit of it. This piece of earth has to support our kids and grandchildren, too." |
Eyewitness accounts from the Syrian massacre emerged Tuesday, describing shadowy gunmen slaughtering whole families in their homes and targeting the most vulnerable in poor farming villages. Western nations expelled Syrian diplomats in a coordinated move against President Bashar Assad's regime over the killing of more than 100 people.
U.N. special envoy Kofi Annan met with Assad in Damascus to try to salvage what was left of a peace plan, which since being brokered six weeks ago has failed to stop any of the violence on the ground.
Survivors of the Houla massacre blamed pro-regime gunmen for at least some of the carnage as the killings reverberated inside Syria and beyond, further isolating Assad and embarrassing his few remaining allies.
"It's very hard for me to describe what I saw, the images were incredibly disturbing," a Houla resident who hid in his home during the massacre told The Associated Press on Tuesday. "Women, children without heads, their brains or stomachs spilling out."
He said the pro-regime gunmen, known as shabiha, targeted the most vulnerable in the farming villages that make up Houla, a poor area in Homs province. "They went after the women, children and elderly," he said, asking that his name not be used out of fear of reprisals.
Assad's government often deploys fearsome militias that provide muscle for the regime and carry out military-style attacks. They frequently work closely with soldiers and security forces, but the regime never acknowledges their existence, allowing it to deny responsibility for their actions.
U.N. peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous said there are strong suspicions that pro-Assad fighters were responsible for some of the killings, adding that he has seen no reason to believe that "third elements" — or outside forces — were involved, although he did not rule it out.
The Syrian regime has denied any role in the massacre, blaming the killings on "armed terrorists" who attacked army positions in the area and slaughtered innocent civilians. It has provided no evidence to support its narrative, nor has it given a death toll.
Following his meeting with Assad, Annan called on the government and "all government-backed militias" to stop military operations and show maximum restraint. He also called on the armed opposition to stop all violence.
"We are at a tipping point," Annan told reporters in Damascus. "The Syrian people do not want the future to be one of bloodshed and division."
Cranking up the pressure on Assad, the Obama administration gave Syria's most senior envoy in Washington, the charge d'affaires at the Syrian Embassy, 72 hours to leave the United States. Britain, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Bulgaria also expelled Syrian diplomats.
"We hold the Syrian government responsible for this slaughter of innocent lives," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said in Washington. "This massacre is the most unambiguous indictment to date of the Syrian government's flagrant violations of its U.N. Security Council obligations."
The massacre in Houla could prove to be a watershed moment in the Syrian crisis, which began in March 2011 with peaceful protests inspired by the wave of uprisings sweeping the Arab world.
Nearly 15 months later, the country is in many ways unrecognizable from the days before the revolt. Assad, once considered a potential reformer in a region filled with aging dictators, is a global pariah. A country that once boasted it was the safest in the Middle East is riven with violence, some of it reminiscent of the worst days of the Iraq war. The economy is in tatters. Syrians are facing price increases for basic goods and endure regular power cuts.
And in some haunting cases, neighbors who have lived side by side for years are turning on each other, driven by sectarian hatred that so many months of violence is laying bare.
According to witnesses, the massacre, which began late Friday in an area about 40 kilometers (25 miles) northwest of the city of Homs, had dangerous sectarian overtones.
The victims lived in the Houla area's Sunni Muslim villages. But the shabiha forces allegedly behind many of the killings came from an arc of nearby villages populated by Alawites, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.
Most shabiha fighters belong to the Alawite sect, to which the Assad family and the ruling elite also belong. This ensures the gunmen's loyalty to the regime, built on fears they will be persecuted if the Sunni majority gains the upper hand.
Sunnis make up most of Syria's 22 million people, as well as the backbone of the opposition. Even as much of the opposition insists the movement is entirely secular, disturbing reports from the ground suggest religious tensions are boiling over.
The volatile sectarian divide makes civil war one of the most dire scenarios.
Activists say as many as 13,000 people have been killed in the uprising. The U.N. put the toll at 9,000 as of March — one year into the revolt — but many hundreds more have died since.
On Tuesday, the U.N.'s human rights office said most of the 108 victims of the Houla massacre were shot at close range. The U.N. report indicated that most of the dead were killed execution-style, with fewer than 20 people cut down by regime shelling.
Deaths from heavy artillery can be blamed on regime forces with relative confidence because rebel fighters do not have such weapons. But it is more difficult to determine who is behind the close-range killings — particularly as Syria sharply restricts media access.
Still, the U.N. cited survivors and witnesses blaming the house-to-house killings on shabiha. Witnesses also told the AP that shabiha were behind the attacks.
"What is very clear is this was an absolutely abominable event that took place in Houla, and at least a substantial part of it was summary executions of civilians, women and children," said Rupert Colville, spokesman for the U.N. High commissioner for Human Rights.
"At this point, it looks like entire families were shot in their houses," he said.
It is not clear what touched off the convulsion of violence. Houla activists reached by Skype said government troops shelled the area after anti-government protests on Friday and clashed with local rebels. Later, shabiha from nearby villages swept through the area, stabbing residents and shooting them at close range.
Videos posted online by anti-regime activists show explosions in Houla and dismembered bodies in the streets, then row upon row of the dead laid out before being buried in a mass grave. Some videos showed dozens of dead children, some with gaping wounds.
According to the state-run news agency, SANA, Assad on Tuesday blamed terrorists and weapons smugglers for scuttling the peace plan, which called for a cease-fire and dialogue with the opposition. The regime denies there is any popular will behind the country's uprising, saying foreign extremists and terrorists are driving the unrest.
Although Damascus has remained largely impervious to international condemnation over the course of the uprising, Tuesday's diplomatic squeeze will increase pressure on Syria's remaining allies, including Russia.
Russia has provided a key layer of protection for the Syrian government in the uprising. Russia and China have used their veto power to block U.N. resolutions against Assad. But Russia has grown increasingly critical of Damascus in recent months, and the Houla massacre has prompted some of the strongest condemnations yet from Moscow.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is traveling to Germany and France this week and is likely to come under even greater criticism for his support of the regime.
"We have to continue our work with the Russians," British Foreign Secretary William Hague said. "We will continue to discuss this with Russia. Russia has particular leverage on the regime and therefore has a particular role in this crisis."
Despite some shift in Russia's stance recently, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Tuesday the Houla massacre must not be a pretext to push for military intervention from outside. Instead, he urged all sides to focus on the Annan plan.
Hague said that the situation in Syria is more complicated than what international powers faced in Libya last year, when a U.N. resolution ushered in NATO military intervention against dictator Moammar Gadhafi's regime.
White House spokesman Jay Carney said the Obama administration remains opposed to military action, reasoning that it would lead only to more carnage. He said the U.S. will continue offering non-lethal assistance to the Syrian people and said Tuesday's coordinated move to expel Syrian diplomats was a signal of the international community's "absolute disgust" with Assad's rule.
Assad still commands a strong army that has proven largely unwilling to turn on him. The entire structure of the state has been built to preserve Assad's power, with the military, the police and security services — even the economy — tied up with the survival of his presidency.
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But as the violence engulfs the country, many see Assad's departure as the only way out.
Fawaz Zakri, a member of the opposition Syrian National Council, urged action by the U.N. Security Council, saying the world body "must do something to save the Syrian people's souls." |
Not Where US Predators in Pakistan Are (Updated)
Remember how outraged we were that Sen. Feinstein had leaked classified information that the US was using bases inside of Pakistan to control our Predator strikes against al Qaeda targets? It looks like Google Earth outed the CIA base of operations first. The above can be found using Google Earth's 2006 maps.
Secret is out. Time to find a new base. Thanks Google.
A thought: In all of the spy novels I read, the protagonists -- Scott Harvath, Mitch Rapp, Kirk McGarvey -- and even the antagonists -- al Qaeda -- all have a pretty good idea when satelites which might give away their positions are overhead. If novelists can think that far ahead, why can't the real CIA?
Thanks to Shachtman for the pic and who notes, correctly, that those are Predators and not Global Hawks.
UPDATE: Dave Schuler has some related thoughts.
Anonymous actually brings up a good point that Global Security had reported on the base some time ago. But I think the rather important thing here is not that the US has an FOB in Pakistan, but that many idiots in Pakistan are outraged that the base is being used by Predators. Case in point.
A lot of Pakistanis are under the impression that the US indiscriminately bombs poor innocents when we use our drones in their territory. I guess there's no fixing stupid.
Here's a great idea: why don't you morons control your own territory and get rid of al Qaeda and the Taliban? Either do that, or shut the hell up. |
.- Claude Paradis was impoverished and homeless, living on the streets of Montreal, Canada. He struggled with addiction to both alcohol and drugs, with a future so bleak, he considered ending his own life.
He did not end his life, however, and today he is a priest who dedicates his time to serving the physical and spiritual needs of those trapped in poverty, prison and prostitution.
“The street brought me to the Church and the Church in the end brought me back to the street,” the priest told the Journal Metro.
Last December, as a sign of his closeness and solidarity with the homeless, Fr. Paradis decided to sleep on the street for the whole month, to care for the homeless people there with solidarity and charity.
His hope was that he could accompany people in a difficult situation while also making the citizens of Montreal aware of the harsh reality faced by those living on the street.
Fr. Paradi founded an institution called Notre-Dame-de-la-rue (Our Lady of the Street). Each night, he goes out to bring food and shelter to those living on the streets. He also administers the sacraments, celebrates the Eucharist and even presides at funerals.
The priest is accompanied by one of his co-workers, Kevin Cardin, who also was addicted to drugs, but found help, changed his life and now has a family.
Notre-Dame-de-la-rue has the support of the Archbishop Christian Lépine of Montreal, who has described the initiative as “a presence of the Church to give encouragement.” It also has the support of the city.
“Our mission is especially to give encouragement. Unlike the shelters, we go out to the people, a bit like a door-to-door service. We talk to them, sometimes we pray together before they go back to face the harshness of the street.”
Fr. Paradis knows how hard life on the street is. After growing up in the Gaspé region and working in Cowansville as a nurse, he came to Montreal 25 years ago.
However, he was unable to find a job. “Isolation and despair took hold of me,” he said.
Living on the street, he thought about committing suicide. “I started doing cocaine and then crack,” he recalled.
In a letter posted on the website of La Victoire de l'Amour (the Victory of Love), Fr. Paradis tells how he met the Lord.
“I had the privilege of meeting God just at the moment I was doubting Him. On a little back street in Montreal, abandoned by people, there was nobody there. Passing by the old church, impelled by I don't know what instinct, I turned back in there.”
At that moment, he had a deep and intense encounter with God. He realized he did not want to die, but rather wanted to become “a man of the Church.”
Fr. Paradis went on to fight his addictions and now ministers to many people who face the same challenges he struggled with years ago.
The 57-year-old priest has dedicated the rest of his life to serving the poor, saying “on the street is where I want to be, until I die.”
This article was originally published on CNA Jan. 17, 2017. |
Donald Trump has sparked fears about a new global nuclear arms race with a tweet that reverberated around the world in which he called on the US to expand its nuclear arsenal.
In a single comment that will raise more questions about both his temperament and foreign policy experience, the President-elect said the US must "greatly strengthen and expand" its nuclear arsenal until "the world comes to its senses regarding nukes".
He gave no other details about his plans. But his comment immediately triggered fears that the next US president will reverse decades of policy in which the nation has, in tandem with Russia, sought to reduce its nuclear arsenal.
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The Associated Press said the Thursday morning comment from Mr Trump came a day after he met with several military procurement officers to discuss defence budgets, including Lt Gen Jack Weinstein, the deputy chief of staff for strategic deterrence and nuclear integration for the Air Force.
During the campaign, Mr Trump had suggested that the US expand its arsenal and he also suggested that the “better off” other countries, including Japan and South Korea, should have nuclear capabilities. He said that would mean that the US’s traditional allies might not be so dependent on Washington.
Mr Trump was spending Thursday at his private estate in south Florida, where he has been meeting with advisers and interviewing potential cabinet nominees. He is also expanding his White House staff, announcing that campaign manager Kellyanne Conway will join him in the West Wing as a counselor.
Reaction to Mr Trump’s comments was quick. Anti-nuclear campaigners said the comments underscored how little Mr Trump understood the danger of nuclear expansion – something on which there had been bipartisan agreement in the US for decades.
Kate Hudson, General Secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), told The Independent she was “deeply concerned” by Mr Trump’s comments.
“It was very striking that during the campaign he made comments that suggested he did not understand much about nuclear weapons, and suggested other countries should develop their own,” she said.
“The US already has enough weapons to destroy everything there is several times over. Why does it need more? It seems crazy. He needs to understand that this is the best way to start a nuclear war.”
It comes as Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia's military can overpower any potential foe.
"We can say with certainty: we are stronger now than any potential aggressor," he told an annual end-of-year defence ministry meeting. "Anyone!"
The Federation of American Scientists has estimated there are currently 15,375 nuclear warheads held by eight countries. Of those, Russia has an estimated 7,300, the US has 6,970, France has 300, China possesses 260, the UK has 215, Pakistan has 130, India has 120 and Israel has 80, though it refuses to confirm or deny its arsenal.
Efforts by the two major nuclear powers to reduce their arsenal date to the late 1960s. SALT I – or the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks Agreement signed on 26 May 1972 – froze the number of strategic ballistic missile launchers at existing levels.
John Pike, director of the Washington-based military studies group GlobalSecurity.Org said that Mr Trump’s actions appeared to fit with the suggestions of critics who say Mr Trump – however unlikely it may sound – is working to benefit Russia.
“What he has done is what someone would do it they wanted to completely upend the US’s security posture,” he said.
Dr Janne Nolan, chair of the Nuclear Security Working Group, a bipartisan group of policy experts working to build consensus on nuclear security issues, said Mr Trump would be inheriting a $300bn nuclear modernisation programme agreed by the Obama administration.
“There is a certain irony here in that the outgoing president, who was rhetorically committed to a vision of global nuclear elimination, leaves behind the most ambitious and expensive nuclear modernisation plan of several decades for his successor to execute,” she said.
“It remains to be seen what President-elect Trump will actually do that is new or different. It would appear that he will need time to learn that effective 21st century nuclear deterrence is a far more nuanced challenge with complex considerations and not so easily achieved with additional weapons or larger budgets.”
