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Donald Trump’s poll numbers in the Philly suburbs have gone from bad to worse. The latest poll shows his trouble might be even bigger than anticipated, and because respondents in the crucial ring around the city have a big problem with the “Access Hollywood” tape. According to a poll released this morning from Bloomberg, Hillary Clinton now leads Trump in the Philly ‘burbs by 28 points. Her overall lead in the state among likely voters is 48-39. This is the first major poll of Pennsylvania since an audio recording of Trump saying, among other comments, “Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” The difference between the rest of Pennsylvania and Montgomery, Bucks, Delaware and Chester counties is stark. All of Pennsylvania, for instance, is pretty lukewarm on Trump. Forty percent of Bloomberg respondents said they had a favorable rating of him. But people in the Philly suburbs really can’t stand him. Only 28 percent of respondents said they had a favorable rating of him. The lack of love for Trump is obvious when compared to how the ‘burbs voted in 2012. Then, Barack Obama still beat Mitt Romney handily, but his margin was 10 percent. This poll shows Clinton 18 points ahead of that. It also shows Clinton eight points ahead of a late September poll that showed her with a 20-point lead in the Philly suburbs. Why such a huge margin for Clinton? The growth in Clinton’s lead may have a little to do with the “Access Hollywood” tape. In the suburbs, 83 percent of respondents said they were bothered either a little or a lot by Trump’s comments. But the rest of the state was angered, too, with 78 percent of Pennsylvania respondents overall saying they were bothered. Like many other pieces of this election, Clinton’s huge advantage in the suburbs in some ways defies explanation. While she expectedly leads by huge margins among women and college graduates in the suburbs, she’s also tied with Trump among whites and leading him by one point among men in the combined area of Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Chester counties, according to the Bloomberg poll. In the rest of the state, Trump is dominating these categories and catering to them with his message. Bloomberg noted that in the rest of Pennsylvania Trump has an 11-point lead. The problem for Trump — and the positive for Clinton — is the rest of Pennsylvania doesn’t matter if you’re failing in the ‘burbs, which accounted for 22 percent of the state’s voters in 2012. “I don’t know how you win if you lose the suburbs by a certain percentage,” said Terry Madonna, a Franklin and Marshall pollster. “You can’t lose by 20 points.”

While discussions continue on the future of the Prototype Challenge platform, the existing spec Oreca FLM09 cars could receive a series of updates for next year’s IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship season. The possible updates, ranging from a 30-50 horsepower increase, to a new ECU that includes traction control and telemetry, and minor aero changes have been proposed by teams as a cost-effective, stop-gap measure for the aging French prototype until the introduction of an all-new platform for as early as 2017. IMSA met with PC team owners last weekend at Circuit of The Americas to discuss various options for the future. “IMSA continues to evaluate the future of the Prototype Challenge class through 2016 and beyond,” said Simon Hodgson, IMSA managing director, racing operations. “As part of this process, IMSA has ongoing dialog with current PC competitors, as well as ORECA and Katech, the current single-specification suppliers, in addition to considering other options. “IMSA will ensure our loyal PC stakeholders – and any future stakeholders – are kept fully informed as we near a conclusion to this evaluation process.” While PC team owners had previously been split on the category’s future direction, the majority appear to be in agreement of rolling out updates to the existing car for 2016, prior to a complete new platform the following year. “We’ve been working pretty hard with IMSA since Laguna on this project, everything from the future of the class to trying to bring in the LMP3 car,” Starworks Motorsport team owner Peter Baron told Sportscar365. “I think the series has done a good job with trying to be financially reasonable and responsible for what the class needs and not go crazy with it. LMP3 didn’t work out, so now the future is to upgrade the PC car.” IMSA hosted an open test with a Ginetta-Nissan LMP3 car at Watkins Glen in June, which saw a number of drivers walk away less-than-impressed with the low power output and handling of the British-built entry level prototype. While further LMP3 examples have come online since, including the highly regarded Ligier JS P3, current PC teams have expressed interest in developing an all-new platform for 2017 that’s largely based off of a new-spec P2 car. The latest proposal differs from ORECA’s proposed upgrade kit, which would have resulted in an entirely new set of bodywork. “From my perspective, there’s only really two viable paths,” CORE autosport Chief Operating Officer Morgan Brady told Sportscar365. “The one that we’re discussing are the smaller technical updates as a stop-gap measure. “The one I’m interested in and excited about would be basically a P2-derived spec chassis as a replacement for the LMPC car. That would certainly be interesting for me. “As far as LMP3, I don’t think it’s really an option based on outright performance. And if the LMPC car has a short lifecycle left, it doesn’t make sense to do a large, excessive update.” While IMSA has yet to make a final decision on possible updates to the existing FLM09s, Brady feels the proposed changes, estimated to cost between $30,000-50,000 in total, would be a step forward for next year. “When we started looking at options for the PC car, there’s not a whole lot of things wrong with it but there are some key aspects missing,” he said. “I think with a cost-effective update that brings some additional technology and drivability to the car, it would create a lot of interest and potentially increase the car count for next year.” Baron, meanwhile, agrees that interest in the class could go up, particularly as operating costs are expected to rise in other categories. “With the costs of the GTD packages all going up, I think there’s a lot more activity and interest for the PC class,” he said. A final decision on what upgrades will be used in 2016 is expected to be made in the coming weeks, possibly during the Petit Le Mans weekend. “Time is of the essence, and it’s of paramount importance that any decision provides clear direction for stakeholders and reflects IMSA’s continued goal of providing our competitors with a platform that is cost effective, stable and speaks to the Pro-Am nature of the class,” Hodgson added.

Anders Lindsjo Coaching the Snatch w/ Christmas Abbott – TechniqueWOD Subscribe to TechniqueWOD on YouTube A few weeks ago the Barbell Shrugged team had the pleasure of training with Anders Lindsjo, Head Strength Coach for Eleiko Sport in Halmstad, Sweden. Anders is kind, highly knowledgeable, and very well qualified. He was also a Swedish World and Olympic team member for about 10 years, so he’s spent plenty of time underneath the barbell. Usually on TechniqueWOD we break down movements into their essential components and demonstrate how they should be done. But this week we thought we’d offer you a different kind of experience, something you don’t get to see that often. This week Anders leads our friend Christmas Abbott through some intense technique work for the snatch. If you’re an aspiring coach pay very close attention and get your notepad ready. There are about a million knowledge bombs here that you’re going to want to write down. If you want to become an expert coach, start by observing an expert coach. Enjoy, For more What does it take to make the world’s finest barbell? Learn all about Eleiko on Episode 155 of Barbell Shrugged . . Learn more about Eleiko’s excellent coaching courses by visiting their website . . Want more TechniqueWOD? We’ve got you covered.

With the winding down of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Washington is turning its sights elsewhere. Quietly, the Obama administration is building up a vast array of military resources in West Africa, and specifically in Portuguese-speaking Lusophone countries. Reportedly, the Pentagon wants to establish a monitoring station in the Cape Verde islands, while further south in the Gulf of Guinea U.S. ships and personnel are patrolling local waters. Concerned lest it draw too much attention to itself, the Pentagon has avoided constructing large military installations and focused instead on a so-called “lily pad” strategy of smaller bases. In São Tomé and Príncipe, an island chain in the Gulf of Guinea and former Portuguese colony, the Pentagon may install one such “under the radar” base, and U.S. Navy Seabees are already engaged in construction work at the local airport. Just why has the Obama administration invested so much time and effort in this corner of the globe? To be sure, controlling remote “lily pads” may come in handy in the battle against Islamist militants operating farther inland in such countries as Mali and Niger. Washington also wants to counteract drug smuggling emanating from West Africa, a volatile and politically unstable region. Guinea-Bissau, a former Portuguese colony, has in recent years turned into a cocaine hub, and the United Nations has called the country a “narco-state.” Guinea-Bissau is geographically situated at Africa’s most westerly point, and South American smugglers are thought to transport drug shipments from here on to Cape Verde and then to Europe. Reportedly, Brazil has become South America’s largest net exporter of drugs to Africa. However, in recent years African traffickers have begun to produce methamphetamines and have muscled in on their Latin counterparts, wresting an increasingly large portion over the drug smuggling business. The Africans ship cocaine by sea and have assumed international control over cocaine exports as far away as the Brazilian city of São Paulo. Brazilian drug traffickers, meanwhile, are left with the domestic side of the business and are forced to sell coke to locals. Oil Intrigue in the Gulf of Guinea To be sure then, the U.S. is interested in patrolling West African waters in an effort to stem the tide of drug traffic. There may be other, less public reasons for the U.S. military buildup in the region, however. In an effort to ease its dependence on the volatile Middle East, the U.S. is looking elsewhere for its oil and is likely to receive a whopping 25 percent of its imported petroleum from Africa by 2015. Former American Vice Admiral and Deputy Commander of the U.S. Africa Command Robert Moeller has stated that protecting “the free flow of natural resources from Africa to the global market” is highly important, as well as forestalling oil disruption. What is more, the U.S. must now confront a rising China, a nation which is also interested in securing oil deposits in West Africa. In its drive to acquire natural resources, China has been pursuing offshore oil exploration contracts in the politically unstable nation of São Tomé and Príncipe. In 2009, Chinese petroleum corporation Sinopec acquired Swiss company Addax which gave Beijing control over four oil blocs in the São Tomé and Príncipe-Nigeria joint development zone. The Sinopec purchase in the Gulf of Guinea made China the leading player in the São Tomé and Príncipe oil sector. Whether the islands will actually take off as a major oil producer is still unclear, though drilling is under way and commercial production is expected to begin within a few years. SPONSORED If São Tomé and Príncipe take off as a major oil supplier, China will certainly be well positioned to reap maximum reward from the petroleum bonanza. However, Beijing will also have to reckon with a growing U.S. military profile on the islands. Recently, U.S. Navy Seabees have been renovating a boat ramp on São Tomé’s coast guard base and building a guard house on the premises. Meanwhile, the Pentagon and State Department have installed a new surface surveillance system on the islands. São Tomé and Príncipe is the first African nation to install the program and to integrate such technology into its overall maritime safety program. A Growing Role for São Tomé and Príncipe Meanwhile, politicians on the island have broached the idea of deepening security ties, and Washington is reportedly receptive to the notion. U.S. officials see the island chain as a lily pad or forward operating base staffed by several hundred troops. São Tomé and Príncipe could be a promising site, the Americans believe, since the islands are heavily Catholic and have no history of Islamic militancy. Recently, American Coast Guard cutters have been patrolling local waters in an effort to assess threats to oil access. Coming ashore, the crewmen then fix door hinges no less in a blatant public relations maneuver. Needless to say, not everyone is thrilled about the contingency plans. Speaking to the Associated Press, one local legislator was under no illusions about the growing American presence. “Unfortunately,” he remarked, “Americans are interested in São Tomé because of oil, but São Tomé existed before that.” Former Prime Minister Guilherme Posser, meanwhile, says there should be greater transparency when it comes to military discussions. The notion of a base should be submitted to a national referendum, he argues. The China-Macau Connection Faced with a growing U.S. profile in West Africa, the Chinese have busily sought to counteract such influence. According to a sensitive U.S. diplomatic cable, Chinese immigrants advance the Asian Tiger’s business interests in the region by forming joint ventures with African firms. The influx of new Chinese entrepreneurs has been accompanied by “organized crime elements, which are involved in trafficking, smuggling, and other illegal activities.” Moreover, in a specific effort to counteract the U.S. in African Lusophone countries, Beijing has appealed to its own business community in Macau, a peninsula connected to the southern Chinese mainland. A former Portuguese colony, Macau reverted to Chinese rule in 1999. Speaking with American diplomats, local contacts told the U.S. Consulate in Hong Kong that Macau could be useful to China due to the former colony’s ties to the Catholic Church. To be sure, “more than a few” of Macau’s ethnically Portuguese residents had relocated to Portugal after the colony’s handover to Beijing, and only a very small percentage of local residents spoke Portuguese. Nevertheless, diplomats reported that “a comparatively high 7.6 percent of civil servants in the Macau government claim that Portuguese is their primary language [and] this has helped maintain the Macau government's capacity to interface with Lusophone counterparts on behalf of Beijing.” According to diplomatic cables, China hopes to take advantage of such cultural links and believes that Macau should “expand its economic and trade links with overseas Chinese communities” while also providing “a stable platform for China’s trade ties and linkages” with such Lusophone countries as São Tomé and Príncipe, Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau. Beijing also hopes that Macau will extend ties to the tiny nation of Equatorial Guinea, a former Spanish colony located in the Gulf of Guinea and Africa’s only Spanish-speaking nation. Though American diplomats report that overall volume of trade between China and the Lusophone countries remains low, Macau could prove quite useful for Beijing in the coming struggle for West African resources. Enter Brazil Overstretched and facing budgetary constraints, the Pentagon may have difficulties containing China in far-flung corners of the globe. In an effort to overcome such disadvantages, the Obama administration has been turning to Brazil, a nation which has common cultural and historical ties to former Portuguese colonies in West Africa [for a longer discussion about the politics surrounding Brazil’s rising role see my earlier al-Jazeera column here]. Though Brazil has not been able to rival China’s economic presence, the South American newcomer has been deploying its corporations to Africa in the hope of cashing in on Africa’s oil boom and deepwater petroleum exploration. Establishing cordial ties to Brasilia may be a shrewd move for Washington. Under former President Lula, Brazil did its utmost to establish links with São Tomé and Príncipe and recently the South American powerhouse wrote off the impoverished island’s debt. During his tenure, Lula traveled to Cape Verde to attend a summit meeting of the so-called Portuguese speaking countries, otherwise known as Comunidades dos Paises de Lingua Portuguesa [or CPLP]. While in Cape Verde, Lula sought to highlight Brazil's long-standing social and economic ties and assistance programs with the island. In a further effort to extend its cultural influence, Brazil is backing Equatorial Guinea’s desire to join the CPLP. Washington seems to hope that Brazil will act as an assistant policeman in West Africa so the Obama administration can avoid unnecessary political entanglements. There are some signs that Brazil, which seeks to guarantee its investments and the free flow of commerce, might just oblige. According to a recent article in the New York Times, Brazil has been training elite African forces at a remote military base in the Amazon. Meanwhile, the Brazilian Ministry of Defense, which wants to halt the spread of piracy, has pledged to donate aircraft to Cape Verde for maritime patrol duties. Washington’s Wary Ally? In West Africa, the Pentagon needs all the help it can get. The U.S. Coast Guard has been paying visits to Cape Verde and Equatorial Guinea, but oil facilities are considered vulnerable. In politically unstable Equatorial Guinea, some American oil platforms are protected not by the local government’s insignificant Navy but by private unarmed guards. Interviewed by the Associated Press, one U.S. military officer described Equatorial Guinea’s military authorities as “distant and standoffish,” speculating that the estrangement had to do with increasing Chinese influence in the troubled West African nation. Coming to the aid of an ally, Brazil has trained U.S. military personnel at its own jungle warfare center. Meanwhile, U.S. ships perform joint exercises with the Brazilian Navy and both countries patrol the waters stretching from Rio de Janeiro to the Gulf of Guinea. Presumably, Brazil carries out such collaboration because it is concerned with maritime security and drug trafficking, though perhaps this South American newcomer also shares Washington’s concern over rising Chinese influence. Whatever the case, Brazil seems perfectly happy for the time being to act in concert with the Obama administration. The question, however, is whether Brazil will view such collaboration as desirable in the long-term. Already, there have been strains in the U.S.-Brazilian relationship, and there may come a time when this up and coming South American nation may wish to carve out its own sphere of influence in the Lusophone world without any interference from outside powers.

The best network TV show that no one’s watching is ABC’s “American Crime.” How this provocative drama from Oscar winner John Ridley got lost in the programming shuffle — and has yet to be renewed — is one of the more distressing mysteries of the TV season. Ideally, it should have premiered last fall, when audiences were primed for new offerings, instead of being tacked on the schedule in March — after the conclusion of the dopey (and unresolved) Viola Davis acting seminar “How To Get Away With Murder.” Thematically challenging and structurally ambitious, “American Crime” offers something lacking in any other show on the ABC lineup: an actual adult story about an issue that affects us all — the nation’s criminal defense system. While Ridley’s point of view is very distinct, he skilfully dramatizes how one crime can ruin the lives of almost any family — and how the search for justice is, at the very least, frustrating and sometimes meaningless. We meet the three families after the murder of Matt Skokie, a US military veteran who has become a petty drug dealer in Modesto, Calif. His divorced parents, recovering gambling addict father Russ (Timothy Hutton) and racist mother Barb (Felicity Huffman), are bitterly reunited. Matt’s wife, Gwen (Kira Pozehl), survives the shooting but is left stricken with aphasia and cannot help the case; her parents (W. Earl Brown and Penelope Ann Miller) are more concerned with their daughter’s recovery than with Barb’s crusade for justice. A local family, the Gutierrezes, becomes swept up in the arrests when a teenage boy (Johnny Ortiz) is in the wrong place at the wrong time. The series, whose eighth episode airs next Thursday, kicks into high gear when the prime suspect, African-American drug addict Carter Nix (Elvis Nolasco), is released in the face of circumstantial evidence. Barb goes ballistic, flat-out telling the cops they don’t know how to do their jobs. She successfully campaigns to have the case reclassified as a hate crime and states her case on television. Not long after, a thrown brick shatters her car window. There is no witness to the crime and the cops can’t do much without one. Barb buys a gun for her own protection, gets a license and starts practicing on a firing range. The demoralization of Barb is only one of the consequences of the original crime, but each is rendered powerfully. Ridley is greatly aided by a first-rate cast. After wallowing way too long in the silliness of “Desperate Housewives,” Huffman rebounds to striking effect as the intolerant Barb, a woman who will not back down from her crusade. Hutton does his best work in years as the wayward father who will never make up for lost time. Had “American Crime” premiered in September, the stars and supporting players, including Benito Martinez as Alonzo Gutierrez, would all be touted for Emmy consideration.

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. -- White supremacists and neo-Nazis planned two rallies in Tennessee on Saturday after law enforcement officials made lengthy preparations to prevent violence between marchers and counter-protesters. The two "White Lives Matter" marches were scheduled in Shelbyville and Murfreesboro on Saturday. Despite high tensions and insults exchanged with counter-protesters, there was no violence reported at the first rally in Shelbyville, CBS affiliate WTVF reports. The Shelbyville rally began Saturday morning and ran until 1 p.m. local time. Only one person was arrested as of Saturday afternoon. A male was taken into police custody after jumping a barrier in an attempt to advance toward the white supremacist rally, WTVF reports. The second event was canceled by "White Lives Matter" protesters shortly after the first march ended. "Apparently it took so long to get through lines in Shelbyville," WTVF journalist Matthew Torres reports. The heavy law enforcement presence at both locations included police helicopters, K-9 units and officers armed with sniper rifles. Several large trucks were used as roadblocks to prevent vehicles from driving into crowds. Counter-protesters were allowed to enter the public square through two designated streets. Safety checkpoints were set up to prevent protesters from bringing weapons and masks into the area. Two lines for counter protesters in Murfreesboro to get through. One of two checkpoints. MANY items are prohibited. @NC5 pic.twitter.com/8RJAqk8DXE — Matthew Torres (@NC5_MTorres) October 28, 2017 The city of Murfreesboro estimates between 400 and 500 protesters were in attendance at the "White Lives Matter" rally. Footage of the demonstrations on social media showed white nationalist protesters chanting "closed borders, white nation, now we start the deportation." The Nationalist Front marchs in Tennessee, chanting: "Closed borders, white nation, now we start the deportation!" pic.twitter.com/i5NT5pttEJ — Jack Smith IV (@JackSmithIV) October 28, 2017 The rallies were held weeks after violent clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia, at a white nationalist rally in August. One counter-protester was killed when a man drove his car into a group marching through the streets.

North America: Tuesday, February 3 @ 4:00 p.m. PST Tuesday, February 3 @ 4:00 p.m. PST Europe: Wednesday, February 4 @ 4:00 p.m. CET Wednesday, February 4 @ 4:00 p.m. CET Asia: Wednesday, February 4 @ 4:00 p.m. KST North America: Friday, February 13 @ 6:00 p.m. PST Friday, February 13 @ 6:00 p.m. PST Europe: Friday, February 13 @ 6:00 p.m. CET Friday, February 13 @ 6:00 p.m. CET Asia: Friday, February 13 @ 6:00 p.m. KST Greetings, nephalem!Season 1 is about to draw to a close, and we wanted to give players an opportunity to prepare for the start of the new season with some dates and times to plan around.Season 1 will be ending at the following dates and times for each region:Season 2 will be starting at the following dates and times for each region:For time zone assistance, click here We look forward to seeing you in Season 2!*Please note that Era 1 will end at the same time as Season 1. For more information, please click here

Serbian Vladimir Vermezovic has been appointed coach of South African side Orlando Pirates, two years after he resigned from rivals Kaizer Chiefs. The 50-year-old succeeds Roger de Sa, who quit last month because of exhaustion after 18 months at the helm. Cheifs said Vermezovic will replace caretaker coach Eric Tinkler once a work permit has been granted. Vermezovic left Chiefs in 2012 after a three-year spell in which he twice won the League Cup. His last job was coach of Partizan Belgrade, who he left in April 2013 after less than a year in charge. Under former South Africa goalkeeper De Sa, Pirates reached last year's African Champions League final, losing 3-1 over two legs to Egyptian giants Al Ahly. They were also beaten in two domestic cup finals this season, and a fixture backlog means they trail league leaders Chiefs by 17 points halfway through the season.

During weekly protest near town of Modiin Illit, Arab protester sends small child towards IDF soldiers, tells them to shoot his son. For nearly a decade, residents of the villages of Nilin and Bilin, located near the haredi town of Modiin Illit, have held fiery, often violent demonstrations against the construction of the security fence every Friday. The demonstrations, which often include stone-throwings, draw anarchists and opponents of the Jewish state from around the world. While provocations against soldiers and Border Police are common, this Friday, one Arab participant attempted to use his son in the propaganda war against Israel, in a disturbing form of child exploitation. A recording of the incident shows the man carrying his young son towards several Border Police officers, setting him down, and shoving him off in the officers’ direction while waving a PLO flag. The man then seemingly yells at the soldiers to shoot his son, hoping to create a news item and fire up anti-Israel sentiment. The officers, however, do not take the bait. They instead attempt to shake the boy’s hand and speak with him, though the father, apparently intent on exploiting his son and turning him into the latest “martyr,” seems to scream at him to attack the soldiers with stones. The child eventually attempted to comply with his father’s demands, but posed little threat as the soldiers watched him harmlessly toss stones aimlessly.

Gwinnett mom felt “devil like spirit” before stabbing children, husband Share Nine-year-old Diana Romero said she saw her mother stabbing her brothers, sister and father, but before the woman turned on Diana she told her that she was “going to the sky to see Jesus,” according to a state child welfare report obtained Wednesday by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The young girl cried and told her mother that she didn’t want to go to see Jesus, according to the report by the state Division of Family and Children Services. The DFCS documents include a caseworker’s notes on her interview with Diana, who describes in horrid detail watching her mother slay her siblings and father one by one in their Loganville home. The child, for instance, says that her father tried to stop the mother but couldn’t. Isabel Martinez, 33, is accused of stabbing and killing her husband, 33-year-old Martin Romero, and four of her children, 2-year-old Axel, 4-year-old Dillan and 7-year-old Dacota Romero and 10-year-old Isabela Martinez, early on July 6. Isabel Martinez gestures towards news cameras during her first court appearance Friday. (AP Photo/John Bazemore) Photo: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution She was charged with five counts of malice murder, five counts of murder and six charges of aggravated assault. The DFCS report also includes a interview with the mother in the Gwinnett jail, who says she is innocent and that the killings were performed by a “family friend,” but she provides no name. Martinez tell the DFCS caseworker that she tried to stop the friend and he cut her on the wrist. Martinez also described a recent family trip to Savannah where, according to the report, she felt “a devil-like spirit” and where she felt the waves trying to take her and her children away. IN DEPTH: A peaceful neighborhood, a monstrous crime RELATED: Hundreds gather to mourn husband, 4 children slain in Gwinnett The child welfare agency had one prior interaction with the family in September of 2015, when the agency received an accusation saying the father struck one of the daughters with a shoe and a phone charger at night when she wouldn’t sleep. It’s unclear in the report which daughter was being struck. The agency investigated and both parents admitted disciplining the children using a belt on their behinds. But the agency found there were no safety threats and the case was closed soon after. “In Georgia corporal punishment crosses the line when there are welts or marks or bruises,” said Ashley Fielding Cooper, DFCS chief operating officer. “Based on the information we gathered in this case we determined that corporal punishment was used within the bounds of the law and that maltreatment did not occur.” On the deadly night of July 6, Diana Romero, a fourth-grader at Magill Elementary School, was stabbed by her mother, police say. She is the only survivor of the attacks. Family members have said she is steadily improving but has a long road to recovery both physically and mentally. In a small mobile home community in Gwinnett, Isabel Martinez was charged with multiple counts of murder in the stabbing deaths of four of her children and their father. (Erica A. Hernandez/AJC) The caseworker spoke with Diana at 12:15 p.m. July 10. Before she opened up to the caseworker about the attacks, the child talked about having fun on the beach in Savannah. She said her mother and father did not fight while the family was away. She said her mother seemed normal when they all came home. Diana said the police had never come to her home before. As she began to speak about that night, Diana cried, the report said. She said everyone seemed to be asleep when the trouble started. She said she saw her mother take the knife out of the kitchen and start cutting her brothers and sister. A public GoFundMe site set up by family member identified the surviving child as Diana. The site says Diana remains in the hospital and is expected to stay there for another two to three weeks to recover from her injuries. The site is seeking donations to cover the family’s funeral and medical costs. Photo: GoFundMe Romero Family Funeral and Medical Fund. Photo: HANDOUT Her father rushed into the living room and tried to get help, but when he was walking to the door, she cut him too, according to the report. Diana told the caseworker that, watching all this before her, she could not move. She said her mother was not crying or screaming during the stabbings, the report said. She said her mother called the police after she cut herself. Five of the family members were dead when police arrived at the home in the pre-dawn hours. Martinez said that before police arrived she placed all the bodies in the same room so they could be together. In a subsequent court appearance Martinez exhibited bizarre behavior, smiling and giving cameras the thumbs-up sign. On Tuesday, the attorney for the woman said she will not undergo a psychological evaluation at this stage in her case, but could later on.

Advertising network Turn announced today that they will suspend their zombie tracking cookie program. Turn was recently caught using Verizon Wireless' invasive UIDH header to undelete tracking cookies that web visitors had previously deleted. This unacceptable practice means that users who delete cookies to avoid Turn's and others' tracking will continue to be tracked against their will, using information associated with their previous activity through a permanent identity. This is a step toward victory for everyone who spoke out against Turn's zombie cookies, but it is not enough. Turn's cookies just underscore the huge privacy problems with Verizon's header injection. Turn's cookies were the first example found, but Verizon enables any company to use the identifier in similarly abusive ways, some of which may not be visible to users. Verizon needs to follow Turn's lead, and end their UIDH header injection program immediately. Turn plans to "suspend" the zombie cookie program "pending re-evaluation." We again call on Turn to end their zombie cookie program permanently, and to commit not to use headers, browser fingerprinting, or any other method to circumvent individuals' decision to delete cookies. Additionally, Turn says, "By early February, Turn will not 'respawn' cookie IDs associated with the Verizon UIDH." Turn should treat this as the urgent privacy problem that it is, and end the cookie respawning today, not three weeks from now. Companies that engage in cookie syncing with Turn, as EFF described recently, should immediately disable the Turn cookie syncing program and delete existing cookie syncing data until Turn has confirmed that they have stopped respawning cookies and have purged any cookies that they may have respawned.

Gov. Scott activates 100 Florida National Guard members NAPLES – Today, Governor Rick Scott activated 100 members of the Florida Air and Army National Guard to support with planning, logistics and operations in preparation for potential impacts from Hurricane Irma. These 100 members will be stationed across the state, and will advise the Governor on available and needed resources to ensure communities are fully prepared for the storm. In addition, at the direction of Governor Scott, all 7,000 National Guard members will be reporting for duty Friday morning. Yesterday, Governor Scott issued Executive Order 17-235, which declared a state of emergency in all 67 counties within the State of Florida in response to Hurricane Irma and allowed for the immediate activation of National Guard members as preparedness actions continue. Governor Scott said, “Today I am activating 100 members of the Florida Air and Army National Guard to immediately begin assisting with ongoing Hurricane Irma preparation. Per my direction, they will be stationed throughout the state. I have also directed all 7,000 guard members to report for duty this Friday, however, if resources are needed before then, I stand ready to activate as many guard members needed to support our aggressive preparedness actions. With Hurricane Irma now a category 5 storm, we must do all we can to prepare our families and communities for any potential impact from this major weather event. We do not know the exact path of this storm, but weather can change in an instant and while we hope for the best, we must prepare for the worst.”

Researchers ID Ways to Exploit ‘Cloud Browsers’ for Large-Scale, Anonymous Computing Researchers from North Carolina State University and the University of Oregon have found a way to exploit cloud-based Web browsers, using them to perform large-scale computing tasks anonymously. The finding has potential ramifications for the security of “cloud browser” services. At issue are cloud browsers, which create a Web interface in the cloud so that computing is done there rather than on a user’s machine. This is particularly useful for mobile devices, such as smartphones, which have limited computing power.The cloud-computing paradigm pools the computational power and storage of multiple computers, allowing shared resources for multiple users. “Think of a cloud browser as being just like the browser on your desktop computer, but working entirely in the cloud and providing only the resulting image to your screen,” says Dr. William Enck, an assistant professor of computer science at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the research. Because these cloud browsers are designed to perform complex functions, the researchers wanted to see if they could be used to perform a series of large-scale computations that had nothing to do with browsing. Specifically, the researchers wanted to determine if they could perform those functions using the “MapReduce” technique developed by Google, which facilitates coordinated computation involving parallel efforts by multiple machines. The research team knew that coordinating any new series of computations would entail passing large packets of data between different nodes, or cloud browsers. To address this challenge, researchers stored data packets on bit.ly and other URL-shortening sites, and then passed the resulting “links” between various nodes. Using this technique, the researchers were able to perform standard computation functions using data packets that were 1, 10 and 100 megabytes in size. “It could have been much larger,” Enck says, “but we did not want to be an undue burden on any of the free services we were using.” “We’ve shown that this can be done,” Enck adds. “And one of the broader ramifications of this is that it could be done anonymously. For instance, a third party could easily abuse these systems, taking the free computational power and using it to crack passwords.” However, Enck says cloud browsers can protect themselves to some extent by requiring users to create accounts – and then putting limits on how those accounts are used. This would make it easier to detect potential problems. The paper, “Abusing Cloud-Based Browsers for Fun and Profit,” will be presented Dec. 6 at the 2012 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference in Orlando, Fla. The paper was co-authored by Vasant Tendulkar and Ashwin Shashidharan, graduate students at NC State, and Joe Pletcher, Ryan Snyder and Dr. Kevin Butler, of the University of Oregon. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Army Research Office. -shipman- Note to Editors: The study abstract follows. “Abusing Cloud-Based Browsers for Fun and Profit” Authors: Vasant Tendulkar, Ashwin Shashidharan and William Enck, North Carolina State University; Joe Pletcher, Ryan Snyder and Kevin Butler, University of Oregon Presented: Dec. 6, 2012, at ACSAC in Orlando, Fla. Abstract: Cloud services have become a cheap and popular means of computing. They allow users to synchronize data between devices and relieve low-powered devices from heavy computations. In response to the surge of smartphones and mobile devices, several cloud-based Web browsers have become commercially available. These “cloud browsers” assemble and render Web pages within the cloud, executing JavaScript code for the mobile client. This paper explores how the computational abilities of cloud browsers may be exploited through a Browser MapReduce (BMR) architecture for executing large, parallel tasks. We explore the computation and memory limits of four cloud browsers, and demonstrate the viability of BMR by implementing a client based on a reverse engineering of the Puffin cloud browser. We implement and test three canonical MapReduce applications (word count, distributed grep, and distributed sort). While we perform experiments on relatively small amounts of data (100 MB) for ethical considerations, our results strongly suggest that current cloud browsers are a viable source of arbitrary free computing at large scale.

Last week, we took a stab at naming one All-Star squad that spanned both leagues, and judging by the actual rosters that were announced Sunday we guessed pretty well. But what about, for lack of a better term, the Non-Stars? The players who've put up the most disappointing first halves in baseball, relative to expectations? What would that team look like? FAGAN: The best players not on an All-Star roster — yet Let's go position by position and find the players who fit the bill: C: Jonathan Lucroy, Rangers Numbers: .263/.311/.375, 4 HR, 20 RBI, 0.1 WAR Why he's here: Lucroy's numbers are way down from his career averages across the board, and he's in danger of posting his lowest OPS since his rookie season in 2010. One of the better offensive catchers in baseball up until this year, Lucroy was supposed to be a key cog in a powerful Rangers lineup but has underachieved just like the entire team. There have been rumblings that the team is listening to offers for him, which shows just how far out of favor he's fallen. 1B: Miguel Cabrera, Tigers Numbers: .264/.358/.456, 11 HR, 39 RBI, 0.5 WAR Why he's here: First base was a tough position to fill, because there really isn't one guy who's having the kind of year that would land him on this list. So it's the future Hall of Famer Cabrera almost by default, as he's sporting what would be the lowest slugging percentage of his career and his lowest OPS since 2003. It's worth noting that Cabrera went crazy at the plate in the second half last year, so his stay on this list may be short-lived. 2B: Rougned Odor, Rangers Numbers: .211/.249/.387, 14 HR, 35 RBI, -0.3 WAR Why he's here: The league seems to have adjusted to Odor after his breakout 2016 season, and he's yet to adjust back. Like his teammate Lucroy, Odor has underachieved considerably with an OPS that right now is 162 points lower than his total from last year. He's never been an on-base demon, but this year he's striking out at an alarming rate and managed just one walk the entire month of June. He's dug himself quite a hole in the first half, and he's yet to find the answers to get himself out. SS: Trevor Story, Rockies Numbers: .224/.305/.409, 11 HR, 31 RBI, 0.6 WAR Why he's here: Expectations were sky-high for Story after his impressive debut last year, when he looked to be neck-and-neck with Corey Seager in the NL ROY race before an injury ended his season early. He hasn't quite lived up to those expectations thus far, posting mostly pedestrian numbers while playing in one of the best hitter's parks in the game. He hasn't been bad, per se — he's dealt with injuries this year, too — but considering what he showed last year, it's hard not to be disappointed with the numbers he's put up in the first half. The Rockies' Trevor Story has struggled to match the performance he showed early in his rookie season. (Getty Images) 3B: Manny Machado, Orioles Numbers: .217/.289/.420, 15 HR, 38 RBI, 1.0 WAR Why he's here: The past two seasons made it look like Machado would be a perennial MVP candidate, which is why his start to the year has been so puzzling. He was bothered by a wrist injury early in June, and it's possible that it's still affecting him, but that doesn't explain away his struggles in April and May. Whatever the reason, Machado's first half might be the most disappointing in either league. HOME RUN DERBY: Participants, date, time, how to watch OF: Carlos Gonzales, Rockies Numbers: .221/.300/.348, 6 HR, 20 RBI, -0.9 WAR Why he's here: CarGo went through a horrendous slump in June, which at one point saw him go hitless in 27 straight at-bats. His numbers never recovered and he's on track to post his worst career numbers over a full season just before hitting free agency this winter. Talk about awful timing. OF: Gregory Polanco, Pirates Numbers: .246/.310/.379, 6 HR, 22 RBI, -0.1 WAR Why he's here: He was expected to be a key cog in the Pirates' lineup after posting career-best numbers last year; however, the struggles that plagued him in the second half of '16 have carried over into this year. Polanco's numbers are rather pedestrian, and while he's had flashes this year (a .900 OPS in May, for instance) he hasn't been able to keep it up (a .520 OPS in June). OF: Kyle Schwarber, Cubs Numbers: .171/.295/.378, 12 HR, 28 RBI, -0.7 WAR Why he's here: No one will forget his incredible comeback from a devastating injury last season to play in the World Series and help push the Cubs over the finish line. But Schwarber hasn't been able to carry over that momentum into this season, to the point where his struggles became so pronounced that the Cubs had no choice but to send him to the minors to get straightened out. This definitely wasn't the season anyone had in mind for Schwarber after watching him hit .412 in the World Series last fall. DH: Albert Pujols, Angels Numbers: .234/.278/.372, 11 HR, 52 RBI, -1.2 WAR Why he's here: Father Time is undefeated, as the old saying goes, and he seems to finally be catching up to Pujols. While he's still a smart, dangerous hitter at times, Pujols has seen his overall numbers plummet this year to career lows virtually across the board. And he still has four years left on his contract. Yeesh. Albert Pujols reacts after striking out. (Getty Images) SP: Rick Porcello, Red Sox Numbers: 5.06 ERA, 1.51 WHIP, .312 BAA, -0.3 WAR Why he's here: Like Dallas Keuchel in 2016, Porcello has been a huge disappointment the year after winning the AL Cy Young Award. Even if he wasn't expected to match last year's achievements, few could have seen such a major drop in production for Porcello, who hasn't been able to fool anyone this season. His teammate David Price could've taken this spot, too. RP: Mark Melancon, Giants Numbers: 4.35 ERA, 1.35 WHIP, .298 BAA, 4 blown saves, 0.1 WAR Why he's here: The Giants gave him a monster contract last winter to fix their bullpen woes. It hasn't quite worked out that way, as Melancon has as many blown saves this season as he did in all of 2016 and has found his way to the DL twice. It's not much better than what the Giants got from their bullpen last year, only it's costing them a lot more money this time. In a year when almost nothing has gone right for the Giants, Melancon's performance still manages to stand out.

May 26, 2015 / Brooklyn news / Williamsburg / Music / Brooklyn Is Awesome Juan Morel Campos students play hallway rock shows Appetite for instruction! Williamsburg school teaches Rock 101 The Brooklyn Paper Share on Twitter Tweet Share on Facebook Share The halls are alive with the sound of music at Williamsburg’s Juan Morel Campos Secondary School, where rock ’n’ roll high schoolers play concerts in the corridor every Friday afternoon. The bands set up right by the school’s main door and play rock and pop tunes as kids and teachers are heading home for the day — and now students actually want to stay behind after class, says the teacher-turned-band-booker behind the gigs. “Every week, everyone will crowd around the musicians,” said Stacey Wong, who teaches music to kids from sixth to 12th grade at the school on Heyward Street, between Marcy and Harrison avenues. “They love it.” The acts cut their teeth in Wong’s music classes, where she forms the mini Hendrixes and junior Joan Jetts into rock supergroups — each including several guitarists, bass players, keyboardists, and vocalists — and schools them in songs such as “Rolling in the Deep” by Adele, “Take Me To Church” by Hozier, and “Thinking Out Loud” by Ed Sheeran. Kids learn music more quickly by playing Bruno Mars than Beethoven, she said. “I want them to be able to enjoy playing music and then they can throw themselves into the theory,” said Wong. “If they are playing music they do not like, they will not stick with it. I get them playing Adele right away and they love it.” Wong uses a curriculum called Amp Up NYC, which helps educators to get their students hooked on music class by teaching them the modern songs they already listen to. Little Kids Rock — an organization that offers free instruments and teacher training to low-income schools with shoddy or no music classes — created the program in partnership with Massachuse­tts’s Berklee College of Music and the New York City Department of Education, and they collectively intend to roll the scheme out to 600 schools city-wide by 2017. At Juan Morel Campos, the school of rock has been such a success that some of the students have split off into their own bands and solo projects outside of the class. And the kids say they intend to keep on rocking long after school’s out forever. “Doing this makes it seem easier for me to branch out when I leave here and continue with music,” said 10th grader Shanice Rodriguez, who has formed a duo with 11th-grade guitarist Elvin Jaquez. “I really want to keep doing this.” Jaquez said he learned jazz drumming in middle school, but didn’t realize he was really born to shred until he was exposed to the axe in class. “My family never had that kind of musical direction, but now that I am doing this, it is something that really interests me,” he said. Amp Up NYC provides the schools with some equipment, but Wong says she has kept up with student demand by asking for donations to purchase extra guitars, amps, strings, picks, and tuners on fundraising websites. Sadly for music scenesters, the Friday shows are the only gig in Williamsburg you can’t get on the door-list for — they are open to Juan Morel Campos students, parents, and staff only. Updated 10:17 pm, July 9, 2018 ©2015

Microsoft is again involved in talks over United States’ PRISM spying program, this time in Australia where the local security boss claims that government computers could be monitored using a Windows backdoor. This isn’t the first time when Microsoft is accused of implemented a backdoor in its operating system to provide unrestricted access to US intelligence agencies, even though Redmond has strongly denied such a scenario, claiming that it only provides user data based on federal request. Eija Seittenranta, head of the network security department in the Australian government, said in a statement that the country hasn’t tried anything in particular to secure the computers and block any surveillance system that might be employed by the United States under the PRISM program. “It probably should be noted that our network is not a protected network, it is unclassified,” Seittenranta stated according to The Guardian. While she hasn’t said it very clear whether a Windows backdoor would provide access to secret data, Seittenranta mentioned that “we don’t have the technical skills to create patches,” so in case such a backdoor exists, it’s still unblocked at this point. On the other hand, Seittenranta stated that while leaked documents confirm that the PRISM program was indeed launched by the United States, some of the information that reached the web was only speculation, suggesting that Australian’s parliamentary IT systems might not be at risk. “We are aware there are rumoured to be things like that around,” she said. Some leaked documents belonging to the German government that got leaked during the summer indicated that local authorities have been advised to avoid using Windows 8 due to a potential backdoor hidden in the operating system. Microsoft, on the other hand, has quickly denied all accusations, saying that Windows 8 is an important step forward in terms of security and all privacy concerns regarding the operating system are “addressable.” “Since most users accept defaults, requiring the user to enable the TPM will lead to IT users being less secure by default and increase the risk that their privacy will be violated. We believe that government policies promoting this result are ill-advised,” the company stated.