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Let me preface this article with an interesting story that came from a tabloid I had read back in the mid 1990’s. It pertains to the following article and attests to the nature of the mighty Vikings. According to the account an ancient record that was handed down describes a UFO encounter from the distant past experienced by the Leif Erickson’s crew who were on their way to North America. I am not sure about what medium that this historic account was recorded in as the Vikings did not supposedly have a written language. Even though the Norsemen were considered incredible craftsman, weapon makers, and accomplished artists, there was no written word. Perhaps these accounts came as a result of pictograms or engraved images.
Who were the Norse gods really?
The Vikings have quite a colorful mythology with a number of different deities like many other religions leading some to speculate that Gods such as Thor with his mighty axe striking lightning in the heavens might represent ancient man’s interpretation of missiles or death rays. According to this uncovered tale from antiquity, Erickson’s crew had been paced by a bright nocturnal aerial object for several nights as they crossed the forbidden waters of the North Atlantic that loomed before them.
Now for Leif Erickson and his men to cross the Atlantic, it was not only the fear of falling off the edge of the earth that haunted them, but also the presence of sea serpents capable of capsizing their ships that also terrified them. However, the Norsemen rarely feared anything, and were just audacious enough to challenge the superstitions of their culture and brave the long and perilous voyage.
Guided to the new world by a UFO
It is said that finally this glowing airborne vessel hovered over the Viking ship and from beneath it came an entity who stood upon the deck of the Viking boat. The response of the Norsemen was to attack, which they did. It is well known that the Vikings tooled magnificent swords, knives, and hatchets. They feared no one and quickly dispatched their enemies with skill and savagery. However, they were no match for this other-worldly being, who disintegrated his attackers with what we would now know to be a ray gun of some kind.
Accosted by an entity
When the Vikings saw that they were outmatched their next tactic was to befriend the alien who had just demonstrated his technical superiority. They reportedly feasted with him and drank. It appears that the Norsemen though brutal were also practical. “If you can’t beat’em join’em”, and apparently they did. After sharing their merriment with the being of fantastic powers, a deal was struck. The aerial object that had paced them for several nights would now lead them to the North American continent which they were soon to land on. History had to be re-written as a result of the fact that it was the Vikings who discovered North America first, yet the other more fantastic evidence of extraterrestrial intervention seems to have been intentionally overlooked.
The actual discoverers
The Vikings succeeded several hundreds of years before Christopher Columbus in 1492 in the discovery of North America. In the year 1000 AD evidence shows that Leif Erickson and his men discovered, what is now the northern shores of Canada, and moved further south along the coastline to more wooded lands with bountiful resources. They named North America Vinlandia after vines they discovered and harvested. Leif Erickson and his 35 man crew overcame the rigors of an Atlantic crossing and cultural superstitions that had stubbornly persisted through-out Europe for hundreds of years afterword that the very edge of the world laid at the end of the Atlantic Ocean somewhere at the horizon.
A past not as we were led to believe
This feat is amazing enough in itself, but if accounts of what transpired on that voyage are to be believed at all, then we must also embrace the fact that the Vikings encountered an entity that descended to the deck of their vessel. This mysterious being defeated the Vikings who attempted to kill him, and once befriending the Norsemen, led them to the North American continent. Once again in the unwritten pages of history is evidence in a milestone for humanity, we find the past is not as we were taught. The ubiquitous appearance of a UFO that intervenes in the affairs of man demonstrates that sometimes fact can even be stranger than fiction.
Click here for Part II |
So it was a natural fit when Brad Martin, who runs the Lakeland Hockey Association and Lakeland Ice Arena, asked Larkin and his brother, Colin, and his cousins, Adam and Ryan, if they were interested in doing a hockey camp.
WATERFORD, MICH . - Although Dylan Larkin is turning 21 this weekend, it wasn't that long ago that he was a little boy skating at Lakeland Ice Arena in Waterford.
All four Larkin boys eagerly agreed to do it and the Larkin Hockey School was born.
"A lot of us that are doing this camp grew up right in this rink and it is cool to come back and give back to these kids that are hopefully going to follow in our footsteps," Larkin said following an afternoon session. "We all have moved on through the hockey ranks and all of us are playing (or have played) college hockey. I hope we're setting a good example and we're having fun with the kids. It's been a good response in both years doing it so it's a lot of fun for us."
Other guest coaches are Mike Chiasson, Darren Brady (Rochester Institute of Technology), Charlie Curti (Yale), Drew Dorantes (Ferris State), Tyler Dorantes (Ferris State), Bryce Hatten (Miami Ohio) and Chase Sereno (Oakland).
Martin said when he was younger, Pat LaFontaine was growing up in Waterford and was for him like Larkin is for these young kids.
"It was just an honor to meet him and know him over the years," Martin said. "I've known (the Larkins) since they were little. It's been great fun. They're all awesome kids. You deal with Dylan a lot but all of them, they're brothers, not cousins. They're unbelievable guys. It's just so cool."
Martin said he originally thought the Larkins might agree to doing one week but instead they wanted to do three weeks. They just started their second week and the third one takes place from Aug. 8-11.
"Last year it was amazing, the hype of when we were building the registration online," Martin said. "I sent an email saying it was going to go live at two o'clock and it was like watching the ticker tape parade. In the first hour, I think there was like, 96 registrations. They were all time-stamped. It was just amazing. Because the owner of the rink's like, yeah, it's not going to sell out. Watching the numbers, it's like tick, tick, tick, refresh, refresh and the numbers just kept jumping and jumping. Almost 100 percent capacity for the three weeks."
Larkin was delighted at the impressive response they got for their new hockey school.
"To see these kids out here just enjoying hockey, they're sometimes crazy and they don't wait in line very well but to see the smile on their face when they make a good play or are out there skating around with their buddies, it's priceless," Larkin said. "Hopefully we can do it for as long as we can."
The kids who participated in last year's camp got first priority for this year's edition.
One of those returning campers is Zachary Brennan, 8, who moved to Michigan a few years ago.
"Some of my friends told me about this and I really wanted to go here so I'm like, 'Hey, Mom! Hey, Dad! Can I sign up for the Dylan Larkin camp? I heard it's really popular,'" Brennan said. "Then my mom and dad said, 'OK. When is it?' I said when it was and they took me here.
"I did last year for Dylan Larkin camp and I really liked it. Dylan Larkin holds the fastest record in skating so I can't believe I'm skating with him. It's very cool that I get to skate with an All-Star."
Brennan said he has taken one thing he's learned at hockey school to heart.
"Skating," Brennan said. "You have to skate to play. If you can't skate, you can't play."
Naturally, the kids have a lot of questions for the Larkins, especially for Dylan, so on the third day of each camp they have an off-ice question and answer session.
"There's some funny questions," Larkin said. "A lot about other teammates and a lot about what's it like to be a Red Wing. I think it's valuable that I share that. I think how I feel about where I came from and what I'm doing now playing for the Red Wings, I would have liked to hear it at their age and I think it's pretty cool for them."
Larkin said the kids always want to know how he made the U.S. National Team Development Program, how he got a scholarship to play at Michigan and how he made it to the NHL at such a young age.
"It really came down to work ethic," Larkin said. "These kids have a lot of distractions and school is the most important part but you got to be willing to shoot extra pucks at home and when the ponds are frozen, you want to be out there for a couple hours or as long as you want. I really preach it because it can't come from anyone else, it just has to come from the kid himself and that's when you get something special.
"When their parents are forcing them to do it, I'm sure it's not fun for them but if it comes from within, that's when something special could happen."
When the kids learn these things from their coaches, they pay attention, but when it comes from Larkin, a young star for the Red Wings, it makes the biggest impact.
"I use a lot of stuff that Dylan Larkin uses," Brennan said. "I use his celly (goal celebration), I use some of his moves. I really like him. He's my first favorite player. Alex Ovi (Ovechkin) is my second because I met him when I was two.
"It's an unbelievable feeling just being with Dylan Larkin and the Larkin family. It's just the most amazing thing anybody could ever wish for." |
The extinction of the American raise — dead as a dodo, by every empirical measure — has become a truth universally acknowledged. Even Republican House Speaker John Boehner, not a fellow often glimpsed on the barricades with protesting workers, pronounced that “wages are stagnant” in his comments on the most recent employment figures.
On Tuesday, two of our most perceptive economics writers, the New York Times’s David Leonhardt and my Post colleague Catherine Rampell, authored columns that handicapped the prospects of employers actually beginning to increase their employees’ wages — which, as legend has it, was once a common practice in the United States. Leonhardt glumly observed that the downward pressure on wages imposed by globalization, sclerotic government and technological change might still outweigh the factors working in employees’ favor. Rampell noted that the 15 million Americans who are officially unemployed or who have dropped out of the labor force create a powerful downdraft on workers’ ability to win wage hikes.
Both of these macroeconomic explanations are sound, but they don’t exhaust the list of reasons why profits and capital income, as a share of the nation’s total income, are at record highs while wages and labor-derived income are at record lows. Nor does the alleged “skills gap” of U.S. workers provide much of an explanation, since “the demand for college-educated workers has actually slowed quite sharply since 2000 and their real wages have been flat,” as economist Jared Bernstein has noted.
Fully documenting the reasons the United States has experienced this epochal upward redistribution of wealth and income requires a look at institutional economics as well as macroeconomics. The distribution of income is a function not just of global forces but also of social and institutional power. And over the past four decades, U.S. workers have suffered a loss of power that may exceed even their loss of income.
Consider, for instance, how Americans succeeded in doubling their real incomes during the three decades following World War II. To be sure, it was a time when the United States dominated the world economy as never before or since, when major corporations had few foreign competitors and were seldom challenged by low-paying start-ups at home. Under those benign conditions, pay raises must have drifted down as the gentle rain from heaven — right?
Wrong. The presumably placid 1950s were rocked by one major strike after another, averaging 300 a year throughout the decade. There are few things as disruptive or unpleasant as a strike, both for the strikers and their communities. But it was by waging these disruptive, unpleasant actions that the greatest generation turned the United States into the first majority middle-class nation in history.
In the early 1980s, employers struck back. Following the lead of President Ronald Reagan, who fired striking air-traffic controllers, major companies began to routinely discharge workers who walked off the job. By the mid-’80s, strikes were in irreversible decline and companies were almost automatically firing workers who sought to form a union. A new doctrine, first propounded by economist Milton Friedman, took hold in boardrooms and executive suites. The purpose of a corporation, it held, was not to benefit all of its stakeholders — shareholders, employees and the public — but to benefit shareholders only. Boosting profits and the value of the company’s stock by laying off workers, holding down their pay, converting them to independent contractors or shifting their jobs overseas became so common a practice that any company not playing by these rules became the subject of journalistic profiles written in a tone of amazement (as the recent coverage of the Market Basket supermarket chain attests).
By the ’90s, most corporate chief executives had their pay linked to the value of their stock, which many of them were able to boost by having their companies buy back outstanding shares, causing the value of the remaining shares to rise. Over the past decade, under pressure from “activist investors” and with the understanding that boosting share value would send CEO pay soaring, the corporations on the S&P 500 list of the largest publicly traded companies have devoted more than 90 percent of their profits to buying back their own shares and paying dividends to shareholders.
That hasn’t left much for wage increases.
While macroeconomic conditions surely explain some of the problems that have befallen U.S. workers, the institutional changes to American business — above all, the rise of investor power and the decline of worker power — are central to the tale. The case of the vanishing American raise can’t be solved without them.
Read more from Harold Meyerson’s archive or follow him on Twitter. |
In the wake of the 2008 Wall Street meltdown, many Americans — including in Washington — expected that the Securities and Exchange Commission would get to the bottom of how things happened, and make sure no such crisis happened again.
But an investigation by The New York Times found that the SEC is regularly issuing a pass to these big banking companies that it's supposed to be regulating. While it may be finding fraud more often now, it's rarely issuing the penalties called for in those cases, the Times found.
Louise Story, investigative reporter for The New York Times, said when the SEC settles a case with a large bank, they reach lengthy agreements spelling out what they did and what punishments they'll face. Most often, Story said, the banks push hard to get out of the specified punishments.
"One of the punishments of misleading investors about your company, for example, one of the punishments is that you might not be able to issue certain kinds of stock in the future. You might not be able to run mutual funds in the future. You might be exposed to a lot of class-action lawsuits," Story said. "What this analysis in the Times found is that there are over 300 instances since 2003 where the SEC agreed to give the banks an exemption from some of these punishments that are normal."
Story said among the reasons, they found, were the bank's importance to the market's functions. Some SEC officials said these exemptions were important to allowing the banks keep doing their business, Story said.
"On the other hand, there's a real question of deterrence here," Story said.
On the flip side, companies that aren't banks often feel the full weight of SEC enforcement actions.
General Electric, for example, was subjected to the sort of punishments that the investment banks don't get, Story said. Citi Group, though, in 2010 settled an investigation into its mortgage securities did not get an exemption protecting them from shareholder lawsuits.
But that's the exception.
"That's been a real burden to Citi Group compared to the other Wall Street firms, but it's also deterrent," Story said.
In recent months, the SEC has been lobbying Congress for new, stricter enforcement powers, but at the same time it's often choosing not to impose them.
"Why not use all these ones that they have," Story said. |
David Cameron has rejected calls to soften the impact of planned cuts to tax credits in the face of a cross-party campaign that warns that 3 million of the poorest working families will be worse off by £1,350 a year.
In an interview on the Andrew Marr Show on BBC1, in which he said the Conservatives would champion the “common ground” as Labour “runs to the hills”, the prime minister defended the cuts on the grounds that the government has to protect the NHS and schools.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Frank Field. Photograph: Anthony Devlin/PA
Cameron indicated that the chancellor, George Osborne, would not revise his plans to cut tax credits when he delivers his autumn statement next month, despite warnings from former Tory minister David Willetts and the Labour welfare expert Frank Field. The Sun on Sunday launched a campaign to help low-paid workers under the headline “Tax credit cut ‘bonkers’”.
Asked whether the chancellor would have a rethink in the autumn statement, the prime minister said: “No. We think the changes we have put forward are right and they come with higher pay and lower taxes.”
Cameron made his remarks on the first day of the Conservative party conference in Manchester, in which he also:
• Teased Osborne, seen as the frontrunner to succeed him as Tory leader when he steps down by 2020, by saying that frontrunners often do not win.
• Hinted that cabinet ministers might be allowed to campaign on either side in the EU referendum, even as he indicated that he was determined to remain in the EU.
• Illustrated the Tories’ plans to occupy what he called the “common ground” of British politics, as Labour moves to the left under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, by announcing that GPs’ contracts were to be rewritten to ensure the NHS becomes a true seven-day service.
Moderate Tories who have welcomed the prime minister’s move to the centre ground have warned that the cuts to tax credits, outlined by the chancellor in his budget in July, could undermine Downing Street’s attempts to appear as the “workers’ party”. Lord Willetts – one of the most influential Tory thinkers of the past decade, who served as science and universities minister for most of the last parliament – warned in the Times last week that the changes could “turn sour”.
The chancellor outlined the cuts in his summer budget when he announced that he would slash the earnings level at which tax credits start to be withdrawn from £6,420 to £3,850 from next April. Osborne said that low earners would be compensated by the creation of a “national living wage” – a rebranding of the minimum wage – which would be set at £7.20 an hour from next April for over-25s. It is to rise to £9 an hour by 2020.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies said in its post-budget briefing that 13 million families will lose an average of £240 a year, while 3 million families will lose £1,000 a year. Paul Johnson, the IFS director, said it was “arithmetically impossible” for the increase in the minimum wage to compensate for the loss in tax credits.
UK tax and benefit changes worsening inequality, IFS warns Read more
The prime minister insisted that families would not be worse off. “If you take a family where someone is on the minimum wage, when you take into account all the things we are changing in tax, in the national living wage and tax credits – that family will be better of, not least because you’ve got the national living wage, and we are cutting tax so you can earn £11,000 before you start paying any tax at all.”
But Cameron said he would look at a proposal by Field, the Labour chairman of the Commons work and pensions select committee, who has proposed a revenue-neutral way of reducing the impact of the tax credit cuts on the lowest paid. Field says that the current income threshold for the withdrawal of tax credits should remain at £6,420. This would be paid for by withdrawing tax credits more sharply – a taper rate of 65% – on gross earnings over £13,100.
Cameron said of the Field proposal: “I always look at everything. But we have had the vote in parliament on tax credits. And people do respect this argument that the national living wage, a 50p increase next year, so a £20 a week pay rise, rising to £9 by the end of this parliament – that is a very significant change that really helps to make work pay rather than a tax credit system that recycles money back to people. Obviously, I accept we are making changes to tax credits. We are protecting the lowest-paid people with the child tax credit and what goes with it. But we are moving to an economy where you get paid more and where you pay less in tax, rather than paying more in tax and getting the money back in tax credits.”
Ruth Davidson, the Conservative leader in Scotland, told a fringe event that she would like to see more detail on how tax credit cuts will work in practice.
“I agree with the prime minister that we should be absolutely cleaving to the principle that work should pay in and of itself and we should be moving to a higher wage and lower welfare economy...
“But when it comes to the application of the policy, I think we do need to see a little bit more detail about how it will work in practice and I would expect that to be brought forward in the autumn statement.”
She also said she would like to see carer’s allowance brought into line with jobseeker’s allowance, and will campaign for this to happen in Scotland once the welfare budget is devolved. |
While legendary sound designer and game composer Bo was not apparently part of the round-table interview, the book appended a short word from him at the end, which I have also included here.
This long interview with the original Phantasy Star development team (except Yuji Naka, sadly) was found in the 1993 “World of Phantasy Star” book. It’s filled with interesting anecdotes and trivia about the seminal RPG, and the by-now common theme of freedom in the early days of Japanese game development is also sounded.
Phantasy Star 1993 Developer Interview
From the “World of Phantasy Star” book
Rieko Kodama: Phantasy Star I and II character designer, Phantasy Star IV team leader. Editor for the Sega publication “Spec.” Champion Boxing, Alex Kidd in Miracle World, Zillion, Miracle Warriors, Hoshi o Sagashite, Fantasy Zone II, Altered Beast, Shadow Dancer, Sonic the Hedgehog, and more.
Miki Morimoto: Game Designer. Phantasy Star Series, Hoshi o Sagashite, Sorcerian, and others.
Kotaro Hayashida: Game Designer. Alex Kidd in Miracle World, Phantasy Star, and others.
Kazuyuki Shibata: Graphic Designer. Phantasy Star I and II, Pyramid Magic, Surging Aura, and others.
Toru Yoshida: Graphic Designer. Super Thunder Blade, King Colossus, Phantasy Star II, Phantasy Star IV, Phantasy Star Text Adventure, and more.
Tokuhiko Uwabo, aka “Bo”: Sound and music. Alex Kidd, Fantasy Zone, Space Harrier, many more.
Miki Morimoto, game designer.
—Why did you choose the Phantasy Star title? Did it simply mean something like “a planet/star of fantasy”?
Morimoto: That’s basically right, but the origin was different. The main programmer, Yuji Naka, was a fan of the idol singer Noripii (Noriko Sakai), and her liked her new song “Nagisa no Fantasy” (Beachside Fantasy). From that he took the word Fantasy, and played around with it till he came up with Phantasy Star. It ultimately ended up matching the image of the game.
—That reminds me of the story of the Advanced Daisenryaku sample rom, where you can find the hidden graphic of idol Chisato Moritaka dressed up in a military uniform.
Hayashida: Yeah, the designer Minami liked Chisato Moritaka so he just added that in there. If you don’t know about it and it suddenly comes up, it’s like, what the hell? Anyway, naming things is always tough. Even after thinking and thinking it’s very common to just come up blank, and sometimes you get hints from strange places. I’m sure it’s the same with people who have to think of titles for movies or songs.
—Even today the original Phantasy Star has many passionate fans, with the Tokuma Published strategy guide having been reprinted many times. What do you think is the enduring appeal and charm of Phantasy Star?
Morimoto: There’s a lot of elements in RPGs today that seem rigidly defined, almost cliches. For example, getting a boat, getting an airship… with an airship you can cross the mountains, but can’t destroy them or anything like that. In Phantasy Star, we had the audacious idea of the Ice Decker vehicle where you could actually enjoy mowing down icebergs on the terrain.
Mowing down mountains with the ice-digger.
Then there’s the spaceship which lets you fly to other planets. It’s a more free, unrestrained world. In most RPGs there’s only one world, right? In Phantasy Star the story straddles three planets, and I think that kind of freewheeling sense of adventure is one of its main charms. The fact that it’s a science fiction RPG also sets it apart, but since we mixed sword and sorcery into the science fiction, it’s a really open, wild world.
—Can you tell us about the origins of Phantasy Star?
Morimoto: Phantasy Star came into being when, during the Master System era, Sega decided that it also needed to create an RPG. So they started soliciting game design ideas from us, and Chieko Aoki had this story idea she’d been mulling over for awhile. We used that and worked it into what became the original story draft for Phantasy Star. Even at that early stage, almost all the dialogue was already written–that was how much Chieko loved Phantasy Star.
Kodama: In the original draft for Phantasy Star there were four planets. But we realized it would be very difficult to properly depict four planets. There was also an issue with memory limitations, so we changed it to three planets. Today you can use a lot of memory for a game, but back then even 4 megs was a huge amount.
—Speaking of the memorable characters in Phantasy Star, Lutz had quite an impact with players, didn’t he?
Kodama: Actually, when I created the first draft of the characters for Phantasy Star II, I made Lutz the main character. By the way, since so many people have asked whether Lutz is male or female, let me say a little about that. In the original story drafts of Phantasy Star, Lutz was a hermaphrodite, and as Alisa grew up, Lutz could become male or female. I thought that was interesting so I depicted Lutz that way.
Early concept art for Lutz from PSII.
Yoshida: In the earliest drafts for Phantasy Star II, the main character is Lutz, and it opens with him awakening from cryosleep. In the 1000 years since Phantasy Star, his abilities have changed. He’s more of a warrior now, and he sets out to wander the world. There was also a part where he warps back in time and has to save Alisa at the time of her birth. In the end he defeats his enemies and vanishes again.
Kodama: We even brought him back for PSIV at first. We didn’t have any ideas and just started playing around with the characters.
—Please tell us how the dungeons in Phantasy Star were designed.
Shibata: You originally scrolled through the 3D dungeons in Phantasy Star much quicker. But we couldn’t have done them in 3D without Yuji Naka.
Kodama: Regarding the 3D, we would get an image of the dungeon in our head and draw them out on paper, but there were little details that bugged us and it wasn’t getting across to the programmers as we had envisioned it. Yuji Naka learned of this and, on his own, made a wireframe 3D imaging program expressly for us. That program was also the start of Shibata learning to draw 3D graphics. That was what was amazing about Yuji: he would never just say “that can’t be done” to a planning or design idea. He thought about our wishes seriously and would always figure out some ingenuous way to make our ideas possible. He was very considerate of the designer’s vision, in other words.
Hayashida: Right, and it was Yuji who fixed the speed of the dungeons. The scrolling was originally so fast they made your head spin, like some high-speed STG.
Morimoto: They went so fast you got dizzy, like you were drunk or something.
Rieko Kodama, PSI/II
character designer.
Kodama: We got many requests to make the dungeons in Phantasy Star II 3D too. But to make dungeons that would look satisfying to us, with rotating floors and other features, would have taken up too much memory on the Megadrive. It would have been almost impossible.
Hayashida: And 3D dungeons aren’t really the essence of Phantasy Star, anyway. By the way, being able to save your game in the dungeons led to a huge problem. If you were deep in a dungeon and very close to death after a battle, you could then save your game. But in doing so, you’d always start out in that weakened state, and if you encountered an enemy you would never win, thereby getting trapped in the dungeon forever. It was especially tragic if it happened in the latter part of the game. With tears in your eyes, you’d have no choice but to start a new game.
Kodama: Back then, we developers didn’t know much about RPGs. (laughs)
—Just before Phantasy Star was released, I remember hearing that it would have both battery backup saves and a password system…
Hayashida: Yeah, we did have those plans, but we had to cut the password feature out due to memory problems.
Yoshida: With RPGs today it’s almost impossible to implement a password-save feature. If we had tried to add one for Phantasy Star IV, first, it would have to be absolutely perfectly entered (just having one character off would mean it wouldn’t work), and the password would be so long it would take two screens to write out–not the kind of thing you can just write down on a notepad. Anyway, compared with the original Phantasy Star, the sequels have many more party members and the amount of data isn’t even comparable.
—One of the most memorable things about Phantasy Star was the ending. Making your way through the brutal final dungeon, beating the boss, and thinking the game is over… suddenly the screen scrolls up and you’re dropped back into the dungeon! I remember seeing that text on the wall and thinking, “who is that?! is there a true final boss?” My heart started racing. Whose idea was it to do that for the ending?
Kodama: I don’t actually remember who suggested it. Who could it be…
Hayashida: After you cleared it and the final pictures were shown, I remember being like, what shall we do for the ending staff roll? Someone came up with the idea of using the 3D dungeons, and we thought it would be cool to put the staff’s names up there.
Toru Yoshida, graphic designer.
Kodama: Yeah, I think it just came about in one of our random conversations. Though I remember the decision to just drop you back into the dungeon came at the very end of the development. We were thinking about how to get the player back there to show the credits, and we decided to just plop you back down in there.
Hayashida: There was a routine in the program for falling through pitfalls, so it was easy to do. But the result was that surprising ending, so for its psychological impact I would call it a success!
—Can you tell us any interesting stories or episodes about creating the monsters of Phantasy Star?
Morimoto: We all thought the Zombie looked funny, so one time we tried to see how many we could put on-screen at once. It turns out you could have 8 of them there. But could they animate? They did, and everyone was completely grossed out by it!
But the weirdest of all was the “Lich” character (spelled “Rich” in Japanese katakana). Despite his name this guy dropped no money when he was defeated!
By the way, the Luveno spaceship was actually the very first mecha graphic that Kodama, our team leader in PSIV, had ever drawn. She had never drawn anything like that before, so I was wondering if she’d be nervous about it, and what kind of image she’d come up with. But I remember she was really relaxed about it. Back then when people came to visit our development room, it wasn’t like today where you have a more systemized organization of departments and such; rather, it was more like there’d be a teacher and pupil working together. It lent the development area a special atmosphere.
—What do you mean by “teacher” and “pupil”?
Kodama: Yeah, there were “teachers” for music, graphics, all the different aspects of development at Sega. That’s how I learned to do graphics, from Yoshiki Kawasaki, who now works in the PR department.
The “gross-out” Zombie animation…
now imagine 8 of them at once!
—What, really?
Kodama: Yes! Kawasaki did the sprites for Flicky and other older games. He’s extremely talented. That’s how I learned all these things: from the know-how passed down from older employees.
Yoshida: Now you’ve got some people with Famicom experience, some with Megadrive experience, and just a whole variety of people joining the company. That old apprentice system is fading away, and I suppose you could say something of the old Sega is disappearing too.
Morimoto: Maybe the Sega-ness of our games was nothing other than the humanity imparted by the apprenticeship system…
—In Phantasy Star, there were some extremely powerful enemies in the last dungeon and last planet. They were stronger than the boss, Dark Force, weren’t they?
Hayashida: That would be Mammoth and Golem. Mammoth, especially–if he appeared in a group, your heart started racing. I seem to remember they were really hard to flee from, too.
Morimoto: I did all the enemy stats, and the flee percentage parameter was actually an enemy stat. You could run easily from monsters in the first half of the game, but by the second half it was very difficult. (laughs)
Hayashida: Monsters sometimes appear in unexpected areas too, like the Serpent inside that one house of the Air Castle. Speaking of weird things, in the backstory the Centaur enemies are supposed to be these knights under Lashiec’s control, but when you use Telepathy on them and talk to them, they sometimes give you information. There’s a part of them that’s very “human.” Even the monsters in Phantasy Star were something unique.
Morimoto: Yeah, and they weren’t monsters, but the village of lying Dezorians and truthful Dezorians was also different.
Hayashida: We had a lot of fun designing the monsters and events for Phantasy Star. Ah, that reminds me… one of the most difficult things about this game was how hard it was to get money. Mixed in with the standard necessities were some surprisingly expensive items, if you tried to save up money for them.
—Was the chemistry between the development staff a large part of the excellent balance Phantasy Star achieved? If the staff doesn’t get along, it seems like any good ideas would just disintegrate in that hostile atmosphere.
Kotaro Hayashida, game designer.
Hayashida: I think the success of Phantasy Star lies in the fact that the development staff was given the freedom to make the game we wanted, without restrictions or control. I wanted to create something that the Famicom wouldn’t have been able to do, so I wanted the dungeons to be in 3D. When I think back on the story now, there were a lot of ridiculous things in it, but we were able to do it how we wanted, had fun while we were doing it, and the result was a good game. After all, if you’re having fun, you can give it your all even when things gets tough.