CORAL GABLES, Fla. – The University of Miami men's basketball team will play nine nationally-televised games and host six conference foes that played in last season's NCAA Tournament, the Atlantic Coast Conference announced with its 2017-18 league schedule release Thursday. The Hurricanes will make two appearances on ESPN's "Big Monday," hosting Duke and traveling to Notre Dame, and will make six other appearances on ESPN or ESPN2, including a road tilt at defending national champion North Carolina. The Hurricanes will also be showcased nationally on CBS when they host Syracuse. "Year in and year out, the ACC is the best basketball conference in the country from top to bottom and this year will be no exception," Hurricanes head coach Jim Larrañaga said. "This schedule will provide a tough test every night, and we will need to play our best because nearly every game we will be squaring off against nationally-ranked opponents." The ACC sent a league-record nine teams to the NCAA Tournament last season, including Miami, which has made the tournament in three of the last five years. Miami posted a 7-2 home record in conference games last season. "Our fans created an electric atmosphere at Watsco Center last year and we are looking forward to having that same type of home court advantage this year," Larrañaga said. Miami will host the Blue Devils on Monday, Jan. 15, at 7 p.m. The Hurricanes defeated Duke at Watsco Center on Senior Day last season, 55-50, behind 25 points from then-freshman guard Bruce Brown. The Hurricanes will venture to South Bend for their second "Big Monday" appearance on Feb. 19. Miami hosts four conference games – Louisville, Wake Forest, Virginia and Virginia Tech – on either ESPN or ESPN2. The Hurricanes travel to Chapel Hill to face the Tar Heels on Tuesday, Feb. 27 on ESPN. Miami defeated North Carolina, 77-62, last season, UNC's largest margin of defeat in 2016-17. The Hurricanes will also host Syracuse on Feb. 17, in a nationally televised CBS encounter. The Orange defeated Miami, 70-55, at the Carrier Dome last season before the Hurricanes exacted revenge in the quarterfinals of the ACC Tournament with a 62-57 victory. The Hurricanes open their conference slate with two games on the road – at Pittsburgh (Dec. 30) and Georgia Tech (Jan. 3) -- before returning home to Watsco Center to host rival Florida State on Sunday night, Jan. 7, 2018, on ESPNU at 6 p.m. Miami then travels to Clemson on January 13, for another ESPNU telecast. After hosting Duke, the Hurricanes travel to Raleigh, N.C., for a second consecutive season to face NC State for a regional telecast on Jan. 21. Miami swept the Wolfpack last season, opening ACC play with an 81-63 win in Coral Gables and then rallying for 84-79 victory at PNC Arena. The Hurricanes return home to battle Louisville on Jan. 24, at 7:30 p.m. on ESPN2. Miami then faces the Seminoles a second time for a regional telecast in Tallahassee, Fla., on Jan. 27. Pittsburgh visits Watsco Center on the final day of January before the Hurricanes head to Blacksburg, Va., on Feb. 3, to face the Hokies. That 2 p.m. tipoff will be televised on either ESPN or ESPN2. The Hurricanes welcome Wake Forest to Coral Gables for an ESPN2 telecast on Feb. 7, followed by a road trip to Boston College on Feb. 10. The Hurricanes then return home to face Virginia on Feb. 13 for a 9 p.m. tip on ESPN2 before hosting the Orange four days later. Miami has a quick turnaround for its "Big Monday" encounter in South Bend on Feb. 19. The Hurricanes host Boston College on Feb. 24, for a regional telecast prior to their trip to Chapel Hill for a 9 p.m. tip on Feb. 27. Miami wraps up ACC play at Watsco Center on Mar. 3, against Virginia Tech at noon. That game will be telecast on either ESPN or ESPN2. The ACC Tournament will be held at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., for the second consecutive year. The 2018 tournament starts on Tuesday, Mar. 6, culminating with the championship game on Saturday, Mar. 10. In addition to their nine ACC games, the Hurricanes host five non-conference games at Watsco Center, starting with Gardner-Webb on Friday, Nov. 10. After back-to-back season ticket sellouts in 2015-16 and 2016-17, the demand for Hurricanes basketball season tickets is at an all-time high. "We have sold out our season tickets for the last two season and we anticipate that this will be the third year in a row that you will not be able to buy a ticket once our season begins in November," Larrañaga said. "We encourage all of our season ticket holders to be sure they sign up now -- don't wait, because there won't be any available soon." A limited amount of season tickets are still available to purchase beginning at only $150. Call 1-800-GO-CANES. 2017-18 Miami Hurricanes Basketball Schedule Friday, Nov. 10, 2017 Gardner-Webb TBA Sunday, Nov. 12, 2017 Navy TBA Thursday, Nov. 16, 2017 Florida A&M TBA Wednesday, Nov. 22, 2017 LaSalle* TBA Saturday, Nov. 25, 2017 North Florida TBA Wednesday, Nov. 29, 2017 @ Minnesota^ 9 p.m. ESPN2 Saturday, Dec. 2, 2017 Princeton$ 8 p.m. ESPNU Tuesday, Dec. 5, 2017 Boston University TBA Saturday, Dec. 16, 2017 @ George Washington TBA Saturday, Dec. 23, 2017 @ Hawai'i! 1 a.m. ESPNU Saturday, Dec. 23, 2017 Diamond Head Classic TBA Monday, Dec. 25, 2017 Diamond Head Classic TBA Saturday, Dec. 30, 2017 @ Pittsburgh 4 p.m. ACCN Wednesday, Jan. 3, 2018 @ Georgia Tech 9 p.m. RSN Sunday, Jan. 7, 2018 Florida State 6 p.m. ESPNU Saturday, Jan. 13, 2018 @ Clemson 3 p.m. ESPNU Monday, Jan. 15, 2018 Duke 7 p.m. ESPN Sunday, Jan. 21, 2018 @ NC State 2 p.m. ACCN Wednesday, Jan. 24, 2018 Louisville 7:30 p.m. ESPN2 Saturday, Jan. 27, 2018 @ Florida State 4 p.m. ACCN Wednesday, Jan. 31, 2018 Pittsburgh 7 p.m. RSN Saturday, Feb. 3, 2018 @ Virginia Tech 2 p.m. ESPN/ESPN2 Wednesday, Feb. 7, 2018 Wake Forest 7 p.m. ESPN2 Saturday, Feb. 10, 2018 @ Boston College 2 p.m. RSN Tuesday, Feb. 13, 2018 Virginia 9 p.m. ESPN2 Saturday, Feb. 17, 2018 Syracuse 12 p.m. CBS Monday, Feb. 19, 2018 @ Notre Dame 7 p.m. ESPN Saturday, Feb. 24, 2018 Boston College 2 p.m. RSN Tuesday, Feb. 27, 2018 @ North Carolina 9 p.m. ESPN Saturday, Mar. 3, 2018 Virginia Tech 12 p.m. ESPN/ESPN2 65th Annual ACC Tournament (Barclays Center, Brooklyn, N.Y.) Tuesday, March 6 (First Round) Game #1 ESPN2/ACCN 12 p.m. Game #2 ESPN2/ACCN 2 p.m. Game #3 ESPNU/ACCN 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 7 (Second Round) Game #4 ESPN/ACCN 12 p.m. Game #5 ESPN/ACCN 2 p.m. Game #6 ESPN2/ACCN 7 p.m. Game #7 ESPN2/ACCN 9 p.m. Thursday, March 8 (Quarterfinals) Game #8 ESPN/ACCN 12 p.m. Game #9 ESPN/ACCN 2 p.m. Game #10 ESPN/ACCN 7 p.m. Game #11 ESPN/ACCN 9 p.m. Friday, March 9 (Semifinals) Game #12 ESPN or ESPN2/ACCN 7 p.m. Game #13 ESPN or ESPN2/ACCN 9 p.m. Saturday, March 10 (Finals) Game #14 ESPN/ACCN 8:30 p.m. *Reading, PA ^ACC-Big Ten Challenge $Hoophall Miami Invitational (American Airlines Arena) !Diamond Head Classic (Honolulu, HI) ACC Regional Sports Networks Lineup FOX Sports South FOX Sports Southeast FOX Sports Florida FOX Sports Sun FOX Sports Midwest FOX Sports Indiana NESN YES Network CSN Mid Atlantic AT&T Sportsnet Pittsburgh

Lin-Manuel Miranda with cast during his final performance curtain call of ‘Hamilton’ on Broadway at Richard Rodgers Theatre on July 9, 2016, in New York City. A Meowth on 46th and 6th almost made me miss a historic night on Broadway, the last performance of Hamilton for star/creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, as well as Tony winner Leslie Odom Jr. (Aaron Burr), Phillipa Soo (Eliza Hamilton), and ensemble member Ariana DeBose. I was blocks away from the Richard Rogers Theatre, with my head down, looking at my Pokémon Go screen, and out of nowhere, one of my favorite Pokémon shows up. I needed to get to the theater, because I knew the scene outside would be a biblical shit-show, but this was Meowth. So I turned and walked the opposite direction from the theater, in an attempt to catch it. It took seven Pokéballs, one slight stumble off the curb, and dirty looks from a family that thought I was creepily taking pictures of them when in reality they were just standing right behind this beautiful Pokémon, but I got it. Celebrating with no one but myself, I remembered that Hamilton was happening in 20 minutes. And upon arriving on the block of the show, I realized that my seven-minute detour might have been a mistake. Because it was packed. Photo: Rembert Browne The scene outside felt like a red-carpet premiere. “Look who I’m with,” one man said looking into his phone, as a famous woman walked by, briefly crossing his screen. After she left, he stopped shooting video and asked his friend who she was. The friend didn’t know. It was Mariska Hargitay, which made me want to take his phone and stomp it out for not knowing the Queen. Before I went in, I saw Jane Fonda, Spike and Tonya Lewis Lee, Rosie O’Donnell, and many people who looked like Adam Levine but weren’t. By the time I made it to my seat, I’d already heard four people say versions of “We’re actually in the room where it’s happening,” a reference to the song “The Room Where It Happens,” in which Aaron Burr describes the envy of not being part of the power circle, in the room where the big decisions are made. Under any other conditions, moments like this would bring out a slight bit of eye-roll, but not tonight. The excitement was understood and it was clear no one was attempting to play it cool, which was oddly refreshing for New York City. Some people were pajama rich, dressed down like they were going to the movies, others glammed out as though they’d just come from the Met Gala. The spectacle was real, and the lights were still on, with six or seven minutes until the show was set to begin. Apparently Jennifer Lopez was there, which certainly gave her the belt for “most famous person here.” But it made sense — she and Lin-Manuel recently made a song together, “Love Makes the World Go Around,” a tribute to those affected by Orlando’s Pulse Nightclub shooting. What a weird thing Hamilton became, that it made sense for J.Lo to be in attendance. Unreal. Sitting there, thinking about J.Lo in the building, and then J.Lo in The Wedding Planner, and then J.Lo and Jane Fonda in Monster-in-Law, and then wondering what Michael Vartan has been up to, I must have missed a crew of men in suits with earpieces enter my area. Snapping out of my analog Wikipedia dive, I cased the room and saw four of these men, two by a doorway, two walking up a staircase. Moments later, Secretary of State John Kerry. One person started clapping, and then more people started clapping, and then a few people stood up, and then the entire room was giving John Kerry a standing ovation. Sorry, Ms. Lopez, but it looks like there’s a new belt-holder in town. And I don’t know why, but I felt great for Kerry in this moment. He’s not really hurting in any way, but it was nice to see him get some public respect. It’s easy to forget about Yung Swift Boat, so this was great. I wondered if he’d seen the show before. I wondered if there were parts of this that might get a bit real for him. I mean, he always kind of wanted to be in the room where — Okay, I now understood how painfully easy it was to make that annoying joke. It was embarrassing, but who cares. A few minutes later, after being thrilled for Secretary of State Kerry, I felt terrible for him, as things turned into a meet-and-greet, clogging up a staircase. People were talking to him and asking for pictures, and if you weren’t in the actual line, you were standing in front of him, getting that massive head and granite hair of his in your rudely unauthorized selfie. But then I felt good again, because he bent over to talk to a little kid in a backwards Hamilton hat. This was all so weird, and again, the show hadn’t even begun. And then things got really good. The Kerry meet-and-greet picked up steam again, with the long-armed Kerry now taking the selfies himself, again crowding the staircase. Which made it comically difficult for Aaron Paul to get where he needed to go. Photo: Rembert Browne When this happens, you have to break your “no photos of celebrities” rule. Is Aaron trying to talk to Secretary of State John Kerry? Did he sign up for this meet-and-greet? Is John Kerry a Breaking Bad fan, and if so, will he say something to Aaron? Is Aaron just trying to test his July 2016 swag by walking by Kerry, catching his eye, and seeing what happens? Unfortunately, we’ll never know, because someone thought this was the moment to dim the lights and start the musical. Moments later, “How does a bastard, orphan …” *** Intermission was wild, mainly because I walked around and finally spotted Jennifer Lopez. It wasn’t hard to figure out where she was, there were throngs of people standing around, near her as well as up on the balcony, just staring at her. The room was buzzing, after being extremely fired up through the whole first act. Miranda received a standing ovation for the first number, “Alexander Hamilton,” and the cheers sounded more like what you’d hear at a sporting event than a Broadway show. It was exciting, and almost everyone behaved perfectly, except for that one lady. That lady. The thing about Hamilton is that it’s a triumph, easily one of the great musicals, an extremely transformative experience. The other thing about Hamilton is that some people like it too much, and these people are terrifying and must be destroyed, because they might challenge you to a duel and shoot you between the ribs if you interrupt them while they’re singing “Wait for It.” I had one of these people in my section, and not only did she sing along, she repeatedly raised her arms and screamed, and would drum on things that weren’t drums, and any time there was a progressive line about immigrants, slavery, or equal rights, she would either clap, or stand up and then clap. During “The Schuyler Sisters” — the fifth number — her presence had already been felt. And throughout that song, in her honor, I mentally changed the word “work” to “woke” in the lyrics. Because she was so woke. The woke god. But it made sense, there were groups in this country that helped build it, groups that were treated unfairly and not properly credited. And she wanted you to know that she knew that. God bless her. Anyway, after about 20 minutes, the lights dimmed again. *** Hamilton will go on in a powerful, important way — both in New York and on tour — but this was certainly the end of an era. While the crowd was in a frenzy, what happened on stage was like any other night. There was one moment when Rory O’Malley (King George) blew Odom (Burr) a kiss, making Odom laugh, which delighted the crowd. And both Odom and Christopher Jackson (George Washington) received standing ovations for “The Room Where It Happens” and “One Last Time,” respectively. But when it wrapped up, there wasn’t a ten-minute Lin-Manuel speech, no one rolled out a cake, Barack and Hillary didn’t show up — there was no self-initiated hoopla. Photo: Rembert Browne After bows from the full cast, the four actors who were leaving stepped forward, and then Jackson pushed Miranda to the front of the stage for more solo applause from the crowd, which was very much deserved. But right when it seemed to be over, suddenly the orchestra started playing the theme song from The West Wing, a show Miranda has cited as an inspiration. I expected many things on this night, but getting slightly choked up at watching Lin-Manuel Miranda laugh at the surprise, while thinking about my heroes Josh Lyman and Sam Seaborn, wasn’t one of them. But this wasn’t a normal show, and this wasn’t a normal night, so it was a fitting way for it to end, triumphantly abnormal. What a run.

Settlement in ignition defect doesn't include criminal charges against individuals. GM recall survivors protest on Capitol Hill in 2014. (Photo: J. Scott Applewhite, AP) The $900 million General Motors agreed on Thursday to pay the government for concealing a deadly ignition switch from regulators is a lot of money — nearly one-third of GM's earnings last year — though hardly an existential threat to the company. Indeed, GM stock was up 11 cents to $31.31 a share on the news. But the truly disturbing part of the announcement was that not a single individual has been criminally charged for concealing the defect: a faulty ignition switch that allowed cars to suddenly stall or prevented air bags from deploying. Defective vehicles remained on the road even as cars crashed, lawyers secretly settled complaints with victims' families, and more than 120 people were killed. Real people, not some faceless “company,” made the fateful decisions not to fix a switch that failed to perform properly even before it went into production in 2002; not to do more once complaints of stalls and shutoffs came in; not to inform regulators of the defect when occupants began dying in crashes; and not to stop selling cars and misleading the public about their safety. No one — engineers, lawyers or executives — has been personally called to account before the law. Laura Christian, whose 16-year-old daughter was one of GM's earliest victims, in 2005, described why the system needs to change. “We buried our loved ones because GM buried a deadly defect. And yet today, all GM has to do is write another check to escape.” Thursday's disappointing conclusion after months of federal investigation is simply par for the course. In the past decade, corporations have gotten away with all manner of fraud, self-dealing, negligent manufacturing and market manipulation. The subprime mortgage industry nearly brought down the U.S. economy and ruined untold number of lives. But to the extent there was punishment at all after these acts, it usually involved a company writing a check, as if these firms ran on automatic pilot. Individuals are deterred from wrongdoing by the prospect of going to jail, much more so than by the prospect of seeing the corporate treasurer pay money to the government. In GM's case, federal prosecutors in New York can point to two criminal charges against General Motors, the company, for concealing a deadly defect and for wire fraud. But even here, GM got off easy. The charges are deferred and will be dismissed in three years if GM fixes its recall process under an appointed federal monitor. Prosecutors also left the door open to charging individuals in the future, but nobody should hold their breath. It's hard to see what more investigating could turn up at this stage. If criminal laws are inadequate to handle the types of fraud or negligence committed by people running companies, it’s time to carefully re-examine those laws. For auto safety, there’s an easy fix. Under laws that cover many consumer products, individuals at companies can be charged criminally when they willfully fail to report unsafe products to regulators. Auto safety laws make it far more difficult to prosecute company executives for similar acts. Three Democratic senators — Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Bill Nelson of Florida — have been pushing a measure that would plug this hole, making it easier to hold auto executives responsible when safety laws are willfully flouted. Despite the uproar over hidden defects in Toyota vehicles a few years ago and the recent GM fiasco, the measure has failed to gain traction in Congress. The Senate, which will consider an auto safety measure this fall, should embrace it. The logic is pretty simple. If an individual who kills someone, even unintentionally, through negligent acts with a car can be charged with manslaughter, individuals at a company that kills scores of people with a car they know is unsafe ought to face criminal prosecution, too. USA TODAY's editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff. Most editorials are coupled with an opposing view — a unique USA TODAY feature. To read more editorials, go to the Opinion front page or sign up for the daily Opinion e-mail newsletter. Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1F5lFPj

A Fundamentalist Born and Raised I was born and raised a fundamentalist. Or, as some of my friends used to passionately say, a “King-James-Bible-Preaching-Devil-Hating-White-Shirt-Wearing-Biscuit-Eating-Capital-B-BAPTIST.” Please, don’t turn off your computer and run away scared. My story doesn’t end that way. [Tweet “I was a King James Bible Preaching Devil Hating White Shirt Wearing Biscuit Eating Capital B-BAPTIST.”] I graduated with honors and a four-year diploma from a fundamental baptist Bible college. I almost completed several years of graduate work from the same school. I attended “King James Only” or “TR only” churches for almost all of that time. I preached in some of them on a regular basis. If you had asked me in those days, I would have help up my nose in pride and explained that I was King James in much the same way as one might say, “I am reformed.” I look back and wonder at the oddity of such a statement. My name is Tim, not James! And while I’m a king in God’s eyes, I’ve never worn a crown. Nevertheless, that’s what we said. What was meant by this sentiment? I was convinced that the KJV was the only preserved Word of God in English, and that every other translation was inferior at best, and perhaps even evil or demonically influenced. Then, something amazing happened—something that rocked my world and made me a different person. It brought me closer to God than I’d ever been before and gave me a stronger faith than I’d ever had; I learned things. The KJV Is Not the Only Option for a Bible Translation I took Dan Wallace’s Credo Course on Textual Criticism. I took Gary Habermas’ Credo Course on the Resurrection. I went through the entire “Theology Program.” I learned things—things I had somehow never known, and things, I suspect, I had been carefully “sheltered” from. I realized how utterly and unforgivably ignorant I was. I’ll mention only a few of the things I learned. The resurrection of Jesus was the true center of my faith. He and he alone deserved the place at the center of my life that, sadly, so many other things had occupied. I could let go of everything but Jesus, and still have all that I needed, because I had Him. God was most honored, not by a blind adherence to dogma that cannot be challenged, but by a breathless pursuit of truth that was willing to go wherever the evidence took me. After reading Aland, Metzger, and Tov as well as Scrivener, I realized it simply wasn’t possible to claim that the KJV was verbally perfect or that the Greek Textus Receptus and Hebrew Masoretic Texts were perfect unless one was willing to say that the KJV translators were supernaturally inspired by God to correct every Hebrew and Greek manuscript in existence. And even if you grant this, you’d still have to decide which KJV was perfect – the 1611 in its original form or the slightly different edition of 1769 which is what most today use? I didn’t know much, but I knew enough to know I couldn’t and didn’t want to say that. It wasn’t honoring to God, his Word, or to truth. This left me with something of a dilemma—one which, due to my upbringing, I had never faced before. If the KJV is not perfect and is not the only Word of God in English, how do I choose what translation to use? If the KJV is not the only Word of God in English, there are options, and with all options comes the responsibility of choice. So how do you choose? To answer questions like this, you must know a little bit about the history of English translations of the Bible, and the different textual and translation theories behind modern versions. A Brief History of English Bible Versions The Original Tongues While some may not be aware of this, the Bible wasn’t originally written in English. When the human authors of the Old Testament (OT) put quill to papyri, they wrote in Hebrew, and a few small portions of Daniel and Ezra were written in Aramaic. When the New Testament (NT) authors penned their works, they wrote in Greek. However, most of us simple folk do not know Greek well enough to pick it up and read it. Even fewer of us chat with our friends on Facebook in Hebrew and Aramaic. This means that if we are to read the Word of God, we must do it through an English translation of the original languages. John Wycliffe While one may rightly point to figures like Alfred the Great, the Venerable Bede, and others as early examples of translating the Bible into English, it is in the work of John Wycliffe and his followers that almost all today would find as the first complete Bible in English. The official Bible of Wycliffe’s day was the Latin Vulgate, which was translated by Jerome almost a millennium earlier. But the common man spoke English. Convinced that every man was responsible to obey what God had said, Wycliffe and his “Lollard” followers desired every man to be able to read the Scriptures in their own tongue. The story of their brave persistence and sacrifice in completing this translation, at risk of life and limb, would rival the level of action in your favorite comic book series. However, their work was to translate from the common Latin into English. While this gave us a Bible in English, it was an extra step removed from the original languages. With the fires of the Reformation burning bright, fueled by the invention of reusable metal type and fanned by the revival of learning which it sparked, a second-hand translation from the Vulgate would not suffice. As the cry of Ad Fontes rang loud, a direct translation of the original languages was the desired response. And one William Tyndale arose to bravely answer this call. William Tyndale Tyndale had the advantage of an Oxford and Cambridge education, as well as the benefit of the Greek NT of Erasmus (though he at times still leaned on the Latin Vulgate). With the bravery of a lion, he faced opposition and persecution as he translated first the NT and eventually the OT into English. The Constitutions of Oxford had made translating the Bible into English illegal, and both translations and their translators were being burned. Even so, Tyndale and his helpers pressed on in their goal, even to the point of Tyndale’s own death by burning at the stake. A Bible in English, from the original Hebrew and Greek, was the blood-wrought result. There would be others along the way (Coverdale, Matthew, Geneva, Great, Bishops, etc.), but none would so stand out or endure as his. In fact, in some ways, each of the runner-ups could be considered as mere revisions of Tyndale’s work. Truly, the splash made by Tyndale’s life and work rippled into almost every English translation to come after him. The King James Version In 1604 at the Hampton conference, a new translation was called for. Then in 1611 six panels consisting of forty-seven of the best scholars of the day finished what became the most enduring English translation to date. While they sought to create a work “newly translated out of the original tongues,” they noted the diligent comparing and revising of the former translations as essential to their work. In fact, in the prefatory “The Translator to the Reader,” they noted the following: “Truly (good Christian Reader) we never thought from the beginning, that we should need to make a new Translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one […] but to make a good one better, or out of many good ones, one principle good one…” Their admitted indebtedness to Tyndale is revealed on almost every page. It has been said that more than 70% of the language of the KJV is actually the language of Tyndale repeated. They did produce a new translation; and in the process, created one of the greatest and most enduring literary works ever produced in English. But in another very real sense, they were simply retweeting Tyndale. [Tweet “They did produce a new translation but in a sense, they were simply retweeting Tyndale.”] The Arrival of a Modern Text – What Do We Translate? Erasmus to Lachmann Much work was done after 1611 in the ever-blossoming field of NT studies. When Erasmus had produced the first critical edition of the Greek NT in 1516—which is essentially the text the KJV translators had used—he had included around 1000 annotations to the text which dealt with differences between the different manuscripts of the NT that were known to him. These differences are known as “textual variants.” With his text, the science of NT textual criticism was born. Textual criticism is the science of comparing the minor differences in the different manuscripts to discover exactly what the text read when it left the original author’s control. As with most births, a growth period would soon follow the birth of textual criticism. As more and more Greek NT manuscripts were discovered, new editions of the Greek NT continued to incorporate these finds (mostly in marginal notes) without making any significant changes to the text itself. With Karl Lachmann in 1831, that all began to change. His printed Greek text was the first to break with Erasmus’ text and allow textual variants to change not only the shape of the marginal notes, but also the shape of the text itself. He believed the most reliable way to reproduce the original form of the NT text was to lean most heavily on the manuscripts which were most ancient rather than relying exclusively on Erasmus’ much later texts. His ideas were continued in critical editions of the Greek NT published by men such as Griesbach, Tischendorf, and Tregelles. But none of them would have the impact of the two scholars who broke onto the scene in the latter half of the 1800s. If Erasmus started the journey, and if Lachmann and others broadened the small trail, we must give credit to two men who turned that trail into a blazing highway. These two men were B.F. Westcott, and F.J.A. Hort. Hort and Westcott After roughly 30 years of intense work on the Greek NT, these two scholars had taken the spark of Lachmann and fanned it into a burning flame. They were working on a new edition of the Greek NT, following text critical principles that have come to underlie almost all modern editions of the NT today. Hort and Westcott were committee members of the newly commissioned revision to the KJV (known as the Revised Version) that had been called for in 1870. As the revision took place, they shared the results of their own textual critical work with those on the translation committee. Like Lachmann before them, they were convinced that the form of the NT text that most closely resembled the original autographs would be found in the most ancient copies. Several uncial manuscripts had been discovered which were almost a full millennium older than those upon which Erasmus had primarily based his work. Whatever the merits of the translation of the RV, its great gift to the world was that it was essentially based upon these older manuscripts. The era of modern translations was born. Older Is Better, and Newer Is Older When we speak of “new manuscript discoveries”, we’re typically talking about the discovery of older manuscripts. The only way in which they’re new is that they were recently discovered. In this sense, newer isn’t better because it’s newer; it’s better precisely because it’s older. Hort and Westcott did their revising work with basically five uncial manuscripts that predated those which had formed the Textus Receptus by, in some cases around 1,000 years. Today, we have discovered so much more. We’ve discovered 323 uncial manuscripts. Even more significant, we have unearthed 131 papyri manuscripts which mostly date even earlier than the uncial manuscripts. A few date to as early as the second century A.D. Historically speaking, that is astonishingly close to the writing of the original autographs. Rumor has it that a fragment of the Gospel of Mark has even been recently discovered which dates somewhere in the 80s A.D. We also continue to discover manuscripts from the later periods. This increases our confidence in the general stability of the text of the NT. In addition to the Greek NT manuscripts, we also have over 10,000 manuscripts of ancient Latin translations of the NT. We have anywhere between 5,000 and 10,000 manuscripts of translations into other ancient languages. As if that weren’t enough to garner confidence, we also have over a million quotations of Scripture from the early church fathers which bear witness to the text of Scripture. [Tweet “Quite simply, we have an astounding amount of data that bear witness to the NT text.”] When the KJV translators produced their work, it was based on essentially a dozen or so Greek NT manuscripts. Today, we have access to 5,839 of them. As the work of textual criticism continues today, we gain (with every new discovery) an ever-increasing confidence in the general reliability of the NT text, and we tweak the minor details to bring us closer and closer to exactly what was originally written by those who penned our NT under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. We can rest quite confident that the NT text we have today is, in all essentials, exactly what was written by the original authors. Modern translations differ from the KJV in that they are based on representations of the original text that are much more fully informed by the evidence. Today, that text is found in the NA28 and the UBS5 Greek texts. Put simply, we have much more data today than they did then. Today, there are only two English translations which are based on the older Textus Receptus (Remember, older here actually means later.): the King James Version, (last updated in 1769) and the New King James Version. All other modern versions are based on the newer (which means older) texts. Translation Philosophies – How Do We Translate It? When choosing a translation today, not only do you have to make a choice between an older or newer original language text, you must also choose between different philosophies of translation. Where did these theories come from, and how to they work? To answer that, we must first consider two men who have had a major influence on how translations are done today. Adolf Deissmann and the Discovery of the Papyri In 1895 Adolf Deissmann changed the landscape of biblical studies significantly when he published his work Bible Studies . In some ways, what made his work so revolutionary were the presuppositions which had come before it. It had been common to think of the language of the NT as a unique language, above that of the mundane life. Some even spoke of “Holy Ghost Greek” in reference to the NT. Deissmann demonstrated that a comparison of the many ancient papyri scraps from the Roman period with the Greek of the NT revealed that the language of the NT was rather the language of the common man. It was written in the conversational style of the average Joe. While the effect of Deissmann’s work was initially felt in the revamping of lexicons, it would eventually also be felt in the revamping of translation theory. If the original language of the NT was a conversational style intended to communicate to the common man, then shouldn’t translations into other languages seek to communicate in the same way? Eugene Nida and the Proposal of Dynamic Equivalence In the mid 1950s a man named Eugene Nida would take similar ideas and help us think carefully through our understanding of translation and the task it should accomplish. Born right here in OKC, OK, Nida was a Baptist minister who gained his Ph.D. in linguistics and began to propose refinements to translation theory. He published Toward a Science of Translating (Brill, 1964) in the mid 1900s and was a founding member of Wycliffe Bible Translators. His suggestions were very widely received. While it had been common to think of translation in terms of either strictly literal or simply paraphrase, Nida showed at length that, in fact, these tight categories were overly simplistic. There is never perfect correspondence between any two languages, and perfect translation between them is impossible. He understood well that all translation already involves interpretation and that a goal of being less interpretive in translation is to miss the target by shooting for the moon. No translation, however literal, can claim not to involve the interpretations of the translators. He proposed that instead of thinking of two strictly different ways of translating, we should recognize that these traditional options are actually more like two opposing poles on a continuum; and it might be a more accurate representation of the function of an original text if a translation sought a kind of “middle ground” between them. This middle ground he termed “dynamic equivalence.” And so was born the modern approach to translation theory. It has been suggested that today there are basically three philosophies of translation in use: formal equivalence, functional equivalence, and what is known as free translation. Formal Equivalence (Emphasis on Individual Words) Formal equivalence is the philosophy that seeks to keep as close as possible to the form of the original language, retaining (as much as possible) the words of the original and even, where possible, the form of those words. It has as its goal the representation of the words of the original language in equivalent words in the translation, even if this causes awkward and unnatural English. Functional Equivalence (Emphasis on Sentences) Functional equivalence recognizes that all translation is already interpretation and that for the modern reader to feel the impact the original readers felt when they read the original, the translators must find the meaning of the text and convey that meaning through the translation. Its goal is to represent the meaning of the original text in modern equivalents. In one sense, one might fairly say that the sentence becomes the translational unit in such a philosophy. The words and their order may be changed slightly into more modern equivalents so that they are smooth English. In another sense, that wouldn’t be true, since the goal is still to translate the words. However, if the language and grammar must be sacrificed to make the meaning clearer in natural English, the degree to which a translation is willing to make this sacrifice is the degree to which the translation has chosen functional over formal equivalence. Free Translation (Emphasis on Thoughts) Free translation is what is often referred to as paraphrase. There is no attempt to maintain the words or the form of the original. The goal is to remove as much as possible the distance between the modern reader and the ancient text. The goal then is to translate ideas rather than words or even sentences. In many ways, such paraphrase is not truly translation. By definition, such an approach will contain more of the interpretation of the translator. Most who have produced such free translations would readily acknowledge this and wouldn’t want anyone to use their work as their sole Bible. That being said, understand that all translations are to greater or lesser degrees a mixture of these approaches. It is impossible to be woodenly literal in translation at all points. It is also impossible to be fully “free” and avoid formal translation at all points. It might be best to think of a spectrum with a woodenly literal interlinear at one end and a free paraphrase at the other. Every translation can be placed on this spectrum. If we were to chart the most readily available translations today, we might see where they would land on such a continuum by suggesting the following chart; Chart of Translations A Brief Examination of Some Major Translations Interlinears YLT/Mounce If someone chooses (for whatever reasons) to go with a translation from the older TR instead of the modern texts, they could turn to Young’s Literal Translation (YLT) for the most literal translation of that text. Robert Young felt that belief in the verbal inspiration of Scripture demanded the most literal translation of the text as was possible, even if slavishly following the word order and form of the original text produced horrible English. He thus produced in 1862 the YLT. While not truly an interlinear (because it doesn’t present the Greek and Hebrew texts), it follows the same basic woodenly literal style of translation followed by an interlinear version. For example, note how his rendering of John 3:16 reads: “For God did so love the world, that His Son—the only begotten— He gave, that every one who is believing in him may not perish, but may have life age-during.” (Footnote) Today, William Mounce has worked with Zondervan to produce several interlinear translations which are much more valuable than previous formats and take advantage of modern textual advances; . In these new editions, the original language is presented in its original order. This can easily be seen, but instead of awkward and impossible English, Mounce has used a system of italicized words to still produce good English. In addition, he has included the full text of common English translations in columns on the side. If you are looking for a way to see a glimpse of the structure of the original language but don’t want to learn the languages, such interlinear are a valuable option. However, there is no substitute for an understanding of the lexical, syntactical, grammatical structures, and nuances of the original languages. All you will truly get from an interlinear is the original word order and perhaps some good lexical definition. One could easily mistake such a brief passing acquaintance for a close relationship with the original text, but that would be to fool oneself. If your acquaintance with the original languages is based on an interlinear, your relationship with them is on the level of “just met.” So please don’t go around telling people that you’re married. Formal Equivalence Translations KJV/NKJV If you want a translation that has the TR as its basis but don’t want the slavishly literal translation of Young’s, you’re left with two basic options: the KJV or NKJV. The KJV is nothing short of a monument to the English language. Its beauty and elegance are unsurpassed. When it was first printed, it became an instant literary classic. In terms of English style, probably no English version will ever approach it. If you’ve come from a long tradition of using the KJV, it may be hard for you to even read the Bible in anything other than “King James English.” Many have formed a deep emotional attachment to this translation . I would never try to get anyone to stop using it. In fact, I think every Christian should own and read a copy of the KJV. We just shouldn’t claim it’s perfect or that it’s the only translation God approves of. Using the KJV will leave you with the impression that you’ve been in the presence of royalty, and its rhythmic prose and enduring turns of phrase will leave a lasting impression upon your heart and will likely spring easily to mind for many years to come. It is and always will be a great translation with an impressive pedigree. It will always hold a dear place in the hearts of English speaking peoples. The NKJV has retained the same original language texts that stood behind the KJV, but the translation has been updated to reflect modern English (and in some cases to produce a more literal translation and more natural translation). However, some have suggested that the choice to retain the text of the KJV but revise its language was in fact to choose to keep the element of the KJV which was inferior (its text), and remove the element which made the KJV so superior (the beauty and elegance of its language) . It might even be said that it was like snipping the rose off its stem; you lose the enticing aroma and the intrinsic beauty, but you keep the thorny stem. The only reason to use the NKJV is if you desire for theological reasons to retain the use of the TR as the original language text but desire a good translation of that text into modern and more easily understandable English. But anyone reading either the KJV or the NKJV should know that several of the passages in it were almost certainly not written by the Biblical authors (such as I John 5:7, or Acts 9:5–6). NASB/HCSB Produced by the Lockman Foundation in 1971 and significantly revised in 1995, the New American Standard Bible (NASB) sought to be the most formally equivalent translation of modern texts as possible without being a slavishly literal translation like that of an interlinear. The Lockman foundation makes the claim for their work that, “At no point did the translators attempt to interpret Scripture through translation. Instead, the NASB translation team adhered to the principles of literal translation. This is the most exacting and demanding method of translation, requiring a word-for-word translation that is both accurate and readable[…] Instead of telling the reader what to think, the updated NASB provides the most precise translation with which to conduct a personal journey through the Word of God.” As we have seen when we mentioned Nida’s work above, such claims are at best overstated. All translation is interpretation. Nonetheless, if one is seeking for the most literal translation short of an interlinear, the NASB is a good choice. It was the favorite among Southern Baptists for many years, but that pride of place has now gone to the HCSB. The Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB) is a much more recent translation. Produced by the Sunday School Board of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the HCSB intended to serve as an alternative to the NIV for Southern Baptist curriculum and ministry. The translation promoted what they termed “optimal equivalence” as a middle ground between formal and functional equivalence. In some ways it picks up the very literal style of the NASB before it. It seeks to follow in that literal translation vein except when that would sacrifice good English. At that point, it maintains good English and presents the more literal translation as a footnote with the “Lit.” abbreviation. I think this is a very helpful approach, especially for those seeking a more literal translation. It’s generally more theologically conservative in its translation and suits well the SBC which created it. It generally leans towards more traditional use of gender language. My understanding is that it was originally intended to be a translation of the “Majority Text” of Hodges and Farstad. This would have made it a very unique translation and would have thrown a “3rd text” of the Greek NT on the English market, but this plan was ultimately abandoned. However, as perhaps something of a vestigial remnant of that purpose, it does still occasionally retain TR readings (in brackets) that have been relegated to the footnotes in most modern versions (e.g. the doxology at the end of Matt. 6:13, or the text of Acts 8:37). RSV/NRSV/ESV The British Revised Version was the first major revision of the KJV, appearing in 1881. It had incorporated the new textual discoveries in its NT that have been noted above. In America, it was edited slightly, and then published as the American Standard Version (ASV) in 1901. While finding a better reception in America, it didn’t quite gain the wide acceptance that had been hoped for. Really, its great gift to the world was its Greek text. In 1952, it underwent a major revision, both of text and translation, known as the Revised Standard Version (RSV). In some ways, this was truly the first modern translation which wasn’t simply a revision of the KJV. The RSV garnered quite a bit of rather controversial attention. It had translated the Hebrew text of Is. 7:14 as “young woman” instead of the more traditional “virgin.” While their translation was quite justified, there was an uproar in some hyper-conservative circles claiming that the RSV was seeking to impinge upon the deity of Jesus through this change. As if that wasn’t preposterous enough, several of its translators were (with no warrant whatsoever) accused of being “communist” and “communist sympathizers.” Add to this, the rather emotionally based knee-jerk reaction to some of the many updates in the Greek text which it had incorporated, (e.g. not printing the phrase “through his blood” in Col. 1:14, etc.). One can grasp the controversy that unfortunately resulted. One pastor in the Rocky Mountains even burned the new translation. The revision, the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), introduced gender inclusive language to a much greater degree than translations had done previously (though not in relation to Deity) as well as updating the Greek and Hebrew texts with modern textual advances, and continues to be used by those who might prefer a more literal translation of the Greek text. ESV In 2001 the English Standard Version (ESV) entered the scene. It was an entirely new translation from the original languages into contemporary English, but one which consciously stood in the lineage of the KJV-NRSV tradition. Leland Ryken had a huge influence on the translation work, and due to his input, the ESV has retained a kind of understated elegance that is quite exceptional. The emphasis on literary excellence is one of the more remarkable features of the translation. Understanding that theological language has a way of being “stabilized” from generation to generation, Ryken sought to retain the language that began with William Tyndale as a fountainhead (where such stabilization was accurate). He departed from that language only where accuracy and smooth modern English required it. Thus, there is a “dignity of expression” to the ESV often lacking in modern translations. Their goal was to produce an “essentially literal” translation into modern English, taking formal equivalence as the starting point and departing from it only where good English demanded such a departure. While most recent translations (HCSB and a few other excepted) have employed ever-increasing gender inclusive language, the ESV deliberately sought to resist that trend. The names of the men who worked on the translation reads like a “Who’s Who” list of modern evangelical scholarship, and the results of their work have become one of the favorite translations of many an English Bible reader. Functional Equivalence Translations The NET Bible is something of an innovation in modern English translation. The acronym “NET” is a bit of a play on words. First, referring to the name of the work “New English Translation” and second, the unique nature of the work which was primarily planned as an Internet translation. It was released online in 2005 and, while available in print, sought to accommodate the modern age by being an online accessible Bible. It is available online, in its entirety, free for all, for all time. This is an inherently ministry-focused model which created a format that immediately solved common problems for those who sought to produce ministry materials which quoted large sections of biblical text. Prior to the publication of the NET Bible, they either had to use older public domain works or obtain difficult permissions from publishers of modern versions which often delayed and sometimes prohibited publication of ministry resources intended to be offered for free online and elsewhere. The NET Bible sought to resolves those difficulties by producing a translation downloadable free online in its entirety. The combined work of over twenty-five prominent biblical scholars, the translation has provided a unique solution to the tensions inherent in translation work. Every translation must balance the competing aims of readability, elegance, and accuracy. The closer a translation moves towards one of these goals, the further they get from the other two. For example, if you glance at the chart of translations above, you see (obviously) that the further one moves to the right, the further he also moves from the left. Deep stuff, I know. This is the inescapable nature of translation work, and every translation inherently faces these tensions. Typically, a translation must land somewhere imperfectly between these competing goals. The NET Bible sought a unique solution. They provide in the actual text a more functionally equivalent translation which is more readable while still seeking an elegance balanced with readability. But then in the footnotes (at important points) they provide an explanation of the interpretive, textual, and translational difficulties of the passage and give a more literal rendering of the text as well as occasionally dealing with general Bible study issues. This allows them to maintain the goal of accuracy. There are over 60,000 such notes. That’s more than any other translation ever produced; and because of the Internet format, they can continue to be updated and added to. Since these notes are provided by the translators themselves, they provide a unique way to “look over the shoulders” of the translators as they did their work, which is not available in any other English translation. Overall, the NET Bible is a unique translation, which has met the competing goals of translation in a hitherto impossible way, and has a clear focus on ministry values. It will no doubt continue to be a favorite among many Bible students. NIV/NIV 2011 In 1894 the complete New International Version (NIV) was published. The release immediately stressed the international character of the work. Employing over 100 translators from America, Canada, Great Briton, Australia, and New Zealand, the translators aimed to produce an entirely new translation that would represent a widely interdenominational and truly international perspective. Taking the “I” in the name very seriously, they sought to make the translation simple enough that it would be easily usable even by a student for whom English was a second language. Thus, they avoided technical theological words (and any words with too many syllables), and sought to employ a more colloquial style. The translators all professed their “commitment to the authority and infallibility of the Bible as God’s Word in written form” which struck a chord with some conservative readers who had been suspicious of translations since the RSV. Such a commitment sought accuracy to the original but also a clear, smooth English style. Thus, three separate committees reviewed both the translation and the style of the English. Further, while using the standard NA 26 Greek NT as its base, the committees occasionally disagreed with the textual choices of the NA, and so, actually translated an eclectic text which differed from the standard text at many points. Needless to say, such an intricate process involving so many scholars was time-consuming, and expensive. It has been estimated that the total editorial cost was around eight million dollars. The NIV almost instantly rose to be the most widely used translation (perhaps excepting the KJV) and continues to top the charts of the best selling translations. While the NIV has faced a few minor revisions (NIVR, and TNIV), they didn’t take on as widely. In 2011 the NIV received a full makeover that is definitely here to stay in the mainstream. Continuing to update the translation to be current with contemporary English usage, the committee also incorporated a greater degree of gender inclusive language. The NIV 2011 will likely continue to be one of the most widely sold and used English translations. NAB/NJB The New American Bible (NAB) was a production in 1970 of the Roman Catholic Church, but unlike several previous such productions, was much more ecumenical in its approach. One third of its translation committee was Protestants, and the translation shows the influence of the cooperation between both traditions. The revisions in 1986 and 1991 also introduced slightly more gender inclusive language. GNB/REB In 1976 the Good News Bible (GNB) arrived as the culmination of its Today’s English Version TEV) predecessor. It sought to directly apply the principles of dynamic equivalence stated by Eugene Nida, and was one of the first translations to do so in such an intentional way. The Revised English Bible (REB) was published as the revision of the NEB in 1989. It moved the translation away from much of its colloquial language and more towards the middle of our chart. The REB also used slightly more gender inclusivity in its language and was much more consistent in its translation of theological language. JB/NLT J. B Phillips originally published his translation as separate entities, but they were eventually published as the single volume The New Testament in Modern English in 1958. His purpose was to convey the sense of the original in a way that would have the same effect on the modern readers that the original writings had on theirs. He sought to set aside the traditional language that had been associated with English Bibles since Tyndale and to translate the text as one would translate any document from a foreign language, using the same freedom of style that would normally be employed in such an endeavor. The result garnered great praise from those who could see the meaning of the text being made plain. The eminent scholar F. F. Bruce stated that, in his time, the translation of the epistles was probably the best available for the average reader. The New Living Translation (NLT), originally a revision of the Living Bible, actually became an entirely new translation in 1996. Based on the original languages, it primarily used a dynamic equivalence method. It thus departed significantly from the LB and became an altogether different translation. Recognizing that the original documents of Scripture were intended primarily to make an impact when read aloud, the NLT has employed a unique focus on recovering that impact in the public reading of the translation. Like the ESV and other modern translations, the translation team enlisted scholars to translate the books of the Bible who were specialist in exegesis and theology of each particular book. They employed such notable translators as Daniel Block, Tremper Longman III, Craig Blomberg, Darrell Bock, D. A. Carson, Douglas Moo, and Tom Schreiner. Its 2007 revision is truly remarkable as a functionally equivalent translation. NEB With a wide variety of denominational input from a variety of British traditions, the New English Bible (NEB) sought in 1970 to leave behind traditional language and create a truly new English translation that did not simply recreate the traditional biblical English. It was in many ways simply a more functionally equivalent version of the RSV. With the notable C.H. Dodd overseeing the work and as notable a figure as C.S. Lewis contributing to its English style, the NEB was instantly popular and remains a favorite for many. Free Translation Living Bible Kenneth Taylor didn’t originally intend to produce a new translation. As a father who wanted to render the great stories of the Bible in a way that his young children would understand, he began to take the ASV and more freely paraphrase its meaning into simple language that would help the ideas be easily grasped by even young children. Eventually, his renderings became wildly popular, and he completed an entire Bible and published it as The Living Bible in 1971. The huge success of his work prompted him to start Tyndale House Publishers, and the free paraphrase nature of his work remained immensely popular in the ‘60s and ‘70s. It was especially popular among young people and many who were less acquainted with traditional biblical language. While still used, one of the major weaknesses of his paraphrase was that it was a paraphrase of an English translation, rather than a paraphrase of the original languages themselves. While Taylor’s work was immensely popular for its ability to bring the concepts of the Bible into idiomatic English, the fact that it was in fact a paraphrase rather than a translation from the original languages severely limited its value. The Message In 2002 Eugene Peterson produced a new free translation which was of much greater scholarly aptitude. Much like Taylor before him, Peterson didn’t originally intend to produce a new translation. He simply began to write out a more idiomatic translation of the books he was preaching in the church he pastored. He had the academic background (from Regent College) to work directly from the original languages, and he submitted his work to the review of a group of other scholars. The result was a free translation much more accurate to the original languages. Rather than translating the words or even the exact ideas of the original languages, The Message sought to reproduce the effect of the original. It used idioms that were current, fresh, and part of the normal speech of everyday life. The language is thus much like that in which you would chat with friends and doesn’t have an “airy” feel at all. As we saw above, Deissmann had shown already that this common language was in fact the conversational speech in which the NT was originally written. While a work like The Message has immense value in helping the reader “feel” the force of the original in fresh language that most translations would prohibit, the reader also must keep in mind that a more free translation has inherently exercised a greater degree of interpretation before he even reads it. Some Concluding Principles Choose the Translation You Will Read At the end of the day, almost any translation of the Bible can be a good one. They each have their strengths; they each have their weaknesses. When it comes to the common question, “Which translation is the best one?” the answer, in some ways, is simply, “Whichever one you will read.” If a Bible never leaves your shelf, its merits and pitfalls don’t really make much difference. I would recommend something near the center of the chart for a regular reading Bible. But really, whatever Bible you will use regularly is the one that is best for you. Study from Multiple Translations Recognize that all translation is interpretation. While almost all translations are good and accurate, when reading the Bible in English, you are already removed somewhat from the Bible as it was originally written. What you are reading inherently contains the interpretive choices of the translators. This is not a bad thing, but it needs to be recognized. While I recommend having one “primary reading Bible,” I would suggest that one of the best habits you can form is to never study from only one translation. When you are really digging into Galatians for that Bible study, read the passage from a few different translations. Take note of where they differ. The differences you see between them will give you a good indication of where there may be a textual difficulty in the originals or where there may be several possible ways to render the original language into English. You’ll get the best understanding of the passage if you compare translations from opposite ends of the spectrum. Compare a more functionally equivalent translation with something on the more formal end of the spectrum. Most of these translations are now available free in online formats (e.g. the YouVersion Bible app). Use a Good Study Bible Finally, I would recommend that you make use of a good study Bible. The additional information you will glean from the study notes will enrich your study in ways that you can’t imagine. The NIV study Bible is excellent. The ESV study Bible is one of the most helpful such tools I’ve ever seen. The NET Bible notes are unsurpassed in text-critical questions. If you desire a “TR” translation, the “King James Study Bible” from Thomas Nelson would be right up your alley. Whatever you choose to use, a good study Bible can give you a wealth of background information that you won’t get by reading only the Bible. Conclusion So, what did I end up choosing? How did a former KJV only preacher choose a translation? After looking though quite a few, I have opted to use the ESV Study Bible as my primary reading Bible. I also regularly compare the KJV, the NET, and the NIV 2011, and I occasionally consult the NLT and the Message. But my choices shouldn’t necessarily be yours. You should make your own decision, and whatever you choose to use, read it. I am reminded of when I read through the story of Augustine’s conversion in The Confessions. It was one of the more powerful moments I’ve experienced in my own Christian walk. As he wrestled with his own depravity, having for so long been afflicted by his own wretchedness, he found himself sitting alone in a garden with his bitter tears pouring out under a fig tree. As he wept, he heard the voice of a child nearby (perhaps playing games as children do), repeating the phrase, “take up and read; take up and read.” Interpreting the words as a “command from heaven to open the book,” he picked up a copy of the book of Romans, began to read, and found in the Scriptures the light of the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ. And none of us has ever been the same since. As he heard so long ago, I encourage you with advice that will change the life of all who will heed it; Tolle Lege, (Take up and read) Tolle Lege (Take up and read)