I think that synergy resulted in a good game. However, until the game was completed, there were a lot of unknowns. We had to give our full effort to the very, very end. RPGs have especially long developments, so by the latter half everyone is just run-down, you know? But if you relax and slack off at the very end, your game will feel sloppy regardless of all the previous work you did. In that sense, the difference between a good game and a bad game really depends on whether the staff can maintain their efforts in that final stretch. The deadlines are bearing down on you, and it’s very common for people to experience utter exhaustion at the end. There will be a difference between the image the designers had for the game, and the game you actually created, and figuring out how to adjust that gap at the very end is an important point.
—I’d like to talk about Chieko Aoki, who created the backstory and world of Phantasy Star (and was a game designer for Phantasy Star II). What was she like?
Morimoto: She was a very quiet, shy person, but she also had a strong inner core. During the development, when everything was getting crazy, she’d be unfazed, working steadily at her own pace. I think she had a lot of attachment to the story and world of Phantasy Star. That reminds me, I hardly ever stayed over at the company office, but one time we had to work on bug checking late into the night, so Chieko and I made some makeshift beds out of office chairs and spent the night there in a conference room. It felt just like a field trip.
There would also be questions about the game circulating around the development room, and Chieko would often answer them. So we gave her the nickname “Otegami Chie” (Letter Chie).
Letters from fans to “Gamer Miki.”
—And what were the origins of the other nicknames for the development staff, like “Gamer Miki” and “Choko Oneesan” ?
Morimoto: “Gamer Miki-chan” refers to me. I got that nickname because I did a lot of the playtesting and bug checks. Sega’s publication “SPEC” featured a manga called “Hataraku Kaihatsu-san” (the hardworking developers), and there’s an interview with “Gamer Miki” there too. I got a lot of postcards from fans addressed to that name. As for Choko Oneesan, there used to be a Telephone Answer line Sega ran called “Joy Joy Telephone.” She was the “Oneesan” from that early period. She was really popular with the kids and would receive a lot of fan letters. You know, it makes me wonder, in Phantasy Star, why was I the only one to be found in such a strange place as the jail???
Anyway, speaking of characters, I wonder if any Sega fans today remember “Professor Asobin” and “Doctor Games” ? They were characters who appeared in the back of Sega game manuals, and they’d give you hints and tips…
—Can you tell us a bit about the sound/music development for Phantasy Star?
Morimoto: Since Phantasy Star was made at the time of the Sega Master System, it was very difficult to create sounds for it. In that sense, you can’t talk about this game without mentioning its sound and music. Sometimes we’d ask Bo to create a certain songs, but if the image didn’t match up he’d have to rewrite it. After reworking it, he’d bring something to us all excited, but everyone would say “maybe the old version was better…” while Bo quietly wept. (laughs)
Despite all that, Bo and the rest of the staff had a lot of love for this game. Back then we all worked together in the same room: sound, planning, programming. That was also where Bo made nearly all his music and sounds. It must have been tough.
SST band plays the PSIII opening theme.
Speaking of music, I think the SST band, a group composed of Sega Sound Staff, was formed just around the time Phantasy Star was released. They did a show at a park outside the east exit of Ikebukuro station, and I remember they were worried if people would even come. It was a big turnout though. Many things didn’t go right because it was their first live show, but it was a rare sight back then to see a video game sound team form a band, and the park was packed with people. It was a huge success.
At that time the SST Band was using sequencers for the live show. A sequencer is something that lets you play back music you’ve programmed into it, and since they used sequencers in their early days, you often saw pictures of the band just standing there, not appearing to do anything. (laughs)
Hayashida: With video game music, whether the songs are poppy or more complex, they need to have catchy melodies you could easily hum to yourself. Then the music has to match the development team’s ideas (graphically and otherwise), so it’s really quite difficult work. If the songs are too long they may not get fully heard in-game, or they’ll eat up too much program memory… it’s no easy job.
—Are there any plans to port Phantasy Star?
Morimoto: We often get requests from fans who never got to play the Master System Phantasy Star and want us to port it to the Megadrive. But the truth is, if you do a thorough search you can find toy stores where they’ve still got copies of the original game for sale. I’ve seen people write on message boards stuff like “I found a copy at XXX-store,” but when I went the next day myself to check, it was sold out. So it seems there’s still some left in some small, out-of-the-way places, but if you find one you had better snatch it up, or they’ll all soon be gone. However, as part of the promotional campaign for Phantasy Star IV, we’re giving out copies of the original Phantasy Star as a present. Make sure you enter!
—One of the weirder events in Phantasy Star involves the cake selling girl in the middle of the dungeon. What was that about?
Dungeon Bakery.
Hayashida: People ask us a lot about that, even today. When Yuji Naka got back from America after finishing Sonic 2, I remember he saw that and said, “Why the hell is someone selling cake in that dungeon.” Yeah, everyone thought it was weird.
Well, I’ve forgotten who exactly came up with the idea originally, but I believe it was a girl. I remember we talked about the event in the story where you go to meet the Motavian governor, and someone pointed out that since the governor is such an important person, you should probably bring him some kind of souvenir. Then we asked what it should be, and a girl said cake was good, so that’s what we did. But then the question came of where the cake shop should be located, and we agreed that it would be boring if it was in some normal or easily accessible place, and I think that was how we decided to put it in the dungeon. I think the woman who suggested it was probably Morimoto or Aoki, but whoever said it probably no longer remembers themselves. But yeah, that event reflects the large number of women on the Phantasy Star development staff.
Message from Bo, Phantasy Star Composer
Bo: Today there’s almost 20 people working as Sega Sound Staff, and I’m focusing on producing. But back then all our console game sound was done by me and one other person. And when I say “sound,” when you include things like sound effects, it means having to create over 100 sounds for each game. When we were busy I had to work on nearly 16 titles at the same time. For each game the image and world were different, so you couldn’t just put out shoddy knock-offs, nor could you expect to finish everything if you only worked at the office. All day, every day, I had to be constantly thinking about writing music: if I woke up in the morning with a melody in my head and could remember it through the train ride to work, then I figured it was a good melody and I’d end up using it. Time management was key to finishing everything. I’d parse out my time in blocks, working on songs for each game in a given period, then moving to the next.
Bo and his sound studio at Sega, circa 1993
Phantasy Star was made during the Master System era, so there were restrictions in both the sounds available and the memory available. It was very difficult, but also very fun. The sounds from that game were a result of experimenting, trying this and that… not the kind of sounds you could create if you just relied on your theoretical knowledge. Even today Phantasy Star stands out as some of the most memorable work I did.
Another aspect of the Phantasy Star development was that we all shared the same room: game designers, programmers, and sound. That meant everyone could peek in on everyone else’s work. I could check out where the game designers were at, and the designers could look over and see how the sound was going. It made for a very different atmosphere from what you see today in game development. The fans then also had a very refined appreciation for the sights and sounds of video games, too. I’d get letters from fans expressing support, or sharing their thoughts on the music. It was a real motivator for writing music. There were no sound tests in our games that time, and a fan once even sent me a tape she had made with all the game music carefully recorded on it. I was so surprised–she even recorded all the sound effects! |
People celebrating on Peachtree Street
Peachtree Street is one of several major streets running through the city of Atlanta. Beginning at Five Points in downtown Atlanta, it runs North through Midtown; a few blocks after entering into Buckhead, the name changes to Peachtree Road at Palisades Road. Much of the city's historic and noteworthy architecture is located along the street, and it is often used for annual parades, (such as the Atlanta St. Patrick's Day Parade and Atlanta Christmas Parade), as well as one-time parades celebrating events such as the 100th anniversary of Coca-Cola in 1986 and the Atlanta Braves' 1995 World Series victory.
History [ edit ]
Peachtree Street in 1907, carrying streetcar, horse, and automobile traffic.
Atlanta grew on a site occupied by the Creek people, which included a major village called Standing Peachtree. There is some dispute over whether the Creek settlement was called Standing Peachtree or Standing Pitch Tree, corrupted later to peach. Pine trees, common to the area, were also known as pitch trees due to their sap.[1]
A trail known as the Peachtree Trail stretched from northeast Georgia to Standing Pitch Tree along the Chattahoochee River.[2] The original Peachtree Road began in 1812 at Fort Daniel located at Hog Mountain in present-day Gwinnett County and ran along the course of the trail to the Chattahoochee. Some portions of the present road trace this route.
After the American Civil War a shantytown named Tight Squeeze developed at Peachtree at what is now 10th Street in Midtown Atlanta. It was infamous for vagrancy, desperation, robberies of merchants transiting the settlement.[3][4]
In 1867, the name of Whitehall Street, the original road to White Hall Tavern in today's West End neighborhood, was changed to Peachtree Street from Marietta Street south to the railroad crossing (now "gulch") just north of Alabama Street.[5] Later in the 1980s,[6] the portion of Whitehall Street from Five Points south to Forsyth Street and Memorial Drive, a major shopping district from the Civil War through mid-20th century, was renamed Peachtree Street SE.
In 2007, Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin unveiled a $1 billion, 20-year plan to transform Peachtree Street with streetscape upgrades, public parks, buried utilities, and the addition of a streetcar, based on a sixteen-month study by the Peachtree Corridor Partnership task force.[7][8]
Nomenclature [ edit ]
Peachtree Street as it travels through Midtown
The Peachtree name is common throughout the Atlanta area. In fact, it is often joked by natives that half of the streets in Atlanta are named Peachtree, and the other half have five names to make up for it.[citation needed] While “Peachtree” alone almost always refers to this street or its continuations, there are 71 streets in Atlanta with a variant of “Peachtree” in their name.[9] Some of these include:
Peachtree Creek Road
Peachtree Lane
Peachtree Avenue
Peachtree Circle
Peachtree Drive
Peachtree Plaza
Peachtree Way
Peachtree Memorial Drive
New Peachtree Road
Peachtree Walk
Peachtree Park Drive
Peachtree Parkway
Peachtree Valley Road
Peachtree Battle Avenue (commemorating the Battle of Peachtree Creek)
Peachtree Dunwoody Road (running between Peachtree Street and Dunwoody, Georgia)
Old Peachtree Road (traces part of the route of the original Peachtree Trail for which the road is named)
Atlanta St. Patrick’s Day Parade on Peachtree Street, 2013
Peachtree is also seen in place names:
Peachtree Center is a major development of skyscrapers and other high-rises in downtown, with Peachtree Center Avenue running a block east of Peachtree Street.
Peachtree City is a planned-suburb golf community located south of the city.
Peachtree Corners is also a planned suburb located north of the city.
West Peachtree Street [ edit ]
West Peachtree Street is not a western branch of Peachtree Street, but a major parallel (and unlike Peachtree, almost perfectly straight) due north/south street running one block west of Peachtree Street through downtown, and mostly two or three blocks west (due to the curves in Peachtree Street) through Midtown. West Peachtree divides the northeast and northwest quadrants of the city and county for street addressing purposes.
Where the current Peachtree Street turns to Peachtree Road and briefly heads northwest, it actually crosses West Peachtree, leaving it on the "east" side. It is at this point that the Buford-Spring Connector (Georgia 13) begins, taking the route of old I-85. The studios of WSB-TV are located on this section of “West” Peachtree Street[citation needed], which terminates at I-85. Through this section north of 17th Street in Midtown, and in downtown south of North Avenue to Peachtree Street (and continuing south then southwest on Peachtree to Luckie Street / Auburn Avenue), the MARTA north/northeast line (red and orange/gold trains) runs directly under West Peachtree. Between the two, it runs no more than a block to the east.
Route numbers [ edit ]
From the Buford-Spring Connector north to Roswell Road, Peachtree Street and Peachtree Road carry U.S. 19 and Georgia 9. At a five-way intersection with East/West Paces Ferry Road at the center of the original Buckhead Village, these continue north onto Roswell Road, and Georgia 141 begins on Peachtree instead. South of the connector, 9 and 19 continue on two one-way streets: West Peachtree Street northbound and Spring Street southbound.
Peachtree meets Piedmont Road (Georgia 237) between Buckhead Village and Lenox Square. Besides the southwestern terminus of Georgia 13 (mentioned above) the only other major intersection in Atlanta is at North Avenue, which carries Georgia 8, U.S. 29, U.S. 78, and U.S. 278.
There are no direct highway interchanges from Peachtree to the Downtown Connector (I-75/85), I-85, or Georgia 400 freeways, all of which it crosses. However, there is a full interchange at I-285, at which point Peachtree Industrial Boulevard is built as an expressway for a few miles.
Landmarks [ edit ]
Modern glass structures on Peachtree Street in Midtown
Many of Atlanta's most prominent buildings and landmarks are located along Peachtree Street. In downtown, 191 Peachtree Tower, Georgia-Pacific Tower, Westin Peachtree Plaza and SunTrust Plaza all line Peachtree. In Midtown, Bank of America Plaza, Atlanta's tallest building, is a block south of the "Fabulous" Fox Theatre, a grand movie palace completed in 1929.
Author Margaret Mitchell was killed by a speeding car in 1949 while crossing Peachtree Street as a pedestrian at the intersection with 13th Street. Mitchell wrote her classic Gone With the Wind in the basement apartment of a boarding house at the corner of 10th Street and Peachtree Street. That house is now a museum and is located across 10th Street from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta which serves the southeastern United States. The film debuted at the Loew's Grand Theatre, at the corner of Peachtree and Forsyth Street, where the Georgia-Pacific Building now stands.
Office buildings 1100 Peachtree (formerly owned and occupied by BellSouth) and 1180 Peachtree, home to major law firms, are prominent business addresses. The heart of Atlanta's arts scene is found just north on Peachtree where the Woodruff Arts Center, including the High Museum of Art, Atlanta Symphony, Alliance Theatre Company, and the Atlanta campus of the Savannah College of Art & Design are located.
Although most have been demolished, there are still several historic buildings left along Peachtree in Buckhead. Several of these are stores, in single-story brick buildings constructed well before the annexation of Buckhead in 1952.
Northeast of the city limit, the road goes through Brookhaven and passes Oglethorpe University. Upon entering Chamblee, the road splits into Peachtree Industrial Boulevard and Peachtree Road. Peachtree Road becomes a two-lane road that travels further east towards Doraville, while Peachtree Industrial Boulevard continues more on a more northerly trajectory (as Georgia 141) towards Dunwoody and Peachtree Corners.
Retail [ edit ]
The Buckhead shopping district features many high-end retailers, concentrated in the Phipps Plaza and Lenox Square malls. Buckhead Atlanta (formerly "Streets of Buckhead") is a mixed-use development that opened in 2014. The "Midtown Mile" was a concept to make part of Peachtree in Midtown like the Magnificent Mile in Chicago.
Geography [ edit ]
Atlantans are often convinced that the ridge followed by Peachtree Street is part of the Eastern Continental Divide. While Peachtree Street is atop a ridge, railroad tracks were built on the actual Eastern Continental Divide, which follows DeKalb Avenue from Decatur to Five Points, then turns southwest toward the Atlanta airport, with the northwest side draining into the Chattahoochee or Flint Rivers and therefore into the Gulf of Mexico, and the southeast side eventually into the Atlantic Ocean. In 1959, Whitehall Street SW, which meets Peachtree Street NE at Five Points, was renamed "Peachtree Street SW", and the Eastern Continental Divide follows this street, so a small portion of the story may be technically correct. Atlanta's primary water source is the Chattahoochee and much of the water is pumped over the watershed. To balance the river flows, treated sewage is pumped back to the Chattahoochee.
In popular culture [ edit ]
Gallery [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ] |
Dave: It started with ulcers on the genitals. Gareth: That is right off the bat a terrible start–and did you just wink at me?
Before I dig (eww) deep on this one, let’s start with the science and stuff. From the Center for Disease Control, here you go–facts and stuff in .html and .pdf. Sorry, no adult coloring books (for now–give me time):
Syphilis:
basic: .pdf download
detailed: .pdf download
images of symptoms (worse than anything in the .js embed, so I double dog dare you)
Also in:
Español (Spanish)
中文 (Chinese)
Kreyòl (Haitian Creole)
Русский (Russian)
Tiẽng Viêt (Vietnamese)
Congenital Syphilis:
basic: pdf download
Also in: Español (Spanish)
My vagina’s dropped! –Gareth
Mine, too, buddy. But we’re not done yet. Clench those Kegels. They really do work.
Four stages of syphilis:
primary secondary latent tertiary
Dig deeper into the Dollop: Tags: STDs, syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia
Now. Let’s have a little chitty-chat about what happens when two folks with untreated syphilis have a child. When a mommy and daddy love each other very, very much, something magical happens–
Meet Mr. Earle Nelson. He was born to parents who both had long-term untreated syphilis when he was born–at least one of them had neurosyphilis–and both were so ravaged by The Syph that they were both deceased before Earle turned three. Neurosyphilis is an infection of the brain and/or spinal cord that occurs from long-term untreated syphilis–basically, when chronic latent or tertiary syphilis jumps the gap and crosses the streams.
Plenty of chronically ill parents raise children, and everything turns out okay, you say? That is true, very true. But let’s look at the combined symptoms of neurosyphilis and chronic syphilis, and translate them to a living environment for a child who was certainly also born with congenital syphilis, shall we?
Buckle your seatbelt and grab your dental dams.
*chronic headaches, blindness/vision problems/ hyper-photosensitivity + visual disturbances + psychosis (which certainly may include paranoia) = exceedingly dark home. Think every horror movie that shows a psycho killer’s lair (spoiler alert) with random newspapers or aluminum foil blockading the windows. What do you think limited visual field does to baby’s brain development, congenital syph or no?
*confusion, disorientation, again with the psychosis, sudden personality changes, changes in mental stability (redundant, but I am overemphasizing because o the humanity), dementia, depression, irritability, memory problems, mood disturbances = completely unstable and unpredictable environment. Baby Earle cannot trust that the parent approaching him will behave consistently from moment to moment. Plus, with all these mental processing problems, odds are good that someone is going to forget there even is a baby. Regularly.
*abnormal gait + numbness in toes, feet, legs + fecal and urinary incontinence + muscle weakness + tremors + seizures + neck stiffness = even if the parents are physically able to lift and carry baby Earle—imagine what this looks like to a toddler. HORROR SHOW. He doesn’t have normal movements to model.
Plus, add in all the chancres all over their skin, all the lovely skin rot. That’s a given.
Well, what happened to baby Earle? Well, both parents’ bodies gave out before he turned three, and he was sent to live with his grandmother (where was she with the shit everywhere and the newspaper on the windows what the hell), and they lived happily ever–
GOTCHA.
Grandma was a devout, strict Pentecostal, so Earle’s transition must have been a doozy, and God only knows (amirite) how much of his early childhood and his own syphilis was blamed upon him.
At age ten, he collided with a streetcar–Head Injury City–and, when you add that catastrophic a head injury to a congenitally syphlitic brain, you get ding ding ding! unconscious for six days! SIX.
So, who is this poor Sad Syph Sack who never had a chance?
Earle Leonard Nelson, “the Gorilla Man”, necrophiliac serial killer of at least 22 victims from February 20, 1926–June 9, 1927.
yay.
There’s no happy endings with syphilis. Wear a fucking condom.
My favorite true crime historian, Harold Schechter, wrote a splendid book about the Gorilla Man and his 14 months of horror: Bestial: The Savage Trail of a True American Monster.
But wait, there’s more:
Treatment of syphilis in early modern Europe:
…understanding of cause necessarily affects treatment.
Translation: hang on to your tits, there’s about to be some bloodletting and mercury rubbing.
Don’t say it out loud or Quentin Tarantino will make it into a movie. –Dave
And…This is, of course, going to be a two-parter. I have to cover war propaganda and wartime medicine, Al Capone, more social injustice…and I have to go in deeper and rant and rave about the human experimentation, especially at Tuskegee. But that day is not today, my loves. For now, I don’t have enough oomph left (stupid immune system) for the ragey typing, and I have just typed syphilis and syph enough for one day don’cha think?
Band names from this episode:
The Blame Game: first hit, “Pure Woman, Spotless Children, Happy Man”
Absent Genital Box
Syphillis Fembots
Weapons of Sexism
Hairy Canteen and the Towel Theory
Gravy Bag
Social Evil Hospital
Genital Gestapo
Cultural references from this episode: |
The current wave of foreign fighters emerging from the conflict in Iraq and Syria will be larger and potentially more dangerous than the mujahideen guerrillas that were a byproduct of the Soviet-Afghan conflict in the 1980s, FBI Director James Comey warned last September.
That is an especially foreboding observation, since the foreign fighters borne from the Afghan conflict went on to form the core of Al Qaeda and fight in the internecine conflicts in Bosnia, Algeria and Chechnya during the 1990s.
When one conflict ends, these fighters often use their connections to move on and join another fight. This phenomenon is likely to worsen in the future.
The number of foreign fighters participating in the conflict in Iraq and Syria is significant compared to those who participated in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Even more concerning, jihadists have improved and facilitated their networking capacity—improved communication, eased transportation, and diversified access to sources of information and money can make even small cadres of experienced fighters a dangerous force. The foreign-fighter phenomenon is not new. Over the past two hundred years, they have appeared in more than a quarter of all civil wars. But now these fighters engage in foreign civil wars and insurgencies—and then export their expertise back to their home countries or to places they have newly immigrated.
While jihadism expert Thomas Hegghammer has estimated the number of foreign fighters in Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet conflict at between five thousand and twenty thousand, other scholars such as Edwin Bakker and Mark Singleton have pegged the crop of foreign fighters currently in Iraq and Syria at around thirty thousand. Other trusted sources have settled on a similar figure. The foreign fighters in Syria are not strictly Sunnis: significant numbers of Afghan and Pakistani Shia are also fighting alongside Hezbollah and other pro-Assad elements. Encrypted communications and the ubiquity of social media mean that even after the caliphate disappears, the ideology of Salafi jihadism will persist, existing online as a virtual caliphate, and offering aspiring jihadists hope that the next major battle is all but inevitable.
But what else might the international community glean from similarities and differences between the Afghan offspring versus the present-day Iraqi-Syrian progeny? For starters, as much as some scholars dismiss the importance of territory, the control of major cities like Mosul, Iraq and Raqqa, Syria has provided ISIS with consistent access to safe haven and sanctuary.
Given the continued assault on ISIS strongholds, there is little doubt that its members (foreign fighters as well as those from Iraq and Syria) will flee abroad to fight in other conflicts in places like Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan and elsewhere. With ISIS sustaining major territorial losses, some foreign fighters are refusing to fight while others are already attempting to return to their countries of origin. In Europe, this has been characterized as a low-probability, high-impact threat. Disrupting the reverse flow of the foreign-fighter pipeline remains a top priority for European governments and intelligence agencies.
To ensure that the foreign fighters who leave Iraq and Syria do not reconstitute elsewhere, it is critical they be denied safe haven, sanctuary, and the ability to train and network with other terrorists and insurgents in ungoverned territories. This must remain a priority, not only for the West, but for all nation-states affected by terrorism, including China and Russia.
The foreign-fighter contingent from Europe has been well-documented, but less understood are the ramifications of militants returning to countries that are ill-equipped and lack a domestic-security infrastructure to combat sustained acts of terrorism. This includes Trinidad and Tobago, which has the greatest per-capita number of foreign fighters in the Western Hemisphere.
In addition, some major global powers are preparing to deal with radicalized returnees from Syria. China is becoming increasingly worried about the growing threat of Uighur militants, jihadists from China’s western Xinjiang region, fighting in the Middle East, some of whom may return home to China to strike against Beijing. For Russia, the sheer number of its citizens fighting for ISIS—almost 2,400—is troubling; if even a fraction return home, it could cause major issues for Moscow. Jihadists from the former Soviet Union are rumored to be among the most effective and feared fighters in Syria today.
The mujahedeen that formed the core of Al Qaeda were able to rely upon Afghanistan as a hub for terrorist activity and training, provided in part by the Taliban. The global coalition arrayed to combat ISIS must do everything possible to ensure that Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and other countries in the Middle East and North Africa do not become fertile soil for the current wave of jihadists to plant roots.
States with differing agendas and adversarial relationships have worked together in the past to counter terrorism. Most recently, the United States, Iran, Turkey and Russia came together in Syria to retake Palmyra from ISIS. Similar cooperation will be vital to ensuring that the threat from jihadists can be contained in the wake of the offensive against Mosul and the forthcoming assault on ISIS’s stronghold of Raqqa .
Colin P. Clarke is a political scientist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation and an associate fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT)-The Hague. Chad C. Serena is a political scientist at RAND. Amarnath Amarasingam is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and a fellow at The George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.
Image: Sgt. Mike Garcia of the 8th Security Police Squadron is silhouetted against the sky as he holds a Stinger anti-aircraft guided missile during the air base ground defense Exercise Foal Eagle '89. Wikipedia Commons / Staff Sgt. Val Gempis |
Conservative Reporter Posobiec Assaulted by Violent Left-Wing Antifa Member at DC Protest (VIDEO)
Washington D.C. – Rebel Media reporter, Jack Posobiec was assaulted by a member of Antifa as he was reporting on the ‘May Day’ protests. Antifa is out in full force today and admittedly preparing for violence.
As usual, left-wing Antifa members are the violent ones who don’t believe in freedom of speech or freedom of the press. Jack Posobiec was assaulted by this man simply because he is a reporter with different views.
VIDEO:
Assaulted by Antifa again and I defended myself #MayDay2017 pic.twitter.com/3DDqK1nAYn — Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) May 1, 2017
Jack Posobiec also did a periscope explaining what happened. He used reasonable force for self defense. Posobiec is also filing a police report. VIDEO:
Jack Posobiec Attacked by Antifa – Uses Reasonable Force for Self Defense https://t.co/1HQ606sJBt — Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) May 1, 2017
Antifa anticipating violence (they always start it) |
What sort of country sends a dozen uniformed officers to haul innocent sleeping children out of their beds; gives them just a few minutes to pack what belongings they can grab; pushes them into stinking caged vans; drives them for hours while refusing them the chance to go to the lavatory so that they wet themselves and locks them up sometimes for weeks or months without the prospect of release and without adequate health services?
My country, apparently.
Reading the report (The Arrest and Detention of Children Subject to Immigration Control [2.4MB PDF] ) from England's Children's Commissioner, Sir Al Aynsley-Green, into the treatment of children and young people at the Yarl's Wood Immigration Removal Centre near Bedford will leave many feeling ashamed.
Of course, there are no easy answers as to how Britain ensures that foreigners don't abuse our benevolence by claiming asylum without good reason. But can this conundrum ever necessitate our treating children with such cruelty?
Sir Al went into Yarl's Wood almost a year ago and spoke to staff, families and children. The centre is where many failed asylum-seekers are held before deportation. Each year, around 2,000 children are locked up there.
The testimony from the youngsters who find themselves unwittingly ensnared at the sharp end of the immigration system tells a story more resonant of a totalitarian state than of contemporary Bedfordshire.
The arrest
According to the children's accounts, some were still asleep when the arrest teams arrived - large numbers of uniformed officers who on occasion hammered on the door or even smashed it down and ran into their homes shouting.
One boy of 11 told the children's commissioner:
"There was this woman, just shouting, shouting at my sister to get up. She was in bed asleep and she's only five so she was crying and the woman just kept shouting at her. She didn't have to do that. The search was bad. Why did they have to search my sister? She is only five, what is she going to have? They touch you all over and they're rough. It's rude."
The report explains how some children described officers as taking pleasure in the family's distress, including telling them that they were "going back to their own country" and laughing and making fun of them when they showed signs of distress or anxiety.
One child said that an officer had called his mother "stupid" and laughed at her crying and distress, while others were told that it was "tough" if they didn't like the officer's attitude.
The children and young people revealed that some immigration officers had used force to control and restrain them - a finding that the children's commissioner describes as "a significant cause for concern".
Imagine what it must be like if you are a young child who has lived in the UK for many years, perhaps all your life, to be woken one morning and told you have just a few minutes to pack your stuff and get out.
That, apparently, was a common complaint of the children and families in Yarl's Wood, a procedure that the report describes as "one of the most de-humanising aspects of the arrest process".
Children were forced to leave behind their most treasured possessions such as shoes, school books, toys and music. Many would never be reunited with their belongings.
A single woman told Sir Al that she had been handcuffed in front of her children, aged one and three, after "panicking" when she was told that she had only three minutes to pack.
Another family with two children suffering from sickle-cell anaemia was prevented from collecting antibiotics and folic acid needed by the children.
The UK Border Agency, which is responsible for the system, "accepts the need to do more work around the topic of belongings that are left behind" and is reviewing the use of force and guidance on medication.
The journey
According to Lin Homer, head of the UK Border Agency speaking on BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour last September: "we do not use caged vans, we use people carriers". The "Enforcement Instructions and Guidance" states:
"Families should not be transported in caged vans unless the risk assessment dictates otherwise."