Colorado State Senator Kevin Lundberg, R-Berthoud, holds up a black ten-round rifle ammunition magazine with a green capacity extender, as he argues against one of several gun control bills before the Colorado Legislature, at the State Capitol, in Denver, Monday March 11, 2013. Colorado Democrats are advancing gun-control proposals in a state balancing a history of heartbreaking shootings with a Western heritage where gun ownership is treasured by many. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley) DENVER (AP) -- Fiercely debated ammunition limits have cleared Colorado's Democratic Legislature and are on their way to the governor, who has said he'll sign the measure into law. The 15-round magazine limit would make Colorado the first state outside the East Coast to ratchet back gun rights after last year's deadly shooting sprees. Colorado's gun-control debates have been closely watched because of the state's gun-loving frontier heritage and painful history of mass shootings. Colorado lawmakers decided to keep negotiating on a bill to expand background-check requirements to most private and online gun sales. The measures are part of a Democratic gun control package that has been the focus of much debate, drawing thousands to the state Capitol over the past week. The GOP has decried the whole package as a bad reaction to last year's horrific shootings in Newtown, Conn., and at a suburban Denver movie theater. ___ Kristen Wyatt can be reached at http://www.twitter.com/APkristenwyatt

Pope Tawadros II has arrived in Jerusalem in a historic visit that marks the first time that a head of the Egyptian Coptic Orthodox Church has visited the city since Israel's occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967. The website of the Coptic Church in Jerusalem said the pope's only reason for the visit on Thursday was to attend the funeral prayer of the Bishop of Jerusalem Anba Abraham, the head of the Coptic Church in the Holy Land, who died on Wednesday. The late Egyptian Pope Shenouda III had issued a ban in 1979, in the aftermath of the Camp David peace accords between Egypt and Israel, preventing Egyptian Coptics from pilgrimage to Jerusalem while under Israeli occupation. Father Boules Halim, the spokesman for the Coptic Church in Cairo, said that the visit was arranged for an "exceptional situation". Halim told the AFP news agency that the visit will not change the stance of the Egyptian Church towards the occupation which it historically opposes. "The stance of the Coptic Orthodox Church concerning travelling to the Holy Lands will always remain the same. The Pope's visit came as an exception," said Halim. "The position of the church remains unchanged, which is not going to Jerusalem without all our Egyptian [Muslim] brothers." The Egyptian government does not ban Egyptian citizens from visiting Israel and encourages normal relations between the two countries. Shenouda III, who was head of the Egyptian Coptic Church for more than 40 years, until his death in 2012, was against normalising relations with Israel despite the peace treaty between the two countries.

The pie list swelled; the richer puddings had vanished; the sausage, with his drapery wrapped about him, barely lingered in a pleasant thanatopsis with the buckwheats and the sweet but doomed maple. 1) In Gopher Prairie there is Thanatopsis Club ( thanatopsis = Greek "vision of death"; a name that was probably suggested by the poem which William Cullen Bryant, aged sixteen, wrote after reading Robert Blair's The Grave and William Cowper's The Task): this is the main cultural force of the city, led by the most eminent ladies, who attend conferences on the English poets. WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT, Thanatopsis , in THE POETICAL WORKS OF WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT 21, 21 (D. 9) John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, Dark Tourism: the Attraction of Death and Disaster (London: Continuum, 2000); Valene Smith, "War and Tourism: an American Ethnography," Annals of Tourism Research 25 (1998): 202-227; Anthony Seaton, "From Thanatopsis to Thanatourism: Guided by the Dark," Journal of International Heritage Studies 2 (1996): 234-244. The term derives from the ancient Greek, thanatopsis , which means 'contemplation of death'. The capsule held more than 50 items, including a piece of wood from Independence Hall, a copy of Thanatopsis , an 1818 poem by William Cullen Bryant said to be the first to contain the word Oregon, and a souvenir badge welcoming the President to Portland. Ishmael experiences other tropes or turnings from his thanatopsis mood, as when in the Spouter Inn he is terrified by the prospect of a cannibalistic, harpoon-toting savage for his bedmate, only to find a bosom friend who indirectly saves his life; as when in the chapel, staring at signs of his seemingly foreordained death in the black-bordered tablets commemorating sailors lost at sea, he finds unaccountably that his "Faith, like a jackal, [that] feeds among the tombs, [. And finally, it means to give oneself back to the place, as the speaker affirms in the opening lines; elsewhere Berry expresses this ecological thanatopsis as "slowly falling / into the fund of things .

Many businesses are planning out their CRM data quality strategies for 2015, yet some will fail to win the battle because their approach is simply wrong. According to Experian’s Data Advantage Report from last year, more than 99 percent of organizations had a plan, but 94 percent still had data errors. That figure was an increase on the previous year’s total too. The takeaway from the report is simple: Data quality is a battle that requires stamina and commitment. Fighting the battle means constantly working towards better quality data to improve efficiency, customer satisfaction, reporting and growth. Winning the battle means approaching the issue effectively, using the right techniques. The Losing Battle Data quality initiatives require investment and an ongoing focus on improvement. Many businesses see data quality as a cash drain, not a cash gain. To cut costs, some businesses try to cut back on spending by using members of staff to carry out complex correction and error detection. The report found that 27 per cent of businesses are using manual database editing to tackle data quality. (While 40 per cent of businesses said that they would be using dedicated software for cleaning databases, this was a drop compared to previous years’ figures.) Here’s the fact: Cutting corners is not a good battle tactic. Manual correction is not fast enough, or accurate enough, to stem the flow of bad data that is being manually entered into other areas of the system. Bad data is also introduced through bad merges, incorrect character sets and the connection of different systems that have different standards and norms. It is also impossible for human reviewers to find fuzzy matches, phonetic matches and duplicate records when scouring a database line by line. Data quality software does the opposite. It automatically catches new data problems at the input stage before they are committed to a database or customer relationship management system (CRM). It can detect and remove the duplicates that already exist. And as businesses work towards a situation where all data is held in one location, they also cut down on the manual import and export operations that are so problematic. Persistence Data quality benefits are well understood in business: 63 percent of respondents wanted to increase efficiency 53 percent aimed to improve customer service 51 percent wanted to make better decisions based on their data 43 percent said they needed to profile customers more effectively 37 percent were working towards a single customer view Winning the battle has almost become a utopian goal, but it is not an unachievable one. Going into battle is daunting, and maintaining the fight on an ongoing basis can be a challenge for everyone, particularly when every single typo generates work and cost. But struggling through with manual editing is a false economy. We are handling more data than ever, and we are responsible for handling it well. Better data means a better return on investment: better response rates, better customer retention, better productivity. Once you’ve won the battle and have a grip on your data, you’ll realise that cost-cutting is actually the worst battle tactic you could use. About the Author Armed with qualifications in mechanical engineering, business and finance, and experience of running engineering and CRM businesses, Martin founded a successful CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software house in 1992, supplying systems to large, medium and small sized companies. Developing a deep understanding of the value of data, he became concerned that many organisations were making decisions based on poor quality data. To fill this gap in the market, he sold the CRM Company and started DQ Global in 2002 to provide data quality solutions, with a mission to detect, correct and prevent data defects which undermine business decisions. Since then, DQ Global has become a global market leader, delivering enterprise-wide data solutions utilising leading edge technology. Martin has gained a wealth of knowledge and experience and has established himself as a Data Quality Improvement Evangelist and an industry expert.

Google's Chrome is on the brink of replacing Firefox as the second-most-popular browser, according to one Web statistics firm. Data provided by StatCounter, an Irish company that tracks browser usage using the free analytics tools it offers websites, shows that Chrome will pass Firefox to take the No. 2 spot behind Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) no later than December. As of Wednesday, Chrome's global average user share for September was 23.6%, while Firefox's stood at 26.8%. IE, meanwhile, was at 41.7%. The climb of Chrome during 2011 has been astonishing: It has gained eight percentage point since January 2011, representing a 50% increase. During that same period, Firefox has dropped almost four percentage points, a decline of about 13%, while IE has also fallen four points, a 9% dip. That means Chrome is essentially reaping all the defections from Firefox and IE. If the trends established thus far this year continue, Chrome will come close to matching Firefox's usage share in November, then pass its rival in December, when Chrome will account for approximately 26.6% of all browsers and Firefox will have a 25.3% share. StatCounter is not the only Web metrics company that publicly posts browser share statistics, however. Data provided by U.S.-based Net Applications, for example, shows a much bigger gap between Firefox and Chrome: In its numbers for August, Net Application had Firefox with a 22.6% share of desktop browser usage, and Chrome at 15.5%. Using Net Applications numbers, Chrome could have a 17.8% share by the end of 2011, short of Firefox's projected 22.3%. But if the pace of change lasts, Chrome should pass Firefox on Net Applications' chart by mid-2012. Because Net Applications weights its numbers to more better estimate usage share in countries from which relatively few users navigate to sites it monitors, the company's data theoretically paints a more accurate picture because it factors in the huge Chinese market. Some browser makers -- Microsoft in particular -- cite that as a reason why they regularly defer to Net Applications' numbers. Not coincidentally, Net Applications pegs IE with a much higher share -- 55.3% -- than do other metrics firms such as StatCounter. Both Net Applications and StatCounter, however, have traced the same trends: usage declines of IE and Firefox, and a corresponding climb in Chrome. Chrome may pass Firefox as the world's second-most-popular browser by the end of the year. (Data: StatCounter.) Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at @gkeizer, on Google+ or subscribe to Gregg's RSS feed . His e-mail address is gkeizer@computerworld.com. See more articles by Gregg Keizer.

Prep Time: 10-15 minutes Cook Time: 40 minutes Pretty patties resting on a bed of oven roasted carrots. Doesn’t that sound delicious? I guess I’m having a ‘vegetable patties’ period. These are wonderfully soft and crispy at the same time, with a ton of options to spice them up. Since potatoes and cauliflower have a very mild taste, you can play around with herbs and spices. For about a dozen patties you will need: 4 medium potatoes, peeled and chopped ½ medium cauliflower or whole if it is small, cut into florets 2 tablespoons coconut oil ½ teaspoon salt ¼ teaspoon turmeric ¼ teaspoon ground red paprika ½ teaspoon dried basil (or a few leaves if you have the option of fresh basil, finely chopped) ¼ teaspoon dried oregano (again, use fresh herbs if you have the option, a few leaves will do the trick) 1 cup vegan bread crumbs (You can make your own if you bake bread at home – leave it to dry and process it in your blender/food processor.) Other options for flavor: garlic, sautéed onions, soy sauce, curry, thyme… To make: Cook the potatoes and cauliflower, potatoes need about 15 minutes, cauliflower 10 minutes – I just add the cauliflower 5 minutes later and cook until soft. Strain and mash well, try to break as many lumps as possible. Season with salt and other spices or herbs to your liking and start adding the bread crumbs a few tablespoons at a time. The mixture will be soft but keep its form. Taste and adjust if necessary. Use an ice cream scooper as a measuring tool to make the patties uniform in size and shape. Flatten them into discs and roll in bread crumbs. If you are not using them all just freeze them on a tray lined with baking paper and later when frozen transfer them into a bag to save on space in the freezer. You can fry these in a pan with a bit of coconut oil for 3-4 minutes on each side, but be careful: they soak up a lot of it. You could also bake them in the oven (375 F 15-20 minutes). The bed of carrots on which these heavenly patties rest are just organic carrots washed and sliced, tossed together with some olive oil, salt and thyme. Set on a baking tray lined with baking paper, 15-20 minutes at 375 F. Bon appetit!

NO, it’s not Honda’s long-promised RCV road bike but in the meantime the newly-revealed Ronax 500 is the closest thing to a GP bike you’re ever likely to be able to buy. As you can probably tell from the ‘500’ name, it’s not taking its inspiration from the latest generation of four-stroke monsters but from an earlier era of more delicate, knife-edge 500cc two-strokes. Yes, it does look a lot like an NSR500, doesn’t it? And yes, they’re making 46 of them, which is a number that’s reminiscent of someone who perhaps took the NSR500 to its last world title. But you’ll find no official mention of that chap’s name on the Ronax website. In terms of spec, the bike isn’t far from an NSR either, even if it is all actually the work of the guys at German firm Ronax. The 499cc motor is an 80-degree V4 with twin contra-rotating crankshafts, fuel injection and a six-speed cassette gearbox. At 160bhp, it’s a tad down on the 180-200bhp that the last of the 500cc strokers were making, but it’s supposed to be road legal and will hopefully last more than a race distance, too, so we’ll let them off for that. What’s perhaps harder to swallow is the price. It’s €100,000. Plus VAT. Plus shipping. Let’s face it, you’ll get no change from £100,000 once you’ve landed one in the UK. Call it two-and-a-half Desmosedici RRs. Or an NR750 and enough change to get a brand new S1000RR for daily use. Or, possibly, one of Honda’s RCV road bikes as and when they get around to actually making them. But then again, maybe if you’ve got that sort of change sitting around, you’ll be in a position to simply get one of each. For more details, see Ronax.

TOULOUSE, France – Satellite builder Thales Alenia Space and six partners are investing their own money, plus grants from the French government, into the Stratobus high-altitude platform station (HAPS) on the assumption that the development yields a contract in 2017, the program manager said. The Stratobus backers are focusing only on Earth observations in the tropical regions for the moment, but expect to add telecommunications payloads once international regulators have authorized HAPS systems to operate in Ka-band. Current International Telecommunication Union (ITU) rules limit HAPS systems to the Q- and V-bands for fixed services communications, between 47 and 48 GHz. These higher frequencies are not well suited to rainy conditions. The U.S. government is leading the effort at the ITU to broaden the frequency regime for command and control of high-altitude drones to Ka- and Ku-band, already in mainstream use by satellite fleet operators. It is unclear whether HAPS could be covered under this. The U.S. position met with substantial resistance – for reasons that were never made clear — at the last quadrennial meeting of global regulators, WRC-15, which agreed only to create a study group to examine the issue in view to a decision at WRC-19. WRC-15 agreed to study future use of Ka-band for HAPS. Until additional frequencies are made available, Thales Alenia Space’s Stratobus will limit itself to optical and radar Earth observation, said Jean-Philippe Chessel, head of the Stratobus project. “If [the ITU decision at WRC-19] is positive, it will clearly open the telecommunications market for HAPS and for Stratobus,” Chessel said June 30 at the Toulouse Space Show. The French-Italian Thales Alenia Space announced Stratobus in April following the receipt of 17 million euros ($19.2 million) in financing from France’s PIA Investing in the Future public bond fund, plus 3 million euros from four regional governments in France that are home to the Stratobus industrial team. Chessel said the industrial partners are financing 60 percent of the development over the next two years, with French government support totaling 40 percent. The commercial version of Stratobus will measure 100 meters in length, as long as an Airbus A380, and 33 meters in diameter at its widest point. Its four electric-powered engines are designed to keep the platform steady at 20 kilometers in altitude in headwinds of up to 90 kilometers per hour. Air density at that altitude is less than half what it is on the ground. It will carry a payload, typically a radar or optical Earth observation sensor, weighing up to 250 kilograms, that will image an areas of between 250 and 300 kilometers for radar applications, and 40-60 kilometers for optical. The top half of Stratobus is transparent material. Attached to the underside of its roof is a solar panel drawing power both from the Sun above, and below from a row of solar power concentrator mirrors lining the floor. The space industry last viewed solar concentrators on the first models of Boeing’s large 702 telecommunications satellite platform. A design flaw caused the concentrators to damage the solar panels and resulted in reduced power, causing large insurance claims for the first batch of satellites. Boeing subsequently dropped the concentrator design, although in the years since then the damage to the satellites in terms of reduced operational life turned out to be less than originally feared. Chessel said the concentrators will triple the amount of solar illumination onto the solar array and provide the 150 kilowatts power day of total power demand for Stratobus, of which 5 kilowatts will be reserved for the payload. Stratobus’s volume is 50,000 cubic meters. Chessel said the pressurized gas will be either helium or hydrogen, with hydrogen preferred because it is less costly to produce and is lighter, saving 300 kilograms over helium. But hydrogen has the downside of requiring special safety procedures. Operating in the tropics with sufficient sunlight year-round, Stratobus could remain on station for up to five years, Chessel said. At more-northern latitudes, the platform would be limited to the spring and summer months and could operate for eight months. Chessel said the current budget is enough to carry the project’s development for two years. A critical design review is planned for 2018, after which a full-size test model could be flown in 2020. Thales Alenia Space has begun the process of Stratobus flight certification with the European Aviation Safety Agency. A new certification category is needed because HAPS platforms like Stratobus fall somewhere in between the existing regulations for balloons and drones. “We expect to have our first contract in 2017 to develop the first proto-flight model,” Chessel said. “It will be paid by the first customer and lead to the production of future flight models. Stratobus is a low-cost product, an order of magnitude less costly than a satellite, plus the fact that we don’t have a launcher. We can take off and land by gas management and we don’t need space-qualified components. Of course, this is a regional product only. It doesn’t provide global coverage like a satellite. The prospects we have today suggest we are going in the right direction in terms of product.”

Apple's iOS 9.3 beta introduces major new features like Night Shift , but there are also dozens of little tweaks to be discovered in the operating system update. It appears that one of those minor changes applies to Wi-Fi Assist, adding a much-needed feature that allows users to see just how much data it's using.Wi-Fi Assist data usage can be checked within the Settings app by choosing the Cellular section and scrolling down to the Wi-Fi Assist option. Next to the toggle that turns the feature on and off, there's now a data usage number that displays how much data has been consumed when it is in use.Wi-Fi Assist was first introduced with iOS 9. It's a feature that allows an iPhone to seamlessly switch over to a cellular connection whenever a local Wi-Fi connection is weak. Enabled automatically when updating to iOS 9, Wi-Fi Assist proved to be unpopular with users who claimed it was eating up a lot of data . One recent news story even accused Wi-Fi Assist of causing a teenager to receive a cell phone bill for upwards of $2,000.Concerns about Wi-Fi Assist led Apple to publish a support document on the feature, explaining how it works and assuring users that data usage should only be a "small percentage higher" than previous usage. Wi-Fi Assist only turns on in a limited number of circumstances and won't activate when data roaming, when apps are downloading background content, or when using third-party apps that stream audio or video.Despite Apple's reassurances about Wi-Fi Assist, unhappy customers filed a $5 million class action lawsuit over the feature, with the plaintiffs claiming they were subjected to overage charges on their iPhones after updating to iOS 9. The lawsuit also claims Apple did not do an adequate job explaining the feature when iOS 9 was released.Wi-Fi Assist is available on any iOS device running iOS 9 or later, with the exception of the iPhone 4s, the iPad 2, the third-generation iPad, and the original iPad mini. Wi-Fi Assist can be turned off using the Settings app for those who don't want to risk using extra data.

NComputing has officially launched the RX300 which is Raspberry Pi 3 based thin client that can run Windows and Linux. It can utilize the cloud, is dual-screen capable and has Wi-Fi. The RX300 will retail for $99 and that price will include a one-year subscription to NComputing’s VSpace 10 platform. For those who are unaware, NComputing specializes in creating virtual desktops to multiple machines. Using this technology, a person will make it easier to manage multiple computers from a single host server. Obviously, larger companies may find it easier to do this manually, but the low price tag makes this an attractive option for mid-range companies that have multiple computers to manage. According to NComputing’s press release, the RX300 will offer full-motion HD video playback, four high-speed USB ports, wi-fi and bluetooth, access to both vSpace and the Linux OS, 8GB of internal memory and 1 GB of RAM, a one-year subscription to VSpace 10, and be compatible with Vcast streaming. In terms of power consumption, NComputing has stated that the RX300 will use less than 5 watts of energy and will feature a sleep mode to save power. Additional options and features will be available for an extra charge and once the yearly subscription has expired, users will be required to purchase a new one to access VSpace 10.

ES Football Newsletter Enter your email address Please enter an email address Email address is invalid Fill out this field Email address is invalid You already have an account. Please log in or register with your social account Arsenal have agreed a new partnership with Universal Pictures that could see the club’s players appear in promotional videos for the latest blockbuster films. The deal will see Arsenal promote a number of the film company’s upcoming releases, including Despicable Me 3. Replicas of the stars of that movie – Minions – have already been involved in promotional activity at the Emirates, where they were paraded on the pitch ahead of the final game of the season. “This partnership with Illumination and Universal Pictures is the first of its kind for the club and one we are extremely excited about,” said Vinai Venkatesham, Arsenal’s chief commercial officer. “It’s a fantastic opportunity for both the club and the studio to be introduced to new audiences and we are already working closely with them to engage with our supporters in the UK and Ireland around their upcoming film releases.” Star names such as Alexis Sanchez and Mesut Ozil could – if they are still at Arsenal – even be asked to take part in unique content or promotional videos for movies. Arsenal are not the first team to agree such a partnership, with Manchester United having had a deal with 20th Century Fox that has seen Wayne Rooney appear in a trailer for X:Men Apocalypse and mascots painted blue for promotional activity, neither of which were well-received by the general public. Universal have also been working on a documentary film about Arsenal’s famous 1989 league title win at Anfield.

The inhabitants of the Crimean peninsula have found a way out of the intricate situation in economics they have had to deal with for 6 months – the Bitcoin payments. As a result of the referendum on the status of Crimea held on March 16, 2014, when the majority of the Crimean population voted for integration of the region into the Russian Federation, the local residents are reported to have started experiencing difficulties accessing essential services, including banking. Michael Chobanian, head of the Ukrainian bitcoin agency KUNA, sees the de-facto separation of Crimea from Ukraine the main reason why the Crimeans started to actively use BTC to purchase goods and items on the Internet. According to Chobanian, Crimea remains completely outside of the international banking system, which means there is no chance at all to conduct any foreign economic activity on the peninsula. The only solution for shopping, payments and financial transactions is the Internet. If you go the usual way, you’ll end up in a bank, standing in a queue to open an account and make a ruble deposit. Then you would have to wait hours in another queue in order to get to the mainland. Once in Krasnodar Krai, you would need to go to another bank, open an account there, and then transfer your funds from a Crimean account to the one you opened in a Krasnodar bank; only then will you eventually be able to effect your payment. “Seems unrealistic for busy people. That is why my colleagues from Sevastopol and Simferopol switched to Bitcoin payments; they purchase BTC with rubles and then pay for whatever they need with Bitcoin” – Chobanian sums up.

After dropping hints for months, Amazon is finally releasing the Amazon Fire TV Stick in Germany, Austria, and the UK. Pre-orders are now live for all three countries, and the device will be released on April 15th. The Fire TV Stick will sell for £35 in the UK and 39 EUR in Germany and Austria. Just like the Stick’s US launch, Prime members can pre-order the device now at a discounted price. Existing Prime members in the UK will pay just £19 and German Prime members will pay just 19 EUR if they place their order in the next 2 days. What’s different from the US release is the availability of an even better price for new Prime members. If you sign up for a new Prime membership, you can pre-order the Fire TV Stick for just £7 in the UK and 7 EUR in in Germany and Austria. Amazon will be enforcing that new Prime members pay their membership fee before receiving the initial discount. New Prime members will not receive the additional discount if they cancel their membership after the free 30 day trial ends. The Fire TV Stick was the fastest selling product ever when it was released in the US. The device was back ordered for months after it was launched. Get your orders in early, because with these great pre-order discounts it won’t be a surprise if history repeats itself for the Fire TV Stick’s international release. Follow AFTVnews on Twitter / Facebook and subscribe via email to be the first to learn when new articles go live. Follow me, Elias Saba, on Twitter and Instagram to see what I'm working on before it's posted here. ShareTweetShare+1

Photos and Video of Derek Fisher DUI Crash Released…He’s Lucky to Be Alive (Pics + Video) Video Playback Not Supported Judging from the newly released photos of his wrecked SUV, Derek Fisher and girlfriend Gloria Govan are lucky to be alive. Fisher was behind the wheel of his 2015 Cadillac Escalade when he crashed into a guard rail on the 101 freeway in Los Angeles around 3 a.m. on Sunday morning. The vehicle flipped, but thankfully both he and Govan were buckled in and the airbags deployed, likely saving their lives. Both walked away without injury. TMZ obtained photos of the SUV, which suffered major damage on both the driver and passenger sides. Take a look: TMZ also obtained video footage of the crash site shot by someone driving by early Sunday morning: I’d say Matt Barnes must be loving this, except he probably isn’t. More likely his anger at Fisher is at an all-time high. Now, not only did Fisher “steal” his girl, the mother of his children, he almost killed her by driving drunk. Of course, Fisher now has much bigger problems than Matt Barnes. He’s facing a serious DUI charge that could derail whatever chance he had of getting another NBA coaching gig. Hat Tip – [TMZ] Tags: Share This

Perhaps the main reason why Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary spoke to a Fine Gael “business breakfast” last week – a private fundraising event for the party – was because he wants backing for Ryanair to provide a third terminal at Dublin Airport and no involvement of the State-owned Dublin Airport Authority. But he said a lot more at that breakfast, organised by a south Dublin branch of Fine Gael in the Shelbourne Hotel. O’Leary revelled in a coarse, hectoring and hate-filled discourse that would make Donald Trump proud, and his primary targets were public servants; those, who according to Minister for Finance Michael Noonan in December 2013 as Ireland prepared to exit the bailout, are among “the real heroes and heroines” of Ireland’s austerity programme and who endured, in his words, “serious pay cuts”. Why do Noonan and his colleagues then provide a platform for O’Leary to eviscerate those same public servants, and not only that, but positively encourage it? Why is Fine Gael so keen to fawn over O’Leary? Noonan is reported as having introduced O’Leary as “Ireland’s leading altogether decent man”. Minister for Foreign Affairs Charles Flanagan publicly, via his Twitter account, expressed his delight at soaking up O’Leary’s rants: “great start today listening to Michael O’Leary sound off in flying form”. Troubling O’Leary enjoys calling himself an “obnoxious little bollocks”, but the main Government party encouraging him is a more troubling issue. Fine Gael, according to itself, is a “party of the progressive centre”. Speaking at the unveiling of the budget on Tuesday, Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Paschal Donohoe solemnly announced: “Those of us in the middle ground of politics have a duty to show that co-operation and consensus can work; to show that our tone can be moderate.” In relation to its fundraising, the party asserts: “All monies fundraised will be used for electoral purposes and referenda campaigns as no statutory funds are permitted to be used for these purposes.” So the money raised by O’Leary’s attacks on public servants and his aggressive privatisation agenda is to assist the electoral fortunes of Fine Gael. Why is Fine Gael so comfortable with this? Is it because, in reality, it sees O’Leary as an ideological soulmate; a perfect fit for a party that talks centre but thinks right? By all accounts, the several Ministers present at the braggarts’ breakfast did not shift uncomfortably at RTÉ being described as a “rat-infested North Korean union shop” and the singling out of an individual RTÉ journalist for abuse; or with the demand that gardaí campaigning for pay restoration be sacked, or with the insistence that the health and transport services should be entirely privatised, or with the contention that Dublin city centre has been destroyed through “nonsensical pandering to bloody cyclists”. All very juvenile and best to be shrugged off, it could be argued, as O’Leary likes being an Irish Trump and savours the attendant publicity, but why should Fine Gael go unchallenged in contributing to and endorsing a destructive pitching of public against private sector which has been a hallmark of reaction to the Irish economic crisis of recent years? Political backing O’Leary knows nothing about public service. Born to the silver spoon, he was a Clongowes Wood College boy and a student at Trinity College Dublin where he lived in a family-owned apartment before he began his private business enterprises. O’Leary was a poor financial adviser to Ryanair founder Tony Ryan, advising him to close the airline, or else sell it to Aer Lingus. But where would O’Leary be without State support and public money? Ryan sought political backing to withstand Aer Lingus’s predatory pricing and Charles Haughey obliged, with Ryanair getting a free run at Stansted Airport through a demarcation of the routes between the two airlines. Ryan also secured State subsidies in return for serving provincial airports and in 1992, rent breaks for Ryanair’s headquarters at Dublin Airport. Another part of the Ryanair history not dwelt on by its champions is how the State-owned Aer Rianta contributed to the saving of the airline in its early days by writing off more than £1 million (€0.9 milliom) in landing charges and other fees and the renegotiating of deals at Cork and Shannon. These layers to the Ryanair story are now banished in favour of the macho O’Leary soundbites, such as “there is no principle that can’t be overturned for competitive reasons”. Likewise, it appears there are no depths to which the unprincipled O’Leary will not reach to excoriate public servants. Long ago he coined his own expletive – “bolloxology” – which, he explained, “should be liberally used in one-to-one print media interviews when referring to any procedure that other airlines claim is complex”. In juvenile, privileged and elite O’Leary-land there are no complexities; it is all a simple matter of money, market dominance and pathetic public servants that Fine Gael seems happy to laugh at too.

Qualification: There will be 4 separate BO1 Single Elimination Qualification Events: Qualifier 1: Sunday, 26th of January 2014 - 13:00 CET (Signups close at 12:00 CET) Qualifier 2: Sunday, 2nd of February 2014 - 13:00 CET (Signups close at 12:00 CET) Qualifier 3: Sunday, 9th of February 2014 - 13:00 CET (Signups close at 12:00 CET) Qualifier 4: Sunday, 16th of February 2014 - 13:00 CET (Signups close at 12:00 CET) Points: The point distribution changes dependent on the amount of teams that have signed up for a qualification event. 33-64 Teams: 17-32 Teams: 9-16 Teams: 5-8 Teams: : The qualifier is cancelled if 4 or less Teams sign up. Each signed up team receives 1 point.Team captains, (and nobody else) must join the ingame channel SwissLegends at 12:45 o clock on the day of the qualifier. We reserve the right to disqualify teams that are not on time.The tournament bracket will be published at 12:45 CET on the day of the qualifier.Teams in the upper position on the tournament tree have first pick.The team with first pick opens a Custom Game in tournament draft mode with a random password and invites the captain of the enemy team, who will communicate the names of the other members of his team.The pause function can be used in case of disconnects only if no fights are happening! If a pause is used this is to be communicated to the tournament administration after the match.In case of abuse to achieve an advantage the offending team willbe disqualified.The winning team has to submit a screenshot of the aftergame lobby to the ingame channel SwissLegends. (Snipping Tool and imgur.com are recommended)If a team wishes to have a break between matches, this has to be discussed with their next opponent and the tournament administration. Team captains that are absent without informing the administration risk disqualification of their team.: Each Team signing up for a qualifier will be able to specify 6 players. During the respective qualifier, the team can freely swap out between these 6 players, but not with any players not specified during signup. At every following qualifier or at the Finals, the teams will once again be able to specifiy 6 players. HOWEVER, 5 out of these 6 players must have been specified at the original signup to qualify as the same team that earned points in any previous events.All Teams need to consist of 100% players that are living in switzerland. All players in any team that break this rule knowingly will be exempt from any further events. This rule includes all 6 players.The first qualifier will be seeded randomly. Every following qualifier will be seeded according to points the teams have already scored.The 8 Teams with the highest amount of points out of all 4 Qualification events will be participating in the finals on. Should any team not be able to participate, the next team in the ranking will be qualified. In case of a tie, a Best of 1 will be played between the tied teams.The detailed schedule will be published shortly after the final qualifier.THERE ARE NO PRIZES FOR THE QUALIFIER EVENTS!All prizes refer to the finals that will be played on Sunday, the 23rd of February 2014 at 13:00 CET.1. Place - 3200 Riot Points + Ryze Skin for all 5 players of the team + 1x150 Swiss francs2. Place - 2400 Riot Points for all 5 players of the team + 1x50 Swiss francs.3. Place - 1600 Riot Points for all 5 players of the team4. Place - 800 Riot Points for all 5 players of the teamRiot points and skins will be distributed by Riot Games. The cash prize will be transferred to the team captain. Further distribution is the concern of the team captains.Should this format be a success, Qualifiers for Swiss Legends #4 will begin on March 2nd, 2014. The best 4 teams from the Finals will automatically be qualified for the next finals and do not need to participate in qualifiers.Copy and paste the form below the line and complete it with the according information about your team. Teams can only sign up for the current qualifier., even if this leaves their score below 0. Teams can withdraw from a signup until the signup closes. However, all withdrawals are final.Submit the filled out sign up sheet in this thread or mail it to us:

TULSA -- Police are investigating after two separate shootings in Tulsa Thursday evening. Police say a man has died after possibly accidentally shooting himself in north Tulsa. The shooting happened on the 1000 block of North Delaware Place. Police say the second shooting happened on the 1600 block of East Virgin Street. According to police, a woman was shot during a possible domestic disturbance. The woman was taken to the hospital by EMSA medics in emergent condition and is currently undergoing surgery. Stay in touch with us anytime, anywhere. Download our free app for Apple and Android and Kindle devices. Sign up for newsletters emailed to your inbox. Select from these options: Breaking News, Severe Weather, School Closings, Daily Headlines and Daily Forecasts. Follow us on Twitter : Like us on Facebook :

WASHINGTON -- A Tennessee state legislator has introduced a bill to make the Bible the official state book, after two other Southern states considered similar moves in recent months. State Rep. Jerry Sexton (R) put forward his legislation Tuesday. He did not return a request for additional comment. Last month, legislators in Mississippi introduced two bills to designate the Bible as the state book. "The Bible provides a good role model on how to treat people," said Mississippi state Rep. Tom Miles (D), one of the cosponsors of that state's legislation. "They could read in there about love and compassion." A similar measure in Louisiana last year sparked a significant amount of controversy, with critics arguing that it would violate the separation of church and state. Other said it would trivialize the religious text. The sponsor of that bill eventually pulled it before it could go to the full floor for a vote. Although Tennessee doesn't have a state book, it does have a state fruit (the tomato), mineral (agate) and wild animal (raccoon). Want more updates from Amanda? Sign up for her newsletter, Piping Hot Truth.

The Obama administration on Thursday blocked development of a copper and nickel mine near a popular wilderness area in northern Minnesota, saying the project could poison the vast web of lakes, streams and wetlands that crosshatch the region. Acting with just five weeks left in the administration, federal agencies refused to renew leases held by a mining company just outside — and upstream from — the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, along the Canadian border. Officials also took steps that could lead to a much larger area being put off limits to mining. The company, Twin Metals Minnesota, sued the government in federal court in September, anticipating a possible rejection and arguing that it had an absolute right to the lease renewals. Twin Metals, a subsidiary of Antofagasta of Chile, one of the world’s largest mining firms, has said it had planned to invest more than $5 billion in building the mine. It was not clear whether the incoming Trump administration, which has vowed to eliminate regulations that hinder economic development, would try to reverse the decision.

Oh boy was this damn hard to crack. Ok, I believe before it was established before that Aperture Science headquarters are in Cleveland, OH. Source: HL2EP2 Though, this has been found. Source: Portal 2 It can be assumed that the Enrichment Center is there, as there is an underground mine in the game. Now here's the catch: Not only are there no salt mines in the Upper Peninsula, the surface as seen at the end of Portal 2 is flat with wheat growing. The UP is very mountainous, so it is impossible that it is flat for miles and miles. Also, no wheat is going to naturally grow there, it is too damn cold. Also, Michigan only has ever had one salt mine. (Source: Michigan State University, Lansing MI) We can either call paradox or assume the newspaper fudged up and meant to say Lower Michigan. Taking that into consideration, Aperture Science bought said mine from the Detroit Salt Company in January 1944. (Source: That Newspaper article from the game. The number 1944 is very hard to read.) So, see this map from Detroit Free Press. That is the location of the Salt Mine. Unless Valve wants to call a sensible location, I am the first person to pinpoint the exact location of where Portal takes place. So, is the field of wheat at the end of the game possible? Yes. Although this is Downtown Detroit, enough time has taken place for all the standing buildings to be gone. First of all, Half-Life takes place in 2003. (Proof below) Source: Half-Life A December like that only happened in 03 and 08. Also, in the book Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar, a note by the series's writer mentions the date March 31, 2003. HL2 takes place 20 years later, making that 2023. Portal happens around the same time as HL2. The minimum amount of time that Chell could have been in hibernation is 2.4 years, so Portal 2 takes place during 2025 or later. (The wake up call tries to specify the amount of days in hibernation, but just repeats 9, so 900 days is reasonable. No facility will decay in 90 days) 29401 AD is also plausible. (9999999/365.25+2029) For many possibilities, it is long enough for the buildings to just plain fall apart. Even for 2025, The Combine may have turned Detroit into scrap metal. Though, Valve really needs to do the research to make this make more sense.

A resolution introduced in the U.S. Senate on Tuesday aims to roll back privacy rules for broadband service providers that were approved by the Federal Communications Commission in October. The rules include the requirement that internet service providers like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon should obtain “opt-in” consent from consumers to use and share sensitive personal information such as geolocation and web browsing history, and also give customers the option to opt out from the sharing of non-sensitive information such as email addresses or service tier information. The rules have been opposed by internet service providers who argue that they are being treated differently from other Internet entities like search engines and social networking companies. The providers secured a win last week when the now Republican-dominated FCC decided that the operation of the data security provisions would be temporarily halted in view of a stay petition by providers. The data protection rules were to come into force last Thursday. The new resolution introduced by Senator Jeff Flake, a Republican from Arizona, is backed by over 20 Republican co-sponsors. It aims to provide for congressional disapproval of the FCC rule relating to ‘‘Protecting the Privacy of Customers of Broadband and Other Telecommunications Services’’ under the Congressional Review Act, a 1996 law that empowers Congress to repeal federal regulations, according to a statement issued by Flake, who is also chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law. The resolution under the CRA would also prevent the FCC from issuing “similarly harmful regulations” in the future, it added. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, who on Tuesday was nominated for a second term five-year term at the agency by President Donald Trump, favors uniform rules on privacy for Internet companies, with the Federal Trade Commission rather than the FCC setting those rules. His renomination requires Senate confirmation. “The federal government shouldn’t favor one set of companies over another—and certainly not when it comes to a marketplace as dynamic as the internet,” Pai said in a joint statement last week with FTC Acting Chairman Maureen K. Ohlhausen. In an op-ed this month, Flake wrote that by reclassifying in 2015 internet service providers as common carriers, subject to Title II of the Communications Act, the FCC had stripped the FTC of its jurisdiction over the privacy practices of ISPs. The reclassification of broadband as a public regulated utility was part of a move by the previous administration of President Barack Obama to preserve net neutrality in the country. The FTC has no real regulatory power to protect the privacy of Americans once they turn 13 and are no longer covered by a 1998 children’s privacy law, said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy in Washington, in an emailed statement. The Flake resolution has been opposed by civil rights groups as well as Democrats in Congress. Electronic Frontier Foundation has called on people to call up their senators and their representatives to tell them to oppose the use of the CRA to roll back the FCC’s new rules about ISP privacy practices. The use of the CRA would allow Congress to overturn the privacy rules with just a majority vote in both chambers, without the opportunity for members to filibuster, said the American Civil Liberties Union. It would also ban the FCC from issuing rules that are “substantially the same,” raising “serious questions about the FCC’s ability to protect consumer’s online privacy in the future,” wrote Nathaniel Turner, lobbyist assistant at ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office. “The Republican leadership—working on behalf of the nation’s largest cable and phone companies—wants to strip Americans of important protections on how their most sensitive information can be used,” Chester said. He warned that the leading broadband ISPs have developed “Big Data collection practices” that gather and analyze personal information when people are on PC’s, mobile devices and increasingly even while viewing TV.

Donald Trump speaks to supporters at his primary election night event at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla., on March 15. (Gerald Herbert/AP) A group of rabbis is planning to boycott Donald Trump’s speech next week before a leading pro-Israel advocacy group, a sign of growing unease among many Jewish leaders about the populist campaign being waged by the Republican presidential front-runner. About 40 rabbis have said that they plan to participate in the protest of Trump’s appearance Monday at the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, according to an organizer. The planned demonstration comes as members of the Republican Jewish Coalition, a group of major GOP donors, is expected to debate how to deal with Trump during its annual meeting next month in Las Vegas. The concerns being expressed by many Jewish leaders go beyond Trump’s controversial pledge to be “neutral” during peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians — and extend to fears of Trump’s style and approach to power. Some say they hear echoes of a painful past under fascism in Trump’s recent comments appearing to praise authoritarian figures such as Russian President Vladi­mir Putin and in the way that Trump stokes economic anger among his supporters. And they point to Trump’s call for a ban on Muslims entering the United States and his harsh rhetoric on illegal Mexican migrants as reminiscent of the anti-immigrant sentiment that greeted European Jews in generations past. “These are the darkest days for Republican Jews like myself,” former George W. Bush speechwriter Noam Neusner wrote in a column this month in the Forward, a Jewish newspaper. He wrote that Trump “has built within our party the nearest thing America has ever seen to a European nativist working-class political movement. Such movements, to put it mildly, have never been good for the Jews or allies of free thought and the free market.” Speaking at the Republican Jewish Coalition candidate forum on Dec. 3, Donald Trump drew the ire of a few audience members when he wouldn't clarify whether he recognized Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel. (Reuters) Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks said in a statement that Trump “has a long history of being a strong supporter of Israel” and has “made significant contributions to a variety of Jewish related causes over the years.” Organizers of the push to boycott Trump’s AIPAC speech said they are worried that Trump could gain legitimacy through the event and want to deny him a chance to present the invitation as a tacit sign of approval. The organizers said they don’t know how many rabbis will ultimately participate. Those who have signed on so far primarily represent the Reform and Conservative movements of Judaism, whose followers tend to lean left politically. Jeffrey Salkin, a Hollywood, Fla., rabbi helping to organize the boycott, said he and other rabbis were alarmed about Trump’s behavior and rhetoric on the campaign trail. “Jewish history teaches that when hatred is unleashed, it takes on a life of its own,” Salkin said. Salkin said the effort was an attempt to head off “more radical” protest suggestions, including walkouts and jeers, and provide an outlet for those “both nauseated and terrified” by Trump. An AIPAC spokesman declined to comment on the reaction to Trump’s appearance. Leaders of the organization have said they have a policy of inviting all active presidential candidates to speak to the group to ensure that “our community develops a constructive relationship with whomever wins their respective party nomination and thus could be elected president.” Trump’s GOP rivals, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who has blasted Trump’s statements on Israel, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, are also scheduled to appear at the AIPAC conference. Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton and Vice President Biden will speak there as well. [Why Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz think Israel is a winning issue against Donald Trump] Trump’s appearance presents an opportunity for the billionaire candidate as he seeks to be seen as the legitimate leader of the Republican Party. Trump holds a wide lead in the nomination battle but faces hostility and opposition from many GOP leaders and the country’s foreign policy establishment, which has voiced concerns over Trump’s views on Israel, his support for torture, and an apparent lack of a team of knowledgeable advisers. In addressing the annual Washington policy conference hosted by AIPAC, which has strong ties to both parties, Trump has a rare chance to show that he can deliver a substantive speech away from the raucous rallies that have become a signature of his campaign and contributed to the anxieties of his critics. Nathan Diament, executive director of public policy for the Orthodox Union, called the AIPAC speech a “critical moment” for Trump. “He won’t just be improvising an answer to a question on a debate stage. This is a planned speech. People are going to be looking to this as his definitive statement on his attitude toward Israel,” Diament said. “The audience in the room and the audience tuning in will be a sophisticated audience. They’re going to be looking for Trump to be specific. Trump just saying, ‘believe me,’ is not going to be sufficient.” Trump’s rise has caused particular consternation among Republican Jewish leaders, who had hoped that lingering discomfort with President Obama’s policies on Israel and the Iran nuclear deal embraced by Clinton might lead to GOP gains in November among the traditionally pro-Democratic Jewish electorate. Even a slight shift could be pivotal in battleground states with heavy Jewish populations, such as Florida and Ohio. Some said they have cringed as Trump has repeatedly likened the Israel-Palestinian negotiations to the real estate deals that he has brokered over his career. In a December interview with the Associated Press, he questioned Israel’s commitment to peace and refused to back an undivided Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, a red line for many GOP Israel supporters. “I have a real question as to whether or not both sides want to make it,” Trump said. “A lot will have to do with Israel and whether or not Israel wants to make the deal — whether or not Israel’s willing to sacrifice certain things.” Trump failed to allay concerns during an awkward December appearance before the Republican Jewish Coalition. As many in the audience sat stunned, Trump suggested that he might not win the support of many in the room because he did not want their money. He also said he was best positioned to get a Middle East peace deal because he’s a negotiator, “like you folks.” “I’d like to go with a clean slate and just say just, let’s go, everybody’s even, we love everybody and let’s see if we can do something,” he told the crowd, adding, “Just relax, okay? You’ll like me very much, believe me.” [Donald Trump struggles with Israel question at Republican Jewish summit] He has reiterated his neutrality comments through speeches and debates, arguing that appearing to strongly favor one side over the other would hamper his ability to broker an agreement. “I’m a negotiator,” he said during a debate in Miami last week. “If I go in, I’ll say I’m pro-Israel and I’ve told that to everybody and anybody that would listen. But I would like to at least have the other side think I’m somewhat neutral as to them, so that we can maybe get a deal done.” Still, Trump has sought to assure Jews and other Israel supporters, including evangelical Christians who make up a core segment of his GOP base. He describes himself as “totally pro-Israel” and has said that he has donated large amounts of money to support the Jewish state. He has cited his role as the grand marshal of a pro-Israel parade in New York City in 2004 and his receipt of the Tree of Life award from the Jewish National Fund, which supports building infrastructure and planting trees in Israel. A spokesman for the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, which now organizes the parade, did not respond to requests for comment. A longtime JNF official, Howard Ingram, said the group’s New York real estate committee gave Trump its Tree of Life award in the early 1980s in part to acknowledge his ability to raise money. During the Miami debate, he mentioned his personal connections to the faith, referring to his daughter Ivanka, who converted to Judaism when she married Jared Kushner, who is a member of a prominent Orthodox family. “I happen to have a son-in-law and a daughter that are Jewish, okay? And two grandchildren that are Jewish,” he said. Hicks, his campaign spokeswoman, added that “many of [Trump’s] top executives and closest friends are Jewish” and “there will be no one stronger on Israeli American relations than him, and his consistent support and advocacy for Israel over many years is proof of this.” Ari Fleischer, a former Bush administration official who also sits on the board of the Republican Jewish Coalition, said Trump’s seemingly confused messages have given “normally reliably Republican Jewish voters reasons to doubt him and question him.” “The term ‘neutrality’ is a terrible buzzword,” Fleischer said. “It’s fraught with the language of the left, that is anti-Israel. So it’s hard to accept this proposition that he’s pro-Israel when he uses such a misguided word.” Fleischer said Trump’s references to the New York parade and his JNF award are not sufficient to soothe concerns. “That has a lot more to do with his wallet than his heart,” Fleischer said. The Israel issue is a particularly important one to a group of deep-pocketed Republican donors, many of them affiliated with the Republican Jewish Coalition, who had rallied around Trump’s opponents, particularly Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. With Rubio out of the presidential race, it remains unclear whether they will acclimate themselves to Trump. Fleischer said there is an active conversation within the RJC about the proper response to Trump, one that will likely dominate the group’s annual meeting in Las Vegas next month. Much of the focus will be on GOP mega-donor Sheldon Adelson, the casino mogul and RJC backer who is aligned with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Adelson has not endorsed in the race, and his spokesman declined to comment. However, Adelson met with Trump in December and declared in an interview with Reuters that he found Trump to be “very charming.” An Israeli blogger, Tal Schneider, reported this week that she had obtained video of Adelson at a fundraiser honoring former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani in Las Vegas on Feb. 27, in which Adelson said: “Trump is a businessman. I am a businessman. He employs a lot of people. I employed 50,000 people. Why not?” An Israeli newspaper owned by Adelson also this week published an interview with Trump conducted after his Tuesday night primary victories, in which Trump declared that his success was “tremendous news for Israel.” “Your friend is leading in the primaries,” Trump told the newspaper’s reporter, who covered his post-election celebration in Palm Beach. “I’ve always been your friend, even at the toughest moments. And that’s not going to change. I love you.” For others, Trump’s broader ideology and leadership style could be a non-starter. “What I hear from the Jewish community is that he’s odious and he’s a bully, and in so far as he expresses a point of view about anything, it’s usually something they disagree with,” said Neusner, the former Bush speechwriter who also served as White House liaison to the Jewish community. Neusner called Trump’s proposed religious test for immigration “a black line” in a community only a generation or two removed from the immigrant experience. “It strikes people as amoral,” he said. “It’s not something that matters only to Republican Jews or Democratic Jews or independent Jews. It’s deeply ingrained.” Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders was scheduled to address AIPAC. An earlier version also incorrectly referred to Israeli blogger Tal Schneider as he instead of she.

If it can happen in show business, it's happened to Jon Cryer. Now he's opening up for the first time and sharing his behind-the-scenes stories in a warmly endearing, sharply observed, and frankly funny look at life in Hollywood. In 1986 Jon Cryer won over America as Molly Ringwald's loyal and lovable best friend, Duckie, in the cult classic Pretty in Pink, in a role that set the tone for his three-decade-long career in Hollywood. He went on to establish himself as one of the most talented comedic actors in the business, ultimately culminating in his current turn as Alan Harper on the massively popular sitcom Two and a Half Men. With the instincts of a natural storyteller, Cryer charts his extraordinary journey in show business, illuminating his many triumphs and some missteps along the way. Filled with exclusive behind-the-scenes anecdotes, Cryer offers his own endearing perspective on Hollywood, the business at large, and the art of acting. Cryer has worked with some of the biggest and most provocative names in the business, and here, for the first time, he details his experiences with Charlie Sheen, John Hughes, Robert Altman, Molly Ringwald, Demi Moore, Judd Nelson, and Christopher Reeve, among many others. He shares the intimate details of his friendships and relationships, pays tribute to his mentors, and explores the peculiar combination of heart, talent, and wisdom it takes to survive not just the bad times in a notoriously fickle industry but even the good times. In this revealing, humorous, and introspective memoir, Cryer offers listeners a front-row seat as he reminisces about his life and experiences in showbiz over the past 30 years.

The mountain of broken down televisions and computer screens caught fire at around 11 o'clock in the morning, sending a thick plume of grey smoke over the tiny Utah town of Parowan. Soon, about ten fire trucks from neighboring towns Paragonah and Brian joined local firefighters on the scene, and authorities shut down an entire mile of Interstate 15. The firefighters extinguished the blaze within a few hours, but the larger danger remains. The March 2 fire was just one symptom of enormous problem that's spreading across the country. As we move to flat screen TVs and computer displays, we're discarding our big, bulky old school televisions and CRT monitors, and they're piling up in warehouses like the one that caught fire in Parowan, with nowhere to go. These discarded screens aren't just a fire hazard. They're filled with lead and other toxic materials. In California alone, more than 100 million pounds of leaded CRT monitors glass is recovered each year, according to CalRecycle, the state's recycling agency. In some states, recycling programs have provided cash incentives for companies to haul away junky old monitors and TVs, but there's almost no secondary market for the biggest parts of these monitors. So they just sit there, in massive piles. Over the past year, at least a half dozen warehouses filled with CRT debris have been abandoned in places like Baltimore, Cincinnati, Denver, and Yuma, Arizona. The stockpile in Parowan, Utah had not been abandoned, but just months earlier, state environmental officials had ordered its owner, Stone Castle Recycling, to move the waste out of the facility because of environmental code violations. Environmentalists say there's no obvious solution to the problem, but that means it's time for the government to step in. At the very least, we need a place where this growing pile of glass and lead can be cleaned and stored until we know what to do with it. We need a Yucca Mountain for all our CRTs. Billions of Pounds of Leaded Glass ———————————- If you've ever hauled one of the bulky monitors that were universal before the advent of flat panel displays, you'll know that they are remarkably heavy. That's because, behind the screen, there's a big funnel of heavy leaded glass designed to be sturdy and to protect consumers from radiation leakage. The glass is recyclable, and for awhile, U.S. recyclers were able to ship it off for reuse in other countries. But today, there are only a handful of places that will accept this leaded glass. There's a lead smelter in Mississippi, and two more in Canada. And an Indian company, Videocon, is buying it too. But the pipeline of abandoned CRTs is spewing out far more leaded glass than the market can bear. "Nowadays, everything is flat panels. There's just no use for the glass," says Earl Campbell, owner of E-Waste Harvesters in Phoenix. "What you're left with is this glass that you literally have to pay to get rid of." >Over the past year, at least a half dozen warehouses filled with CRT debris have been abandoned in places like Baltimore, Cincinnati, Denver, and Yuma, Arizona. Ten years ago, Videocon was paying recyclers between $100 and $200 a ton for their leaded glass, says Jeff Hunts, a manager with CalRecycle. Today, recyclers have to pay Videocon $100 to $200 per ton just to take the glass away. California pays recycling companies about $10 per monitor to haul away these old school TVs. Typically, they're moved to processing facilities where they can bet stripped of copper, plastic, and circuit boards. The recycling companies can sell all of this waste, but that still leaves the leaded glass in the CRTs. And getting rid of that costs money. So, instead, companies simply store the old monitors or glass in warehouses – warehouses that are increasingly being abandoned. One company – Dow Management – was paid by about ten California recycling companies to haul away about 10 million tons of old monitors and TVs over a three-year period. According to Hunts and Arizona state officials, Dow stuffed them into a warehouses Los Angeles and Arizona, and simply walked away from the toxic glass, leaving the California recyclers and local officials to clean up the mess. Dow's website is still active, but the company didn't respond to an emailed request for comment and a number listed on the website has been disconnected. Stat officials believe that its operators have fled the country. A National Junk Monitor Graveyard? ———————————- The recycling trade publication Resource Recycling has recorded a mini-boom in abandoned warehouses stuffed with old CRT monitors, each one a miniature ecological disaster for local officials, says Jerry Powell, executive editor with Resource Recycling. The numbers add up: 1,500 tons in Cincinnati; 8,000 tons in Denver; 10,000 tons in Halsted Pennsylvania and Vestal New York; 3,000 giant "gaylord" boxes in Baltimore Maryland. "It's a nationwide problem," says Powell. Resource Recycling expects Videocon will stop accepting leaded glass altogether within five years, but people are still throwing out their monitors. Because many of these facilities include mountains of broken leaded glass, they're all mini environmental disasters in the making. Lead can leech into the water system and can cause organ damage when ingested by humans. So what to do? Jim Puckett, founder of the Basel Action Network, the environmental watchdog group that has most carefully watched this situation, says we should clean the glass and then basically bank it for the future. That is to say, storing it in "carefully prepared landfill cells," where it cannot leech out and damage the local environment. To do that, though, will most likely take federal action by an agency such as the Environmental Protection Agency. An EPA spokeswoman didn't have any immediate comment for this story. Puckett's idea is not a long-term solution, but it's better than the toxic surprises that are popping up over the country right now. "I think we need to sequester it," he says. "It is glass and it is lead and some day someone might be able to find a use for that stuff." "Of course the ultimate solution is to design products with end-of-life in mind," he says.

The Smell Report Emotion The perception of smell consists not only of the sensation of the odours themselves but of the experiences and emotions associated with these sensations. Smells can evoke strong emotional reactions. In surveys on reactions to odours, responses show that many of our olfactory likes and dislikes are based purely on emotional associations. The association of fragrance and emotion is not an invention of poets or perfume-makers. Our olfactory receptors are directly connected to the limbic system, the most ancient and primitive part of the brain, which is thought to be the seat of emotion. Smell sensations are relayed to the cortex, where ‘cognitive’ recognition occurs, only after the deepest parts of our brains have been stimulated. Thus, by the time we correctly name a particular scent as, for example, ‘vanilla’ , the scent has already activated the limbic system, triggering more deep-seated emotional responses. Mood-effects Although there is convincing evidence that pleasant fragrances can improve our mood and sense of well-being, some of these findings should be viewed with caution. Recent studies have shown that our expectations about an odour, rather than any direct effects of exposure to it, may sometimes be responsible for the mood and health benefits reported. In one experiment, researchers found that just telling subjects that a pleasant or unpleasant odour was being administered, which they might not be able to smell, altered their self-reports of mood and well-being. The mere mention of a positive odour reduced reports of symptoms related to poor health and increased reports of positive mood! More reliable results have been obtained, however, from experiments using placebos (odourless sprays). These studies have demonstrated that although subjects do respond to some extent to odourless placebos which they think are fragrances, the effect of the real thing is significantly greater. The thought of pleasant fragrances may be enough to make us a bit more cheerful, but the actual smell can have dramatic effects in improving our mood and sense of well-being. Although olfactory sensitivity generally declines with age, pleasant fragrances have been found to have positive effects on mood in all age groups. In experiments involving stimulation of the left and right nostrils with pleasant and unpleasant fragrances, researchers have found differences in olfactory cortical neurone activity in the left and right hemispheres of the brain which correlate with the ‘pleasantness ratings’ of the odorants. These studies are claimed to indicate that positive emotions are predominantly processed by the left hemisphere of the brain, while negative emotions are more often processed by the right hemisphere. (The ‘pleasant’ odorant used in these experiments, as in many others, was vanillin.) Perception effects The positive emotional effects of pleasant fragrances also affect our perceptions of other people. In experiments, subjects exposed to pleasant fragrances tend to give higher ‘attractiveness ratings’ to people in photographs, although some recent studies have shown that these effects are only significant where there is some ambiguity in the pictures. If a person is clearly outstandingly beautiful, or extremely ugly, fragrance does not affect our judgement. But if the person is just ‘average’, a pleasant fragrance will tip the balance of our evaluation in his or her favour. So, the beautiful models used to advertise perfume probably have no need of it, but the rest of us ordinary mortals might well benefit from a spray or two of something pleasant. Beauty is in the nose of the beholder. Unpleasant smells can also affect our perceptions and evaluations. In one study, the presence of an unpleasant odour led subjects not only to give lower ratings to photographed individuals, but also to judge paintings as less professional. The mood-improving effects of pleasant smells may not always work to our advantage: by enhancing our positive perceptions and emotions, pleasant scents can cloud our judgement. In an experiment in a Las Vegas casino, the amount of money gambled in a slot machine increased by over 45% when the site was odorised with a pleasant aroma! In another study – a consumer test of shampoos – a shampoo which participants ranked last on general performance in an initial test, was ranked first in a second test after its fragrance had been altered. In the second test, participants said that the shampoo was easier to rinse out, foamed better and left the hair more glossy. Only the fragrance had been changed. Scent-preferences Scent-preferences are often a highly personal matter, to do with specific memories and associations. In one survey, for example, responses to the question ‘What are your favourite smells?’ included many odours generally regarded as unpleasant (such as gasoline and body perspiration), while some scents usually perceived as pleasant (such as flowers) were violently disliked by certain respondents. These preferences were explained by good and bad experiences associated with particular scents. Despite these individual peculiarities, we can make some significant generalisations about smell-preference. For example, experiments have shown that we tend to ‘like what we know’: people give higher pleasantness ratings to smells which they are able to identify correctly. There are also some fragrances which appear to be universally perceived as ‘pleasant’ – such as vanilla, an increasingly popular ingredient in perfumes which has long been a standard ‘pleasant odour’ in psychological experiments (see Vanilla). A note for perfume-marketers: one of the studies showing our tendency to prefer scents that we can identify correctly also showed that the use of an appropriate colour can help us to make the correct identification, thus increasing our liking for the fragrance. The scent of cherries, for example, was accurately identified more often when presented along with the colour red – and subjects’ ability to identify the scent significantly enhanced their rating of its pleasantness.

Philadelphia Phillies second baseman Scott Kingery makes a diving grab on a ground ball in the sixth inning March 3 against the Minnesota Twins during spring training at Spectrum Field. (Photo: Butch Dill-USA TODAY Sports) CLEARWATER, Fla. – Every spring there tends to be a player who emerges in camp, delivering a performance that enthralls the team and fans. For the Phillies this year, second baseman Scott Kingery, has been that guy. He has made stellar defensive plays, hit for power and shown speed on the bases. Although he's yet to play above Double-A Reading, he has been treated like any other young player in the Phillies' clubhouse. First baseman Tommy Joseph is trying to create a fun handshake for the two to use, centered on Kingery's nickname "Scotty Jetpax." "Nothing that's camera worthy yet," Joseph joked. "Still in the trial stages." Kingery picked up the nickname at the University of Arizona. He stole home in a game after which a teammate proclaimed he was so fast it appeared he was wearing jetpacks. The nickname stuck. He even uses it for his Twitter handle (@ScottyJetpax25). That's where Joseph first learned of it and he's taken to calling Kingery "Jetpax" ever since. Kingery, 22, is exactly the kind of player any Phillies fan should want to embrace. STORY: Budding instructor Roy Halladay returns to Phillies camp Between the unique nickname and his style of play, it's fun to imagine how he'd fit in the Phillies' infield. The reality, though, is that even with his strong performance – 6 for 16 (.375), two home runs, three RBIs, five runs scored and a stolen base in seven games – Kingery is still likely a year away from having a real shot at making the team. In the meantime, Kingery's performance has the potential to create unreasonable expectations, both in his readiness for Major League Baseball and how good he can be if he makes it to the big leagues. That's one of the pitfalls of exhibition games, where players aren't always going up against major-league caliber opponents. "That's the hardest part when you have success in spring training like this, you almost start to believe that you're able to do this every day so you have to find a way to stay humble through it," Joseph said. "He's going to get sent down at some point, right? So everybody's going to wonder, 'Why isn't he going to make the team?' Come on, he's got to get more experience. But I think it can do nothing but help his confidence." When manager Pete Mackanin has trotted out prospect-laden lineups this spring, he makes sure to sit back and enjoy watching what the young guys can do. It often presents one of Mackanin's, and fans', only opportunities to watch the prospects at this stage in their careers. Mackanin has liked what Kingery's shown through the first 10 Grapefruit League games and believes he's capable of being a good MLB player. However, he cautioned reading too much into a player's numbers. "The only issue I have is when a young guy starts doing extremely well in the spring then all of you media people start asking me if he's going to make the team," Mackanin said, laughing. "The old saying is: Don't judge a guy on his spring training performance or September call-up performance. ... Everybody's looking for that future star player." This isn't meant to diminish anyone's excitement at seeing prospects like Kingery or Nick Williams play well this spring. Embrace it. Enjoy it. Envision them being part of the Phillies' next World Series championship team. Just don't let two weeks of good play create unrealistic expectations. Keep it in perspective. Contact Meghan Montemurro at mmontemurro@delawareonline.com. Follow her on Twitter at @M_Montemurro.

If every Internet subscriber pays $5 monthly; then all music downloads should be free and legal. The Music Association of Canada cannot suck and blow at the same time. David Boyle, Toronto Already they over charge huge amount to buy their CDs, if only they could be practical in pricing their product, they would not be in this situation. Steve Moore, Toronto If that comes to pass, how and what would corporate and business subscribers pay ? Now I wonder if Toronto Star would also ask for a $5 fee since I came across this on the online edition ? Mukesh Vashi, Brampton Ridiculous. I have never downloaded music, never will, I'm lucky to have finally accomplished a level of computer savy to do basic tasks. I still have a collection of tapes for heaven's sake...I don't want to be bothered replacing them all with CD,s. So why should people like me, and there are plenty of us, pay for a service we will never use? Jan Pinney, Elora I object to paying for a service I would never use. If I want music I use a CD or listen to the radio. Why should I pay for some strangers' habit of pirating music from the internet Aileen Carter, Toronto Since we already pay a levy on blank media such as CDs and DVDs, and there is also a proposal to add a similar levy to hard drives and MP3 players, I don't see why we should have to pay yet another fee to supposedly compensate for downloaded music. Downloading music is already legal in Canada because of these levies, so why should we be slapped with another fee for doing something that is actually legal? Iris Gray, Victoria The idea is ridiculous. Should all mortgage payers be surcharged to help those who live beyond their means and default on their payments? Should all credit card users have to pay extra to bail out those who abuse credit? Should all car drivers have to pay an extra tax to subsidise those who evade payment? The truth of the matter is that the music business has brought its ills upon itself by its head-in-the-sand attitude. Clive Warner, Monterrey, Mexico What happens to this money that is collected? How can the possibly know how much a musician or song writer should receive? Randy Drefs, Medicine Hat Nothing wrong with paying $5 a month provided you WANT it. But I just dont get the thought process behind this ludicrous proposition of making everyone pay even if you never download music. Are we heading towards a communist/socialist internet usage, having to pay up for someone elses losses. I, for one, will not fork it. Vikas Thusoo, Richmond Hill $5 a month for music is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard of, even if you are a music downloader. The only music I've actually ever downloaded was Radiohead's newest album, In Rainbows. Radiohead chose to release the music independently and actaully let you set your own price for the online download - a truly novel idea that the music industry should take note of. I have no doubts they've still made plenty of money. Shawn Vickar, Calgary How arrogant can these people be? First there was a tax on blank CDs, with the working assumption that anyone who burns a CD is ripping off an artist. How do these funds get disubursed? Why should Anne Murray get paid everytime I back up a database on a CD? Dave Kingston, Toronto Most people have said that this fee is unreasonable, rightly so indeed. However I see some disturbing trends in those responses - first of all it's difficult to believe that almost any broadband internet user has never downloaded any music, but even if that's true how can you justify your "throw the downloaders under the bus" attitude - this is nothing more than attack on our freedoms and right to privacy by aggressive corporate lobbies in this insane post-9/11 world. Fight for your rights or lose them forever!! Ron Dyck, Edmonton Considering the lousy music that record companies have been foisting on us for the past decade or two, I would suggest they work on actually cultivating talent and investing in developing artists rather than promoting interchangeable one hit wonders. People don't want to buy music that's disposable; they want something they'll still like in five years. Until there's better music available these companies don't deserve a penny from anyone. Ilana McVeigh, Toronto As a senior who only uses internet for e-mails and Pogo games I resent having to pay $5 for music. I have never downloaded any music nor will I ever. Should this charge appear on my bill I will cancel the internet outright. Claude Leduc, Ottawa Having been connected to the internet for more than 13 years and have yet to download 1 song I would be horrified to learn I would be contributing to celine dions hundreds of millions of dollar bank account. Make money the old fashion way and earn it. Andy Vanklompenburg, Nanaimo I do not down load or by music CD's. I should not have to subsidise the music industry. The Music industry does not subsidise my income tax. Joe O'Byrne, Amherst, New Brunswick Of course! Music stores are practically extinct due to WWW. When was the last time you saw line ups in the HMV store?! Downloading from the web is equivalent to buying from a regular store - thus, pay up! Yana Doubrovine, Toronto This is just the tip of the iceberg. Now that the core internet has become a household necessity, every Tom Dick and Musician wants a surcharge put on for their particular organization. If people are illegally downloading, then criminally charge and convict them.. Don't download the costs on to the normal user of the internet, like myself, who does not download.. Chris McRae, Ottawa This is an absolutely moronic idea. People who have no interest in downloading music will be paying for nothing and also subsidizing the cost for those who do wish to download. Tom Tadman, Scarborough I am retired and on fixed income. I use the internet to keep in contact with friends but have never downloaded any music and have no intention of doing so. Fees for such would cause me to reevaluate my need for the internet at all. I simply cannot afford any more expenses eating away at my monthly pension. Judy Court, Toronto I stopped purchasing music long ago, not because I'm downloading it but because it is priced beyond what I perceive its value to be. I DO NOT download music, and cannot see any valid reason why I should be forced to pay a fee to do so. Tony Heayn, Brampton The internet can be used to pirate music, true. Cars can be used in bank robberies. Shall we apply a surcharge to car sales too? If this $5 fee comes into effect I will never pay for music again. Scott Wiebe, Toronto So people who don't download music will still be paying an extra $5/mo? That sounds like a terrible idea. The fees should be the responsibility of those who download the music - not a tax on everyone. Jeni Ator, Toronto What a great idea! Maybe we can save the auto industry with a $5 per month Internet Access Fee. And Toronto's budget problems - solved with an additional $5 fee! And climate change? Let's add another $5 on. Now isn't that easier than actually confronting the real issues at hand? Paul Tenk, Toronto I have always bought CDs: not once have I downloaded or shared music on the internet. If I am arbitrarily charged $5 a month on my internet, what incentive would I have to buy CD copies of music I have "already paid for"? Gabriela Byron, Toronto I use the internet but have never downloaded a piece of music -so why should I pay. It's appropriate for music downloaders - for them it's still a savings over purchasing CD's. Bea Klug, Toronto Why should my mom, who has never downloaded anything in her life except email pay $5 a month to the recording industry? Craig Hall, Toronto The idea is not bad but music comes from around the world. What if I only listen to music from an Australian band? Paying $5 to the Songwriters Association of CANADA won't make any sense! Gavin Mill, Markham Now now, everyone calm down. Im sure Rogers will collect the fees fairly and make sure everything is alright, just like it does everything else. Dan Carter, Hamilton I don't want to pay it either, but then, isn't this the same thing as having to pay school taxes when you don't have kids? Robert Guimont, Toronto Instead of imposing a new tax, stop and think about why piracy exists... These entities charge absurd prices then wonder why people don't want to pay. If they lowered their prices, people would buy legally. The same goes for software and games. Bianca Devins, Toronto

With the release of the Defense Build Update, players have been creating labyrinths and going up against some very well designed ones. Since the release on April 29 through to the end of the day on May 2, there were 600 raids. The boss won 50.2% of the time and lost 49.8% if the time. Pretty much 50/50! Additionally, there have been no reported crashes, and only 1 reported hang due to cards getting stuck in a state we didn't anticipate. If you have seen problems, please report them. Duelist Development Over the past week our team has been busy preparing what will be in the next update release. We are considering doing a small update soon to patch some card bugs. But the next major update with progression will probably be a month or so away. Our Engineering Team worked on card logic; iOS Performance; tuned cards. Our Design Team worked on Wind up hit animations; Pyroclasm revamp. Our Art Team worked on Card 11 finished; Card Back 12 design. Our Audio Team worked on UI Sound design. Bola Shot Labyrinth Gameplay Statistics Since the release on April 29 through to the end of of the day on May 2, there were 600 raids. The boss won 50.2% of the time and the boss lost 49.8% if the time.

Qualcomm’s executive pay practices came under the spotlight this spring. Financial columnists from The San Diego Union-Tribune and New York Times weighed in on Qualcomm’s equity awards to executives and employees — saying these grants block the benefit to shareholders of billions in stock buybacks. Activist investor Jana Partners called for changes in Qualcomm’s performance targets for executives. Instead of revenue and adjusted operating income, which can create “the incentive to grow at any cost,” Jana wants shareholder-friendly metrics, such as earnings per share or return on invested capital. These targets “provide an important check on stock-based compensation,” the activist said in a letter to Qualcomm this spring. The wireless chip maker’s executive compensation plan is complex. It became more elaborate last year as the company took steps to keep its management team together after Microsoft reportedly tried to hire Chief Executive Steve Mollenkopf. The moves included providing millions in front-loaded restricted stock grants to Mollenkopf, Executive Chairman Paul Jacobs and other top officials. One key issue for Qualcomm’s critics is shareholder dilution. Over the past five fiscal years, the company has spent $13.6 billion repurchasing 239 million of its own shares. These buybacks should have reduced the number of shares in the market, boosting shareholder value. But despite the buybacks, Qualcomm’s total share count at the end of fiscal 2014 was flat compared with five years before. “The company has spent a lot of money on repurchases, yet the share count has not declined,” said Steven Re of Quality Growth Management, a Rancho Santa Fe investment firm that owns Qualcomm shares. “It’s like a cloud over the company that it has so richly rewarded a management that has done so poorly for shareholders.” Qualcomm says its stock compensation program is designed to retain not only executives but also lower level employees. On average, Qualcomm’s top five officers received 6 percent of compensation shares awarded over the past five years. The remainder went to employees outside of the executive suite. A glut of stock options from their heyday in the early 2000s was the main reason why buybacks failed to cut share count. Qualcomm no longer relies on options to pay executives. It has shifted to restricted stock, which is less dilutive. This current fiscal year, the company increased buybacks. It pledged to repurchase $10 billion in shares by March 2016 — a move that is expected to shrink share count. The bulk of Jacobs’ pay last year came from stock options. He exercised 1.8 million shares at strike prices ranging from roughly $37 to $45 per share. He immediately sold the shares for about $73 to $79 each, pocketing the difference. About one-third of Jacobs’ options were 10 years old and set to expire. Others were granted several years ago. He last received stock options in 2009. Last year wasn’t typical for Qualcomm. After reports that Microsoft had approached Mollenkopf, Jacobs stepped down as CEO. “A key element of retaining Mr. Mollenkopf was Dr. Jacobs agreeing to relinquish the CEO title and adopt a different role,” the company said in its proxy.

Toronto city council has overwhelmingly voted no to a massive new downtown casino, shutting the door on a year-long debate that featured a parade of ambitious plans and a citizen-led campaign against them. In an unexpected move, council also rejected plans to expand the gambling floor at Woodbine Racetrack, a narrow result that left the site's operator concerned for its future. However, council went on to vote in favour of pursuing discussions with the provincial and federal governments to expand the amount of convention space in the city, news that will be welcomed by those who say Toronto is lagging behind other North American destinations. Nick Eaves, chief executive of Woodbine Entertainment Group, which operates the north Etobicoke site, watched the vote along with about 200 of his workers, who bussed in to city hall. Story continues below advertisement In addition to the support from workers, Woodbine had a petition with 10,000 signatures, he said. "For all of that to be unnoticed and to be turned down today is a real shock," he said. Councillor Mike Layton, who led the charge to have the special meeting even after Mayor Rob Ford declared the casino plan effectively dead last week, put forward the motion to oppose the downtown site. It passed 40 to 4. Mr. Layton also asked council to oppose expansion in the area that includes Woodbine, which passed in a 24-20 vote. Earlier in the meeting Mr. Ford attempted to get support for a compromise that would see expanded gambling at Woodbine. That motion failed 13 to 31. Mr. Eaves said the prospect of a new casino now going to neighbouring Vaughan or Markham would "severely compromise" Woodbine's ability to compete. He said he hopes to work out a deal with the province to keep Woodbine operating. Oxford Properties Group, which in 2011 acquired the land under the Metro Toronto Convention Centre's north building, has been advocating for a casino on Front Street to help fund the convention centre's expansion. Michael Kitt, Oxford's executive vice-president, said in an interview that the company supports the city's decision. He said Oxford was encouraged by the discussion that arose at Tuesday's meeting. Council unanimously voted in favour of pursuing discussions with Queen's Park and Ottawa to invest in additional convention space. "We think that's an important topic to continue the momentum over the coming months," he said. Tuesday's highly anticipated casino vote, held at a special meeting called by a majority of councillors over Mr. Ford's objections, was overshadowed by recent allegations the mayor was caught on video smoking crack cocaine. Story continues below advertisement Story continues below advertisement During the council debate, Mr. Ford – who for months was one of the casino's most vocal supporters because of the jobs and revenue he said it would bring – spoke out against a downtown casino and laid the blame at Premier Kathleen Wynne's feet. "No deal is good enough for this Premier," Mr. Ford told a packed council chamber. "She doesn't want a casino in Toronto. No one knows which direction she's going on the gaming file." The City of Toronto had originally counted on collecting $100-million annually for hosting a casino, but that came crashing down after The Globe and Mail reported that would mean a special deal for Toronto. Ms. Wynne told the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. to give all municipalities the same deal, and the new funding formula would see Toronto get a little more than $53-million a year for the downtown site. Las Vegas-based MGM Resorts was among those to express interest in Toronto and, according to city lobbyist records, was the most aggressive of the potential casino operators. Alan Feldman, MGM vice-president of public affairs, in a written statement thanked council for carefully considering the opportunity. "As we have always said, we only want to operate in a city where we can partner with the local community," he wrote. "For this reason, we are excited to continue the process and remain committed to sharing our vision with a willing host in the greater Toronto area." Story continues below advertisement Mr. Feldman did not respond to an e-mail asking why the casino pitch didn't work in Toronto. Jan Jones, of Caesars Entertainment, which had also expressed interest, wrote in a statement that she was "disappointed" by the vote, but respected council's decision. Peggy Calvert, one of the founding members of citizens' group No Casino Toronto, said she was "delighted" by the result. "We couldn't be more ecstatic. … We could only hope way back when that this would be the outcome," she said.

Richard Stallman’s GNU (gnunet.org) and French computing institute Inria have released the initial code for an “electronic payment system,” which is “unlike BitCoin or cash.” GNU’s ‘Not for the Black Market’ Taler The project, dubbed The project, dubbed Taler (for Taxable Anonymous Libre Electronic Reserve), is designed “for the mainstream economy, and not the black market,” its website explains. Taler, according to the current available literature, is aimed at providing as much a solution to mainstream organizations’ use of parallel payment systems as for customers. While sounding similar to cryptocurrency, the ethos behind the project suggests an attempt to distance itself from Bitcoin. The website states: Unlike BitCoin or cash payments, Taler ensures that governments can learn their citizen’s total income and thus collect sales, value-added or income taxes.” Nonetheless, the system ensures anonymity for users, who will ultimately use coins as a stand-in for national currencies and be free from exposure to any volatility inherent in a new cryptocurrency. “When you pay with Taler, your identity does not have to be revealed to the merchant. The bank, government and exchange will also never learn how you spent your electronic money,” it is written. “However, you can prove that you paid in court if necessary.” As such, in terms of stability, Taler is reported to “[use] an electronic exchange holding financial reserves in existing currencies.” Experimental As is standard for a GNU-related project, the Taler is free and the code readily accessible. Stallman, who coined the term “free software” in the 1980s, has nonetheless been quiet on the progress or ultimate potential of Taler in the mainstream economy. As is standard for a GNU-related project, the Taler is free and the code readily accessible. Stallman, who coined the term “free software” in the 1980s, has nonetheless been quiet on the progress or ultimate potential of Taler in the mainstream economy. Currently, the project is very much in its infancy, with disclaimers noting pitfalls, which have yet to be addressed. No “real” currencies are currently available for experimentation, with an initial release slated for some time this year. “There is no auditor, and hence components do not properly support auditors either. As a result, a dishonest exchange could embezzle funds,” an “There is no auditor, and hence components do not properly support auditors either. As a result, a dishonest exchange could embezzle funds,” an email from systems maintainer and software architect Christian Grothoff states. “This is a first alpha release of the four key components providing logic for running a bank, exchange, merchant and wallet.” The development team meanwhile hails from various outlets including Inria, which is in turn placed under the supervision of French government industries of research and development. In terms of deployment, as The Register In terms of deployment, as The Register points out , criticism of Taler may well come from Bitcoin circles, with critics in turn pointing to weaknesses in the Bitcoin ecosystem to validate the need for a Taler-like platform for the mainstream. What do you think about the potential of the Taler project? Let us know in the comments sections below.