But that is not what the children said. And when challenged, the agency admitted to the commissioner that "contractors do sometimes use caged vans during the 'second stage' transport of families from the reporting centre to Yarl's Wood".
This is often the longer part of the journey, with children imprisoned in vehicles "stinking of urine" and "stained" with vomit. No wonder some said that the journey made them feel like criminals or animals.
What's more, many of the children complained about the lack of "comfort breaks" on the long journeys to detention. This had led to "accidents" in some cases. A chance to go to the lavatory was apparently denied "even when the vans stopped for petrol and, on at least two or three occasions, access to a toilet was denied throughout the whole journey despite urgent requests to stop."
If a parent treated their children like this, they might well be charged with neglect.
Treatment at Yarl's Wood
Unsurprisingly, children locked up in Yarl's Wood described it as being "like a prison". Their emotional state was often fragile, their having been ripped from the life they had known with no idea what had happened to their belongings or the pets they have been forced to leave behind and without the chance to say goodbye to their friends.
"One child asked us what the time was. When we replied with the time and the day he appeared sad and told us, "Oh, I thought it was a Saturday. If it was a Saturday I would be swimming with my friends now."
This picture, drawn by one young child and reproduced in the report, says that it is 0900, "it's a Sunday and I want to play football and I support Liverpool".
The healthcare of the children at Yarl's Wood was also found to be poor, in particular the need to ensure that youngsters are protected from disease when they are returned to their country of origin.
"Preventative healthcare arrangements prior to removal, for example immunisations and the provision of malaria prophylaxis, were found to be so inadequate as to endanger children's health."
Since the visit, the private contractor which runs Yarl's Wood, Serco, has appointed a head of clinical governance and a paediatric nurse.
Sir Al's findings relate to a visit almost a year ago, a year in which the government has agreed to adopt fully the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (see previous post, UK to give up child rights opt-outs).
Article 37 of the convention states that the detention of a child "shall be used only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time".
The children's commissioner believes that this means that the government must put an end to the detention of children "for administrative purposes". He wants "an urgent review" of the system but accepts that nothing can happen immediately. (You can listen here to Sir Al on this morning's Today programme.)
The government, on the other hand, signed up to the convention confident that it would not prevent them arresting and detaining children of immigrants who were due for deportation.
While today's report welcomes recent improvements and ongoing reviews into the way children are treated by the UK Border Agency, it is not easy to see how the Home Office is going to square its obligations under the convention with its determination to be "tough" on failed asylum seekers with children. In the end, I suspect, lawyers will argue it out and a judge will decide.
UPDATE, 17:07: Following this post, the Border and Immigration Minister Phil Woolas has commented: |
(CNN) — A freshly made white chocolate and raspberry mix is carefully poured into a piping bag by chef Yasumasa Takagi, one of the most renowned patissiers in Japan
After snipping the end of the bag, he squeezes the delicious pink paste into a tray of oblong, white plastic molds.
Surprisingly, Takagi isn't creating an elaborate confection for customers to his fashionable Tokyo cafe; this is something far more modest.
It's a KitKat.
Most of the world knows the KitKat as an ordinary coffee break snack made from wafers and milk chocolate.
In Japan, it's in a completely different league. Here, gourmet versions, pioneered by Takagi, compete with a mind-boggling array of mass-produced flavors that to some palates might border on the bizarre.
Wasabi KitKat anyone? How about lemon vinegar? Or pumpkin pudding, green tea, Shinshu apple or adzuki bean sandwich?
It's a long way from the KitKat's humble origins in 1930s England. Born in the northern city of York, the chocolate treat was relatively unknown globally until local manufacturer Rowntree was bought by Swiss food giant Nestle in the 1980s.
Winning formula
Even as it spread across the planet, success was never guaranteed in Japan -- a market notoriously difficult to break into for non-domestic brands.
So how has it become such a phenomenon?
That's down to some hard work and smart ideas from KitKat's Japanese marketing gurus in the western city of Kobe. And also a lucky quirk of language.
KitKat sounds very similar to "kito kato," which in Japanese means "to surely win."
Chef Takagi mixes up new flavors in his kitchens. CNN
It's a common phrase said to students sitting exams, particularly high-pressure university entrance tests. Soon after they arrived in Japan, KitKats were being given by parents to their children and friends were giving them to each other with hand-written messages -- and not just around exam time.
"There was strong emotional bonding going on and the 'gifting emotion,'" says Ryoji Maki, marketing manager for KitKat in Japan.
Flavor riot
Rainbow of flavors: Japan's KitKat kaleidoscope. CNN
He says Japan's gift-giving tradition and particular culinary habits -- prizing seasonal and regional products -- were tapped into. But it wasn't until the early 2000s that KitKat in Japan began to show its true colors with a riotous expansion in flavors.
Consumers in Japan demand choice and novelty as much as they prize tradition.
According to Maki, about 2,000 new confectionery products are released each year in Japan, so it's not enough to just offer dark or milk chocolate variations.
To date there have been more than 300 different KitKat flavors.
Ingredients are sourced from regions across the country, often produced and sold to coincide with food seasons in limited edition boxes of KitKat minis.
Shizuoka prefecture provides the wasabi. Okinawa gives up its purple potatoes and matcha green tea. Other unlikely flavors are sakura (cherry blossom) and sake (non-alcoholic).
Taking the bars out of the shops and into Japan's eateries has also been another strategy. Tie-ins have gone beyond straightforward desserts like cheesecake, resulting in curiosities like KitKat pizzas and "baking bars," designed to be cooked before eating.
Since 2012, KitKat has started to eclipse homegrown confectionery brands such as Meiji.
Limited edition
Confectionery king: KitKat has become a best seller. CNN
About four million KitKat minis (a smaller, two-finger version of the classic bar) roll out of the chocolate factory each day -- that's close to 1.5 billion each year.
And it doesn't stop there, which is where patisserie supremo Takagi comes in.
"After I gained training at various famous shops in France and Belgium, I thought that it was my mission to fill the gap between Western countries and Japan," says Takagi.
Initially approached about a collaboration with KitKat, he rejected it.
"I believed I couldn't create chocolate freely without ties," he says.
A decade of discussions and negotiations later, convinced he had free rein to experiment within his own high standards, Takagi agreed to open his kitchens to KitKat.
They now produce very limited edition high-quality KitKats, using couverture chocolate, that can only be found in his shops and eight of Japan's high-end department stores through KitKat "Chocolatory" concessions.
"Chocolatory" concessions around Japan sell the exotic bars under KitKat chandeliers. CNN
The first opened in Tokyo in January 2014 and sold out of Chef Takagi's specialty bars in hours. Since then he's been advocating for new flavors and pushing out new products, from the single-finger Sublime range to "special" flavors that include fruit or tea-infused minis.
Visitors to Japan can get their hands on Chef Takagi's current range from under KitKat chandeliers (yes, really) at the Chocolatory concessions. Gift boxes in limited-edition flavors are on sale at major train stations and airports.
There are no concrete plans for export, but if Takagi is able to convince a global food giant operating in one of the most competitive markets in the world to change their approach, don't rule it out.
"What I would most like to achieve is to deliver Japanese KitKat Chocolatory with craftsmanship to the people around the world," he says. |
Booster Gold is back at it again, bringing you a Time Capsule perfect for prime time! Available today, the new Team-Up Time Capsule can now be earned and unlocked in-game.
If you’re looking to learn more about how to get, open, and use a Time Capsule, check out our helpful guide!
TEAM-UP TIME CAPSULE
Each Team-Up Time Capsule contains some items from a general list, including Soder Cola Ultimates, R&D Exobytes, complex materials, collections, and more. They may also contain the new Magic Supply Crystal trinket, a new magic-inspired version of the Supply Drop trinket.
Every Time Capsule also includes one of four sub-capsules, or boxes, that can contain the following items or related collection pieces:
High-Density Tactical Gear
Inspired by everyone’s favorite archer Green Arrow, the High-Density Tactical Gear set can be collected in pieces from the Team-Up Time Capsule. When consumed, the pieces will be level-appropriate to your character. If you want to trade them, be sure to do so BEFORE you attune them!
Plus, you can upgrade to the Enhanced High-Density Tactical Gear for an even more impressive look. Collect enough of the standard gear and Fabricated Motes for this stylish set!
Tactical Mods
A new series of Tactical Mods are available in the Team-Up Time Capsule. These mods fit into the leg slot and restore a small portion of your Health when using specific abilities. You can also remove these mods using the Tactical Mod Removal Kit for 20 Marks of Victory.
Team-Up Emblems
Eight iconic new emblems are featured in this capsule, including the Flash emblem! Collect them all for special feats. Just like the High-Density Tactical gear, you can upgrade these emblems to emissive versions using Fabricated Motes and recipes. Which emblems will you and your team sport?
Team-Up Provisions
Finishing certain collections from the Team-Up Time Capsule will grant you access to these three incredible styles: the Black Flash Cowl, the Lazuli Misted Aura, and the Negative Speed Force Material.
AVAILABLE NOW – the Team-Up Time Capsule is now dropping in the game! |
Too many of us have forgotten the lessons of the Cold War.
Headlines about “the end of the republic” litter political commentary across the political landscape. They usually mark the beginning of a discussion of the merits of Donald Trump as president of the United States, but his ascendency is not the leading sign of a collapse of American society. For that, see a recent poll indicating a tectonic shift occurring in the political preferences of U.S. adults. When you consider current trends in cultural norms and widely held beliefs, you will see that we are headed toward the end of the American experiment.
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The American Culture and Faith Institute recently conducted a survey of adults 18 and older. It shows not only how deeply divided Americans are on some issues but also how their view of the nation stands in many cases in stark contrast to our nation’s founding principles. Most Americans (58 percent) see themselves as politically moderate, while a quarter identify as conservative, and 17 percent as liberal. Those who were both socially and fiscally conservative, the group tracked by the ACFI in greatest detail, were 6 percent of the population.
But those differences don’t reveal the greatest divide and danger to America’s future. “The most alarming result, according to [George] Barna, was that four out of every ten adults say they prefer socialism to capitalism,” the ACFI noted in its commentary on the poll. “That is a large minority,” Barna said, “and it includes a majority of the liberals — who will be pushing for a completely different economic model to dominate our nation. That is the stuff of civil wars. It ought to set off alarm bells among more traditionally-oriented leaders across the nation.’” That 40 percent of Americans now prefer socialism to capitalism could spell major change to the policies advanced by legislators and political leaders and to the interpretations of judges ruling on the application of new and pre-existing laws.
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How did we get here? The popularity of Bernie Sanders, whose 2016 presidential campaign was marked by an altruistic spirit and a consistent value system, is of course not the cause of this movement in public opinion but rather an indicator of it. Many Americans have forgotten the lessons of the Cold War and the disasters witnessed in the crumbling economies and failed polities of Communist and socialist countries in the 1990s. Communism was on its last leg, it appeared, and its little brother socialism was not far behind.
Little did we know that the fires of socialism were being stoked in corners all across America where it is held in higher regard than in nations that have suffered under it. It is obvious where such thinking abounds and continues to spread: in our colleges and universities. The ideologies of professors and educators have proven stronger than facts: The “benefits” of socialism and Communism are taught from the Ivy League to the local community college. A generation has been taught a lie, and they now believe it.
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Americans who believe in limited government, welfare reform, and states’ rights should look over their shoulder and realize that a dangerous ideology is gaining ground. A crowd that you thought history had left behind is growing. It prefers an America that would look drastically different from what it has been from its founding through the present day.
One reason that such a dangerous political construct has advanced is that left-leaning activists have hijacked terms of the debate and muddied the popular understanding of political language. Consider that more than 80 percent of all respondents to the ACFI poll said they supported traditional values, as did nearly 70 percent of those who identify as liberal, even if in fact they tend to be socially progressive.
Barna described those who in the poll were identified to be liberals. They are
a group among whom three-fourths support same-sex marriage; seven out of ten advocate legalized abortion; a majority want socialism to replace capitalism; and nearly one out of five claim to be LGBT. It’s hard to imagine which ‘traditional moral values’ they are referring to. This oddity does, however, reflect how the ideological Left consistently appropriates language and imputes new meaning to terms that are known and popular. The survey data raise the possibility that liberals may redefine “traditional moral values” to include beliefs and behaviors that are not at all traditional — or moral, from a biblical perspective.
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It all depends on what the definition of “values” is.
“Freedom isn’t free” is inscribed on the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., reminding all who visit of the blood and treasure that has been paid to end tyrannical rule abroad. That America itself may become a socialist country must be abhorrent and foreign to the many who have fought, and to those who still fight, for free markets, traditional values, and capitalist ideals. Conservative and traditionally minded Americans can no longer assume that their neighbor believes what they believe or that he defines the terms of political discourse the same way. The country has changed.
Sadly, Barna is only partially wrong that this divide is the stuff of civil wars. In this case, the civil war is fought not directly and openly, with bullets and bombs, but with an intellectual assault on history and facts — a quiet revolution.
It is time to play both the short and the long game. Now is the time to speak out and educate all who will hear about the history of this nation and the benefits of traditional values, free markets, and capitalism, which, though not perfect, are better than all the alternatives. Those who love this nation and the ideals of our experiment in liberty must counter the gainsayers in academia and the media or they will soon find that America as “one nation under God” is no more. |
After the recent crackdown on Torrentz and KickassTorrents, it seems like it’s time for Pirate Bay to face the music from rights holders around the world. The site has become the freshest victim of copyright laws and may be blocked in Australia before Christmas! This has prompted torrenters in Australia to search for alternatives to Pirate Bay.
The Federal Court of Australia has passed a landmark decision that will prompt all internet providers operating within the country to block five “copyright-infringing” websites. The list includes Pirate Bay among other popular torrent-indexing websites.
The federal Court gave ISPs just 15 days to make sure that the sites are blocked. Other torrent-indexing websites that will be blocked as per the ruling of the Federal Court include Torrentz, TorrentHound, IsoHunt, SolarMovie.
However, it is the shutdown of Pirate Bay in Australia that has many torrenters worrying about how they’ll spend their holidays. However, where one door shuts down, many more open up!
One of the best ways to circumvent this ban is to use a fast, reliable and affordable virtual private network (VPN) connection. While in Australia, you can still access The Pirate Bay with Australia VPN.
A VPN not only masks the IP address of the internet user, but also makes you anonymous online, thus facilitating you to download torrents anonymously in Australia. To get the best torrenting experience, Sign up for Ivacy, the best VPN service for Australia now.