Why did they do this? Diplomats from many countries have been asking this for days about Canada's sudden move to cut off diplomatic ties with Iran. Whether it was a good move or bad, there can be no doubt that in the execution Ottawa bobbled the ball. If Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird wanted to deliver a clear message to the world about Iran, they didn't. Instead, they confused the world. For many countries, Ottawa's basic message, "Iran is bad" was crossed with another signal: "Canada is weird." Story continues below advertisement The Harper government was clearly fed up with Iran on many fronts and chose to dispense with stagnant diplomatic ties that it decided were just getting in the way of tougher criticism. But it made Canadian foreign policy look erratic by muddling the message. For most foreign governments, the message is interpreted through their diplomats, and diplomatic language. To diplomats, breaking off relations – suspending them, technically – is a serious step, a notch below declaring war. Countries maintain diplomatic ties through cold wars and even hot skirmishes. For days, foreign diplomats have been seeking explanations from fellow diplomats, Canadian officials, even journalists. To them, it's shocking. That doesn't mean Canada should only do things that won't shock foreign diplomats. But if Ottawa wants to send a message, it has to explain, not confuse. This time, the explanation has been vague and shifting. For starters, there was the suddenness. On Friday, Mr. Baird went before a microphone in Vladivostok to announce the closing of Canada's embassy in Iran and the expulsion of Iranian diplomats from Canada. Okay, that's because the Canadian government wanted to get all its diplomats safely out of Tehran before it said anything and then Mr. Baird, at a summit in Russia, rushed to the microphone just after 1 a.m. local time. But the scene led to a sense of urgency. The obvious question was, why now? Mr. Baird didn't offer a convincing answer. His first explanation was a long list of complaints about Iran's behaviour on human rights, its nuclear program and support for Syria – all legitimate but none new – and also that, given Iran's poor record for protecting diplomats, "it's simply no longer safe" to have Canadian representatives in Iran. The lack of a strong explanation fuelled speculation. Some suggested Israel had tipped Ottawa off to an imminent military strike, so Mr. Baird has since made a point of repeatedly denying that. The CBC speculated Iranian diplomats here might have been organizing sleeper cells. The real safety reasons, it turned out, were more pedestrian but poorly explained – a sense that Canadians in Tehran were exposed. There's no U.S. embassy there and the British left last November, when their gated embassy was stormed by protesters. Ottawa worried Canadians could be next in line as the enemy foreigners. If Israel launches strikes, Canadian diplomats believed they would be taken hostage. Ottawa, after all, has become Israel's staunchest defender. Story continues below advertisement Story continues below advertisement The Harper government also had a September deadline to list Iran as a "state sponsor of terrorism" under a new law, and worried about retaliation. It will probably also soon impose sanctions on Iran's powerful Revolutionary Guards. There was one other thing Ottawa didn't adequately explain: its diplomatic relations had become less than zero because Iranian officials wouldn't meet Canadians. But that's still not the whole reason for the Harper government's actions. It didn't have to expel all Iranian diplomats to deal with safety concerns in Tehran. On Monday, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney offered a new reason: Iranian diplomats were intimidating Iranian-Canadians. But the key reason, certainly, was that the government wanted to make it part of a statement about Iran as a rogue nation. That's why Ottawa listed Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism on the same day as it made its surprise announcement. It's a statement that confused, because Mr. Baird didn't offer a systematic explanation that cutting off diplomatic ties was not decided suddenly. The Harper government failed to grasp that the world would expect a clearer rationale for a big step. After all, if you're trying to send the world a strong message about Iran, it's best not to leave them puzzled about Canada.

A mother passing by her daughter's bedroom was astonished to see the bed was nicely made and everything was picked up. Then she saw an envelope propped up prominently on the center of the bed. It was addressed, "Mom." With the worst premonition, she opened the envelope and read the letter with trembling hands: Dear Mom: It is with great regret and sorrow that I'm writing you. I had to elope with my new boyfriend because I wanted to avoid a scene with Dad and you. I've been finding real passion with Ahmed and he is so nice-even with all his piercings, tattoos, beard, and his motorcycle clothes. But it's not only the passion Mom, I'm pregnant and Ahmed said that we will be very happy. He already owns a trailer in the woods and has a stack of firewood for the whole winter. He wants to have many more children with me and that's now one of my dreams too. Ahmed taught me that marijuana doesn't really hurt anyone and we'll be growing it for us and trading it with his friends for all the cocaine and ecstasy we want. In the meantime, we'll pray that science will find a cure for AIDS so Ahmed can get better; he sure deserves it!! Don't worry Mom, I'm 15 years old now and I know how to take care of myself. Someday I'm sure we'll be back to visit so you can get to know your grand children. Your daughter, Judith PS: Mom, none of the above is true. I'm over at the neighbor's house. I just wanted to remind you that there are worse things in life than my report card that's in my desk center drawer. I love you! Call when it is safe for me to come home. - An e-mail

While writing a post yesterday I noticed there were some gaps in my vim setup for when I'm authoring a markdown file so here are a few tips for polishing up your markdown experience in vim, specifically for jekyll blogs. Front Matter Starting at the top, literally, with the front matter. It was looking a bit weird out of the box: It's rather inconsequential data compared to the meat of the document, the actual content. I found a helpful blog post with some details that worked for me. The heart of which is to parse between the --- s and consider this content a comment. au BufNewFile , BufRead , BufWrite *.md syntax match Comment /\%^---\_.\{-}---$/ After, it looks a little less odd. Textwidth I prefer a little more space when I'm writing so I change the width before text wraps to something slightly more than my default 80 character width - like 100 characters. In my autocommand group I place something like: au FileType markdown setlocal textwidth = 100 Fenced-in Languages If you have many, or maybe super-specific, languages and syntaxes you commonly use in your markdown you can specify them in your vimrc to be interpreted as such. let g :markdown_fenced_languages = [ 'javascript' , 'ruby' , 'sh' , 'yaml' , 'javascript' , 'html' , 'vim' , 'coffee' , 'json' , 'diff' ] Snippets I use snipmate but I guess the same can be applied with something like UltiSnips? Probably. In any case, snippets are a lifesaver for the occasional piece of code or markup you can either never remember the exact syntax for, or are slightly awkward to type. For me it's more often the former. ~/.vim/snippets/markdown.snippets snippet a [${1:text}](${2:http://}) snippet img  snippet front --- title: ${1:Title} author: Joel layout: post permalink: `strftime("/%Y/%m/%d")`/${2:slug}.html --- The first two are for links and image tags, respectively. I consistently confuse the two so why leave it to guessing? The front snippet is handy in that date for the permalink is automatically populated when the snippet is expanded. Preview Your Markdown A tweet from Ches asking about previewing documents piqued my curiosity so I decided to look into it a little further. His suggestion to try the QuickLook plugin was met with failure, as he mentioned, as there's some weirdness when you try to launch from terminal. From finder it seems to work just fine but that defeats the purpose of being vim-driven, right? The next best thing would be to leverage a native mac app to get a look at what our rendered markdown files look like. The app I prefer is called MacDown and has plenty of good features if you ever feel like dropping into a gui app instead of vim. MacDown comes with a cli command you can use to open documents from the terminal but I've found that it doesn't retain your preferences and switches to the defaults once you use it. Using OS X's open command, however, does retain your preferences. So, about getting vim to play nice with this? Not so hard: map < leader > pre : w < cr > : silent ! ! open - a MacDown % > /dev/ null & < cr > : redraw !< cr > So <leader>pre will now open up MacDown with the current document so I can get a good look. Not bad! The changes to MacDown's preferences I've found useful: General > Put editor on the right. I don't care much about the editor, so it gets shoved right. Rendering > Detect Jekyll front-matter. For those of us jekyll users. Helpful Plugins

Periodic limb movements during sleep (PLMS), with or without symptoms of a restless legs syndrome (RLS), may cause sleep disturbances. The pharmacologic treatments of choice are dopaminergic drugs. Their use, however, may be limited due to tolerance development or rebound phenomena. Anecdotal observations have shown that oral magnesium therapy may ameliorate symptoms in patients with moderate RLS. We report on an open clinical and polysomnographic study in 10 patients (mean age 57 +/- 9 years; 6 men, 4 women) suffering from insomnia related to PLMS (n = 4) or mild-to-moderate RLS (n = 6). Magnesium was administered orally at a dose of 12.4 mmol in the evening over a period of 4-6 weeks. Following magnesium treatment, PLMS associated with arousals (PLMS-A) decreased significantly (17 +/- 7 vs 7 +/- 7 events per hour of total sleep time, p < 0.05). PLMS without arousal were also moderately reduced (PLMS per hour of total sleep time 33 +/- 16 vs 21 +/- 23, p = 0.07). Sleep efficiency improved from 75 +/- 12% to 85 +/- 8% (p < 0.01). In the group of patients estimating their sleep and/or symptoms of RLS as improved after therapy (n = 7), the effects of magnesium on PLMS and PLMS-A were even more pronounced. Our study indicates that magnesium treatment may be a useful alternative therapy in patients with mild or moderate RLS-or PLMS-related insomnia. Further investigations regarding the role of magnesium in the pathophysiology of RLS and placebo-controlled studies need to be performed.

PDF generation with Clojure, thanks to Dmitri Sotnikov Jose Ayudarte Blocked Unblock Follow Following Dec 19, 2017 Unlike consumer software, Reporting is something that enterprise software always needs, so a month ago our team did a benchmark analysis to choose the best PDF generator library or third-party tool. As Clojure runs on the JVM and has smooth Java interop we considered tools like JasperReports to create reports with drag-and-drop functionality but we weren’t convinced: the design tool is user-friendly in the sense of having the option to create PDF sections visually, but then we realized that we had complex requirements, making it more difficult to achieve the results using JasperReports without losing ability to have dynamic data structures. So we took our exploration further afield. Eventually, we decided on clj-pdf, a library created by Dmitri Sotnikov, which shares similarities with Hiccup library at the time of generating elements. Now that we have developed and released our PDF report tool to production I will try to summarize the benefits and share some tips on how to use clj-pdf: I think it’s important to highlight that the most useful document element for structuring advance content is the pdf-table. It’s the only way to properly customize space and alignment between elements. Table could be also used but it has bugs and the display is broken on some advanced use-cases. As for creating a header for the PDF, you might want to add a logo and some title aligned horizontally. In our case, as you can see in the code, we have created a pdf-table element that is 100% width and it’s right-aligned, with no borders. We have also positioned the header statically within “x” and “y” axes in the page. Then we have used a watermark element to set and scale the logo just in the right place. This method has the caveat of having to customize header position for each different case. So if you have several documents with different text-lengths in the header, you have to adjust the position by hand for each of one. So a better method to create a header it might be not setting its “x” and “y” axes at all, but just creating a 2-column pdf-table with pdf-cell inside that has paragraphs aligned to the desired place (right or left). Thus you could use any length for the header text but with the limitations that you should use some negative paddings for pdf-cells (needed to align the items horizontally) as well as getting more vertical top-margin in the page. Another interesting thing is to create simple tables with few lines of data: For instance, we have used a pdf-table element with a chunk element inside, separating data lines with “ ” end of line character, creating a background for the whole table. Also, as a way to control jump or vertical gaps between elements, spacer element is good combined with size property that gives us more fined control, as the size specifies the font-size of the space inserted. Finally, another interesting trick is the use of negative padding values to have a better control over vertical gaps. As pointed before, left, right, top and bottom padding properties are available to use within pdf-tables’s pdf-cell elements. By way of illustration, to move a pdf-cell’s content up you would set a property padding-top to -3 value or something like that. Numbers are pixel units but it’s better just to give it a go and experiment a bit. Important issues: We have had huge gaps with very long pdf-table columns. So we have created faux rows to split the content to avoid that. That shouldn’t be a problem and we have to report an issue in the author’s repository. In fact there is a property to control behavior of pdf-table’s content across different pages. Pdf-table column number is strict and immutable. We have to use colspan attribute to merge columns for a given row but we cannot pass less or more columns than expected to the pdf-table’s body and that includes Clojure’s nil values as well (they are counted as a column even if there is no content inside). We remove nil values or we skip structure creation completely in case we find the risk of breaking that rule. Also we create rows with nil columns if required when there is no content. As my colleague Asier mentioned in an earlier post, our goal is to contribute more to Open Source projects and this awesome library can be a good candidate to start doing so.

The Hofstra University student killed during a home-invasion robbery was the victim of friendly fire from a veteran cop, Nassau County police revealed last night. The officer unleashed a barrage of bullets when intruder Dalton Smith pointed a gun at him while using Andrea Rebello as a human shield, police said. “He kept saying, ‘I’m going to kill her,’ then pointed the gun at the police officer,” Det. Lt. John Azzata said. The cop fired eight times, with one bullet accidentally hitting Rebello, 21, in the head, he said. The other seven rounds struck and killed Smith, a career criminal, ex-con and parole absconder, Azzata said. Smith — clad in dark clothes and a ski mask — was wielding a 9mm pistol with one bullet in the chamber and another in the magazine, Azzata said. But he never got off a shot during the deadly encounter early Friday inside the off-campus house in Uniondale where Rebello lived with her twin sister, Jessica, Azzata said. The cop who fired the shots was described only as a 12-plus-year veteran of the Nassau County Police Department who earlier served more than seven years with the NYPD. A source told The Post his decorations include the medal of honor. He was treated for trauma after the incident, said James Carver, head of the Nassau County Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association. Nassau County Police Commissioner Thomas Dale said the cop was “OK,” adding: “I believe he’s out sick.” “We’re going to make sure he receives counseling and appropriate medical attention if he needs it,” Dale said. Dale also said his department would conduct a “complete investigation.”

February 28, 2015, at UFC 184. That was the last time Cat Zingano competed in the UFC. While she pleaded to get right back in there after her 14-second armbar loss to Ronda Rousey, the former title contender instead sat in the sidelines for a year and a half. During that time off, Zingano's weight ballooned up to 175 lbs, and she has slowly dropped the weight in preparation for her return at UFC 200. Zingano took to Instagram to post a series of photos showing a timeline from January up to the present. Her post came with the following caption: "Fighters be like.... I was 175 in January & 145 today. Reality vs expectation. There is a much bigger fight than what you see go on in that cage. And If I can do it, anyone of y'all can. #teamalphacat #ufc200 #bulkingJ/K #strongAF #regretnothing #alphacatzingano #sorrynotsorry #notashamed #thatbasstho #cake" Zingano, 33, will face Julianna Pena as part of the UFC 200 preliminary card. She has a 2013 TKO victory over the current UFC champion, Miesha Tate.

Best Operas Ever is a new podcast from Saturday Afternoon at the Opera on CBC Radio 2. In each instalment, host Ben Heppner talks to one of the major opera figures of our time about a particular opera recording that they especially love. You'll find each episode here on cbcmusic.ca, and you can tune in to CBC Radio 2 at 1 p.m. any Saturday from now until the end of November to hear these classic recordings in their entirety — along with extended conversations with our esteemed guests. Best Operas Ever No. 5 - Barbara Hannigan Ben Heppner talks to the contemporary music maverick about a 20th-century opera she adores. Audio Contemporary music has an estimable champion in Barbara Hannigan. There aren't a lot of musicians in the world who have cemented international singing careers, defined themselves with new repertoire, and still felt like that wasn't quite enough. And yet, Hannigan has taken to the conductor's podium with as much relish as the operatic stage. And the opera recording she chose as her favourite ever is as ambitious, smart and iconoclastic as Hannigan herself. Olivier Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise is nearly five hours long in its entirety, requires as many as 300 musicians, and has virtually no story. It's a work of intense religious devotion, expressed through bursts of musical colour and texture, with nary a Verdian melody in sight. But for Hannigan, seeing it performed at the Salzburg Festival as a young singer was a life-altering experience. The singers in that production wore modern dress, as per the wishes of director Peter Sellars. Baritone José van Dam sang the title role, and soprano Dawn Upshaw was the angel who appears to him periodically. Kent Nagano conducted the vast ensemble. "Peter Sellars opened up the rehearsals in Salzburg to anyone who wanted to come, as long as we were quiet and didn't disrupt," Hannigan told Ben Heppner. "In a way, it was kind of like going to church, because the rehearsal space that Sellars created with Nagano was.... it was sacred." Hannigan was singing in another production at the festival, but she spent nearly every spare minute at Sellars' rehearsals for Saint François — hours on end, watching the immense production come together. The recording that Hannigan has chosen to feature on Best Operas Ever is from that very production at the Salzburg Festival, with those same singers. Hit the play button above to hear Heppner talk to Hannigan about why that Salzburg Saint François was so formative to her. You can tune in to Saturday Afternoon at the Opera on Oct. 8 to hear more from this conversation, plus Kent Nagano's recording of Saint François d'Assise in its (near) entirety. Subscribe to Best Operas Ever on iTunes! Explore more: Best opera ever? Jonathan Darlington chooses Weber's Der Freischütz Best opera ever? Sondra Radvanovsky chooses Puccini's Tosca

EXCLUSIVE: In what may be the first group of features to be financed by cryptocurrency and distributed via the blockchain, a consortium of companies plans to release New Frontiers, a sci-fi anthology of five segments that will combine into one feature. Ground Control Entertainment, XYZ Films, and producer Kyle Franke are partnering with SingularDTV co-founder and president of entertainment Kim Jackson on the project, which will consist of a five-part anthology of films created and directed by Ruairi Robinson (The Last Days on Mars), Stephan Zlotescu (True Skin), Zac&Mac (Law Zero), and Tyson Johnston (Lunar). Producer Scott Glassgold, Ruairi Robinson and Ground Control Entertainment developed the universe for New Frontiers with screenwriter Philip Gelatt. Production will start in the first quarter of 2018. Futurism Studios will serve as an executive producer on the project. No details on the anthology plots have been released. The combined films sport a budget of $5 million, or approximately 9000 in ether, the digital currency derived from the ethereum blockchain and one of the largest cryptocurrencies in the world. The deal was negotiated by SingularDTV’s Jackson, with Chris Spicer and Nick Scott from Akin Gump for XYZ and Allison Binder for Ground Control. Jackson’s credits include Tub (Sundance 2010), Children of God (Newfest, Outfest 2010, HBO), Gun Hill Road (Sundance 2011 competition, 2011 theatrical release), and Blue Caprice (Sundance 2013, MoMA New Films/New Directors, IFC/Sundance Selects). It was nominated for a Spirit Award. “I’m very proud that SingularDTV is creating a new frontier of its own, with a peer-to-peer funding and distribution platform, connecting fans with the films and filmmakers that they love,” said Jackson. “Our platform allows for audiences and creators to mutually benefit from the success of any project. As long as they keep supporting projects, there is no end to the possibility of sequels or TV series continuing to reach eager audiences. With SingularDTV there are no disappointing cancellations of beloved pilots or series. It’s a self-sustaining franchise.” SingularDTV’s Ethervision distribution platform streaming channel plans to offer films, music and other content later in 2018. The company has been ramping up its activities and just announced the appointments of executives Shreesh Tiwari (chief strategic officer), Archna Desai (chief operating officer), and Oliver Mahrdt (SVP of marketing).

It is easily the most depraved little episode of presidential campaign crime in decades, worthy of Nixon’s CREEP or Boris Yeltsin’s goons, and it’s been almost totally ignored by the media—mainstream and otherwise. Ron and Rand Paul’s top campaign aides, led by the husband of Ron Paul’s granddaughter, bribing and extorting a crooked Tea Party Iowa politician to endorse the “Ron Paul rEVOLution”—which turns out to have been little more than a mirage built on fraud, oligarch cash, and the credulous fantasies of a few thousand pimply college-aged waffendweebs. And then there’s the specter of the world’s largest private surveillance apparatus, Google, looming over this story—playing a central role in the criminal investigation that is both deeply conflicted, and oddly conflicting. For over a year now, Google has refused to comply with federal warrants to hand over Gmail accounts of the three indicted Paul campaign managers and operators: Jesse Benton, John Tate, and Dimitrios Kesari, who all have held senior posts in Rand Paul’s various campaigns and PACs. (Many of the legal filings mentioned in this article are embedded below.) But it goes further: Ron Paul himself is named in a federal subpoena made public last year. Prosecutors want access to the libertarian hero’s emails, as he appears to be a person of interest in the criminal investigation, an investigation that Google has been hindering with legal roadblocks and distractions. The crimes are bad enough, and I’ll explain them in a minute—but when you have the most powerful Internet company in the world, and one of the largest corporate lobbyists in Washington DC, protecting indicted criminals who run presidential campaigns for politicians—Ron and Rand Paul—which Google has given thousands of dollars to in recent years, and whose libertarian ideology Google has supported in a number of ways and venues. . . . then we’re talking about potentially nightmare-scenario levels of conflicts-of-interest. Potentially—that’s the key here, because the real story of Google’s role in this sordid crime is a bit more complicated than that, and not entirely evil, much as that might frustrate me and many of our readers. Google’s problem in this case rests in its overwhelming monopoly power—it’s as if the Nixon Tapes were on Google’s servers, along with all of our own personal recordings, and Google had a policy of generally being a pain in the ass about handing over tape recordings so as to keep consumers lured into spending all their babbling moments babbling into their tape recording product...only in this case, Google is also a major campaign donor to Nixon and his political agenda. It’s very problematic, and I’ll save a deeper discussion of Google’s conflicts in fighting government warrants for Ron and Rand Paul’s indicted felons for another article... But first, the crime. Let’s start with Kent Sorenson, a mean, dumb, thumb-headed prairie bumpkin who so far stands as the only person convicted of a series of felonies involving the Ron Paul 2012 campaign, after Sorenson pled guilty last year to crimes—including filing falsified federal election reports, and obstruction of justice, crimes that could carry a maximum sentence of 25 years behind bars. Sorenson was, until recently, Iowa state Senator Sorenson, Iowa’s leading firebreathing Tea Party radical who vowed to “burn down” Des Moines when he won his seat in the state’s upper chamber in 2010. Sorenson talked the God-talk, bashed gays, the poor, drug users, and immigrants, which made him a darling among Tea Party libertarians like Ron Paul, who personally endorsed Sorsenson’s run for state senate in 2010. Among the bills Sorenson pushed—a state Constitutional amendment banning same-sex civil marriages; a “birther” law aimed at Obama, requiring presidential candidates to produce their birth certificates; a law forcing indigent welfare recipients to submit to random drug tests—and denial of benefits if they failed the tests. Naturally, it was later discovered—after he was elected— that Sorenson had been busted in 1992 delivering a baggie of weed and taking $30 cash from a drug informant, for which the Tea Party firebrand was convicted of an aggravated misdemeanor and sentenced to six months in county jail. He was 20 years old; he served five days. When the story came out in 2011, he blamed another guy and claimed to have mended his ways. But it was also discovered that he’d welched on his child support payments, had his wages garnished, was penalized again for failing again, was charged but cleared of domestic violence, and had declared bankruptcy on his mortgage and student loans debts, which he blamed on usurious interest rates. In other words, a typical mean dumb white lowlife. Last year, after Sorenson was first convicted of taking bribe money from Ron Paul and lying about it, he was subjected to mandatory drug tests of the sort he voted to impose on Iowa’s poorest residents—and yes, Sorenson failed his own drug tests — not once, but three times. And just last month, police arrested Sorenson again for allegedly beating his wife. But in our official narrative, as far as all the media harrumphers and pundits were concerned, Sorenson was a serious Tea Party evangelical, driven by conservative principles, no matter how much those principles might ruffle mainstream two-party Establishment feathers, by gum!—just like Ron Paul. In early 2011, Sorenson’s endorsement was something taken seriously, as a matter of weighty Tea Party principle—and he threw in early for Michele Bachmann. As it turns out, he endorsed her, and became her Iowa campaign co-chairman, on a more familiar principle: Payment in kind. In secret and in violation of Iowa Senate ethics (and federal laws, once those bribes became falsified reports), the Bachmann campaign paid Sen. Sorenson nearly $8,000 per month in a clunky scheme in which Bachmann funds went through a couple of dummy companies and into Sorenson’s pocket. This is how politics works, folks; it’s not what they teach you in middle school civics classes, but journalists should’ve gotten over that little shocker by now. In public, Sorenson said his endorsement of Michele Bachmann was all on account of shared deep Christian libertarian principles. Meanwhile, towards the end of 2011, as the Iowa caucuses were drawing near, Ron Paul’s grandson-by-marriage, Jesse Benton, and his fellow staffers, having learned Sorenson was for sale (apparently everyone but the media knew it), opened negotiations to buy Sen. Sorenson’s support by outbidding Bachmann. It helped that Ron Paul was raising money hand over fist compared to Bachmann, thanks to all the Silicon Valley and extraction industry billionaires who love Paul’s vision of government without taxation or regulation or welfare or help of any kind for anyone or anything, but their private property, which is always in need of armed protection... According to a recently unsealed indictment, in late October 2011, Benton — who also led his uncle Rand Paul’s SuperPAC until just recently, in case I haven’t made this family point clear enough — sent an email to Sorenson and Sorenson’s top aide offering to take over paying Sorenson’s $8,000/month bribes in return for Sorenson switching his allegiance from Bachmann to Dr. Paul. Both Sorenson and Dr. Paul’s people agreed to delay Sorenson’s switch until after a meeting of Iowa Republicans, where he’d strengthen his own position within the party, on the eve of the big caucasus, as a principled Tea Party Christian libertarian. Then from mid-November 2011 until late December, a Ron Paul operative, Dimitrios Kesari, made numerous calls to Sorenson to negotiate and lobby for the bribe-and-switch deal. A few days before the switch, around Christmas 2011, Sorenson agreed with Ron Paul’s campaign heads to write up a press release in-advance explaining how his Tea Party principles moved him to abandon Bachmann for Ron Paul. Sen. Sorenson then sent his draft statement to the Ron Paul 2012 campaign chiefs for editing—his granddaughter's husband Jesse Benton, his family operative Kesari, and John Tate, the head of a Ron/Rand Paul libertarian organization called Campaign For Liberty, who also served as an officer in Rand Paul’s SuperPAC. And in case Sorenson double-crossed Ron Paul over his planned double-cross of Michelle Bachmann, Dr. Paul’s campaign chiefs had readied a plan to smear Sorenson and ruin his life by leaking select emails of their payoff negotiations. Sorenson agreed to switch to Ron Paul in exchange for being put on an $8,000 a month under-the-table salary, plus a $100,000 payoff to Sorenson’s personal PAC. Being a thumb-head, Sorenson demanded a $25,000 check, and Dr. Paul’s operative, Kesari, agreed, handing him a check in the name of Kesari’s wife’s jewelry company at an Iowa diner. But as soon as Sorenson got that big fat $25,000 check, he wasn’t sure what he should do with it. So he just held onto it, figuring it would be useful later (and it was useful—to federal prosecutors). Two days after getting the $25,000 check, on December 28, 2011, Sorenson appeared at an early afternoon rally for Bachmann at Pizza Ranch, still playing the role of her campaign’s co-chairman—but he kept silent throughout the Bachmann rally, claiming he couldn’t speak because he’d just had dental work done and his mouth was so numb “he was afraid he would drool on himself,” according to the Des Moines Register. After the Pizza Ranch rally for Bachmann, Sen. Sorenson skulked away in his car, and showed up to a Ron Paul 2012 rally (“Sorenson said he drove to Paul’s event, called a Paul staffer and asked: ‘Do you guys want me on board?’”—reported the Des Moines Register) and jumped on the stage in a fake-spontaneous Tea Party moment of libertarian passion, announcing that his conscience had compelled him, at the spur of the moment, to switch allegiance to the Ron Paul rEVOLution! Sen. Sorenson sent the 500 Ron Paul dupes into a placard-waving frenzy, telling them, “We have a choice where we can elect more of the same … or we can elect someone who’s going to transform this country to get it back to what our founding fathers wanted, and I believe that’s Ron Paul.” Benton gave statements to the press full of high-minded civics class gravitas: Congressman Paul is delighted to accept the endorsement of Senator Kent Sorenson, whose blessing and assistance carry a great deal weight in Iowa. The fact that he doesn’t take this decision lightly tells a great deal about the senator and Ron Paul. Indeed. And if that wasn’t sick farce enough, the Paul campaign released a giant “spontaneous” statement from Sen. Sorenson—heavily edited by Ron Paul’s campaign chiefs and relatives—full of high-minded anti-establishment libertarian blather, air-quotes and all. Here are a few choice quotes:: Since my election, I’ve learned that doing the right thing isn’t always easy. It’s easy to see why so many legislators “sell out” once elected. The pressure to do so is immense. But what America needs now is a President who will not just “go along to get along.” Instead, we must send someone who puts doing what is right above all else to the White House. That candidate is Ron Paul. If you are as frustrated as I am with what's been done by the ruling class, I urge you to join me in supporting Dr. Paul. We can send the national big government political establishment a message they will never forget by voting for Ron Paul for President in the January 3 Iowa Caucuses. Sorenson’s betrayal was meant to land as a punch to the gut, to shock and awe Bachmann into total submission, losing her co-chair like that. What the Ron Paul hicks didn’t expect was that Bachmann — a prairie hick of a different subspecies of mean-and-dumb, the kind of prairie hick that self-destructs unless under constant 24/7 watch from a slick political minder — would expose the whole scam. Bachmann went straight to the press and spilled the beans, that Sorenson had been bribed by Ron Paul’s campaign, and that Sorenson had even told her that they were going to bribe him. Which was true—Sorenson had been bargaining with her, trying to leverage the Paul campaign’s offer to squeeze a better counter-offer bribe out of Bachmann. Immediately after Bachmann’s suicidal statement, her top aides ran to the media and said no-no-no-, you know how crazy Michele is, cuckoo! cuckoo!... nothing of the sort was going on, we’re all honorable people here, Ron Paul’s family member included. Because, obviously, there was the fear that if anyone decided to look into the allegations, they’d find that Bachmann’s campaign was guilty of the same crime. And according to last year’s subpoena, the FBI wants access not only to Ron Paul’s and his campaign staffers’ emails, but to Bachmann’s and her staffers too. * * * * Bachmann’s statement about Paul’s bribes caused a brief controversy among the media, which didn’t want to believe such a thing could happen in America, and especially not from the campaign of that real-life 21st C Jimmy Stewart—albeit a hick-fascist Confederate Jimmy Stewart, but earnest and “authentic” all the same, according to the rubes in the media, pushing Paul as the perennial anti-establishment hero. Among the conspirators, however, it caused a real panic, and a brief change of plans. The next day, December 29, Benton & team had Sen. Sorenson issue a defiant statement that basically said, “You think I get paid for my principles? Wait till you see the FEC filings, then you’ll see that Bachmann is a liar and no one’s paying me anything, by gum!” And then Sorenson and the Paul capos proceeded to forge their FEC filings to funnel their payments to Sorenson through a pair of dummy front companies. Not exactly the sharpest conmen, but brains aren’t much of a requirement for success as a con artist. An empty conscience, some cunning, and the stupid sense that you and your testicles are smarter than everyone else—those are much more important qualities. And then in January 2012, the payments started rolling: Sen. Sorenson filed an invoice for $33,000 from his dummy company, Grassroots Strategy, to a Ron Paul company called ICT Inc; then the Ron Paul people behind ICT filed an invoice for $38,125 from ICT Inc to the Ron Paul 2012 committee, and that way passed through their first payment. That was in January 2012, while the rubes in the libertarian movement and their fanboys in the progressive media were having high-minded debates about Ron Paul’s principles. More followed throughout that year, ending in June, totaling nearly $80,000. The last payment, for $8,850, elicited an annoyed response from John Tate—who until his recent indictment was president of Rand Paul’s main SuperPAC, America’s Liberty. When Sen. Sorenson’s last invoice came, Tate emailed Ron Paul operative Kesari: What is this? What is it for, who is it? Why do we keep paying them? The last payment was supposedly the last. Kesari responded with two short emails: This is the last payment for kent Sorenson [sic]. The deal jesse [Benton] agreed to with kent. Is [sic] was for 6 months By this point, Ron Paul’s people got even lazier and just expensed the last payoffs as “AUDIO/VISUAL EXPENSES” in their FEC filings. And all this time, for some inexplicable reason, Sorenson clung to that uncashed $25,000 check the way that zombie in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead clung to that pistol as he shuffled around the shopping mall, dimly aware in some twitchy reptilian-zombie way, that the check could be useful. CUT TO: September, 2013. One of Sorenson’s true-believer Christian aides couldn’t stomach the sleaze, spilled the beans and incriminating emails, and landed Sorenson in an ethics committee investigation that he couldn’t crawl out of. At this point, former Ron-now-Rand Paul operative Kesari jetted to neighboring flat state Nebraska so as to not look suspicious, and gunned it straight to Iowa to get that motherfucking $25,000 check from Sorenson that the lughead never cashed. According to a federal indictment, Kesari [the Paul operative] flew to Omaha, Nebraska, backtracked to Senator Sorenson’s home in Iowa, required that he and Senator Sorenson show each other that neither was wearing a recording device, and then asked that Senator Sorenson either return to Kesari or alter the $25,000 check that Kesari previously gave to Senator Sorenson...which Senator Sorenson refused to do. One thing Sen. Sorenson had some experience with was ratting out others. He ratted out the pot dealer he got busted with and got his sentence reduced to five days and probation, and later, in office, voted to turn up the heat in the War On Drugs (funny how this didn’t bother Ron Paul’s principled people); and last year, after FBI agents raided Sorenson’s home and took his and his family’s computers, Sorenson copped a plea. Now the feds have the very top people in both Ron and Rand Paul’s campaigns for president going back to 2007, campaigns heavily underwritten by Silicon Valley billionaires and true believers... This past week has been an active one in the government’s case against Jesse Benton, John Tate and Dimitrios Kesari—the Southern Iowa District Court ruled that they were such a risk for leaking confidential documents that they could only view government evidence on CDs stored in their lawyers’ offices. On Thursday of this week, Jesse Benton and John Tate appeared before the court and pled not guilty on a number counts that mirror the Watergate charges 40 years ago: conspiracy to “knowingly defraud the United States”; “knowingly and willfully falsify, conceal and cover up by a trick, scheme and device a material fact in a matter within the jurisdiction of the executive branch”; “knowingly cause the concealing, covering up, falsification...with the intent to impede obstruct, and influence the investigation...” and so on. Meanwhile, the Court just sided with Google that it still wasn’t required to comply with the FBI warrant just yet and allow access to all the Gmail accounts that the feds demanded last year. As Google was careful to point out in its filings, the company has made sure to preserve and protect all email communications from those listed on the warrant — including presumably Ron Paul’s emails — to prevent anyone from trying to scrub or alter them. So Google is essentially complying, and they’re going to eventually hand them over, in all likelihood, and it will be some very incriminating material that could drive a barbed stake in the heart of libertarianism’s First Family... The funny thing is that real libertarians don’t even necessarily believe that bribery and fraud are legitimate crimes, if carried out in self-interest. For the most part, even mainstream libertarians from the CATO Institute argue that bribery should be legal. And yet—because libertarians have paradoxically transformed in recent years into the most sanctimonious loud-mouthed whiners in the political arena, this is one of those ugly, sleazy, low-rent corruption scandals, going all the way into the Paul family gene pool, that won’t sit well with the young, credulous males who give the libertarian cult its energy. Most of all, however, this story finally answers the question that all the hundreds of quasi-grizzled, quasi-cynical campaign trail journalists failed to answer: What happened to Rand Paul’s presidential campaign, the most hyped-up, promoted candidacy of anyone’s over the past two years? The liberal media has been drooling over Rand Paul like he’s the second coming, the Confederate with the heart of gold that all middle-class liberals dream of. I heard a lot of suckers claim that the Koch brothers had suddenly decided, after all these years of supporting their pet Pauls, that Rand was not to their liking, too much of a lightweight, or something like that. Because you know the Kochs only go with Very Serious Gravitas-y Heavyweights—the Herman Cains, Michele Bachmanns, Scott Walkers… I’ve learned since coming back here that American political journalists mistake their sneering for cynicism. Cynicism is what you learn in a place like Russia, which isn’t as far from the US as one would think (or hope). It never crosses a smug sneery journalist’s mind that the politics they’re reporting on is as corrupt as a tinpot dictator’s, that all the cant about principles is capital to be cashed, and cash it they do. Because politics is about dividing up trillions of dollars in wealth and power and privilege, not about high-minded debates in three-pointed hats. Those campaign donations that all the boring, unreadable nonprofit watchdog sites report on—that’s the dull accounting stuff for public consumption. The real game is the payoff—the check cashed, the dummy company that gets the wire transfer. First you have to be willing to see that it’s there.

Futsal: it might look like a simple game, but playing it well is far from easy. It takes a level of technical and tactical understanding that can take years to develop. Luckily, there are those out there who already have this knowledge and are generous enough to share it. The following 25 tips for futsal have been put together by elite level futsal players and coaches (credits below), with decades of combined experience in the game. They’ve distilled down the complexity of the game into simple technical and tactical rules: 25 maxims that you can bank on making you a better player, and improving your team. Learn them, live them, love them. Attacking Futsal Tactics Open the court, wingers should play hugging the sidelines to provide maximum width The 3 second rule: players must be on the move all the time when they don’t have the ball. When your team is attacking you should never stay in the same place without the ball for more than 3 seconds. In a game of 40 minutes you play for 4 minutes with the ball and 36 without it. To find space, occupy the space left free by a teammate. The player with the ball moves closer to the defender (to be able to go past him and force him to turn around), the players without the ball move away from their defenders (to create space and passing options). Help the player who has the ball. Sometimes this means getting closer; other times you need to move away. The aim, every time, is to create a clear passing line between you and your teammates. Never lose sight of the ball nor the eyes of the teammate who has it – sometimes it doesn’t matter if you move if your teammate has not even seen you. Pass and run – like the old motto: ‘pass and move’, but with an emphasis on the urgency of your movement. Be generous with your passing. The game is won by the TEAM who scores more goals; not the player who scores more goals. Separate where you look from where you pass. Do not make obvious passes. Use the element of disguise. Futsal is a sport for “liars”. Good players make it more difficult for the opposition to read them by performing feints when they’re passing, and checking away from their markers before moving in the other direction and losing their marker. (See an example of Sean Garnier do it in his tips for futsal – see tip 2 on his list). Passes must be strong but not carelessly violent. A firm pass doesn’t give defenders any unnecessary time to intercept it, or to close the space on the player receiving it. Be careful with passes from one wing to another when playing close to your own goal, near the “D”. If they’re intercepted they’ll lead to an easy chance for the opposition. The rule of 5 passes. Patience is often needed in futsal. Where the opponents are set-up behind the ball in a defensive position, expect to pass the ball at least 5 times before shooting to disorganise them. The goalkeeper must know how to deal with the tempo of the game. When their team is losing, goalkeepers should play as quick as possible, but in a winning position they should take their time with the restarts and their throws. The backman or “fix” (or any player for that matter) never dribbles if he is the last man, because if he loses the ball it will be a 1 v 1 against the goalkeeper. Finish the play with a strong shot to avoid a counterattack. A weakly struck shot ends up in the goalkeepers arms and can quickly put the opponents on the front foot. Defending Futsal Tactics Aggressiveness: a ball is never given up; fight for every single one. Defending is more about attitude than technique. Players have to want to steal the ball with everything they’ve got and try to be the best defender in the team. Strength in the tackle. Tackle the ball like you mean it but not violently. Do not allow the player with the ball to think. Continuously annoy / disrupt the opponent but without trying to steal the ball, unless they lose control of it. Never lose sight of the ball or the eyes of the player who has it. Exactly the same tip as no.6, but equally crucial in defense. The wing (sideline) is one more defender. Direct the opposition player with the ball towards it. There is no rest when defending and no player should adopt an upright position / stance, as the opposition will exploit the tiniest mistake to score. All players must defend behind the ball. When you haven’t got the ball all players get back to defend, and all of them should be behind the ball, making it difficult for the opposition to break you down. Never cross over in defence. Talk to each other and change the players being marked. There should be constant communication between defenders The above list has been reproduced (with small amendments) from “FUTSAL: Technical & Tactical Concepts” by Dr. Daniel Berdejo-del-Fresno, Jonathan Steel and David Jennings. This has been done with the permission of Dr. Daniel Berdejo-del-Fresno, who, among a host of achievements, is Sports Scientist / Strength & Conditioning Coach for the England National Futsal Team and has plenty of experience with elite level futsal players. Daniel has generously made his book available free for download on his blog: http://danielberdejodelfresno.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/book-released-futsal-technical-tactical.html It contains lots of futsal tips, techniques and tactics – definitely worth downloading a copy. More tips and tactics for futsal If you’re just starting out on your futsal journey, and you’re craving more tips. Check out our top 10 tips for futsal beginners. Full of very practical tips, it is a useful crib sheet for anyone new to the game. Share this: Tweet Email

Android OS version: 8.1.0_r7 8.1.0_r7 For devices: Kenzo Kenzo Authors build: xyyx xyyx Source code: https://github.com/nitrogen-project | https://github.com/nitrogen-os-devices https://github.com/nitrogen-project | https://github.com/nitrogen-os-devices Developers: xyyx xyyx Thanks: billchen1977 for brilliant work on Kenzo, ezio84, beanstown106, maxwen and etc. billchen1977 for brilliant work on Kenzo, ezio84, beanstown106, maxwen and etc. Google Apps: opengapps.org opengapps.org Recovery: TWRP Attention: I don't force you to use my ROM. I fix bugs that doesn't require many commits from CAF. If you don't like something, please, use another ROM and don't write in this thread. Please. SELinux in permissive mode. It is ready for enforcing. But I like no denies. Go to your recovery Wipe Data Install ROM and Gapps zip. Reboot - 1st boot takes around 5-10 minutes. Code: Status Bar: - Network traffic; - Bluetooth device battery level in status bar; - Adjust brightness by sliding across the status bar; - Input method selector notification. Quick Settings: - Number of rows and columns; - Quick pulldown; - No QS on secured lockscreen; - Brightness slider; - Smart pulldown; - Show/hide adaptive brightness icon in QS; - LTE enable/disable tile. - Hiding tile's caption Buttons: For devices with hardware buttons - Enable/disable buttons; - Adjust brightness; - Keys brightness timeout; - Reassignment hardware buttons action; - Volume rocker wake; - Playback control by volume keys; - Allow volume keys to enable/disable “Do Not Disturb” mode. Navigation Bar: - 3 type navigation bar mode: Smartbar (as usual in android) and Fling (navbar from “Dirty Unicorns” rom), AOSP Navbar; - Pulse settings in Fling navbar; - Navbar height control in portrait and landscape orientations; - Context buttons layout position; - Context buttons transparency; - Button touch animation; - Cursor arrows in navbar while typing; - Force show/hide navbar on the bottom side when device is rotated; Gestures: - Open camera by double tap the power button; - Double tap on lockscreen to put the device to sleep; - Double tap status bar to put the device to sleep; Lock Screen: - Lock screen shortcuts; - Show/hide weather on lock screen; - Longpress power button with lock screen turn on torch; Power Menu: - Customizing power menu; - Enable/disable power menu on secure lock screen. Recents apps: - Exclude apps from the recents panel; - Select recents view. - Clear all button positions Miscellaneous: - Screenshot type – fullscreen screenshots or selected area as a screenshots; - Enable MTP instead charging after connect to PC; - Wakelock blocker; - Alarm blocker - App ops; - Wake up device if charger is plugged/unplugged; - Allow signature spoofing (microG). Other: - Quick unlock - Enable/disable dashboard suggestions, conditions; Pal Known Bugs: XDA:DevDB Information Nitrogen OS, ROM for the Xiaomi Note 3 Pro Standart/Prime XDA:DevDB Information [ROM] ► [8.1.0] ► [OTA] ► Nitrogen OS Beta, ROM for the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 Contributors Version Information Based on AOSP xyyx (Max) - main developerCopy the ROM and Gapps in SD card.EnjoyStable builds HERE Testing versions HERE Mirror for SF - HERE If you like my ROM, you can support me.xyyx:- sim detection after boot (random)- VOLTE video call- hidden wifi (need to turn off and on display after adding)8.x OreoLinux 3.10.xAOSP, CM, Pure, DU, OmniROMTesting2017-01-112018-03-04

Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary has rejected suggestions that UK-Israeli relations would suffer if party leader Ed Miliband becomes prime minister in May. She dismissed such claims a bid to “play party politics” with foreign affairs. Yvette Cooper’s comments were issued in an exclusive interview with the Jewish Chronicle in response to remarks made by Conservative Northern Irish Secretary Theresa Villiers. Villiers had claimed in January a newly-elected Labour government would have a “chilling” effect on Britain’s relationship with Israel. Cooper said the suggestion that Britain’s role as a key ally of Israel would be diminished if Labour wins May’s general election is “utter nonsense.” "It's nonsense to say Labour is anti-Israel", says @YvetteCooperMP. Relationship w/Jewish community “strong as ever” http://t.co/rPe19KKNAy — Marcus Dysch (@MarcusDysch) February 12, 2015 She said Villiers’ bid to play political football with foreign policy issues was “disappointing.” Cooper acknowledged, however, Miliband’s condemnation of PM David Cameron’s response to the 2014 Gaza conflict was scathing. At the height of the conflict, Miliband had described Israel's military offensive in Gaza as“unacceptable and unjustifiable.” The Labour chief had also criticized Cameron’s stance on Israel’s actions, accusing the Tory leader of being too ambivalent on the military campaign. Boycott Divestment & Sanctions: ‘Tactic not principle’ While some backbench Labour MPs have signaled support for Britain’s boycott, divestment and sanctions movement (BDS) against Israel, the campaign has not been endorsed by Miliband or Cooper. The British arm of the movement is backed by academics, pro-Palestinian campaigners, and politicians across the UK. READ MORE:UK MP says Bradford doesn’t want Israeli goods, services or visitors The BDS campaign, which is supported worldwide, says it seeks to “strengthen and spread the culture of boycott as a central form of civil resistance to Israeli occupation, colonialism and apartheid.” Launched in the Occupied Territories in 2005, it is supported by over 170 Palestinian organizations representing exiled Palestinian refugees, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip and Palestinian’s who suffer discrimination in Israel. Speaking to the Jewish Chronicle, Cooper said Miliband has made his position on boycotts against Israel clear. “Ed does defend Israel, but that’s not to say he will support every decision the Israeli government takes. No one could expect that,” she added. While addressing the UN in October 2014, world renowned linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky was somewhat critical about the BDS campaign. He argued it is characterized by a set of tactics rather than principles. “Tactics are not principles. They’re not actions that you undertake no matter what because you think they’re right,” he said. Decline in neighborhood policing As part of her role in government, Cooper has worked closely with Jewish groups in an effort to tackle racism and hate crimes in the UK. Amid a rising climate of anti-Semitism in Britain, the Shadow Home Secretary said government cuts had led to drop in “community-led policing.” Cooper said the decline of a neighborhood police presence in Britain is problematic. “You need that community-led policing work because people have a right to feel safe on their streets and in their homes,” she added. A poll conducted in late January indicates Israeli foreign policy has not impacted on the majority of Britons’ resolve that Israel has a right to exist. Great that PM says antisemitism goes against what UK stands for. Wish politicians would say that for all racism http://t.co/S7WSr1VlpF — rachel shabi (@rachshabi) February 9, 2015 The survey, commissioned by the UK’s All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Anti-Semitism, revealed 89 percent of Britons polled said the Middle Eastern state has a right to exist. The survey suggested Britain’s current rate of anti-Semitism mirrors that of 2005, hitting 4.6 on a scale of one to 10. According to the scale, one indicates anti-Semitism is “not a problem” in the UK, while 10 indicates it is “a serious problem.” In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, members of the Jewish community in North London’s Stoke Newington told the Shadow Home Secretary they were concerned. Cooper said high-profile terror attacks and anti-Semitic abuse on the street and on social media platforms can seriously impact people’s day-to-day lives. “We should never ignore that. We have to take it seriously and provide that reassurance for people,” she said. The Shadow Home Secretary insisted a newly-elected Labour government would implement measures to counter extremism and the rise of radicalization in Britain. She added a reformed strategy for tackling hate crime in Britain is paramount. Cooper condemned social media firms for failing to intercept online anti-Semitic abuse, stressing how Labour's Lucia Berger MP was exposed to offensive vitriol from an online troll in 2014.