Looking for the Pirate Bay Alternatives? Here are the top 5 Pirate Bay alternatives that will make your holiday season an exciting one!
Top 5 The Pirate Bay Alternatives
Here are the top 5 Pirate Bay Alternatives that are still live and kicking!
1337x YTS Lime Torrents RARBG Zooqle
1. 1337x
1337x happens to be one of the notable torrent websites and was launched in the year 2007. It garnered traction when the major torrent websites started to come under fire. People wanted a fall back plan and there it was, 1337x! The dedicated set of users and uploaders keep the site fresh and up-to-date with content.
Be sure to hide your IP with Be sure to hide your IP with Ivacy VPN before downloding torrents.
2. YTS |
MS Surface Book Review
The Surface Book was all that I anticipated. It's an amazing laptop first and foremost, but it's also an amazing tablet. The specs on this model make all of the applications load quickly and easily. The display is super sharp with vibrant colors. The key board feels a little larger than most, but when compared to an Dell of the same size there really is no difference. As mentioned, the laptop features are first, but with the touch of a button, the display pulls up from the keyboard allowing you to easily care the device in tablet mode. It runs all of the current Office products (Word, Excel, PwrPoint, etc.,) extremely fast and it's very noticeable. However, you must consider the I7 Inter Processor along with the 16 GB of RAM and the super quick 512 GB SSD. All in all, the MS Surface Book is Microsoft's answer to Apple's hardware and software designs. Good job, Microsoft.Read full review
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned |
What former Bok coach NICK MALLETT had to say on SuperSport about the past weekend's Super Rugby matches involving South African teams.
Cheetahs vs Bulls
‘Both the Bulls and the Cheetahs have adopted this playing style of using the width of the field and playing off their halfbacks. But you still have to commit. If you just catch and pass the whole time, then the defence just shifts with the ball. You have to actually run at a defender and time your pass so that you fix the defender to stop him from going across. What was interesting is the Cheetahs’ philosophy to move the ball around until they could get their kicker into a good position to clear for touch.
‘The Cheetahs scored some excellent tries and were leading comfortably and then the Bulls had a really good comeback with a burst of two tries.
‘One of the key things we have to mention about this Cheetahs team is that Uzair Cassiem has been passing before taking contact and it’s so nice to see. He is a big, physical flank who takes the ball up a lot with pick and go's. But in the lead-up to the Cheetahs’ first try, he gets out to the wing and pops a lovely pass inside to Paul Schoeman before contact and allows them to get forward momentum. And Cassiem also threw that exquisite pass for one of Oupa Mohoje’s tries. I thought the Cheetahs were disrupted by Cassiem going off at half-time because of a knee injury.
‘We mentioned last week that the Cheetahs made a number of handling errors which cost them the game against the Lions. This weekend, their decision-making of when to pass and when not to pass were far better. The Bulls don’t have such a heavy pack and the Cheetahs moved the ball to different areas of the field that made it difficult for the Bulls to defend. If you run straight at a Bulls player, he will tackle you, but the Cheetahs were running good angles and passing just prior to making contact. The breakdown was always beyond the advantage line so every Bulls player had to retreat backwards to get in position as opposed to running forward with an offensive hit. And that is credit to Franco Smith’s attacking play that he brought into the Cheetahs set-up.
‘The Bulls are coming out of the line so quickly that no one is setting in as the first and second defender, which is why there is no organisation. They are on the back-foot all the time.
ALSO READ: Five takeaways from past weekend
‘It’s interesting that Handré Pollard has started both games for the Bulls and we know how good he is. But I imagine had he been a New Zealand player he would have played off the bench. They should have started with the guy who did well the whole of last year [Tian Schoeman], perhaps giving Pollard 20 minutes in his first game back and 40 minutes in the second match against the Cheetahs.
'But what really cost the Bulls were the 38 handling errors they made compared to 13 by the Cheetahs. That is three times as many handling errors. If you are going to try and play a ball-in-hand game, you better made sure to hold onto the ball. The Cheetahs were much better at doing that than the Bulls.
‘We’re focusing a bit too much on Pollard. We ought to focus on the Bulls pack. In both their games to date, the pack only got into the game in the last 20 minutes. For 60 minutes the backline didn’t really get much ball and Pollard was substituted after 60. I don’t care if you put Dan Carter behind a pack going back like that, he is not going to look like a good player. That’s where the Bulls problem lies and that’s what needs to be solved. The Bulls lost four lineouts against a Cheetahs team that we thought was supposed to be weak in the lineouts.
‘We can’t keep on saying it’s because they have pack of forwards. The Bulls need a prop, a fetcher and they are missing a creative loose forward. They have bashers in the loose trio as opposed to someone who can make the little passes, a linking player like Cassiem and Michael Hooper, and like Rob Louw was in the past. If the pack manages to get at least a tighthead prop so that they can win their own ball without collapsing and giving a penalty away, when we can start talking about the play of Rudy Paige and Pollard and compare them in a fair way. They can blame a bad start all they want, but it’s actually a lack of first-phase ball that is causing them all this trouble. Against the Stormers it was the scrums and against the Cheetahs it was the scrums and the lineouts.’
‘And it was interesting to see when Warrick Gelant came on, that the wingers Jamba Ulengo and Travis Ismaiel were far more prominent for the Bulls than prior to that. My feeling is that Jesse Kriel doesn’t get the best out of the wingers. To give Kriel credit, they didn’t have much possession. But even so Jesse and the two big centres that the Bulls utilise are not creative enough to create space for the outside backs. I thought they looked really good in the last 15 minutes with Gelant on the field, but it was too little too late.’
‘We were treated to some good wing play today. Ismaiel made one mistake with that little knock-on at the end. Ulengo was good under the high ball and very physical. But Raymond Rhule was unbelievable. He improved his tackling and is unrecognisable from the player he was two years ago. Wingers are not a problem in South Africa , so let’s not start putting our No 9s on the wing again.’
VIDEO: Highlights of Cheetahs vs Bulls
DHL Stormers vs Jaguares
‘From a Stormers point of view there were a lot of defensive weaknesses. There was a lot of physicality in that Jaguares side and the Stormers didn’t tackle them backwards, which allowed the visitors to get front-foot ball, especially later on in the game. The Stormers got both first-half tries with little kicks, one well-constructed but the other one fortunate because it came off the heel of Jano Vermaak. They have to learn to be better with offensive kicking. Offensive kicking is the secret against really strong defence.
‘The Stormers have a good offloading game, but 24 handling errors are just too many for a team wanting to get into the Super Rugby playoffs and to compete with New Zealand teams.
‘The Jaguares have this absolute determination not to allow a team to score from around the fringes of a ruck and they are prepared to do anything to stop it. We had a penalty try, and Santiago Iglesias came around the side and that could arguably have been another yellow card. And these are lessons they have to learn. Their discipline has to improve. Four yellow cards in two games are far too many.
‘The one positive they can take out of the game is the powerful ball carrying of the forwards that we saw against the Stormers. The two flankers, Tomás Lezana and Pablo Matera, were outstanding and the tight forwards carried well and ran good angles, like that brilliant run that set up Santiago Cordero’s second try. They really tested the Stormers defence in close. It was a much more physical affair for the Stormers.’
VIDEO: Highlights of Stormers vs Jaguares
Lions vs Waratahs
‘This was an incredibly loose game. You’re not going very far in the competition if you concede five tries, even if you score eight yourself. The Lions need to really tighten up on defence.
'Ross Cronjé deserved the Match of the Match award. He doesn’t have the most fantastic pass in the world, but he is a nugget, gritty player who makes defences concentrate because of his good step around the fringes and he tends to made good decisions with his passing under pressure.’
VIDEO: Highlights of Lions vs Waratahs
Round two wrap
‘South African teams were involved in some close and exciting games this weekend. What worries me is the New Zealand teams. There’s a big difference between us playing derbies against each other and then playing against a Kiwi side. We’ll only know where we are once we start playing against them.
‘In terms of the tournament, New Zealand teams still lead the way. But I think we’re ahead of Australian sides, who are really battling at the moment.’
*Note: Mallett did not comment on the games between the Brumbies and Sharks in Canberra and the Sunwolves and Kings in Singapore.
ALSO: Sharks, Cheetahs score big wins
Photo: Johan Pretorius/Gallo Images |
Publications that specialize in Medical Marijuana
Advertising are now common place in many states.
Federal law makes it illegal for any person to place an advertisement for a controlled substance. Up until now, courts have generally interpreted that to mean that the person paying for the ad would be responsible, but now officials are saying that media outlets themselves could be held accountable because they are the ones physically placing the ad for publication.
My personal message to Mrs. Duffy: I'm well aware of the message that these ads send to our children. They send the message that marijuana is a natural medicine that can help with a whole slew of debilitating illnesses. They send the message that marijuana can ease the suffering of people who really need it. I think the message being sent to our children is exactly the one that needs to be sent. People like you go around spreading disinformation and demonizing what is essentially a medicinal herb. Why not start a campaign against advertising St. John's Wart instead? It makes just about as much sense as attacking marijuana.
In another sign of the Obama Administration's escalating war on medical marijuana , Federal prosecutors in California announced Wednesday that they are set to begin actively targeting newspapers, radio stations and other media outlets that advertise medical marijuana.U.S. Attorney Laura E. Duffy, a prosecutor in San Diego, is leading the effort.“I’m not just seeing print advertising,” Duffy said in a recent interview with California Watch and KQED. “I’m actually hearing radio and seeing TV advertising. It’s gone mainstream. Not only is it inappropriate – one has to wonder what kind of message we’re sending to our children – it’s against the law.” |
With tonight's win, Florida is now 44-3 and still holds the highest win percentage (.936) in the country.
Florida, who's currently in first place in the SEC standings, holds a 14-3 mark in conference play for the first time since 2012 when the Gators were 15-2 through 17 league games.
Florida's senior class is now 217-31, which currently ranks tied for fifth among four-year class records in program history. This year's group is now tied with UF's 2014 graduating class that went 217-47 throughout its four seasons. Taylore Fuller , Kirsti Merritt , Aubree Munro , Taylor Schwarz and Kelsey Stewart are trying to catch UF's 2011 class which boasted a 238-33 mark during their four years.
Tim Walton is now just four wins away from his 600th win at Florida. Walton earned his 700 th career win on March 12 at Auburn.
is now just four wins away from his 600th win at Florida. Saturday's game was broadcast on SEC Network+. Florida is now 24-2 in contests that are streamed online.
Florida is now 28-0 against unranked opponents this season.
UF has now outscored its opponents this season, 292-46. In 2015, UF had a plus-246 run differential (333-87) through 47 games. In 2014, UF had a plus-213 run differential (317-104) through 47 games.
Florida's 46 runs allowed through 47 games is the second fewest in school history through this point in any season. UF's 2009 squad allowed 40 tallies through 47 contests and Florida's last two NCAA Championship teams had allowed 85 runs each, respectively. The Gators have made just 20 errors this season and currently sport one of the best fielding percentages (.984) and earned run averages in the nation (0.86). For comparison, Florida had committed 27 errors through 47 contests last season and had a fielding percentage of .978. UF went on to record a .981 fielding percentage and commit just 33 errors, which are both school records.
Florida's astounding 0.86 team ERA (302.2 IP) would go down as the second-best ERA for a single season in program history if the season ended today.
Top ERA Season's in UF History: 2008 – 0.92 ERA (512.0 IP) 2009 – 0.69 ERA (444.0 IP)
Florida's miniscule .158 batting average against (302.2 IP) would go down as the best b/avg. for a single season in program history if the season ended today.
Top B/Avg. Season's in UF History: 2008 – 0.176 b/avg. (512.0 IP) 2009 – 0.161 b/avg. (444.0 IP)
UF did not allow a stolen base on Saturday, remaining the only team in the SEC who has yet to allow more than three stolen bases in 2016. In addition, three stolen bases is the fewest Florida has allowed in school history through 47 games. Florida's opponents have only attempted to steal nine bases against Aubree Munro and Florida's catchers this season. That mark would shatter Florida's school record of 25 attempts that was set in 2015. In addition, UF's stolen-base-against percentage of 33% (3-9) this season would be the lowest in school history if the season ended today. Florida's 2003 team currently holds that mark as they allowed just 51.7% (31-60) of runners to steal a base safely.
Aleshia Ocasio (16-1), Kelly Barnhill (14-0) and Delanie Gourley (14-2) are looking to become the first trio in school history to all record at least 15 wins in a season.
(16-1), (14-0) and (14-2) are looking to become the first trio in school history to all record at least 15 wins in a season. Gourley (150), Barnhill (135) and Ocasio (110) are the second trio in school history to all record 100+ strikeouts in a season. They are trying to become the first trio in school history to all record 150+ strikeouts in a season.
Florida's trio of pitchers are looking to become the second group to all throw at least 100 innings in a single season. UF's 2002 group of Amanda Moore (174.2 IP), Amanda Knowles (113.2) and Mandy Schuerman (105.0 IP) last achieved this feat. Innings pitched totals = Delanie Gourley – 108.2, Aleshia Ocasio – 107.0, , Kelly Barnhill – 84.0 Ocasio (136.0, 2015) and Gourley (107.2, 2014) have each achieved this feat once before in their careers.
Florida's pitching trio has combined to allow just 46 runs, while they have totaled 395 strikeouts. Both of those numbers lead the SEC. Only two teams in Florida history have ever allowed less than 100 runs in a single season. UF's 2009 squad allowed just 67 runs and its 2008 team allowed 94 tallies. Florida's 395 strikeouts currently ranks ninth all-time in program history for strikeouts in a single season.
Ocasio (0.65) and Gourley (0.71) entered this week with the No. 1 and No. 4 ERAs in the country and Barnhill is fourth in strikeouts per game (10.9).
After Gourley earned her fifth save of the season, Florida's pitching staff has now recorded 11 saves season. That is the top mark for a single season in Florida history.
Gourley joined Ocasio with five saves this season, which is tied for the Florida single season record.
Ocasio's astounding 0.65 ERA (107.0 IP) would go down as the second-best ERA for a single season in Florida history if the season ended today. Stacey Nelson currently holds the top two single season ERAs in program history, as she recorded a 0.61 ERA (285.1 IP) in 2009 and 0.75 (352.2 IP) in 2008.
Gourley's astounding 0.71 ERA (108.2 IP) would go down as the third-best ERA for a single season in Florida history if the season ended today. Stacey Nelson currently holds the top two single season ERAs in program history, as she recorded a 0.61 ERA (285.1 IP) in 2009 and 0.75 (352.2 IP) in 2008.