Dubai startup BitOasis announces its first round of funding Dubai based bitcoin startup BitOasis has secured a new investment of seed funding for an undisclosed amount led by Wamda Capital. BitOasis provides bitcoin exchange, wallet, and cross-border payment services in and around the UAE. According to Wamda Capital, the seed funding round included Barry Silbert’s Digital Currency Group (DCG), Samih Toukan, the serial tech entrepreneur chairman of Jabbar Group, as well as Payfort and other tech angel investors based in New York and Dubai. “Our aim since launch is to build the largest digital currency exchange and payments infrastructure platform in the Middle East and North Africa,” said Ola Doudin, CEO and cofounder of BitOasis. Within the next year using the new venture capital, the bitcoin startup plans to grow its team further and expand to other Arab countries around the region to strengthen its presence outside the UAE. One of the main advantages that BitOasis has over other startups in the space is at this time it’s the only bitcoin business focused on the Middle East.

Get answers from your peers along with millions of IT pros who visit Spiceworks. Here are some stories we’ve found across the internet from tech support folks we’d love to share. Each of them is full of fun and drama. 1. Making users liars since 1975 Once, I had a user come in… User: My MacBook air is really slow. Me (while opening up terminal and running uptime): Hmm, when was the last time you rebooted? User: Oh, a few days ago. Me: According to your compute, it’s been up for 41 days. User: It’s lying. She also had 5 Chrome Windows with at least 20 tabs apiece, Spotify, Photoshop, Word, AND Excel. 2. Now you see me, now you don’t. Customer: Do I have to watch my computer screen to use your app? Me: It’s considered a best practice. Otherwise you can’t see what people are saying. Customer: I see… 3. Cat and mouse Me: Good afternoon, this is Ari. How can I help you? Lady: My son’s computer is just pissing me off. He is traveling with his new wife. Can you help me? Me: Sure. Have you started the computer? Lady: Oh yeah. Me: I will need to see the configuration. Can you do a left click on the Start button bottom left of your screen with the mouse? Lady: That arrow thing is acting like a son of a bitch, not moving. The right clicks seems to show me some shit. Me: Could you please lift the mouse and check that the ball is moving freely and there is no dirt? Lady: Ah… uh… Now I know where that bloody ball came from. My cat’s been playing with it since yesterday… 4. P as in Peter Me: Sir, do you see a login screen asking for username and password? User: Yes. Me: Type admin as username. User: Badmi? Me: No, sir, its admin. A as in alfa, D as in delta, M as in Mike, I as in India, N as in November… User: Admin, right. (35 minutes passed. Finally, the user did it.) Me: Can you type the word password in the password field and click login? User: Bassword. “Invalid bassword.” Me: Try again. Type P as in Paul. User: B as ball? Me: No sir. It’s P as in Peter or P as in parrot. User: B as Beter? Me (trying again): P as papa. User: B as bapa, (This next part is my favorite.) Me (losing my temper): Sir, it’s not AB… it’s abcdefghijklmnop. P. P! User: Oh so it’s P! Huh!! I’ll try now. 5. My computer is not yours Me: XYZ technical support, how may I assist you? User: I have some difficulty in locating some files on my computer, it seems I am not able to open any files Me: Sir, could you please check whether you are able to get the Desktop screen. User: Yes, now what? Me: Can you open My Computer? User: How can I open your computer? 6. Fix it! Customer: Fix it! Me: Fix what, ma’am? Customer: My Internet connection. Can’t you tell why I’m calling? Me: No, ma’am, the technology doesn’t work that way. (I apologize for any inconvenience, and then check her connection. Everything is fine. I even test with ping and packet testing; again, very strong signal to the Internet.) Me: Ma’am, are you using a router? Customer: I don’t know. You guys installed it all. Me: Ma’am, we don’t install routers. Do you know the name of the router you’re using? Customer: No. Me: We can test the modem to make sure it’s working. Can you take your laptop into the room with the modem and unplug the modem from the rou— (Had I finished, I would have asked her to connect the laptop to the modem directly.) Customer: No. I couldn’t possibly do that! You just need to fix it. Me: Ma’am, are you suffering from an illness or injury preventing me from helping you today? Customer: No, and I couldn’t possibly be bothered with that. The modem and the laptop are on different floors. I called you to fix it. Why can’t you just fix it? 7. Push When Ringing Me: Thank you for calling [Cell Phone Provider]. This is [My Name]. How may I assist you today? Customer: Yes. Every time my phone rings and I try to answer it, my phone shuts off. It happens every time. Me: Well, that is pretty odd. Let me see if I can figure out what the issue with your handset is. (After spending almost an hour trying to look up account info and diagnose what could possibly be wrong with this woman’s phone with no luck, I am about to give up and replace the phone.) Me: So that I can write up in your account what exactly is happening so we can replace your phone, what button are you pushing when trying to answer the phone? Customer: The “Push When Ringing” button. Me: I’m sorry, which button? Customer: “Push When Ringing.” You know? P-W-R. Me: I think I know the problem… What are the funniest tech support stories you’ve ever heard? Share with us.

Recently I was reminded of something I learned ten years ago, while studying in Beijing. It was a month ago, and I was walking into a restaurant in Chengdu, around closing time, with a group of my wife’s friends. It was nearly 9pm and most of the staff were eating their shift meal or clearing tables, waiting for the last diners to finish. I asked a waiter if we could get some food and he responded apologetically that they were closing. Knowing that our dinner options were dwindling, I pleaded our case, asking that they seat us. To deflect my request the waiter said, ‘sorry, we are out of gas’. I knew it was a lie, but I did not take it personally. It brought to mind the director of my study abroad program in Beijing, who had introduced me to what she dubbed “the social institution of the polite lie.” The polite lie is a lie that a stranger tells a stranger to avoid the discomfort of being direct. She told a story of trying to catch a ride from a cab driver that was playing a game of cards on the street. “I would take you,” he said, but my car is out of gas. She could see that he was playing cards and did not want to leave his game. She could also see the dashboard of his car, and she pointed out that he did in fact have gas in his car. “That gauge is broken,” the driver retorted without looking up from his game. This phenomenon seemed to pop up frequently after it had been pointed out to me. On one occasion I ran into a group of friends eating at a restaurant. I sat down at a table beside them, not intending to eat. As we chatted, a waiter approached and asked what I wanted to order. “I’ve already eaten, but I would like some tea,” I said. “Sorry, we are out of tea”, the waiter said casually and walked away. I was stunned by the slap of the lie; I felt a mixture of confusion and insult. I see now the waiter was just too busy to serve me. I was announcing that I was not going to be a paying customer, and he was announcing that he was not going to be giving me complimentary tea. Though it seemed interesting from an anthropological perspective, the polite lie always bugged me. I love China, and this niggling social convention felt like the most disingenuous part of it. One frustrating encounter happened last year near my apartment. A new toy store had opened at the corner, and I wandered in to peruse their wares, idly chatting with the cashier as I fondled a magnetic floating globe. “So you guys just opened,” I asked. “We’re open every day from morning till night,” she responded. “No, I mean this location,” I clarified, “you just opened this store.” “No, we’ve been here for a few years, you probably just didn’t notice,” she replied matter-of-factly. I was infuriated by her suggestion that the opening of a new toy store near my house could have gone unnoticed by me for so long. I was instantly fuming, and then instantly amused at myself for taking offense at the remark. But I still couldn’t understand why this woman would want to dupe me over something so inconsequential. There had to be a functional purpose for this evasive rhetorical device. Then it suddenly dawned on me. She wasn’t trying to trick me, she was trying to cover up her own unfamiliarity with the business. I knew the store had just opened – I had seen it under construction – she must have just been hired. Maybe she didn’t even know the store’s history. “How long have you been working here,” I asked. Her face reddened, and she acknowledged that it was her first day. I brought up the polite lie with an expat friend of mine, another long-time Chengdu resident, and he mentioned that he had often encountered the polite lie with his Chinese friends, though not as its recipient. He told me: My Chinese friends would invite me to go do something, and I would tell them, ‘sorry, I can’t, I have to watch my kids.’ And that was the truth. And my Chinese friends would say ‘Okay, okay, okay, its okay, I understand. No problem.’ And I could hear in their voice that they thought I was just making up an excuse. The Chinese friends assumed they were being told a polite lie, happy to accept it. Social pleasantries utilize coded language, and if you are attuned to detect it, the polite lie is not so much an affront, as a form of indirect communication. There is no question that face plays a role in the perpetuation of the polite lie as a social convention. Rejecting someone outright can cause them to lose face, and a polite lie allows you to avoid that by fabricating an excuse. It is in some ways a gesture of respect, demonstrating a desire to avoid contradicting the other person. A polite lie can be a lifeline, allowing you to deflect the wrath of a social superior. In that way, I can imagine how these micro-doses of mistruth function as a kind of social lubricant, diffusing status conflicts, maintaining norms, and preventing the loss of face. So when I was recently hit with the explanation that the restaurant was out of gas, I was neither insulted nor dissuaded. Most restaurants in China close pretty early by Western standards, and I had been welcomed and denied by wait staff in similar situations in the past. So while I knew we might not be served, I also knew that the possibility was negotiable. If you want to overturn a polite lie, directly confronting it is not advisable, since the lie was concocted with the courteous intention to avoid confrontation. The way to diplomatically counter such a lie is to build upon the provided scenario, to give the other person an option to reverse their stance without losing face. You give them a step down (一个台阶下 ) as they say in Chinese, a way to yield without embarrassment. A Chinese friend repeated the staff’s message for me, “They said they are out of gas. We should go.” I ignored her. “Maybe you have enough gas for just few more dishes?” I said to the waiter. “We have aaaaaall these people – I gestured to our group – I don’t want them to be hungry.” Perhaps sensing oncoming hassle, the staff relented and ushered us upstairs. Avoidance of hassle can be a key motive for the polite lie. A Dutch friend, newly arrived in Chengdu, asked me to help him find a tailor who could execute some fashions designs that he had. His ideas were pretty straightforward, and he was frustrated that every tailor he visited had told him, “We can’t do that” – it should have been a snap for any experienced tailor, he reasoned. I explained to him that the reason he was being given was probably not the whole story. When the tailors told him “we can’t do that,” they were really saying, “you look like a big hassle, and I don’t want to deal with you.” They were excusing themselves from the interaction before it even began. One of the most confounding things about the polite lie is that it is deployed when it seems unnecessary. The lies of the tailors did not even register as lies to my friend – after all, why would anyone even bother lying about something like that? Why do I even care how long a toy store has been open? I can cope with the harsh truth if you just don’t feel like keeping the restaurant open for me. There is part of me that refuses to accept that casually lying to a stranger can be anything other than socially harmful. But then I catch a whiff of my own ethno-centrism. I remember a Chinese friend who refused to accept my (heartfelt) assertion that an American friend and I graphically joking about each other’s mothers was anything other than disgracefully insulting. The more I joked about my American friend’s mother, the angrier the Chinese friend became, and the funnier it became to me, exacerbating the situation. To me, the suggestion that my American friend could possibly be offended by such remarks was absurd. After all, I would not dare to insult the mother of anyone but my dearest friends. To me, the mother jokes were an expression of fraternity. If I can embrace the idea of an insult as a form of endearment, I should be able to accept the possibility of a lie as a form of courtesy. Whether it boils down to the interpretation of an insult, or the interpretation of truth, context is the ultimate arbiter of meaning. I brushed up against the soul of the matter again this past weekend. I had called my water store to order three new jugs of drinking water, and typical of their recent service, an hour and a half had passed without the water being delivered. I called the water dispatch center, irate about the delay. “This happens all of the time,” I said. “ALL-THE-TIME. Every time.” I was verging on belligerent. “The delivery guy was eating lunch,” the voice on the other end of the line shot back reflexively. Was he really at lunch, I wondered. It was around lunchtime. It was impossible to know. Either way, the real reason for the delay was more complicated. One factor, I learned later, was that the dispatch center number I had been calling was no longer technically correct. The branch was still operational, but it had been supplanted by a newer, closer branch, which was now responsible for delivering to my section of the complex. The old branch was still obliged to field my call, because I had pre-purchased water coupons from them, but now I was out of their delivery zone. The slow delivery time was the result of my order being relayed from one dispatch center to the next, getting de-prioritized along the way. The water delivery guy explained this all to me, when he finally arrived with my jugs. I could understand why the woman from the old branch would have elided over these details on the phone. It probably seemed a lot simpler to tell me that the delivery guy was eating lunch, than to explain the politics of delivery zone redistricting to an angry foreigner. The efficiency the polite lie must have been alluring – how quickly it could staunch my stream of complaints, how cleanly it could end the phone call. I am averse to social conventions that perpetuate euphemistic language, so at the end of the day, even after giving consideration to its practical function and cultural context, it is still hard for me to see the polite lie as anything other than a kind of linguistic pathogen. It dilutes communication, and it normalizes a social dynamic in which two people are not always comfortable being completely honest with one another. But there is an important lesson that I take away from the experience. If I dislike an element of local culture, I should make sure that I dislike it for what it really is, and not what I imagine it to be. In practice, local meaning trumps the pseudo-objective perspective of outsider like myself. Among denizens of any locale there is a shared familiarity with the contours of social discourse. Language is a map of our collective cognitive landscape, and the polite lie is just one thoroughfare of communication that we navigate to reach one another’s intended meaning. I doubt that the polite lie is unique to China, but it was certainly alien to my upbringing. That makes it anathema to me, but for many others, the idea of a “friendly” insult to someone’s mother is no doubt equally unfathomable. If the people who traffic in the polite lie do not feel deceived, that should factor into how I view the phenomenon. The polite lie is not evidence of moral failure, or a predisposition for deception, or a culture of untrustworthiness… it is just an anachronistic piece of social etiquette that rubs me the wrong way. A lie is a lie, except when it doesn’t feel like one. A punch in the face is assault, except when it happens in a boxing ring.

U.S. President Barack Obama told Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday that Russia's actions in Ukraine were not conducive to a diplomatic solution of the crisis in that country, and the White House warned that Moscow would suffer further costs for its behavior. Obama spoke to Putin at the Russians' request, a senior administration official said, describing the call as "frank and direct," a diplomatic construction that usually means tense. "The president made clear that the diplomatic path was open and our preferred way ahead, but that Russia's actions are neither consistent with or conducive to that," the official said. Obama told Putin that Kiev had made "real offers" to address concerns about the decentralization of powers to local governments in the country. "That is a matter for Ukrainians to decide," the official said. "We have always and will continue to support an inclusive process." Earlier, U.S. officials stopped short of announcing a new set of sanctions against Russia but said they were in consultations with European partners about the prospect. The European Union agreed on Monday to step up sanctions against Moscow by expanding a list of people subjected to asset freezes and visa bans. Keep updated: Sign up to our newsletter Email * Please enter a valid email address Sign up Please wait… Thank you for signing up. We've got more newsletters we think you'll find interesting. Click here Oops. Something went wrong. Please try again later. Try again Thank you, The email address you have provided is already registered. Close "Russia continues to engage in provocative actions in eastern Ukraine. The mere presence of the troops, in addition to what else they've done inside Ukraine, creates a threat of destabilization within Ukraine," White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters. "I can assure you that Russia's provocations - further transgressions and provocations will come with a cost. And I'm not here to specify what cost will come from which specific action, but there have already been costs imposed on Russia; there will be further costs imposed on Russia." The next round of U.S. sanctions, which would be the fourth imposed since the Ukraine crisis began, is likely to target Russians close to Putin as well as Russian entities, three sources familiar with the discussions said on Sunday. U.S. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki noted that the United States was prepared to impose sanctions on individuals and entities in the financial services, energy, metals, mining, engineering and defense sectors. The sanctions have been the most visible sign of U.S. anger at Russia's annexation of the Crimea region in southern Ukraine last month, reflecting the deepest plunge in U.S.-Russian relations since the Cold War. Obama spoke to French President Francois Hollande about the crisis on Monday and praised Ukraine's government for showing "great restraint" and working to unify the country, the White House said. Carney also confirmed that the director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan, had been in Kiev over the weekend and decried what he called "false claims" leveled at the CIA by Russian authorities. "Senior level visits of intelligence officials are a standard means of fostering mutually beneficial security cooperation including U.S.-Russian intelligence collaboration going back to the beginnings of the post-Cold War era," Carney said. "U.S. and Russian intelligence officials have met over the years. To imply that U.S. officials meeting with their counterparts (in Kiev) is anything other than in the same spirit is absurd," he said. According to media reports, Russia has urged Washington to explain what Brennan was doing in Ukraine.

Reading Steiner: REFERENCE-OGRAPHY PUNOGRAPHY: So, when you go back in time in "Life is Strange", you technically bring anyone who died a few seconds ago back from the dead, right? What if those people'sdon't come back with them? What if they just came back as empty husks with a few base instincts, like cannibalism (the basest of all human instincts, of course)? And if souls aren't affected by time-travel, then logically, fungus isn't either, because souls and fungus are in the same biological kingdom (duh), which means that whenever you go back in time in "Life is Strange", fungus is able to evolve more and more until something that used to only be able to infect insects jumps to infecting mammals -- even humans. The evolution would seem so sudden to anyone without the Reading Steiner* as the fungus makes its way into food delivered to the masses and infects the human species on a global scale.So, when you go back in time in "Life is Strange"... what are youdoing?1. An awareness of temporal re-experience2. The ability to recognize that you have undergone a nonstandard passing of time3. Knowing that you have gone back in time, but also retaining your memory from the original timelineThe red-headed girl, Ellie, is from "The Last of Us" which spawned my first parody series, "THE LEAST OF US" (look out for spoilers).The two with the gun, Lee and Clem, are from "The Walking Dead Game", which I've also made cartoons for called "THE WALK-IN DEAD" (also spoilers).The title is a pun on the term "temporal anomaly", which is a disruption in the space-time continuum usually resulting from time-travel or something like that.

In addition to Nintendo 2DS announcement, Nintendo of America announced a $50 dollar price drop for the struggling Wii U console. We've just gotten word from Nintendo Australia will not be following suit. As of this point there are no current plans for a Wii U price drop in Australia or New Zealand. This also follows news that Nintendo will not be bringing the Wind Waker HD Limited Edition to our shores, or the Wii U Wind Waker HD bundle. The limited edition for Wind Waker HD was rather snazzy, featuring a Ganondorf figurine, so I find this news rather disappointing. As for the price drop, the statement coming from Nintendo Australia didn't necessarily rule out any future price drops. I suspect we'll definitely see one, but probably not before Christmas.

Primus :: 6.24.14 :: The Capitol Theatre :: Port Chester, NY Read Chad’s review after the photo gallery. Primus is an acquired taste, existing in – or more like occupying – the space where art-rock, metal, funk and jamband meet to forget themselves and rage together for a few hours. That the trio is sometimes inaccessible and occasionally stunty is part of the deal: set the scene, let the casual onlookers hang out nervously around the perimeter and engage front-and-center the fans for whom this odd collection of sounds and grooves holds singular appeal. It isn’t that the setlists or jams see enormous variation or surprise, or that the expected theatrics – gnarly stage setup, titillating visuals, Les Claypool’s twisted-wiseacre monologues – are all that fresh each and every time. No, what brings you back to Primus – what sells out a show like this typically galvanizing night at the Capitol Theater – is the depth of the experience. All Les Claypool bands have layers. You start with the carnival atmosphere, commingling with those who have also come for the “show” aspect. This is a place where of course there will be trippy lights, and of course there will be two 15-foot astronaut statues flanking the stage and of course vintage Popeye cartoons will be shown on the projection screen during set break, because why not? A layer below that is the aural assault: Les’ filthy thump, slaps and grooves, Tim Alexander’s pummeling, yet nimble drumwork, Larry LaLonde’s abrasive guitar runs, stabs and snatches of melodic counterpoint. And a layer below that is the actual songcraft – a catalog of character sketches and incisive, even scathing commentary that asks nothing of the listener but to hang on a little longer before it’s default-described as “wacky,” so often the crutch phrase used to describe Primus’ eccentric approach. The two sets at the Capitol drew from across the Primus discography, and what was most encouraging was how the best songs from 2011’s Green Naughahyde – particularly the frank, let’s-funk-our-way-through-the-pain “Jilly’s On Smack” and the mutant bounce of “Lee Van Cleef” – have integrated with the expected Primus highs of tunes like “Jerry Was a Race Car Driver.” I don’t share the opinion that “Naughahyde” is any great leap forward for the band, but a solid collection to keep pace – if not quite on par –with the Frizzle Fry era of Primus output and convince us that with all the other things occupying Claypool’s creative space, returning to Primus isn’t just a nostalgia trip. Maybe that’s the way to think about Primus in 2014. Les turned 50 last year and proved he could leave it behind before, so that it’s back and once again thriving – having not altered its fundamentals – is the reason to keep coming. There’s heart behind Primus; it’s not a mechanical “wacky” for wacky’s sake. Underneath the scary-funky menagerie populating this trio’s world is a band aging with grace. Primus, 6/24/2014 Setlist: Set One: Those Damned Blue-Collar Tweekers, The Last Salmon Man, Southbound Pachyderm, Over the Falls, Lee Van Cleef, The Heckler, Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver, Frizzle Fry, Groundhog’s Day Set Two: Spaghetti Western, Duchess and the Proverbial Mind Spread, Moron TV, American Life, Jilly’s On Smack, Mr. Krinkle, My Name Is Mud, Mrs. Blaileen, Jerry Was a Race Car Driver, Harold of the Rocks Encore: Too Many Puppies > Hello Skinny > Too Many Puppies JamBase | Primus Sucks Go See Live Music!

“They love to engage in revisionist history,” Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) said on the floor of the U.S. Congress, Nov. 19. She was referring to Democrats as she had risen to speak in opposition to an environmental protection measure intended to safeguard a 21-mile segment of Molalla River in Oregon. As she spoke, Foxx set about some blatant revisionism of her own. Foxx’s began her objection with the bizarre suggestion that the GOP had been the champion of “good” environmental protection laws. Had she stopped there, her floor speech would have justifiably been dismissed as a bit of irony. Instead, Foxx went on to perpetuate the misconception that Republicans were also the champions of civil rights legislation in the 1960s, amid fervent obstruction from Democrats. Upon the completion of Foxx’s remarks, she was passionately rebuked by Rep. Dennis Cardoza (D-CA). “I can’t believe my ears,” Cardoza said, and went on to assign credit for the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965) to the efforts to the Democratic administration of Lyndon B. Johnson. Here is video of the exchange on the House floor from the ThinkProgress.org Nov. 19 post on the subject. (continued below the clip) While Cardoza’s assessment was factually correct and his tone appropriate, his rebuke of Foxx would have been strengthened by informing her that the Republican Party of which she spoke no longer exists. Indeed, the Republicans whose votes were vital to passing civil rights legislation in the 1960s would be derided as RINOs – Republicans in Name Only – by Foxx and like minded, right-wing ideologues of today’s GOP. That conservatives have sought to maintain this myth is nothing new. Paul von Hipple addressed it in a 2005 Alternet.org post responding to a taxpayer funded “Republican Freedom Calendar” which presented a one-sided representation of their Party’s historic role as advocates of civil rights. The evidence employed to prop up this argument relies upon the higher proportion of GOP votes for the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It’s a far too narrow interpretation of history, as von Hipple indicated in his 2005 post: In fact, Congressional votes on the Civil Rights Act did not break along party lines – they split along regional lines. In the North, both parties supported the Civil Rights Act; in the South, both parties opposed it. The difference was that the Republican Party had very little presence in the South, which had been dominated since the 1870s by the segregationist wing of the Democratic Party. This period marks a historical turning point for both political parties. President Johnson and liberal Northern Democrats were ill prepared for the Southern white backlash that followed the passage of civil rights legislation. Of course, the legislation wasn’t the only factor, but it was during this time that the Democratic Party set on a path to shedding its racist elements. In doing so, Democrats lost the political grip on the South it had held since the Great Depression. The path chosen by the Republicans was altogether different. Interestingly, the GOP underwent a schism, not unlike the one presently in progress. Republican conservatives, sympathetic to the racist backlash among Southern whites, made their first political inroads in the South around this time. The most significant evidence for this trend was the GOP’s 1964 presidential nomination of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. Before Goldwater’s nomination, the GOP’s regional strength was based in the American North-East. Their party leaders were inclined to support government investment in infrastructure. Having been decimated during their initial struggle against Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal (which they decried as “socialist,” sound familiar?) a moderate GOP persisted as a minority party, seeking to improve FDR’s legislation rather than rail against it. Goldwater lost to LBJ in 1964, but having won his home state and four other Southern states in the contest, the GOP’s course was set. They abandoned their moderate positions — the mantle of which Foxx is presently attempting to claim — in pursuit of the racially divisive “Southern Strategy.” This political strategy was neatly summarized by Sidney Blumenthal in a 2003 Salon.com post: With the coming of the civil rights revolution, Democratic presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson deployed the federal government to support social equality. In reaction, Republicans — from Barry Goldwater to Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan — developed a Southern strategy to win over white voters in the region who felt betrayed. That strategy involved using widely understood code words going back to the Civil War like “states’ rights,” an updating of the well-worn strategy of Southern reactionaries to demagogue on race in order to keep poor and working-class whites divided from blacks on issues of common interest. Thus the party of Lincoln became the party of Reagan. Indeed, Reagan’s ascendency is instructive. His rise was facilitated by the GOP’s rejection of its moderate voices. Just as Foxx mistakenly claimed the civil rights mantle on Nov. 19, Reagan did also. Yet his true feelings were betrayed by his policies and rhetoric. From the above mentioned von Hibble Alternet post: …Ronald Reagan, in his 1966 campaign to become governor of California, endorsed repeal of California’s Fair Housing Act, saying, “If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, it is his right to do so.” Similarly, Foxx’s own statements over the past year illustrate her departure from the moderate positions of the kinder, gentler GOP of yore. She has more than made herself clear regarding the present-day civil rights issues, most notably in debates over the rights of homosexuals and health care reform. My Care2 colleague Tracy Viselli understandably called for Foxx’s apology or resignation following her slanderous comments about Matthew Sheppard on the House floor while debating the hate crime legislation that bares his name. More recently, Viselli , rightly, took issue with Foxx’s declaration that the present health care reform proposals pose a bigger threat to America than “any terrorist from any country.” Add to this Foxx’s 2006 vote, along with 33 other Republicans, opposing the extension of the Voters Rights Act, and it becomes clear that any claim of civil rights advocacy exists only in her mind. Further, these outrageous examples of Foxx’s true beliefs plainly illustrate that the North Carolina congresswoman has absolutely nothing in common with the Republicans who helped advance the cause of civil rights in the 1960s. Rather, Foxx is just another product of the cynical GOP which prospered by exploiting the societal divisions left after their passing. Related on Care2: ~ Judy Shepard: Grace in the Face of Foxx Photo used under the Creative Commons Attribution Act; Rep. Virginia Foxx

If Telstra wins the company will get between $100 million and $200 million more than what NBN Co expects to pay over a 10-year period. It is understood the problem was caused by the lack of a specific year in the contract despite legal teams working on the deal for over two years. Arguments heard by judge The problem was discovered after the deal was signed and both sides attempted to plan the timing of the payments. Both sides have already had arguments heard by former Federal Court judge Kevin Lindgren in 2012. Mr Lindgren found in favour of NBN Co in December 2012 and provided an 11-page explanation as part of the judgement. “I have come to the conclusion that NBN Co is correct," he said. “Telstra’s arguments are akin to the tail wagging the dog." Telstra has chosen not to accept Mr Lindgren’s judgement and will contest the issue in the NSW Supreme Court. A preliminary hearing is due to begin on November 8 in Sydney. Telstra spokeswoman Nicole ­McKechnie said the legal proceedings and their impact would be significant but not material from a investor ­perspective. “We have commenced legal proceedings with NBN Co over when CPI adjustments should start to apply under the NBN Definitive Agreements," she said. “We have one take on the contract and NBN Co has another." The case has the potential to cause problems for both companies as they enter fresh negotiations over the $11.2 billion contract. Timing of lawsuit Where Labor’s $37.4 billion NBN would have replaced Telstra’s ­copper network, the new Coalition ­government prefers a fibre-to-the-node approach that will use the copper connections. The Coalition government will now have to buy and use Telstra’s copper network, once valued at up to $17 billion, to build its fibre-to-the-node system which is expected to be cheaper and slower than Labor’s version. Ms McKechnie said that resolving the issue before negotiations began would “help provide greater certainty and as such may assist future policy ­discussions." She also insisted the re­negotiations of the contract had nothing to do with the timing of the lawsuit. Telstra’s lead NBN negotiator Tony Warren last week told investors in ­Sydney that any negotiation would need to add value to the telco’s existing deal. But he also said that positive statements by Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull had helped assure the company a renegotiation could be successful for both sides.

ANALYSIS/OPINION: The Senate has turned full-force toward repeal, replace, reform, what have you of Obamacare. And while admitting the way is tough-going, Republicans by and large say: The premiums, and their potential to shred the family finances of households across America, are core to concerns. Well, that is a core concern. But what’s an even bigger concern is the fact that all these discussions signify one thing, and one overlooked thing only: The free market, on America’s health care, has gone the way of the dodo bird. “The biggest most notable damage is these skyrocketing premiums,” said Sen. Ron Johnson, CNN reported. Notice what he didn’t say — that the biggest most notable damage from Obamacare is the fact that it set the government securely in place in America’s health care system. But even on that — the skyrocketing premiums front — the Senate seems a bit flummoxed about what to do, Look at these quotes, the first, from Johnson, as CNN noted: “I’m still on the kind of 30,000 foot-level in terms of what are the primary goals of our efforts here.” And this, from Sen. John Cornyn: “We haven’t made any decisions. We’re just batting around ideas.” And this, from Sen. Ted Cruz: “This is not going to be easy.” These are not comforting statements — hardly the sort of rhetoric Americans who voted based on a hatred of Obamacare would like to hear. In early May, Cornyn told reporters that the Senate was going to be “going through the issues methodically,” scrutinizing funding for Medicaid and trying to cut costs while lowering premiums. But part and parcel of all the discussion is this underlying truth: the reform-repeal-replace campaign still allows for government-run healthcare. And that right there is the elephant in the room. So long as the government takes the lead on deciding Americans’ health insurance plans, it’s Americans who are out of luck. It’s the Constitution that’ll stand corrupted, the free market that’ll feel the pinch — the individual who’ll lose the freedom. Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.

Could a Dutch Volunteer Be Charged with Murder for Killing Islamic State Militants? When a Dutch man decided to join Kurdish forces in Syria to help them beat back the Islamic State, he probably thought he would return to the Netherlands to a hero’s welcome. Turns out he returned to murder charges instead. Dutch prosecutors believe the 47-year-old, whose name has not been released due to the country’s strict privacy laws, killed Islamic State militants in Syria. Although he is a former Dutch soldier, he reportedly traveled there without any instruction from the military. If he did in fact kill Islamic State militants, that could earn him prison time in the Netherlands. He appeared before an investigating judge in the city of Rotterdam on Friday, but was released after agreeing to turn over his passport, which the judge said would ensure he did not travel back to Syria. Still, the possibility of a full-fledged criminal trial is very real. Prosecutors said Friday there is “an important difference between Dutch nationals who travel to Syria on their own to fight against IS and Dutch soldiers who train Iraqi and Kurdish forces.” The Netherlands has backed a campaign against the Islamic State, and even sends Dutch soldiers to train Kurdish forces. But the country does not encourage Dutch nationals to join the Kurds on their own. Still, some 100 Westerners are thought to have joined them in Iraq and Syria in the past two years. In 2015, at least one Canadian and one Briton were killed in battle. But whoever this 47-year-old is, he’s not the only Dutch committed to backing up the Kurds. In October 2014, members of No Surrender, a Dutch biker gang, announced gang members had traveled to Mosul to fight the Islamic State. At the time, Dutch public prosecutor spokesman Wim de Bruin defended the bikers. “Joining a foreign armed force was previously punishable; now it’s no longer forbidden,” he told AFP. “You just can’t join a fight against the Netherlands.” Photo Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Notorious ​M​afia hit man-​turned-canary Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano has been released from an Arizona prison five years early, according to inmate records. ​​ The ​infamous ​72-year-old mob rat, who ​squealed to ​help authorities bring down “Dapper Don” John Gotti in exchange for a 1991 plea deal, was let out Sept​. 18, Arizona’s Department of Corrections records show. He’ll​​ remain on federal parole for the rest of his life, as ordered by Brooklyn federal ​Judge Allyne Ross in 2002 when she locked him up. “I spoke to him,” the aged wiseguy’s daughter, Karen Gravano, ecstatically told The Post. “He is happy to be out after spending the last 17½ years in prison. He’s in good health, great spirits and he’s anxious to move forward with the next phase of his life.” “There is no doubt I’m extremely happy,” she said. “I’ve been fighting for this day the whole 17½ years that he’s been in prison, so I’m ecstatic it’s finally here.” Defense attorney Thomas Farinella echoed Gravano’s comments almost exactly, saying his client was “in good health and great spirits” and “extremely happy to be out.” He declined to comment on whether the elder Gravano would settle again in Arizona, or if he would continue sketching — a hobby he picked up while incarcerated. The former Gambino underboss pleaded guilty to running a nearly 50-person, $500,000-a-week ecstasy ring in 2001, and was sentenced to 20 years behind bars. That conviction followed a sweetheart deal in which Gravano was sentenced to just five years in prison for an admitted 19 murders — in exchange for helping the feds fell 39 mobsters, including his former boss and pal the Teflon Don. The turncoat consigliere took the stand and spilled the Five Families’ secrets for five days during Gotti’s trial — and then testified in nine more, putting 39 wiseguys and associates in prison. At the time, he was the highest-ranking member of La Cosa Nostra to turn fed. After a short stint in the big house followed by an even shorter one in witness protection, he moved to Tempe, Arizona, and lived under the assumed name Jimmy Moran. While Gravano was living in Arizona, peddling ecstasy and installing pools, he barely escaped his own killing, when the late godfather’s enraged brother, Peter Gotti, sent a team of hitmen to go find him in the Copper State. The then-Gambino crime boss ordered the hit in retaliation for his brother’s death from cancer at age 61 behind bars. His latest bid for early release was in 2015, when Ross declined to shave years off his sentence, citing his “longstanding reputation for extreme violence.”

A report from OpenSQLCamp Did you know...? LWN.net is a subscriber-supported publication; we rely on subscribers to keep the entire operation going. Please help out by buying a subscription and keeping LWN on the net. What do you get when you put together 80 to 100 hard-core database geeks from ten different open source databases for a weekend? OpenSQLCamp , which was held most recently at MIT. Begun three years ago, OpenSQLCamp is a semi-annual unconference for open source database hackers to meet and collaborate on ideas and theories in the industry. It's held at various locations alternately in Europe and the United States, and organized and run by volunteers. This year's conference was organized by Sheeri Cabral, a MySQL community leader who works for PalominoDB This year's event included database hackers who work on MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, VoltDB, Tokutek, and Drizzle. In contrast to the popular perception that the various database systems are in a no-holds barred competition for industry supremacy, most people who develop these systems are more interested in collaborating with their peers than arguing with them. And although it's OpenSQLCamp, programmers from "NoSQL" databases were welcome and present, including MongoDB, Membase, Cassandra, and BerkeleyDB. While the conference was mainly database engine developers, several high-end users were present, including staff from Rackspace, GoDaddy, VMWare, and WidgetBox. The conference's location meant the participation of a few MIT faculty, including conference co-chair Bradley Kuzsmaul. While few of the students who registered actually turned up, attendees were able to learn informally about the software technologies which are now hot in universities (lots of work on multi-processor scaling, apparently). Friday The conference started with a reception at the WorkBar, a shared office space in downtown Boston. After a little drinking and socializing, participants slid immediately into discussing database and database industry topics, including speculation on what Oracle is going to do with all of its open source databases (answer: nobody knows, including the people who work there), recent releases of PostgreSQL and MySQL, and how VoltDB works. Whiteboard markers came out and several people shifted to technical discussions and continued the discussion until 11pm. Jignesh Shah of VMWare brought up some interesting SSD testing results. In high-transaction environments, it seems that batching database writes actually reduces throughput and increases response times, completely contrary to performance on spinning disks. For example, Jignesh had experimented with asynchronous commit with large buffers, which means that the database returns a success message to the client and fsyncs the data in batches afterward. This reduced database write throughput, whereas on a standard spinning disk RAID it would have increased it up to 30%. There was a great deal of speculation as to why that was. A second topic of discussion, which shifted to a whiteboard for comprehensibility, was how to put the "consistency" in "eventual consistency" without increasing response time. This became a session on Sunday. This problem, which is basic to distributed databases, is the question of how you can ensure that any write conflict is resolved in exactly the same way on all database nodes for a transactional database which is replicated or partitioned across multiple servers. Historical solutions have included attempting to synchronize timestamps (which is impossible), using centralized transaction counter servers (which become bottlenecks), and using vector clocks (which are insufficiently determinative on a large number of nodes). VoltDB addresses this by a two-phase commit approach in which the node accepting the writes checks modification timestamps on all nodes which could conflict. As with many approaches, this solution maintains consistency and throughput at a substantial sacrifice in response times. Saturday The conference days were held at MIT, rather ironically in the William H. Gates building. For those who haven't seen Frank Gehry's sculptural architecture feat, it's as confusing on the inside as it is on the outside outside, so the first day started late. As usual with unconferences, the first task was to organize a schedule; participants proposed sessions and spent a long time rearranging them in an effort to avoid double-scheduling, which led to some "concurrency issues" with different versions of the schedule. Eventually we had four tracks for the four rooms, nicknamed "SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE". As much as I wanted to attend everything, it wasn't possible, so I'll just write up a few of the talks here. Some of the talks and discussions will also be available as videos from the conference web site later. I attended and ran mostly discussion sessions, which I find to be the most useful events of an unconference. Monty Taylor of Drizzle talked about their current efforts to add multi-tenancy support, and discussed implementations and tradeoffs with other database developers. Multi-tenancy is another hot topic now that several companies are going into "database as a service" (DaaS); it is the concept that multiple businesses can share the same physical database while having complete logical separation of data and being unaware of each other. The primary implementation difficulty is that there is a harsh tradeoff between security and performance, since the more isolated users are from each other, the less physical resources they share. As a result, no single multi-tenancy implementation can be perfect. Since it was first described in the early 80's, many databases have implemented Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC). MVCC is a set of methods which allow multiple users to read and modify the same data concurrently while minimizing conflicts and locks, supporting the "Atomicity", "Consistency", and "Isolation" in ACID transactions. While the concept is conventional wisdom at this point, implementations are fairly variable. So, on request, I moderated a panel on MVCC in PostgreSQL, InnoDB, Cassandra, CouchDB and BerkeleyDB. The discussion covered the basic differences in approach as well as the issues with data garbage collection. Jignesh Shah of VMWare and Tim Callagan of VoltDB presented on current issues in database performance in virtualized environments. The first, mostly solved issue was figuring out degrees of overcommit for virtualized databases sharing the same physical machine. Jignesh had tested with PostgreSQL and found the optimal level in benchmark tests to be around 20% overcommit, meaning five virtual machines (VMs) each entitled to 25% of the server's CPU and RAM. One work in progress is I/O scheduling. While VMWare engineers have optimized sharing CPU and RAM among multiple VMs running databases on the same machine, sharing I/O without conflicts or severe overallocation still needs work. The other major unsolved issue is multi-socket scaling. As it turns out, attempting to scale a single VM across multiple sockets is extremely inefficient with current software, resulting in tremendous drops in throughput as soon as the first thread migrates to a second socket. The current workaround is to give the VMs socket affinity and to run one VM per socket, but nobody is satisfied with this. After lunch, Bradley ran a Q&A panel on indexing with developers from VoltDB, Tokutek, Cassandra, PostgreSQL, and Percona. Panelists answered questions about types of indexes, databases without indexes, performance optimizations, and whether server hardware advances would cause major changes in indexing technology in the near future. The short answer to that one is "no". As is often the case with "camp" events, the day ended with a hacking session. However, only the Drizzle team really took advantage of it; for most attendees, it was a networking session. Sunday Elena Zannoni joined the conference in order to talk about the state of tracing on Linux. Several database geeks were surprised to find out that SystemTap was not going to be included in the Linux kernel, and that there was no expected schedule for release of utrace/uprobes. Many database engineers have been waiting for Linux to provide an alternative to Dtrace, and it seems that we still have longer to wait. The VoltDB folks, who are local to Boston, showed up in force and did a thorough presentation on their architecture, use case, and goals. VoltDB is a transactional, SQL-compliant distributed database with strong consistency. It's aimed at large companies building new in-house applications for which they need extremely high transaction processing rates and very high availability. VoltDB does this by requiring users to write their applications to address the database, including putting all transactions into stored procedures which are then precompiled and executed in batches on each node. It's an approach which sacrifices response times and general application portability in return for tremendous throughput, into the 100,000's of transactions per second. Some of the SQL geeks at the conference discussed how to make developers more comfortable with SQL. Currently many application developers not only don't understand SQL, but actively hate and fear it. The round-table discussed why this is and some ideas for improvement, including: teaching university classes, contributing to object-relational mappers (ORMs), explaining SQL in relation to functional languages, doing fun "SQL tricks" demos, and working on improving DBA attitudes towards developers. In the last track of the day, I mediated a freewheeling discussion on "The Future of Databases", in which participants tried to answer "What databases will we be using and developing in 2020?" While nobody there had a crystal ball, embedded databases with offline synchronization, analytical databases which support real-time calculations, and database-as-a-service featured heavily in the discussion. Wrap-up While small, OpenSQLCamp was fascinating due to the caliber of attendee; I learned more about several new databases over lunch than I had in the previous year of blog reading. If you work on open-source database technology, are a high-end user, or are just very interested in databases, you should consider attending next year. Watch the OpenSQLCamp web site for videos to be posted, and for the date and location of next year's conferences in the US and Europe.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie was called a 'liar' today by thousands of police officers and firefighters at a rally in Trenton today. New Jersey reporter Brian Thompson tells us about the battle between public employee unions and politicians over budget cuts and pension changes. (Published Thursday, March 3, 2011) Three union workers who called out sick to attend a labor rally at the New Jersey Statehouse last week have been suspended. The move comes a day after Gov. Christie told NBC New York in an interview that "people who call in sick better be sick." Christie issued his warning ahead of another labor rally that drew thousands on Thursday. Monmouth County officials said the three employees suspended without pay Thursday work for the county's Senior Citizen Area Transportation service and are members of CWA Local 1038. The county said the workers were among 14 in the department who called out sick; officials alleged that 174 developmentally disabled adults who depend on the county's services ended up "waiting for buses that never came." "These employees are being suspended without pay based on the fact that we have evidence to prove that they were not home sick as they had claimed," said Lillian Burry, a county official. The union representing the workers, the Communications Workers of America(CWA) put out a statement through its District One calling this a "politically-motivated attack on public workers who perform vital services." Top New York News Photos of 2011 The CWA statement added "When all the facts come out, it will be clear that whatever errors in judgement were made, no one served by the county missed a medical appointment and no one should be fired." State Sen. Joe Kyrillos (R-Monmouth), who first complained of a "sick-out," applauded officials for the suspension, noting some workers were "caught on camera" at last week's rally. He wants officials to keep reviewing video to see "if others were absent without proper excuse." Weird News Photos: Holiday Edition Meanwhile, thousands more rallied again at the Statehouse -- this time a gathering of police and firefighters protesting job cuts and changes to first responder benefits and pensions. Labor unions have been riding a wave of national attention on labor contracts and collective bargaining, sparked in part by disputes between Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and public employees there. Bruce Chester, a Woodbridge police office attending the rally, held up a campaign letter from Christie promising not to touch police officer pensions. When that same letter was shown on a big screen TV, officers and firefighters broke out in the chants of “liar.” “Enough is enough,” said Tony Weiners, president of the NJ State Policemen’s Benevolent Association. Irvington Police Officer Jerry Ramos and Irvington firefighter Kevin Franz said they voted for Christie and were experiencing ”buyers remorse.” At a separate news conference Thursday, Christie called the latest demonstration a "me-first rally" but admitted he made campaign promises he could not keep. “The situation has gotten significantly worse since I took office,” Christie said “The system could be bankrupt by 2020….I’m not going to let that happen.” Christie said he tried to meet with the state PBA president and that “the numbers are the numbers.” Follow Brian Thompson on Twitter @brian4NY and us @NBCNewYork,and on Facebook/NBCNewYork, and sign up for breaking news SMS alerts on your phone by texting “NYBREAKING” to 639710.

As the robot tests alternative movements, it continuously updates it database of options—having used a computer simulation of itself to create a sort of how-to-walk map ahead of time. Researchers call this testing phase a “simulated childhood,” and it’s a little bit like what a baby does when she’s learning how to crawl. Only the robot takes minutes—not weeks or months—to test and determine the movements that will work best. This is much faster, the authors say, than previous attempts. And that’s in part because although the robot is sifting through about 13,000 possible movements, they are all options that the robot has already deemed potentially useful. “The space of all possible behaviors that is searched to find these 13,000 high-performing behaviors is unimaginably vast,” they wrote. “In fact, it contains 10^47 possible behaviors, which is about how many atoms make up the planet Earth!” Researchers experimented with both a hexapod robot and a robotic arm, and they believe their algorithm could be used to enable any kind of robot to adapt to damage and complete a mission. Over the course of hundreds of tests, the six-legged robot was able to adapt to at least six different types of damage—including completely losing two legs—and the robot arm was able to adapt to at least 14 kinds of damage, including having two of its motors broken. Perhaps all this evokes images of Westworld, or of The Terminator, or at least of an assembly line that never breaks down. A robot that can break and keep going anyway is, after all, a robot that doesn’t need people. Or needs them less than its robot predecessors did, anyway. The potential uses for such machines are incredible to imagine. These things could skitter across Mars, or explore an ocean trench, or crawl over rubble to help search for victims after an earthquake. Scientists and engineers have been working on perfecting such algorithms for more than a decade. And in 2006, when researchers at Cornell built a robot that could teach itself how to limp, one scientist said the behavior was a form of consciousness. "Whether humans or animals are conscious in a similar way—do we also think in terms of a self-image, and rehearse actions in our head before trying them out—is still an open question," researcher Josh Bongard told the university’s news service at the time. Elsewhere, researchers have designed robots with squishy, self-healing muscles, robotic cubes that can apparently clone themselves, tiny robots that can assemble themselves in the first place, and giant robots that can hurl cinder blocks. The fields of robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are making gains so rapidly it can be hard to keep track. The work that culminated in Wednesday’s Nature paper began in 2011. The intelligent algorithm at the center of the research turned out to be astonishing even to the people who designed it.

The trip to Brazil, Peru, Colombia, and Chile by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang in May this year sought to follow up on the planned cooperation between China and CELAC (the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) announced in January of the same year. This plan’s main goals are to increase bilateral trade to $500 billion and the inflow of Chinese direct investments to the region to $250 billion until 2025. The two objectives are linked, since China expects that the bilateral trade will grow if it invests in Latin American infrastructure. This strategy has also been used to bolster China’s economic relations with countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Railways, roadways, ports, and airports have been built or revamped to enable Beijing to buy raw materials and sell its manufactures around the world more cheaply and easily. The investments promised by Li Keqing during his trip to South America are largely in line with this strategy. The flagship project is a $10 billion railroad between Brazil and Peru that will connect the Atlantic and Pacific ports. The railroad will make it easier and cheaper to export of soybeans, beef, and ore from the Brazilian hinterlands. Currently, these exports must first reach Brazilian ports in Pará or Maranhão, and then traverse the Panama Canal to reach the Pacific and China. In Colombia, China promised to modernize the port of Buenaventura, the country’s second most important harbor, and pledged to build a 600 km highway linking central Colombia with the Venezuela border. The road is supposed to cross the region of Orinoquía – rich in agriculture, cattle, oil, and minerals. China and Colombia also pledged to negotiate a bilateral free trade agreement. These announcements join a long list of projects in South American logistics proposed by China in recent years. Examples include the construction of a port in Suriname, which will also get a railway and a road connecting Paramaribo with Manaus to facilitate the export of Brazilian minerals; the expansion of Venezuela’s Palúa port, in the Orinoco delta, as a vital complement to the investments announced in Colombia; the overhaul of the Chilean port of Desierto to export iron ore from the Atacama mines; and the expansion of the San Antonio West port in Argentina, to enable the export of agricultural goods cultivated in lands administered by the Chinese themselves. During his visit to Chile, Li Keqiang signed a series of financial agreements that will also be important for China’s strategy of binding Latin American commerce with its own economy. A currency swap arrangement worth 22 billion yuan (approximately $3.5 billion) was announced, together with the establishment of a yuan clearing bank in Chile, which would be the first in South America. Both initiatives seek to reduce the use of the U.S. dollar in bilateral trade, restricting U.S. influence over their commercial dynamic. China and Chile also agreed to expand their bilateral free trade agreement, which was signed in 2005. Of course, some of these proposals probably will not materialize, but the strategy behind them reveal China’s intentions. Beijing seeks to deepen its ties with South America and its investments are essentially oriented towards transporting commodities to coastal areas, connecting ports to mines and farmlands from the region’s hinterlands. This is what has historically always been done in South America. China may be trying to update the model of cooperation, but it is up to the South American countries themselves to effectively use the export revenues and the Chinese investments to avoid the deindustrialization that has occurred in the past. Meanwhile, a significant shift in regional dynamics looks likely. There is a clear will on China’s part to redirect South American production to the Pacific. That will economically benefit the countries located in coastal areas. Keqiang visited three countries that have that characteristic (Peru, Chile, Colombia) and which are articulated in the Pacific Alliance. This trade bloc seeks to facilitate trade and external financial flows, making it easier for China to develop its presence in the region, and contrasts with the more protectionist Mercosur, which is led by Brazil and Argentina. For South American countries facing the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea (most of them members of Mercosur), China seeks to create transoceanic links to reach the Pacific, such as the Brazil–Peru railway or even the Nicaragua Canal. This scenario suggests an especially important challenge for Brazil (but also for the other countries of the region) concerning South American regional integration and its domestic economy. It will be necessary to devise a national and regional project that mitigates the negative effects of investments from China (or indeed any other country), considering that “(…) the promotion of infrastructure focused on economic and commercial development does not guarantee that it will be useful for geopolitical and strategic objectives of a State of region, since it may be conditioned by private or external interests” (Jaeger, 2014, p. 87, authors’ translation). Doubtless, these investments will increase inter-regional trade between South America and China (or East Asia) as a whole, but that by itself does not assure intra-regional development and integration. There will certainly be social, environmental, and deindustrializing impacts. However, South American countries need to develop strategies and establish rules to enable more effective use of the resources coming from Beijing in the defense of their interests. Infrastructure investments will not modernize local economies or guarantee regional integration on their own, but they could be very helpful if long-term development policies are in place and if the investments are used as leverage in bargaining with the U.S., the EU, or China itself. In fact, ECLAC affirms that the logistics infrastructure that China provides could well stimulate intra-regional trade and the formation of regional value chains. It is up to South America states to use Chinese investments for their own development goals and deepening regional integration. Bruno Gomes Guimarães is a researcher at the South American Institute for Policy and Strategy (ISAPE). Diogo Ives is an MA candidate in Political Science at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS).

The City of Boca Raton gave Jozy Altidore the hero’s welcome he deserved on Friday, July 18th at the Waterstone Resort & Marina. “He is our hometown hero,” Mayor Susan Haynie said. “He has achieved so much in his sport and that certainly deserves acclaim from the community. We are all very thrilled and honored of him carrying the name of Boca Raton as his hometown.” Altidore, the 2013 Futbol de Primera Player of the Year and the 2013 U.S. Soccer Athlete of the Year, was honored by Haynie and the City of Boca with his own day, Jozy Altidore Day. “The first I heard of this it was incredible,” Altidore said. “It’s such a prestigious city in Boca Raton. I’m so happy to be here and represent the soccer team.” At a young age it was evident that Altidore had a natural talent as he would toy with children at the local parks. Josef Schulz, a longtime youth coach in Boca Raton, took note of Altidore when he was 8 years old while Altidore was playing a pickup game at Boca’s South County Regional Park and Schultz was amazed. “Schulz played a very pivotal role for me in my career in a time where soccer wasn’t so big here in the States,” says a grateful Altidore of what Schulz did for him. As a middle school student at Loggers’ Run Middle School, Altidore harnessed his craft and after only one year he moved to Boca Raton Prep on a soccer scholarship. Altidore, who currently holds the record for most goals by an American overseas with 39, is set to rejoin his club Sunderland AFC late next week to begin preparing for the start of the 2014 English Premier League season. Click the link to be redirected to the gallery: http://goo.gl/uhNAWg

The sight of Hakeem Nicks gently running routes with his teammates early in Thursday’s practice allowed the Giants to move closer to becoming whole on offense. Nicks is a huge piece of the puzzle and his return from a broken foot is on schedule. He won’t play tonight, though, leaving the Giants with Victor Cruz as the only proven receiver to take the field against his favorite team to dominate, the Jets. Once Nicks is back for good, he and Cruz command the two starting spots and the search continues for the third receiver needed to really get Eli Manning’s passing attack cranked up. “Well, I think there are a number of guys,’’ Manning said. “I don’t know if there’s just one guy right now.’’ A number of guys and not one guy right now are euphemisms for “No one has seized the opportunity yet.’’ Though Mario Manningham struggled for much of last season, he always presented a threat to opposing defenses and if some slouch was lined up against him, Manningham could make him pay in a big way. Manningham is now with the 49ers and to this point none of the candidates looking to fill his role have shown enough to claim the job. Domenik Hixon, coming back from two knee surgeries, is the most consistent of the bunch, but he was held out of the preseason opener with a slight hamstring issue. Jerrel Jernigan, a second-round pick last year, was impressive early in camp, but didn’t catch a pass last week in Jacksonville. Rookie Rueben Randle already has gained the trust of Manning and the coaching staff as a sure-handed, natural pass-catcher, but he’s still learning the nuances of route-running. Ramses Barden, as usual, had his moments in camp, and managed one catch last week for 14 yards. But he hasn’t been able to maintain any positive momentum. If one of these receivers is going to emerge from the pack, he hasn’t done so yet. “It’s been a little bit of everyone,’’ Cruz said. “Ramses had a great training camp, Jerrel Jernigan had a great training camp, Rueben Randle did some good things. It’s going to be tough for these coaches. I’m glad I’m not a coach or anybody working up top because it’s going to be tough to pick one of those guys or even two of those guys to be our third or fourth receiver. They’re all talented and all good players.’’ Those are the supportive words of a teammate, but Manning is more discerning. He demands a great deal from his targets, and if they deviate from the script or fail to make the proper read, it doesn’t sit well with the franchise quarterback. “These preseason games are big, when you see them against live action, against good corners, see their releases, and see if they’re doing a good job getting open,’’ Manning said. “So, it’s always a good problem to have as a quarterback, have a number of receivers who can come in and play well for you.’’ Of course, it’s not known whether Manning truly does have a number of receivers who can play well or just a bunch of receivers who can play, but perhaps not very well. “Well, I think some guys do some things better than others,’’ Manning said. “So, I think that’s why you usually carry six receivers, so you can put guys in certain spots, have them do what they do best.’’ Hixon must be considered the favorite to occupy the No. 3 spot at the start of the season, at least until Randle is ready. “[Hixon’s] played very well, and done a great job,’’ Manning said. “So, I’m excited about having him back, because he’s played in games and he’s played well for us in the past.’’

Oceans are the cradle of life on Earth. Giving life a birth date, though, is complicated as we’re still discovering traces of bacteria older than all those we found so far. For now, we think that the oldest one lived at least 3.5 billion years ago, so around one billion years after Earth’s formation. This theory is based on prints that bacteria left on soft mud that turned into rock with time. It is nearly impossible to preserve a bacterium as a “fossil” since they are extremely fragile. Image: Anomalocaris painting. Reconstruction of what this early predator must have looked like. Image by UNE photos (Creative Commons). Bacteria are unicellular organisms (their bodies are constituted of only one cell, while the human body is formed by thousands of billions of cells…) and for long, we didn’t find anything between the old bacteria prints and the oldest fossils with shells and skeletons that lived 540 million years ago. A fossil is the remains of a long dead organism that was buried in mud which transformed into rock (or sediment) over time. Soon, by physical destruction by the mud and the water flow or by decomposition by bacteria, only the skeleton or the shell of the original animal remains. That’s what you can see at the museum, once they’ve been discovered and extracted from the rock. We know from these fossils that a large amount of species have lived on Earth in the last 600 million years, in the ocean and later (since around 400 million years ago) on the continents, and that their sizes and shapes were very different to one another. In the last few decades, we even discovered a new type of fossils… In some rare environments, the mud that buries dead organisms can be so fine and the water flow so weak that they don’t harm the remains, and the shape of the skin of the organism can print on the mud and be preserved that way. This is how we could find the Ediacaran fauna in Australia. In this sort of environment we made an extraordinary discovery: fossils of animals (not bacteria) so old (around 560 million years ago) that they didn’t have any hard parts in their bodies. No shells, no teeth, not a single bone. But these were not the most disturbing characteristic of their anatomy. Their perfect state of preservation allowed palaeontologists to notice another component of modern animals missing: the mouth. Not a single specimen of this strange zoo had any orifice, and we suppose they were able to absorb nutrients from the seawater directly through their skin. Palaeontologists discovered organisms with the strangest shapes, frozen in time and preserved in this extremely smooth mud turned into rock. Dozens of new fossil species were described and a new extreme limit of the appearance of multicellular organisms (in opposition to unicellular organisms like bacteria) was defined. But it was just the start of a new series of astonishing discoveries. At Burgess (Canada), new and slightly younger species were found that lived around 540 million years ago, during the Cambrian era. Unlike Ediacara, all species from this fauna had shells (or “exoskeletons”; skeletons outside the organism, unlike humans or other vertebrates but just like molluscs and arthropods). Amongst them, an impressive specimen of the species Anomalocaris presented another major difference with older organisms: it had teeth, and those of a predator. Overall, the Burgess fauna presented a huge amount of different species compared to Ediacara, and we call this rapid increase in the biodiversity the “Cambrian Explosion“. 20 or 30 million years may seem a lot of time, but when dealing with evolution, it’s really not a lot. But for some reason, at this time, life on Earth had rapidly evolved. Ediacara was important because it was the first time we found multicellular organisms ageing before skeletogenesis (creation of skeleton and other hard parts). Burgess was also important because it was the oldest fauna we found with hard parts. But these two faunas combined made another major discovery: the start of predation. During the Ediacaran era, no organisms had teeth or even mouth, so they were clearly not carnivorous. Anomalocaris was an obvious proof of predation during the time the Burgess rocks were deposited. Because of this, we talk about the “Ediacaran paradise“, when Nature was at peace, without fight for survival. When we look at other species of Burgess fauna, several produced spines on their back, probably as a defence mechanism against predators like Anomalocaris. This led to the conclusion that hard parts were initially synthesized in order to protect the organism against aggressive species. Another possible explanation of skeletogenesis is also proposed and focuses on chemistry mechanisms. As the seawater chemistry changed, maintaining an appropriate level of acidity in the organisms became more problematic. Synthesizing shells would have allowed the organism to store acidic molecules from their soft tissues to reach the proper equilibrium. But this doesn’t explain by itself the presence of spines and teeth… The truth is probably somewhere between the two theories. But anyway, something major happened to living species between 560 and 540 million years ago. Something that changed the shape and the behaviour of all life on Earth, forever. Vincent Mouchi Ph.D. student, Department of Geology, Trinity College Dublin If you want to know more about this topic and have more details on these extraordinary organisms, I would suggest you to read the book “Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History” by the palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould. 0.000000 0.000000 Advertisements

RIGBY -- A reserve officer for Rigby Police has died, months after he was badly burned in a crash in Utah, the department confirmed. Bill Gray, who also worked as a truck driver, was driving an 18-wheeler when he was struck head-on by a suspect fleeing from Utah State Patrol July 26. The other driver was killed in the collision. Gray was rushed to the University of Utah Burn Center in critical condition, with burns over 46 percent of his body. He died from his injuries Monday after nearly two months in the hospital, Rigby Police said. MORE: Rigby reserve officer critical after Utah crash In a Facebook post, the department wrote that Gray would be remembered as "a man of selfless service," always ready to help others in his community. "Bill was truly the best of mankind. Always willing to help, always willing to go the extra mile," Rigby Police posted. "Bill was a big man, with a bigger heart. Everything about him was generous and kind." The department recounted a time when he used his personal ATV to plow a path for local children to get to school during the heavy winter, saving them from having to walk into the street to get around the built-up snow. "Bill always had a funny story to bring about a laugh. He always did the good thing," the department posted. "This world would be better off with more Bill Grays, and this world is truly darker without his light." RELATED: Viral video highlights patient privacy laws Gray's accident sparked a nationwide debate after a nurse caring for him at the University of Utah Burn Center was arrested after she refused to allow a a Salt Lake City Police detective to draw his blood without a warrant. Nurse Alex Wubbels explained to the officer that Gray could not consent to the blood draw because he was unconscious. Detective Jeff Payne's body camera captured footage of him roughly grabbing Wubbels and physically pulling her out of the hospital as she wept and screamed for help. The video drew widespread outrage, culminating in the hospital changing its rules to not allow police to speak with nurses and staff. Rigby Police Chief Sam Tower thanked the nurse "for standing firm, and protecting Officer Gray's rights as a patient and victim.” A GoFundMe account has set up to pay for Gray's hospital bills is still nearly $7,000 short of its goal. Copyright 2017 KTVB

Welcome to the BUFFY PHENOMENON Identifying the best Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans love to argue about which episodes are their best. Some believe that "Becoming, Parts 1 and 2" are the greatest episodes. Others believe that "Once More, with Feeling," "Hush," and "The Body" are the greatest. There are even fans who love "Doublemeat Palace." Like its sister site, The Phi-Phenomenon, the Buffy Phenomenon studies lists that people make. Instead of studying lists of the greatest films of all time to create the definitive best film list, the Buffy Phenomenon studies lists of the greatest episodes to create the definitive best (and worst) episode list. The episodes are listed by rank, alphabetically, by writer, by director, and by season. This site also lists the episodes that polarize fans and episodes that fans have largely forgotten as well as streaks of great and weak episodes. This site also tries to figure out what makes an episode great or weak. It looks at the extent to which the quality of an episode may be affected by the when the episode aired, the episode's writer and director, and the relative prominance or absence of major characters in that episode. Finally, this site has found that Buffy fans do not agree on everything. There are at least two different tastes in Buffy episodes. Users can now see how fans differ in how they rank episodes. Users can also see how fans differ in how when the episode aired, major characters, writers, and directors may affect the quality of an episode. WARNING!! —This site contains spoilers. Most pages give episode titles for all 144 episodes, indicate how good each of these episodes are, and indicate who wrote and directed each episode. The Characters Ranked page also mentions characters who do not appear until season 7 and discusses the presence or absence of major characters in seventh season episodes, and the Seasons Ranked page describes all seven seasons. If you have any questions or comments, you can write this site at . Buffy the Vampire Slayer and all characters are the property of 20th Century Fox, Mutant Enemy, Joss Whedon, UPN, WB, and a whole bunch of other entities that are not affiliated with this site. All opinions on this site are either that of the Webmaster or from a compilation of the opinions of various people, most of whom are not affiliated with the aforementioned entities. All contents on this site that are not owned by the above entities © 2003-2016. This page was last modified on February 5, 2016 Since January 2005, Powered by please enable browser's Javascript to use the Hit Counter tool.Powered by people visited this page.

Vulcan survivor's guilt: Why J.J. Abrams should make Mr. Spock the hero of the new "Star Trek" franchise May 23, 2013 | May Contain Spoilers In J.J. Abrams’ reboot of the “Star Trek” universe, Spock is a burdened soul. As in Gene Roddenberry’s original series, he is the only child of a human mother and Vulcan father — by birth, a man of two worlds and an outcast. But Abrams and his co-writers give him a fascinating additional burden: Midway through the first movie, Spock’s home planet of Vulcan is destroyed by a Romulan villain, Nero. The enormous implosion claims the lives of the planet’s indigenous population as well as Spock’s mother. Cosmic and personal tragedies converge: not only does Spock lose his mom — his heretofore beacon of humanity — he and his Vulcan kinsmen become stateless nomads. Even at his most vulnerable, though, Spock controls his emotions, and lets logic dictate his actions, declaring his race to be an endangered species. Advertisement The destruction of Vulcan, one of the most crucial planets in the "Star Trek" legendarium, should be at the core of J.J. Abrams’ films. It is the single development that most distinguishes the original TV and movie series from Abrams’ reboot, an event so boldly imagined that it marks the filmmakers’ new, blank canvas with a hideous dark stain. And yet for the most part, the new films draw around the stain, not treating it quite as an afterthought, but not engaging with it as fully as they ought to. I believe they should engage with it — that in fact they should put it at the heart of the new franchise. It has an imaginative power comparable to the destruction of Alderaan in "Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope," which gave 1970s children apocalyptic nightmares, though not intentionally: "Star Wars" creator George Lucas treated the Death Star's annihilation of a world as the cause of space-nausea and never mentioned it again, much less weighed down the adopted Alderaanian Leia Organa with the psychological freight of its absence. In contrast, Abrams and his collaborators have woven mentions of Vulcan’s death into the plot of the second film, "Star Trek Into Darkness," in ways that, however tossed-off and limited, reinforce the superiority of "Star Trek" to "Star Wars" as popular art; they could, and should, build these references out and embellish them, because they're solid enough to give the entire franchise an a narrative anchor that it thus far has lacked. "As if millions of voices cried out in terror..." Advertisement That present-tense experience of grief is palpable even though the new "Star Trek" series hasn’t placed it at the heart of its stories. Why not formalize the focus, and see what results? I believe the new “Star Trek” franchise would be a greater, more powerful, more moving accomplishment if it stopped obsessing over the maturation of the impetuous James T. Kirk — an amusing but too-familiar arc, one that many adventure series have already portrayed — and redirected its energy toward exploring the psychology of the post-Vulcan Mr. Spock, the rightful lead in this rebooted franchise. That Abrams seems already to be headed in that direction, however fitfully, suggests that on some level he has already accepted this truth, although he hasn’t yet embraced it as enthusiastically as I believe he should. At the end of “The Wrath of Khan,” the second film in the original “Star Trek” series, Captain Kirk eulogizes Spock by declaring, “Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most human.” This anthropocentrism has always been evident in “Star Trek,” and, even though it betrays a superficially Earth-bound and reactionary nature, the statement echoes the deeper, secular, Bertrand Russell-style humanism of "Star Trek." As such, the “human soul” of Spock that Kirk laments is that of a universal adherent of the Golden Rule. This maxim has always governed Spock, whose strict dedication to Aristotelian logic was, for all intents and purposes, a gimmick. Given the choice, the character always opted for doing the Right Thing, even if it led to self-sacrifice. In the reboot universe, J.J. Abrams could have amplified these central tenets of the character. With their planet gone, Spock and the remaining Vulcans are left without a home. “Star Trek” has built up this race as wise and philosophical, a people whose existence is based around knowledge, around reading and thinking and remembering. The total obliteration of the Vulcans’ home planet is the razing of the Great Library of Alexandria, the Fall of Babylon, the Sack of Rome and the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all rolled into one. Advertisement How would a catastrophe this immense affect the Federation? Are there tenets of the Vulcan culture that are irredeemably lost in time? What sort of effect does this have in the Federation’s balance of power? There is a more immediate analogue, too, namely the destruction of Vulcan as the “Star Trek” equivalent of the Holocaust. The event turns the Vulcan race into an intergalactic Jewish diaspora consisting entirely of survivors. This is powerful stuff, and potentially fruitful. Abrams’ “Trek” films have been criticized for shifting the original series’ focus away from exploration and onto political and military intrigue, but this needn’t necessarily represent a betrayal of what the original stood for. The destruction of Vulcan could let Abrams formalize an interest that’s already evident to anyone who’s seen “Star Trek” and “Star Trek Into Darkness,” and let the new series look at many of the classic "Star Trek" philosophical and moral issues through a fresh prism. Among the questions such a refocused series could explore: Who preserves the memory of Vulcan? Would a new, post-Vulcan society of Vulcan survivors have fascist overtones, defending the racially “pure” against the unwanted attentions of the mixed-blood portion of society? Perhaps the surviving Vulcans have split into political factions akin to those seen within so many majority-minority societies. They may also be squabbling about how best to relate to the "majority" society they've been forced to become a part of; their arguments could echo the ones that happened within Native American and African-American society in the 1960s and '70s, which were torn between trying to change the United States' majority culture to make it more hospitable, versus standing apart from it or actively attacking it. The aftershocks of Vulcan's end also raise the question of whether a civilization can be a proper civilization without a homeland, or a home world. That there's a fleeting reference in "Star Trek Into Darkness" to New Vulcan -- presumably this universe's Vulcan version of Israel? -- suggests that Abrams and his cowriters have already been thinking about it. Advertisement It's all quite fraught -- a powderkeg of identity politics that people would avoid at cocktail parties for fear of ruining the evening. Where would Spock, a racially “impure” Vulcan, find himself in all of this? He would probably be an assimilationist, committed to integrating Vulcan identity into the patchwork of galactic civilization, otherwise why would he have committed himself to Starfleet, or the Federation itself? This commitment would already be present given what we know about Spock's "half-breed" psychology, but the destruction of Vulcan would magnify those feelings and give his actions even greater urgency. But not every Vulcan would agree with Spock. There would probably be separatist elements, perhaps with a militant mentality. Some would have dedicated themselves to wiping out the Romulans as revenge for Vulcan’s death, notwithstanding counter-arguments that Nero, the man responsible for Vulcan's destruction, was just a "bad apple," not representative of the Romulans as a race. And of course the Vulcans that wanted revenge against the Romulans wouldn’t call it “revenge.” They’d come up with some “logical” euphemism. But that would be their true motivation, and it’s something Spock would have to contend with in his role as a half-Vulcan Starfleet officer, a man who’s under constant pressure to be A Credit to his Race. Mr. Spock, your destiny is calling Advertisement Isn’t it plausible that by giving his younger self information that he would otherwise not be privy to, old Spock actually changes the future? We know that the universe of "Star Trek" has a relativist approach to time, not determinist. By implying a future friendship, could the old Spock be actually affecting — perhaps even dooming — that bond? Heisenberg’s uncertainty principal would suggest so. How would Spock, now the true hero of "Star Trek," deal with such a dilemma? This line of argument also suggests a more fundamental difference between classic "Trek" and the reboot. In the original version, destiny does not play a part. The ship is called Enterprise, and is the vessel to uncover hitherto unknown possibilities. The reboot errs strictly on the side of destiny. The crew of the Enterprise is destined to be together; Kirk and Spock are destined to be best friends; the Enterprise is destined to encounter Khan. But if all these conceits, previously established in the original Trek universe, are destined to happen, how, then, would they be affected by the destruction of Vulcan? And how would Spock, as the real hero of this incarnation of "Star Trek," surmount these personal, philosophical, and physical challenges? These are logical questions with potentially fascinating answers. Next Article: Book Excerpt: Guillermo Del Toro talks about the Best FIlm You've Never Seen Previous Article: Roger Ebert was an inspiration for disabled people Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. Disqus

“No, that kind of stock I don’t buy. They are usually very, very expensive. A lot of people like to buy expensive stocks like that, but I do not,” said Rogers, a widely followed investor who has published several books on investing, co-founded the Quantum Fund with George Soros, and more recently is the creator of the Rogers Global Resources Equity Index. Reports suggest Facebook could file its papers for an initial public offering on Wednesday, one that could be the largest Internet offering ever, with the social media giant hoping to raise upwards of $10 billion. Such an IPO would value the company at more than $100 billion. Rogers told CNBC that the timing of an IPO this week would be a smart move by Facebook. “It’s been demonstrated many, many times before that sellers are usually smarter than the buyers, and they usually know when the best time to sell is, and Facebook is doing it,” he said. However, he said he would be interested in broader technology stocks, but is currently short the sector. “I am interested in technology in some shape or form, but I can’t imagine buying any of them. They are a bit hot these days and they have been for two or three months, so that’s why I am short. I don’t buy high-priced stocks,” Rogers said. US Public ‘Saps’ Turning to the broader US economy, Rogers said the United States looks and feels better because the government is throwing money at it.

Contin­ued use of drones a barrie­r to global peace, says Ramsey Clark. KARACHI: Former Attorney General of United States of America Ramsey Clark on Monday urged the Pakistani media to be more forthright in preaching “the criminality of US drones”. Speaking as chief guest at an award ceremony of the Pakistan American Democratic Forum, Clark stated that the US should cease using this ‘vicious’ technology, adding that the use of drones is primarily a US innovation in warfare and their use is a violation of all international laws. The former US attorney general went on to say that there will be no peace on earth with the looming threat of drone attacks from one country to another. ‘Free Afia Siddiqui’ Earlier, Ramsey Clark said that he came to Pakistan after 20 years with a singular purpose of raising his voice over the injustice meted to Dr Afia Siddiqui. “She was kidnapped from your country. It should not have happened, should not be allowed to happen, she lost her youngest child in the kidnapping bid, and was tried and convicted for no fault” he said. Ramsey Clark categorized Afia Siddiqui’s case as “tragic” and “outrageous”, and stressed the importance of her release and return to Pakistan. The former US Attorney General cut short a meeting with the Chief Justice of Pakistan Iftikhar Muhammad Choudhry at the Karachi Registry of the Supreme Court of Pakistan to attend this award ceremony at Karachi Press Club. Dr Fouzia Siddiqui of the Dr Afia Movement in her brief address thanked Karachi-based journalists for their support in the movement for the release of Dr Afia Siddiqui. She attributed the release of Dr Afia’s daughter and son from US captivity to the efforts made by the journalists of Karachi who, she said, duly highlighted the plight of Dr Afia’s family. Published in The Express Tribune, August 28th, 2012. Read full story

Less than a week after CBS let the cat out of the bag on its own iPad HTML5 tests, more media companies appear to boarding the HTML5 video train. Video services company Brightcove announced Monday morning that it will support HTML5 for its customers, offering "high quality, interactive, and advertising-supported Web video experiences for HTML5-compatible devices." Two major Brightcove clients, the New York Times and Time Inc., are participating launch partners, meaning that these two sources will have the option of ditching Flash in some cases in order to be more iPad compatible. Brightcove's announcement comes just days before the iPad launch, and the company makes no attempt to hide the fact that this is a major reason for the HTML5 support. More than 1,000 Brightcove customers will be able to "easily expand the reach of their online video initiatives to popular consumer devices including the Apple iPad, iPhone and iPod touch," wrote the company. Brightcove currently provides support for device detection, playlist rendering, and playback of H.264 content, but plans to add support for customization, advertising, analytics, social sharing, and other features over the next year. With such major names as the New York Times and Time on board, it's pretty clear that media companies aren't holding out hope that Apple and Adobe will kiss and make up. Like CBS, it's likely that they'll keep using Flash on their normal websites while allowing iPhone OS devices to access the HTML5 versions of the videos—at least for a while. The remaining questions are when can we expect Hulu to hop on the HTML5 train, and will Netflix reconsider its stance on bringing its own streaming videos (via Silverlight) to the iPad?

'Twitter is a playground and the website is the office," says Reverend Stuart Campbell, when asked whether he is a wind-up merchant. Campbell is the founder of Wings Over Scotland, a controversial pro-independence site that gets an astonishing 4.5 million page views a month. Born in Stirling, he moved to Bath in 1991 for a job at a computer magazine and became a notorious reviewer of video games. He has lived in Somerset ever since. The 46-year-old is also a long-term supporter of Scottish independence, but the issue only became pressing for him when the SNP's landslide Holyrood victory in 2011 made a referendum a certainty. Wings, known for its abrasive take on Scottish politics - one Tory MSP was described as "fat troughing scum" - was started six months after Alex Salmond's historic victory. "I was looking around for Scottish politics websites to follow ... and they weren't doing the job," he explains, sitting in a friend's house in Keynsham, outside Bath. "It became fairly rapidly obvious that nobody was doing the thing that I thought needed to be done." Other than giving readers what he describes as the "facts" about independence, Wings also attempts to shine a light on newspapers' alleged bias. In a podcast interview last year, Campbell said he wanted to "shame" the mainstream press and ensure newspapers did their job in a "more even-handed way". Does he think newspapers have a duty to be even-handed? "No is the short answer. They don't have a duty to. I think they should be." Newspaper stories, I say, are required to be accurate, not even-handed. Surely you are asking something of newspapers that they were never set up to deliver? "They are perfectly at liberty to do that [not being even-handed] but if they're going to do that then they should expect that we will highlight that." Would he be sad if the Daily Mail closed? "No." How about The Scotsman? "No." Like Guido Fawkes and the US-based Drudge report, Wings is an internet phenomenon: on top of 4.5 million page views, 250,000 unique users visit the site every month. Campbell works around 14 hours a day on the site and is the poster boy for a certain type of online independence campaigner. And yet, Yes Scotland - the official campaign group for independence -won't touch Wings with a barge pole. Yes recently ordered a local group to stop distributing leaflets that endorsed the website. A senior Yes figure told the Sunday Herald that the reason for this distance can be summed up in one word: Hillsborough. In September 2012, an independent panel confirmed that policing failures, not Liverpool fans, were to blame for a crush that led to the deaths of 96 people. But on the day after the panel issued its findings, Campbell wrote a piece that pointed the finger squarely at Liverpool fans: "The police's mendacious attempts to blame the fans for being drunk, late or ticketless were red herrings. The reality is much simpler, and required no lying - the fans were to blame because they, alone, were the ones who pushed and thereby caused the crush." Campbell now says of the article: "Some people are upset at some of my personal views. I struggle to see what conceivable relevance they [his views] are. I stand absolutely by the stuff that I've written about Hillsborough." But the panel said a lack of police control was to blame, not Liverpool fans. "The inquiry has a very specific definition of blame. Listen, this isn't something that I particularly want to get into here. As I say, it's nothing to do with Scottish politics." It's the reason people in Yes won't deal with him: "The bottom line is I don't particularly care if people don't want to be associated with us." Does he regret publishing it? "No. As far as I am concerned, it is true." However, it would be wrong to say that Yes Scotland has had absolutely no contact with Campbell. Asked whether he had ever spoken to Yes chief executive Blair Jenkins, Campbell said: "I have spoken to Blair on a number of occasions." When was the last time? "I'm not particularly sure I want to reveal that." Wings has also attracted money, with fundraisers reeling in nearly £150,000 from supporters. As a result, Wings registered as a referendum campaigner, which means the source of donations over £7500 has to be declared. The website received a £10,000 donation from a supporter, but this has not shown up on the register. He says the £10,000 will be spent after the referendum, which falls outwith the rules. So who is the donor? "It was somebody who did appear on the Electoral Commission's list of donors that was published the other week," he says. Campbell declines to name the donor, but he rules out tycoon Brian Souter and lottery winners Colin and Chris Weir. Looking ahead to September 18, the Wings founder says he has "no idea" what the result will be. However, he worries about the effect of a No vote: "The psychological damage to Scotland as a whole will be enormous." One remaining mystery is Campbell's use of the word "Rev" before his name. He does not have a university qualification, but he says he became a reverend in the 1990s. Does he do weddings? "I have not done weddings." Funerals? "No." Does he believe in God? "Things evolve." He says he uses Rev because a stalker used to edit his Wikipedia page in a way that directed people to a different Stuart Campbell who was a murderer. Campbell is an IT-literate troublemaker who has a long history of winding people up. A combination of the referendum, the internet and an edgy electorate has given him the perfect canvas.

The Football Association has announced that Alan Wiley will replace Merseyside official Mike Dean as referee for the FA Cup final between Liverpool and West Ham next month. The 45-year-old Wiley took charge of this season's Carling Cup final between Manchester United and Wigan and replaces Dean due to the FA's policy of not using officials who come from the same area as one of the teams in question. "The decision was taken following Liverpool's semi-final victory on Saturday," read an FA statement, contradicting an FA spokesman's earlier claim that, "he's [Dean] been appointed, and that's not going to change." The statement continuted: "We have complete faith in Mike Dean's refereeing ability, integrity and impartiality. However, given the huge interest in all aspects of the FA Cup final, the fact that he is from the Wirral might lead to comment and debate which would place him under undue additional pressure. "The decision has been taken with the best interests of Mike Dean and the competition in mind. At the age of 37, Mike Dean is still young enough to referee a future FA Cup final." The final will be held at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff on May 13.