Hitting Streak: Aubree Munro – nine games (season long & one shy of career long) Kirsti Merritt – four games (one shy of season long) Kelsey Stewart – three games
In addition, Kelsey Stewart is now two total bases shy of Lauren Haeger 's program record 494.
is now two total bases shy of 's program record 494. Kirsti Merritt recorded her fourth double of the season and her 10 th extra-base hit in the third inning.
recorded her fourth double of the season and her 10 extra-base hit in the third inning. Aubree Munro 's three home runs this season ties her single-season high that she set back in 2014. Munro now has eight career long balls.
's three home runs this season ties her single-season high that she set back in 2014. Munro now has eight career long balls. Kayli Kvistad is hitting .500 (15 for 30) over UF's last 10 games with six homers, 17 RBI and eight runs scored.
is hitting .500 (15 for 30) over UF's last 10 games with six homers, 17 RBI and eight runs scored. Kvistad and Amanda Lorenz are challenging for the top on-base percentage in school history, as they each have recorded an OBP of .547 and .512 thus far this season. Bailey Castro set the program record a season ago when she reached base at a .536 clip.
are challenging for the top on-base percentage in school history, as they each have recorded an OBP of .547 and .512 thus far this season. Amanda Lorenz , who's currently hitting .386, is on pace to record the highest batting average for a freshman in school history. In addition, she could become the first rookie in program history to have an on-base percentage over .500. Kelsey Stewart holds the batting title as she hit .378 during her freshman season in 2013.
, who's currently hitting .386, is on pace to record the highest batting average for a freshman in school history. In addition, she could become the first rookie in program history to have an on-base percentage over .500. Other freshman ranks that Lorenz is climbing into: Runs Scored – T-7 th (43) Doubles – T-7 th (10) Walks – 6 th (36)
Florida now leads the all-time series with Mississippi State, 32-19; this including a 18-8 advantage at home.
Since Tim Walton became Florida's head coach before the 2006 season, the Gators are now 23-3 against the Bulldogs.
Promotions
Kids Run The Bases All kids 12 & under can run the bases following the game!
Seniorhit her first-career grand slam and sophomoreearned her 16th win in the circle during Saturday's series-clinching win, as No. 1 Florida (44-3/14-3 SEC) downed Mississippi State (24-22/3-14 SEC), 6-3.Munro, who's currently on a nine-game hitting streak, is hitting .542 (13 for 24) during this streak with three home runs, two doubles, one triple, 11 RBI, and seven runs scored.The Gators overcame a two-run third-inning deficit with six runs in the bottom of third to mark Florida's seventh come from behind victory in 2016. In the circle, Ocasio (16-1) allowed two runs on five hits and three walks with a season-high seven strikeouts over five innings.Ocasio allowed two runs in a game for the first time since June 1, 2015.Juniorrelieved the sophomore in the sixth and tossed two scoreless innings with one strikeout to earn her fifth save of the season and 12of her career. The Lakeside, Calif. native ranks third in in Florida history with those 12 saves as Stacey Nelson (18) and Hannah Rogers (14) hold the top two marks in program lore.Mississippi State wasted no time grabbing its first hit and run of the series on Saturday. After Ocasio walked the leadoff hitter in the top of the first, MSU's Mackenzie Toler recorded an RBI double down the left-field line to score the game's first run.In the top of the third inning after a leadoff triple by Kayla Winkfield, Mississippi State extended its lead to 2-0 on an RBI single by Caroline Seitz.Undaunted, Florida answered in the bottom of the third inning.With runners on first and second with two outs, seniorrecorded a two-run double into right-center field to tie the game at two runs apiece.After a hit by pitch and walk loaded the bases, seniorhit Florida's first grand slam of the season to left-center field to give the Gators a 6-2 lead.Mississippi State scored the game's final run in the fifth when MSU's Amanda Ivy recorded a two-out RBI double into right-center field.Head CoachOn Florida's pitching…"I'm not going to take anything away from Aleshia (Ocasio). Mississippi State just found a way to hit her better than most teams have this season, and that's why we changed it up with Delanie (Gourley) at the end of today's game."On Florida's offense…"If you would have asked me who would've have had the biggest hits today, I would have said it would be (Aubree) Munro and (Kirsti) Merritt. Both of them have hit Alexis Silkwood pretty well historically. They both hit it out of the ball park last year a couple of times, so I think there was a right on left match-up there that's favorable to them. Both Aubree and Kirsti had really nice swings in the third inning. I thought we were patient enough at the plate earlier to get into that situation where we weren't chasing pitches."This series concludes tomorrow at 5 p.m. on SEC Network and it can be heard on Florida Sports Talk (WGGG-AM & WMOP-AM/FM). Live stats links for the contest can be found on the Gators' schedule page Sunday:In the Polls: NFCA |
A Colombian resort which is currently promoting a prostitute-filled “sex island experience” has had its steamy promotional video removed from YouTube.
The Good Girls Company’s YouTube account, which was suspended by the site’s moderators as of Friday morning, was advertising its sex-filled getaway with footage of scantily clad women dancing, partying on a yacht, and offering their services to a guest.
The on-screen text also promised “unlimited sex” would be included in the price of admission, and that there would be “60 girls” for the 30 guests.
NEIGHBOR'S 'MORTIFIED' BY RAUNCHY SEX AT NYC'S PUBLIC HOTEL
“Each ticket includes the company of two girls each day for unlimited amounts of sex during the four days of the event,” the company’s website explains of the getaway, which runs from Nov. 24 through Nov. 27 . “At any moment you can switch girls with the other 30 guests.”
According to The Independent, guest will also be invited to partake in an orgy on the first day of the getaway, and on the second day, each will have the opportunity for a 30-minute solo encounter with 16 prostitutes at once. The last two nights are reserved for boat parties.
CUBA BRINGING BACK 'LOVE MOTELS' TO DISCOURAGE PUBLIC SEX
Despite the marketing video being removed from YouTube, tickets to the “experience” are still available online, and cost $5,000 apiece, per the Sex Island website.
The website further promises “surprise sexual activities,” “unlimited condoms,” free alcohol and food, luxury yacht parties, and pick up and drop off services from the airport in Cartagena, all included in the price.
The resort and the prostitutes are said to be “drug friendly,” as well.
Newshub reports that while prostitution is legal in Colombia, facilitating a sexual experience, or pimping, is not. Marijuana and cocaine are also decriminalized in Colombia, so long as users are not carrying more than 20 grams of marijuana or 1 gram of cocaine for personal use.
FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS
This isn’t the first time the Good Girls Company has made headlines for their risqué services. Earlier this year, the brothel entered the global hospitality industry when it debuted all-inclusive packages to its resort in Cali, Colombia, that included horseback riding, golf, and prostitution services. Prices ran between $599 and $1499, depending on which package a guest purchased. |
What is CryptoSummary! all about?
The options were not that great ...
I invested some money into various cryptocurrencies at different times, and it becamefor me to keep track about myand
FAST : checking the current coin value But that didnt tell me anything about the actual value of my investment..
SLOW : logging into my Exchange and check it there But that took unnecessary long and was complicated..
Solution?
Well lets imagine you have a direct URL, saved as a bookmark that knows all your open positions and after opening it immidiatelly tells you about how you stand?
Thats where CryptoSummary! steps in - just create your custom, personallised URL and save it as a bookmark
Example
Under the following button there is a URL that shows and analyses three different positions. Check it out
Example URL - three open positions |
Patrick Semansky / AP The National Security Administration campus in Fort Meade, Md., on June 6, 2013.
One day after The Guardian revealed that the U.S. government has been secretly collecting call log data from millions of Verizon customers, The Washington Post reported Thursday that the government’s monitoring of American’s data goes much, much deeper. The FBI and the National Security Agency are mining the servers of the country’s biggest technology companies for the purpose of hunting spies and terrorists. The program, code-named PRISM, is massive in scope and involves web services that many Americans use every day.
To make all this shadowy surveillance easier to digest, here are the relevant data points about the massive data collection:
(MORE: 7 Things to Know About the Government’s Secret Database of Telephone Data)
9
The number of tech companies involved in the PRISM program. Here’s a list, from an NSA slideshow, including the date when monitoring began:
Microsoft (September 2007)
Yahoo (March 2008)
Google (January 2009)
Facebook (June 2009)
PalTalk (December 2009)
YouTube (September 2010)
Skype (February 2011)
AOL (March 2011)
Apple (October 2012)
So far Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Yahoo have flatly denied that they provide the government backdoor access to their services, according to a variety of news sources. Twitter, which says it has been particularly vigilant in protecting user data from government agencies, is notably absent from the list. Dropbox is next in line to be added to PRISM, according to the Post.
10
The number of different types of data that are collected through PRISM. E-mails, instant messages, videos, photos, stored data (likely items stored on cloud services like Google Drive), voice chats, file transfers, video conferences, log-in times, and social network profile details have all been monitored by the government. Through PRISM NSA officials can even conduct live surveillance of someone doing a Google search, according to the Post.
(MORE: The NSA Snooping Scoop: Behind the Guardian‘s Risky Plans for Global Expansion)
$20 million
The annual cost of PRISM, according to NSA documents obtained by the Post
2007
The year PRISM was established. The Post describes an “exponential growth” in the program since President Obama took office. The government has snooped on other forms of communication in recent years as well. On Thursday, Senator Dianne Feinstein confirmed that the NSA phone log database has been in place for at least seven years.
1,477
The number of times PRISM data was cited in 2012 as part of President Obama’s daily briefing, a high-level intelligence presentation given to the president, the vice president and select cabinet members. According to the Post, at least 1 in 7 intelligence reports from the NSA make use of PRISM data.
51%
Confidence level intelligence officials are supposed to have of a target’s “foreignness” to make use of PRISM data. The massive database is aimed at surveilling spies and foreign terrorists, not Americans. However, large amounts of American user data is also picked up as officials hunt for threats. The NSA describes this as “incidental.”
MORE: Verizon, Telephony Metadata, the National Security Agency and You |
BBC/GETTY Polly Mackenzie said Boris Johnson is now losing his shine
Polly Mackenzie, the former advisor to Nick Clegg, expressed her doubts about Boris Johnson’s popularity. The Foreign Secretary has been at the centre of a series of gaffes and controversies since his appointment to Cabinet. He was accused of undermining Theresa May’s authority by releasing an article in The Telegraph before the Prime Minister’s all-important Florence Speech in which he set out his own vision for Brexit. Newsnight presenter Kirsty Wark asked if Theresa May would like to get rid of Boris Johnson if she could, whether she can contain him more inside than out of Cabinet, and if he is still revered by Party members.
Ms Mackenzie said: “I don’t think he is still revered. I think a lot of the shine has come off Boris as that kind of great figure of fun who might be the witty, standard bearer for conservatism. “Lots of people who admired Boris for that now have shifted to thinking Jacob Rees-Mogg as that Have I Got News For You, friendly Tory.” It comes as the Foreign Secretary made a gaffe which critics claim lengthened the detention for a British woman, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, in Iran.
Mr Johnson has faced calls to quit after telling a committee of MPs last week that Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe was training journalists in Iran at the time of her arrest last year, something her employer and her family insist is incorrect and could be used to increase her sentence. Richard Ratcliffe, Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe's husband said that Mr Johnson should make a statement in Parliament to correct his mistake in an effort to prevent the sentence being lengthened. But in the Commons, Mr Johnson said the UK Government "has no doubt that she was on holiday" in Iran and that was the sole purpose of her visit.
The real Jacob Rees-Mogg Wed, February 8, 2017 Jacob Rees-Mogg is one of the biggest characters in the Tory party. Known for his RP diction, humorous speeches and staunchly pro-Brexit views, the MP for Northeast Somerset is firmly in the public eye Play slideshow AFP/Getty Images 1 of 12 Jacob Rees-Mogg poses as he delivers a petition against the provision of foreign aid at 10 Downing Street in London
In a statement released by the Foreign Office earlier, a spokesman did not offer any correction, saying instead that Mr Johnson's comments may have been "misrepresented" and they provide "no justifiable basis" for additional charges. Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who is serving a five-year sentence in an Iranian jail, was summoned to an unscheduled court hearing last weekend at which Mr Johnson's remarks were cited as proof that she had been engaged in "propaganda against the regime". Reports suggest the new charge could add five years to her prison term, imposed over unspecified allegations of involvement in a supposed coup attempt against the Tehran regime, which she denies.
GETTY Boris Johnson has been under fire for his comments about Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe
The political editor for The Sun, Tom Newton Dunn, said: “I don’t think this is going to get Boris. And I will happily put my hat on the table and eat it when it’s made of marzipan at some later stage. “He screwed up, no doubt about it he made things worse. But it is still the Iranians who are doing this. “The Iranians are hooding three-year-old children when they go meet their mother, who’s also hooded. And I think as time elapses people will realise they are using his idiocy to make matters worse for their own pretty despicable ends.”
BBC Tom Newton Dunn does not think Boris Johnson is finished because of the gaffe |
The rising popularity of online video game streaming—that is, watching other people play video games live—really hit the mainstream once Twitch, the Internet's largest game-streaming platform, was bought out by Amazon for nearly a billion dollars last year. Anyone who thought that asking price was insane may not have realized that Google was about to spend roughly the same amount to acquire Twitch. In short, the value of running a game-streaming platform is rising, and the tech industry's big dogs know it.
As such, we weren't surprised to see a Tuesday report alleging that Google's YouTube arm is moving ahead with a game-streaming backup plan. The Daily Dot, quoting "sources within the streaming industry," reported that a "new-look YouTube Live" will launch in the foreseeable future, and that service will target live gaming and e-sports content in particular.
As proof of its seriousness, YouTube has already hired over 50 streaming-savvy engineers, the report said, and it hinted to "promotions and partnerships" designed to encourage more e-sports viewing on the main YouTube site. The Daily Dot predicted a YouTube Live reveal timed around this June's Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles. When asked about the report, a YouTube representative declined to comment to Ars and instead sent us an animated GIF of a little girl shrugging her shoulders. (No, seriously. This one.)
Assuming this report is accurate, we at Ars figured this was a matter of when, not if. In August, Peter Bright wrote about the infrastructure YouTube already has in place to support hobbyists' live video streaming, not to mention Google's ability to purchase exclusive streaming rights to all kinds of e-sports events. Bright also pointed to Twitch's uneven video-archive support—a fact that has kept a lot of high-earning streamers attached to YouTube, meaning they wouldn't have to walk very far to switch teams. |
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