Pony is a new programming language described on their site as "an open-source, object-oriented, actor-model, capabilities-secure, high performance programming language." It has some interesting features and is different enough to existing popular programming languages to make it a nice diversion to experiment with. Some features include: lightweight actor based concurrency with M:N threading, mapping multiple language level threads to operating system threads. strong static typing with generics data-race free. The type system ensures at compile time that a concurrent program can never have data races. deadlock free. There are no locking mechanisms exposed to the user so there are no deadlocks. capabilities exposed to the type system to allow compile time enforcing of such things as objects that have no other references to it, immutable values, reference values, etc. lightweight C FFI This post is an outline of my initial experiments with the languages including pitfalls to be aware of. Installing Pony can be installed from git and run from the build directory: $ git clone https://github.com/CausalityLtd/ponyc $ cd ponyc $ make config=release $ export PATH=`pwd`/build/release:$PATH $ ponyc --help Run tests with: $ make config=release test Some of the Pony standard packages dynamically load shared libraries. If they're not installed this will be reflected in build failures during the tests. The required libraries on a Linux based machine are openssl and pcre2-8 . To build Pony itself llvm version 3.6 needs to be installed. There is an llvm37 branch on github that works on Linux but is awaiting some llvm37 fixes before it is merged into master . Pony can be installed in a default location, or using prefix to install it somewhere else: $ make config=release prefix=/home/user/pony install One catch is that running ponyc requires it to find the Pony runtime library libponyrt.a for linking purposes. This might not be found if installed somewhere that it doesn't expect. This can be resolved by setting the environment variable LIBRARY_PATH to the directory where libponyrt.a resides. I had to do this for the Nix Pony package. Compiling Pony programs A basic "Hello World" application looks like: actor Main new create(env: Env) => env.out.print("hello world") Place this in a main.pony file in a directory and compile: $ mkdir hello $ cat >hello/main.pony actor Main new create(env: Env) => env.out.print("hello world") $ ponyc hello $ ./hello1 hello world ponyc requires a directory as an argument and it compiles the *.pony files in that directory. It generates an executable based on the directory name, with a number appended if needed to prevent a name clash with the directory. The program starts executing by creating a Main actor and passing it an Env object allowing access to command line arguments, standard input/output, etc. The Main actor can then create other actors or do whatever required for program execution. Actors Actors are the method of concurrency in Pony. An actor is like a normal object in that it can have state and methods. It can also have behaviours . A behaviour is a method that when called is executed asynchronously. It returns immediately and is queued to be run on an actor local queue. When the actor has nothing to do (not running an existing method or behaviour) it will pop the oldest queued behaviour and run that. An actor can only run one behaviour at a time - this means there needs to be no locking within the behaviour since access to actor local state is serialized. For this reason it's useful to think of an actor as a unit of sequential execution. Parallelism is achieved by utilising multiple actors. To compare the difference between a standard object and an actor I'll use the following program: class Logger let _env: Env let _prefix: String new create(env: Env, prefix: String) => _env = env _prefix = prefix fun log(msg: String, delay: U32) => @sleep[I32](delay) _env.out.print(_prefix + ": " + msg) actor Main new create(env: Env) => let l1 = Logger.create(env, "logger 1") let l2 = Logger.create(env, "logger 2") l1.log("one", 3) l2.log("two", 1) l1.log("three", 3) l2.log("four", 1) This creates a class called Logger that on construction takes an Env to use to output log messages and a string prefix to prepend to a message. It has a log method that will log a message to standard output after sleeping for a number of seconds given by delay . The unusual syntax for the sleep call is the syntax for calling the sleep C function using the Pony FFI. I'll cover this later. The Main actor creates two loggers and logs twice to each one with a different delay. As a standard object using class is not asynchronous running this will result in a delay of three seconds, outputting the first log line, a delay of one second, outputting the second line, a delay of three seconds, outputting the third line and finally a delay of one second, outputting the final line. Everything happens on the single Pony thread that runs the Main actor's create constructor. Pony runs this on a single operating system thread. Total elapsed time is the sum of the delays. Compile and build with: $ mkdir clogger $ cat >clogger/main.pony ..contents of program above... $ ponyc clogger $ time ./clogger1 logger 1: one logger 2: two logger 1: three logger 2: four real 0m8.093s user 0m0.116s sys 0m0.132s Changing the Logger class to an actor and making the log method a behaviour will result in the logging happen asynchronously. The changes are: actor Logger let _env: Env let _prefix: String new create(env: Env, prefix: String) => _env = env _prefix = prefix be log(msg: String, delay: U32) => @sleep[I32](delay) _env.out.print(_prefix + ": " + msg) Nothing else in the program changes. I've just changed class to actor and fun to be . Now when the Main actor calls log it will add the behaviour call to the actor's queue and immediately return. Each Logger instance is running in its own Pony thread and will be mapped to an operating system thread if possible. On a multiple core machine this should mean each actor's behaviour is running on a different core. Compiling and running gives: $ mkdir alogger $ cat >alogger/main.pony ..contents of program above... $ ponyc alogger $ time ./alogger1 logger 2: two logger 2: four logger 1: one logger 1: three real 0m6.113s user 0m0.164s sys 0m0.084s Notice that the total elapsed time is now six seconds. This is the sum of the delays in the calls to log in the first Logger instance. The second instance is running on another OS thread so executes in parallel. Each log call immediately returns and is queued to run. The delays on the second Logger instance are shorter so they appear first. They two log calls on the second Logger run sequentially as behaviours on a single actor instance are executed in order. The log calls for the first Logger instance run after their delay, again sequentially for the calls within that actor. Capabilities Pony uses reference capabilities to allow safe concurrent access to objects. In practice this means annotating types with a tag to indicate how 'sharable' an object is. For data to be passed to another actor it must be safe for that actor to use without data races. Reference capabilities allow enforcing this at compile time. There are defaults for most types so you don't need to annotate everything. Notice that none of the examples I've done so far use any capability annotations. I'll go through a few examples here but won't be exhaustive. The Pony tutorial has coverage of the combinations and defaults. val and ref A val capability is for value types. They are immutable and therefore anyone can read from them at any time. val objects can be passed to actors and used concurrently. Primitives like U32 are val by default. This is why none of the primitive arguments to behaviours in the previous examples needed annotation. A ref capability is for references to mutable data structures. They can be read from and written to and have multiple aliases to it. You can't share these with other actors as that would potentially cause data races. Classes are ref by default. This is an example of passing a val to another actor: actor Doer be do1(n: U32) => None actor Main new create(env: Env) => let a = Doer.create() let n: U32 = 5 a.do1(n) As U32 is a primitive it defaults to a val reference capability. It is immutable and can be read by anyone at any time so this compiles without problem. This example fails to compile however: class Foo let n: U32 = 5 actor Doer be do1(n: Foo) => None actor Main new create(env: Env) => let a = Doer.create() let b = Foo.create() a.do1(b) The error is: main.pony:5:13: this parameter must be sendable (iso, val or tag) be do1(n: Foo) => ^ class defaults to the ref capability which can be read, written and aliased. It can't be used to send to another actor as there's no guarantee that it won't be modifed by any other object holding a reference to it. The iso and tag capabilities mentioned in the error message are other capability types. iso is for single references to data structures that can be read and written too. The type system guarantees that only one reference exists to the object. It is short for 'isolated'. tag is for identification only. Objects of capability tag cannot be read from or written too. They can only be used for object identity or, if they are an Actor, calling behaviours on them. Actors default to tag capabilities. Calling behaviours is safe as behaviour running is serialized for the actor instance and they don't return data. To get the previous example to work we can force the Foo object to be of type val if it can be immutable: class Foo let n: U32 = 5 actor Doer be do1(n: Foo val) => None actor Main new create(env: Env) => let a = Doer.create() let b: Foo val = Foo.create() a.do1(b) ref and iso Let's modify the example so we can change the value of the Foo object to demonstrate moving a mutable reference from one actor to another: class Foo var n: U32 = 5 fun ref set(m: U32) => n = m fun print(env: Env) => env.out.print(n.string()) actor Doer be do1(env:Env, n: Foo iso) => n.print(env) actor Main new create(env: Env) => let a = Doer.create() let b = Foo.create() a.do1(env, b) In this example the do1 behaviour now requires an iso reference capability. As mentioned previously, iso means only one reference to the object exists therefore it is safe to read and write. But where we create the instance of Foo we have a reference to it in the variable b . Passing it as an argument to do1 effectively aliases it. The compile time error is: main.pony:18:16: argument not a subtype of parameter a.do1(env, b) ^ main.pony:11:19: parameter type: Foo iso be do1(env:Env, n: Foo iso) => main.pony:18:16: argument type: Foo iso! a.do1(env, b) ^ This error states that do1 requires a Foo iso parameter whereas it is being passed a Foo iso! . The ! at the end means that it is an alias to another variable. Even though class objects are ref by default, Pony has inferred the capability for b as iso as we didn't declare a type for b and we are passing it to a function that wants an iso . However as it has an alias it can't be used as an iso therefore it's an error. One way of avoiding the aliasing is to pass the result of the create call directly: actor Main new create(env: Env) => let a = Doer.create() a.do1(env, Foo.create()) There is no alias here so it compiles fine. If we do want to have an initial reference to it, say to set a value first, we can tell the type system that we are consuming the existing reference and will no longer use it. This is what the consume keyword is for: actor Main new create(env: Env) => let a = Doer.create() let b = Foo.create() b.set(42) a.do1(env, consume b) // b.set(0) This now compiles. Uncommenting out the use of b after the do1 call will be a compile error as we've consumed b and it no longer exists. In this case the error owuld be: main.pony:20:5: can't use a consumed local in an expression b.set(0) ^ main.pony:20:6: invalid left hand side b.set(0) consume is more often used for passing iso objects around. To pass it to another object you need to consume the existing reference to it. This becomes problematic if you are consuming a field of an object. Modifying the example so that the Foo is stored as a field of Main shows the problem: actor Main var b: Foo iso = Foo.create() new create(env: Env) => let a = Doer.create() b.set(42) a.do1(env, consume b) The error is: main.pony:20:16: consume must take 'this', a local, or a parameter a.do1(env, consume b) ^ b can't be consumed as it's a field of Main . It can't be left consumed - it must have a valid Foo iso object stored in it. In Pony assignment returns the old value of the variable being assigned too. This allows assigning a new value to the field and returning the old value in one operation and avoiding leaving the field in an invalid state: new create(env: Env) => let a = Doer.create() b.set(42) a.do1(env, b = Foo.create()) b gets a new value of a new instance of Foo and do1 gets passed the old value. There's a lot more to capabilities and the capabilities section of the tutorial covers a lot. Although there are sane defaults it feels like that 'capability tutorials' will be the Pony equivalent of 'Monad tutorials' in other languages for a while. When I first was learning ATS I spent a lot of time floundering with function annotations to get things to compile, trying random changes, until I learnt how it worked. I'm probably at that stage with capabilities at the moment and I hope it becomes clearer as I write more Pony programs. Pattern Matching Pony has many of the concepts of most modern functional programming languages. Matching on values is allowed: let x: U32 = 2 match x | 1 => "one" | 2 => "two" else "3" end Union types with capturing: type Data is (U32 | String | None) .... match x | None => "None" | 1 => "one" | let u: U32 => "A number that is not one: " + u.string() | let s: String => "A string: " + s end Enumerations are a bit verbose in that you have to use primitive to define each variant of the enumeration first: primitive Red primitive Blue primitive Green type Colour is (Red | Blue | Green) ... let x: Colour = Red match x | Red => "Red" | Blue => "Blue" | Green => "Green" end C FFI Pony has an easy to use C FFI. I showed an example of this previously: @sleep[I32](delay) The @ signifies that this is a C FFI function call. The type in the backets is the return type of the C function call. The types of the arguments must match what the actual C function expects. Errors here will crash the program. Pony allows specifying the type of an FFI function in advance so argument types are checked. For sleep it would be: use @sleep[I32](n: U32) ... @sleep(10) Note that it's no longer necessary to specify the return type at the call point as it's already been defined in the declaration. If the C function is part of a library already linked into the Pony executable then there is no need use a statement to define the library file to link against. sleep is part of libc so it isn't needed. In the cases where you need to link against a specific library then the use statement is used in this manner: use "lib:foo" The addressof keyword is used to pass pointers to C code. It can be used for passing out parameters of primitives types: var n: U32 = 0 @dosomething[None](addressof n) env.out.print("Result: " + n.string()) Callbacks The FFI allows passing Pony functions to C for the C code to later call back. The syntax for this looks like: let foo = Foo.create() @callmeback[None](addressof foo.method, foo) Calling C code example A working example for the following C function in a cbffi.c file: void do_callback(void (*func)(void* this, char* s), void* this) { func(this, "hello world"); } The Pony code to use this is: use "lib:cbffi" class Foo let prefix: String let env: Env new create(e: Env, p: String) => prefix = p env = e fun display(msg: Pointer[U8]) => env.out.print(prefix + ":" + String.copy_cstring(msg)) actor Main new create(env: Env) => let foo = Foo.create(env, "From Pony") @do_callback[None](addressof foo.display, foo) Note that the display function takes a Pointer[U8] as an argument. Pointer[U8] is a generic type with U8 being the parameter. In this case it is the C string that the C function passes. Pony String types are an object with fields so C doesn't pass it directly. The String type has a couple of constructor functions that take Pointer[U8] as input and return a Pony String - the one used here, copy_cstring , makes a copy of the C string passed in. Compile with: $ mkdir cb $ cat >cb/main.pony ...Pony code... $ cat >cb/cbffi.c ...C code... $ gcc -fPIC -shared -o libcbffi.so cb/cbffi.c $ LIBRARY_PATH=. ponyc cb $ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. ./cb1 From Pony:hello world Here LIBRARY_PATH is set to find the shared library during compiling and linking. To run the generated executable LD_LIBRARY_PATH is used to find the shared library at runtime. It's also possible to link against static C libraries: $ rm libcbffi.so $ gcc -c -o libcbffi.o cb/cbffi.c $ ar -q libcbffi.a libcbffi.o $ LIBRARY_PATH=. ponyc cb $ ./cb1 From Pony:hello world Things to look out for While writing Pony code I came across a couple of things to be aware of. Each actor has their own garbage collector but it runs only between behaviour calls. If a behaviour runs for a long time, never calling another actor behaviour, then it can be a while before garbage is collected. An example of where this can happen is a simple Main actor where everything is done in the default constructor and never calls another actor. Benchmarks can be an example here. No GC will occur and you can get an OOM (Out of Memory) situation. Another is that there is no backpressure handling for behaviour calls on an actor. The message queues are unbounded so if a producer sends messages to an actor at a faster rate than it processes them then it will eventually OOM. This can occur if you have the message sender tied to an external process. For example a TCP listener that uses sockets and translates the data to a message to an actor. If the external users of the TCP interface (a webserver for example) are sending data faster than the actor handling the messages then OOM will occur. Slides from the Pony developers indicates that backpressure is on their radar to look at. As usual with a new programming language there is a lack of libraries and library documentation. Expect to look through the Pony source code to find examples of how to do things. The tutorial is great though - even though parts are incomplete - and is on github. There is a --docs command line argument that can be used to parse docstrings in Pony libraries and produce documentation in markdown format. For example: $ cd packages $ ponyc --docs collections $ ls collections-docs/ Conclusion This has only been a quick overview of some features of Pony. There's more too it. Some places to get more Pony information:

An overtaxed bullpen forced the Rockies into a slew of moves Wednesday, as they optioned first-baseman Wilin Rosario to Triple-A Albuquerque to make room for relief pitcher John Axford. Right-hander Scott Oberg was also recalled to the Rockies, while LaTroy Hawkins was placed on the disabled list with a biceps injury. Rosario will play every day for the Isotopes at first base. The Rockies sent him down to make room for Axford. Several short outings from their starting pitching staff in recent games put pressure on the Rockies’ bullpen, and they need relief reinforcement. Rosario was not happy about the move. “I don’t feel good,” Rosario said. “I’d be lying to you if I said that. I need to be here. I’m playing at a big-league level.” Rosario, who was converted from starting catcher into a back-up first baseman in the offseason, is hitting .357 with three doubles in 14 at-bats this season. “I feel really good swinging,” Rosario said. “It’s something I can do, is hit. Whether they play me here or not play me every day, when I get an opportunity, the time that I do get, I play well. I give the team a chance to win.” The Rockies on Monday got just two innings from starting pitcher Jorge De La Rosa, then five more from Tyler Matzek on Tuesday — both losses to the Padres at Coors Field. Their relief corps took on too much work in too short a span. So the Rockies will move forward with an eight-man bullpen. “Our hands were tied on this one,” manager Walt Weiss said. “It was really the only possible move we could make… The bullpen is what needs protecting at the moment.” Axford returns from the restricted list after missing 10 days while caring for his 2-year-old son, who is recovering from a rattlesnake bite. His son, Jameson, returned home Wednesday exactly one month after he was rushed to a Phoenix-area hospital. He’s since been moved to Denver and is using a wheelchair while his foot recovers from the bite. “I’ve kept myself prepared and game-ready this entire time,” Axford said. Oberg will return after he was optioned to Triple-A on Monday. He allowed three home runs against the Dodgers in inning Sunday in a 7-0 loss. Hawkins, the team’s former closer, pitched one scoreless inning Tuesday. But a lingering bicep injury forced him to the 15-day DL. “This gives him some time to recover,” Weiss said. Looking ahead Padres’ Tyson Ross (1-0, 4.08 ERA) at Rockies’ Jordan Lyles (1-1, 3.50), 1:10 p.m. Thursday, no TV; 850 AM Through three turns of the rotation, Lyles has been the Rockies’ best pitcher in the early going. His ERA doesn’t match Eddie Butler or Tyler Matzek. But he stays in games, throwing six innings each game so far. In his best outing — in a 6-5 loss to the Cubs in Denver — Lyles allowed just one run and struck out three. He’s 5-1 all time at Coors Field with a 4.70 ERA. But he’s just 1-3 with a 6.30 ERA against the Padres. Friday: Giants’ Chris Heston (2-1, 0.87 ERA) at Rockies’ Eddie Butler (1-1, 2.25), 6:40 p.m., ROOT Saturday: Giants’ Tim Hudson (0-2, 3.93) at Rockies’ Jorge De La Rosa (0-1, 31.50), 6:10 p.m., ROOT Sunday: Giants’ Tim Lincecum (1-1, 2.00) at Rockies’ Tyler Matzek (1-0, 2.40), 2:10 p.m., ROOT Nick Groke, The Denver Post

Harry and Leia and the BBC Proms (Picture: Getty Images) Harry Potter, Princess Leia, E.T. and Indiana Jones will be joining the BBC Proms for the first time in 2017 as part of a celebration of John Williams’ 85th birthday. Netflix has changed The Notebook’s ending and people are really, really angry The BBC Concert Orchestra will pay tribute to the award-winning and iconic film composer John Williams with a selection of his most famous film scores, including Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Jaws. ‘Will people come dressed as Star Wars characters? I’d be really disappointed if they don’t,’ said Proms director David Pickard after the news was revealed. Luke, Leia, and Han (Picture: Disney) Performances during the annual classical music festival will also for the first time take place outside of London, with three performances planned in Hull, the 2017 City Of Culture. ‘I thought it was important, most specifically this year, to mark Hull as a City of Culture,’ said David. Advertisement Advertisement ‘I was also looking to expand the initiative we took last year of taking some Proms out of the Albert Hall.’ The BBC Proms (Picture: BBC/: Mark Allan) Elsewhere the festival will 100 years since the births of Ella Fitzgerald and Dizzy Gillespie with a concert starring vocalist Dianne Reeves and trumpeter James Morrison. Ella Fitzgerland (Picture: BBC) The music of jazz giant Charles Mingus will be celebrated by conductor Jules Buckley, while BBC Radio 2 presenter Clare Teal returns with bandleaders Guy Barker and Winston Rollins for a concert celebrating big band legends including Duke Ellington, and Jools Holland and His Rhythm and Blues Orchestra pay tribute to the legendary Stax/Volt Revue, credited for its championing of Southern and Memphis soul music. MORE: BBC Proms presenter Katie Derham is Strictly Come Dancing’s fifth contestant MORE: Expect thunderous applause for Joseph Calleja at the BBC Proms

The Monday Morning Quarterback | A quick analysis of important economic data released over the past week U.S. Snapshot The government shutdown weighed heavily on the minds of consumers as the confidence index dropped from 80.2 in September to 71.2 in October. The index now stands below levels reached a year ago. National retail sales for September declined 0.1% from last month, but, are 3.2% above a year ago. This is a sign of weakness going into the Christmas season. Sales of light vehicles and trucks fell a sharp 5.2% in September following a 1.9% rise in August. The drop was led by domestic trucks, down 7.5%. Domestic cars were down 5.1%. Import autos were down only 1.8%. Consumer prices were up 0.2% in September vs. August and now stand a modest 1.2% over a year ago. This is good news and bad news. The bad news is that the modest increases are below the Fed target of 2.0% and reflect very weak domestic demand. Growth in industrial production topped expectations in September. But, it was all about atypically cool weather. Manufacturing was still flat. Overall, industrial production was up 0.6% following a rise of 0.4% in August. The gain was primarily due to a surge in utilities as cool weather boosted utility demand. Capacity utilization rose to 78.3% from 77.9% in September. While this is an improvement, it is still below the 80% that has historically been associated with increases in plant spending. According to the Institute for Supply Management, manufacturing expanded in October for the fifth consecutive month and the overall economy grew for the 53rd consecutive month. Pending home sales declined for the fourth consecutive month in September as higher mortgage interest rates and higher home prices curbed buying power. The Pending Home Sales Index, a forward looking indicator based on contract signings, fell 5.6% to 101.6 in September from a downwardly revised 107.6 in August. The index is at the lowest level since December 2012. According to the S&P/Case-Shiller home price index, home prices continued to climb nationally. Both the 10 and 20-city indices were up 12.8% over a year ago and 1.3% in August vs. July. Arizona Snapshot According to data compiled by Fletcher Wilcox and the Cromford Report, it appears the major disruptions in the Greater Phoenix home market is near an end. September foreclosure starts were below 2006 levels. Auctioned properties were the lowest since 2006. Short sales were the lowest since 2007. Virtually every indicator of disruption was down significantly. According to CBRE, the Greater Phoenix office market continues to improve. For all three quarters of 2013 reported, absorptions significantly exceeded change in inventory. Thus, vacancy rates are down 1.7 percentage points over the last year. While vacancies are still very high by historic standards, they are moving in the right direction. The same is true in retail markets where vacancies are down 0.8 percentage points over the past year and are approaching 10%. Industrial markets are more mixed as change in inventory for the first three quarters of the year exceeded absorption by over 1 million square feet.

When will my order be dispatched? All orders through the Royal Mail delivery service will be dispatched up until 5.20pm (Monday –Friday), with DPD deliveries up until 5.00pm (Monday –Friday). During busy periods such as Christmas we can dispatch on Saturday as well though. If your order is placed outside of these hours it will be dispatched the next working day (Monday –Friday). If an item is on pre order and not in stock, this will be dispatched as soon as further stock arrives into our warehouse. How will my order be shipped? At checkout you will have a selection of delivery options. This will determine the service your order is shipped out on. What would the delivery time of my order be? UK Royal Mail First Class On dispatch to you can expect to receive your order within 1-3 working days. Royal Mail First Class (Signed For) On dispatch with you can expect to receive your order within 1-3 working days. DPD ‘Next Business Day’ (UK Mainland) On dispatch you can expect to receive your order the next business day (Monday –Friday). Please note this will exclude some areas of Scotland which can take up to two working days for delivery. DPD have improved their service by introducing facility to track where the driver is 15 minutes before delivery. Click for more details... International International Royal Mail First Class & International Royal Mail First Class (Tracked) Times will vary depending on your countries import regulations and postal service. Please check with your local Post Office for an estimate on how long it takes to ship items from the UK to your country.

Something notable took place on the streets of London after the attack on Westminster Bridge which was carried out by Khalid Masood. The usual picture has been that after a major terrorist attack, there is a corresponding significant peak and rise in anti-Muslim hatred. After Westminster, we did not see what was expected and there was no major peak in anti-Muslim hatred picked up across the country. If there was, our work within Tell MAMA would have immediately been alerted to this. This raises some interesting questions. What was there about this terrible incident that did not create major ramifications for cohesion and policing within our country? What was done on this occassion to reduce possible impacts on communities and which also impacted on the frequency of anti-Muslim hate crime incidents across the country – with no major peak after what was a major terrorist incident? This is the first major terrorist incident in the last 3 years where there has not been a significant rise and peak in anti-Muslim hatred. We understand that some groups put out messages asking people to significantly change behaviour patterns on the assumption of a major anti-Muslim backlash. We believe that such advice, (given no large scale backlash after the Westminster terrorist murders), was counter-productive and was not borne out with evidence on this occassion. Such advice may also impact heavily on the confidence of the more vulnerable in communities and we ask that agencies reflect on the messaging that they put out. What we can say though is that the capital still remains resilient against major community divisions and that the lives of Londoners as whole were not significanty impacted upon because of the terrorist attack. There are times when we can feel a sense of hope and the last week provides us with a real window of hope. London truly is a great city.

Somalia had every reason to succeed: an advantageous geographical situation, oil, ores and only one religion and one language for the whole territory; a rare phenomenon in Africa. Somalia could have been a great power in the region. But the reality is completely different: famine, wars, lootings, piracy, bomb attacks. How did this country sink? Why has there been no Somali government for approximately twenty years? Which scandals stand behind those pirates who hijack our ships? In this new chapter of our series “Understanding the Muslim World”, Mohamed Hassan explains for us why and how imperialist forces have applied in Somalia a chaos theory. How did piracy develop in Somalia? Who are those pirates? Since 1990, there has been no government in Somalia. The country is in the hands of warlords. European and Asiatic ships took advantage of this chaotic situation and fished along the Somali coast without a license or respect for elementary rules. They did not observe the quotas in force in their own country to protect the species and they used fishing techniques –even bombs!- that created huge damages to the wealth of the Somali seas. That’s not all! Taking also advantage of this lack of any political authority, European companies, with the help of the mafia, dumped nuclear wastes offshore Somali coasts. Europe knew of this but turned a blind eye as that solution presented a practical and economical advantage for the nuclear waste management. Yet, the 2005 Tsunami brought a big part of these wastes into the Somali lands. Unfamiliar diseases appeared for the first time among the population. This is the context in which the piracy mainly developed. Somali fishermen, who had primitive fishing techniques, were no more able to work. So they decided to protect themselves and their seas. This is exactly what the United States did during the civilian war against the British (1756-1763): with no naval forces, President George Washington made a deal with pirates to protect the wealth of the American seas. No Somali state for almost twenty years! How is that possible? This is the result of an American strategy. In 1990, the country was bruised by conflicts, famine and lootings; the state collapsed. Facing this situation, the United States, who discovered oil in Somalia a few years ago, launched Operation Restore Hope in 1992. For the first time, US marines intervened in Africa to take control of a country. It was also the first time that a military invasion was launched in the name of humanitarian interference. The famous rice bag exhibited on a Somali beach by Bernard Kouchner? Yes, everybody remembers those pictures carefully showcased. But the real reasons were strategic. An US State Department report recommended indeed that the United States must stay the lonely global superpower after the Soviet Bloc collapse. To reach that goal, the report advocated to occupy a hegemonic position in Africa, which enjoys a vast amount of raw materials. However, Restore Hope will be a failure. There was even that Hollywood movie “Black Hawk Down”, with those poor G.I.’s “attacked by the bad Somali rebels”… US soldiers were indeed defeated by a Somali nationalist resistance. Since then, American policy was to keep Somalia without any real government, even to balkanize it. This is the old British strategy, already applied in many places: setting weak and divided states in order to better rule them. That is why there has been no Somali state for almost twenty years. The United States has implemented a chaos theory in order to stop any Somali reconciliation and keep the country divided. In Sudan, due to the civilian war, Exxon has had to leave the country after having discovered oil. So isn’t letting Somalia plunge into chaos contrary to American interests, which cannot exploit the discovered oil? Oil exploitation is not their priority. The United States know that the reserves are there but doesn’t need it immediately. Two elements are much more important in its strategy. First, prevent the competitors from negotiating with a rich and powerful Somali state. If you consider Sudan, the comparison is interesting. The oil that the American companies discovered there thirty years ago, Sudan is selling it today to China. The same thing could happen in Somalia. When he was president of the transition government, Abdullah Yusuf went to China although he was supported by the United States. US mass media had strongly criticized that visit. The fact is that United States have no guarantee on that point: if a Somali government is established tomorrow, whatever is its political color, it could probably adopt a strategy independent of United States and trade with China. Western imperialists do not want a strong and unified Somali state. The second goal pursued by this chaos theory is linked to the geographical location of Somalia, which is strategic for both European and American imperialists. Why is it strategic? The issue is the control of the Indian Ocean. Look at the map. As mentioned, western powers have an important share of the responsibility in the Somali piracy development. But instead of telling the truth and paying compensation for what they did, those powers criminalize the phenomena in order to justify their position in the region. Under the pretext of fighting the piracy, NATO is positioning its navy in the Indian Ocean. Source: Wikipeda What is the real goal? To control the economic development of the emerging powers, mainly India and China. Half of the world’s container traffic and 70% of the total traffic of petroleum products passes through the Indian Ocean. From that strategic point of view, Somalia is a very important place: the country has the longest coast of Africa (3.300 km) and faces the Arabian Gulf and the Straight of Hormuz, two key points of the region economy. Moreover, if a pacific response is brought to the Somali problem, relations between African in one hand, and India and China on the other hand, could develop through the Indian Ocean. Those American competitors could then have influence in that African area. Mozambique, Kenya, Madagascar, Tanzania, Zanzibar, South Africa etc. All those countries connected to the Indian Ocean could gain easy access to the Asian market and develop fruitful economic relationship. Nelson Mandela, when he was president of South Africa, had mentioned the need of an Indian Ocean revolution, with new economic relationships. The United States and Europe do not want this project. That is why they prefer to keep Somalia unstable.. You say that the United States does not want Somali reconciliation. But what are the roots of the Somali divisions? In order to understand this chaotic situation, we must delve into Somali history. This country had been divided by colonial powers. In 1959, Somalia gained independence through the fusion of the Italian colony in the South, and the British colony in the North. But Somalis were also living in some parts of Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti. The new Somali state adopted a star on its flag, each branch representing one part of the historical Somalia. The message behind that symbol: “Two Somalias have been united, but three are still colonized”. Facing the legitimacy of those claims, the British – who controlled Kenya-, organized a referendum in the Kenyan area claimed by Somalia. 87% of the population, composed mainly of Somali ethnics, voted for the Somali unity. When the results were published, Jomo Kenyatta, a Kenyan nationalist leader, threatened the British to throw the colonists out if they gave a part of the territory up to Somalia. So Great Britain decided not to take the referendum into account, and today an important Somali community is still living in Kenya. You must understand that those colonial borders were a real disaster in the Somali case. The border issue was besides the object of an important debate among the African continent. What was the issue of that debate? In the sixties, as many African countries became independent, there was a debate between what we called the Monrovia and the Casablanca groups. This later, including among others Morocco and Somalia, resolved that the borders inherited from colonialism be discussed. For them, those boundaries had no legitimacy. But most of the African countries and their borders are colonialism products. Finally, the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the ancestor of the current African Union, closed the debate by decreeing that the borders were indisputable: going back over those boundaries would provoke civilian wars everywhere on the continent. Later, one of the OAU architects, the Tanzanian Julius Nyerere, confessed that this decision was the best but that he regretted the Somali outcome. What will be the impact of the colonial divisions on Somalia? They will create strains with neighboring countries. During those years when Somalia advocated for revising the borders, Ethiopia became a US imperialism bastion. The United States had also military bases in Kenya and Eritrea. At this moment, Somalia, a young pastoral democracy, wished to build its own army. The goal was to not appear weak in front of the armed neighbors, to support Somali movements in Ethiopia and even to regain by force, if necessary, some territories. But the western forces were opposed to the creation of a Somali army. So Somalia had tense relations with its neighbors. Was it not reasonable to be opposed to this Somali army project? It would have provoked wars, wouldn’t it? The West did not care about conflicts between Africans but its own interests. The United States and Great Britain were providing and training militaries in Ethiopia, Kenya and Eritrea. Those countries were still under the yoke of very repressive feudal systems. But they were also neocolonial regimes devoted to Western interests. On the other hand, the power in place in Somalia was more democratic and independent. So the West had no interest in providing for a country that could escape its control. As a consequence, Somalia decided to turn to the Soviet Union. This frightened the Western forces that feared Soviet influence stretching in to Africa. Those fears became more important with the 1969 putsch. What do you mean? Socialist ideas were spread in the country. An important Somali community was indeed living in Aden in South Yemen. However, this is where Britain used to exile persons it considered dangerous in India: communists, nationalists and so on. They used to be arrested and sent to Aden where nationalist and revolutionary ideas quickly developed and affected later both Yemenites and Somalis. Under the influence of civilians with Marxist ideas, a coup d’état was led by officers in 1969 and Siad Barre took power in Somalia. What were the reasons of that coup d’état? The Somali government was corrupted. He had however the cards in hand to erect the country to the great regional power rank: a strategic position, only one language, one religion and many common cultural elements. This is fairly rare in Africa. But, by missing the economical development of the country, this government has created a context favorable to divisions among clans. Under the pretext of doing politics, Somali elites become divided. Everyone created his own political party, without any real program, and recruited voters among the existing clans. This increased the divisions and turned out to be totally useless. A democracy in a liberal type was in fact unsuitable for Somalia: there were at once 63 political parties for a three million population country! And the government was even not able to adopt an official script, which was creating serious troubles in the administration. Education was weak. Bureaucracy, police and army were, however, established. This later will play a key role in the progressive coup d’état. “Progressive”! With the army? The army was the only organized institution in Somalia. As a repressive apparatus, it was supposed to protect the so-called civilian government and the elite. But for many Somalis coming from different families and areas, the army was also an exchange place where there were no borders, no tribalism, no clan divisions. This is how Marxist ideas from Aden circulated among the army. So the coup d’état was led by officers who were most of all nationalist. They did not have a good knowledge of socialism but they had sympathy for those ideas. Moreover, they knew what was happening in Vietnam, and that fed anti-imperialist feelings. The civilians, who knew Marx and Lenin’s teachings lacked a mass political party, supported the coup d’état and become the advisers of the officers who took power. What changes did the Somali coup d’état bring about? One important positive aspect: the new government quickly adopted an official script. Likewise, the Soviet Union and China were helping Somalia. The students and the population mobilized themselves. Education and social conditions were enhanced. The years that followed the coup d’état were in fact the best ones that Somalia never knew. That is, until 1977. What happened? Somalia, which has been divided by colonial forces, attacked Ethiopia to get the territory of Ogaden back. Ogaden was mainly populated by Somalis. At this time however, Ethiopia was itself a socialist state supported by the Soviets. This country had been led for a long time by Emperor Selassie. But in the seventies, there was an important mobilization to overthrow him. The students’ movement, in which I personally participated, made four major demands. First, to nonviolently and democratically resolve tensions with Eritrea. Secondly, to establish a land reform that would distribute the lands to the peasants. Thirdly, to establish the principle of equality among the nationalities; Ethiopia was a multinational country led by elite who did not represent the diversity. Fourthly, to abolish the feudal system and to establish a democratic state. As in Somalia, the army was the only organized institution in Ethiopia and the civilians joined the officers to overthrow Selassie in 1974. How did two socialist states, each supported by the Soviet Union, enter conflict? After the Ethiopian revolution, a delegation including Soviet Union, Cuba and South Yemen organized a round table with Ethiopia and Somalia in order to resolve their contradiction. Castro went to Addis Abeba and Mogadishu. To him, Somali claims were justified. Finally, the Ethiopian delegation agreed to seriously seriously its Somali neighbor’s demands. The two countries made an agreement stipulating that no provocation should happen as long as no decision has been taken. Things seemed to start well but Somalia did not honor the agreement… Two days after the Ethiopian delegation returned to its country, Henry Kissinger, a former Nixon Secretary of State, turned up to Mogadishu. Kissinger was representing an unofficial organization: the Safari Club that was among others including Shah’s Iran, Mobutu’s Congo, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and French and Pakistani intelligence services. The objective of that organization was to fight against the Soviet infiltration in the Gulf and in Africa. Under the Safari Club pressures and help promises, Siad Barre committed a disastrous strategic mistake of attacking Ethiopia. What were the consequences of that war? Soviets left the region. Somalia, still led by Siad Barre, integrated the neocolonial network of the imperialist forces. The country had been seriously damaged by the conflict and the World Bank and the IFM were in charge of “rebuilding” it. This has aggravated infighting among Somali bourgeoisie. Each regional elite wanted to have its own market. They made the divisions among the clans’ worst and contributed to the progressive dislocation of their country up to Siad Barre’s fall in 1990. Since that, any head of state succeeded to him. But, thirty years after the Ogaden war, the opposite scenario happened: Ethiopia was supported by the United States to attack Somalia… Yes, as I said, since the Restore Hope failure, United States has preferred to keep Somalia in chaos. However, in 2006, a spontaneous movement developed under the Islamic courts to fight against the local warlords and bring unity to the country. It was a kind of Intifada. In order to stop this movement from rebuilding Somalia, United States decided suddenly to support the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) after having refused to recognize it before. In fact, they realized that their project of a Somalia without effective state was no more possible: a movement – furthermore Islamic!- was about to lead to a national reconciliation. In order to sabotage the Somali unity, United States decided to support the TFG. But this later was lacking any social basis and an army. So the Ethiopian troops, commanded by Washington, attacked Mogadishu to overthrow the Islamic courts. Did it work? No, the Ethiopian army was defeated and had to leave Somalia. On their side, the Islamic courts were dispersed in several movements that still control a big part of the country today. As for Abdulla Yusuf’s transitional government, he collapsed and United States replaced it by Sheik Sharif, the former Islamic Court spokesman. So Sheik Sharif has passed to “the other camp”? He used to be the Islamic courts spokesman because he is a good orator. But he has no political knowledge. He has no idea what imperialism or nationalism are. That is why western powers took him back. He was the Islamic court’s weak link. Today he chairs a fake government, created in Djibouti. This government has no social base or authority in Somalia. It only exists on the international level because the imperialist forces support it. In Afghanistan, the United States said they were ready to negotiate with Taliban. Why don’t they look for discussing with the Islamic groups in Somalia? Because those groups want to take the foreign occupier over and to allow a national reconciliation for the Somali people. As a result, the United States wants to break those groups: a reconciliation, through the Islamic movement or through the TFG, is not in the interests of the imperialist forces. They just want chaos. The problem is that today, this chaos reached Ethiopia too, which is very weak since the 2007 aggression. A nationalist resistance movement came to the light over there to fight against the pro-imperialist government of Addis Ababa. With their chaos theory, United States had in fact created troubles in the whole region. And now, they took it out on Eritrea. Why? This little country leads an independent national policy. Eritrea also has a vision for the whole region: the Horn of Africa (Somalia, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia) do not need foreign powers’ interference; its wealth should allow it to establish new economical relationship on the basis of mutual respect. According to Eritrea, the region must get it together and its members must be able to discuss about their problems. Of course, this policy frightens United States that fears that other countries follow that example. So they accuse Eritrea of sending weapons to Somalia and instigating troubles in Ethiopia. Isn’t Eritrea sending weapons in Somalia? Not even a bullet! This is a pure propaganda as they did against Syria about the Iraqi resistance. Eritrea’s vision catches up with the project of Indian Ocean revolution that we spoke about before. The western powers do not want of that and wish to bring Eritrea back to the circle of the neocolonial states under control, such as Kenya, Ethiopia or Uganda. Are there no terrorist in Somalia? Imperialist powers have always labeled as terrorists the people who fight for their right. Irishmen were terrorists until they signed an agreement. Abbas was a terrorist. Now, he is a friend. But we heard about Al Qaeda in Somalia? Al Qaeda is everywhere, from Belgium to Australia! That invisible Al Qaeda is a logo designed to justify to the public opinion military operations. If United States say to their citizens and soldiers: “We are going to send our troops into the Indian Ocean in order to probably fight against China”, people would be afraid of course. But if you tell them that it is just about fighting piracy and Al Qaeda, it won’t be a problem. The real goal is however different. It consists in setting forces in the Indian Ocean region that will be the theater of major conflicts in the coming years. This is what we will analyze in the next chapter… Mohamed Hassan is a geopolitics and Arab world specialist. Born in Addis Abeba (Ethiopia), he participated in student movements on the occasion of the socialist revolution of 1974 in his country. He studied political science in Egypt before specializing in public administration in Brussels. As a diplomat for his country of origin, he worked in Washington, Beijing and Brussels. Co-writer of L’Irak sous occupation (EPO, 2003), he has also contributed to books about Arab nationalism, Islamic movements and Flemish nationalism. He is one of the best contemporary experts on the Arab and Muslim world. Understanding the Muslim World with Mohamed Hassan – Previous chapters: Yemen: USA are fighting against democracy, not against Al-Qaeda What should Ahmadinejad do to get the Nobel Price? Afghanistan – Pakistan: the black hole of the empire The Darfur crisis: blood, hunger and oil “Gaza is a normal place with normal people” How can we explain the success of Hamas ? To examine the subject in depth, Mohamed Hassan recommends the following publications: Mohamed Omar, The Road to Zero: Somalia’s Self-Destruction, Haan Publishing,1993 Babu, Abdul, Rahman Mohamed. African Socialism or Socialist Africa? Londres, Zed Press, 1981, 190 p. Hersi, Ali Abdirahman, The Arab factor in Somali history : the origins and the development of Arab enterprise and cultural influences in the Somali Peninsula, Thesis–University of California, Los Angeles, 1977 Michel Caraël, La ruine du pansomalisme, in Le Monde diplomatique, octobre 1982 Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror, John K. Cooley, Unholy wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, Pluto Press, 2000 John Drysdale, Whatever Happened to Somalia?, Haan Publishing, 1994 Translation review: Fausto Giudice

Susan Collins dismisses Palin presidential bid By Rachel Weiner On Tuesday, Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.) made headlines for saying Sarah Palin cost Republicans the Senate. (Some analysis of that claim here.) Now Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) is throwing cold water on the idea of a Palin 2012 run. She told the Kennebec Journal: "I think she likes being a celebrity commentator for Fox and a speaker and being able to provide for her family," Collins said. "I think that life appeals to her. It's a lot easier to charge people up than to actually govern." Collins also argues that moderates like herself will still have power in the new Congress. She says that as soon as he won, Senator-elect Mark Kirk (R-Illinois) called her up to say, "I can't wait to join your Mod Squad."

Skip Holtz has scored his second big win against his alma mater in less than a calendar year. The South Florida coach will add former Notre Dame defensive end Aaron Lynch to the Bulls' roster in 2012, the school announced Monday. "With Aaron originally being from Florida, we're very familiar with the kind of player he is," Holtz said in a news release. "Aaron had a great freshman season at Notre Dame and we're excited to welcome him into the Bulls family." The Irish announced April 13 that Lynch would transfer at the end of the spring semester. Lynch, a Cape Coral, Fla., native, earned freshman All-American honors in 2011, recording team bests of 5.5 sacks and 14 quarterback hurries, in addition to 33 tackles, seven tackles for loss and a forced fumble. He played in 12 games and started six. Barring a waiver from the NCAA to play immediately, Lynch will have to sit out the 2012 season. Lynch's first college game was the Sept. 3 opener against USF, which upset the Irish, 23-20, in South Bend, Ind. With former Notre Dame and current New York Giants defensive end Justin Tuck in town over the weekend to serve as an honorary captain for the Irish's spring game, Lynch's mother, Alice, posted a message to Tuck on Twitter asking him to talk Lynch into staying at Notre Dame. It proved to be too little, too late, as the 6-foot-6, 270-pound Lynch is heading home to Florida. Holtz, the Bulls' coach, is the son of ESPN analyst and former Notre Dame coach Lou Holtz.