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A second car has become stuck on Gold Coast tram tracks, just hours after an unmarked police car on the way to a pedestrian fatality became wedged when it attempted a shortcut. The driver of a white Toyota Corolla became stuck on the Sundale Bridge in Southport just before 2pm, halting light rail services between the Main Beach and Surfer's Paradise stops in both directions. A second car has become stuck in Gold Coast tram tracks, just two hours after an unmarked police car. Photo: Matthew Howard / Ten Eyewitness News / Twitter Credit:Matthew Howard/Ten Eyewitness News A Translink spokeswoman said buses were replacing trams between the two stops and commuters could expect delays of up to 40 minutes. A Queensland Police spokesperson said the male driver was assisting police with their inquiries.

One journalist hacked phones of 100 celebrities every day for 18 months, says barrister acting for victims including Sadie Frost and Paul Gascoigne The “industrial scale” of phone hacking at the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and the People made the News of the World look like a “small cottage industry” in comparison, the high court in London has heard. Scores of celebrities, including the actor Sadie Frost and ex-footballer Paul Gascoigne, were targeted thousands of times by journalists using the illegal practice from mid-1999 until 2009, it was claimed. In the first hint of the true extent of phone hacking at the three titles, the court heard that the former Sunday Mirror journalist Dan Evans hacked about 100 celebrities every day from 2003 to mid-2004. Such was the reliance on phone hacking for stories that one senior journalist was desperate for Evans to create “an enigma-type machine that would automatically crack pin codes”, the court was told. David Sherborne, the barrister for eight victims, said hacking at the titles was “utterly unprecedented” and that knowledge of the activity went to the highest levels of the newspaper group. “This was not just the work of junior reporters … quite the opposite,” he said. “The evidence demonstrates that voicemail interception, as well as the unlawful obtaining of personal information by blagging or use of private investigators, was in widespread and habitual use by a large number of journalists across all three MGN titles.” Between June 2002 and mid-2006, Sherborne said MGN journalists made nearly 10,000 calls to Orange’s voicemail platform, which allows people to access their messages by calling a general number and entering their personal details. He said senior MGN journalists gave “deliberately crafted and disingenuous statements” to the Leveson inquiry into press ethics, and accused MGN of withholding key evidence that meant that only the “very tip of the proverbial iceberg” could be revealed. Two senior journalists, who cannot be named for legal reasons, allegedly introduced Evans to phone hacking in April 2003 and ordered him to build a “phone-hacking database” using pay-as-you-go phones and a list of celebrity mobile numbers. Evans, who later pleaded guilty to phone hacking, covered up his illegal activities by throwing his mobile phones – dubbed “burners” – into the river Thames every two months, the court heard. The evidence came on the opening day of a civil trial brought by eight claimants – including Frost, Gascoigne and BBC creative director Alan Yentob – against MGN for invasion of privacy. The judge, Mr Justice Mann, is being asked to assess the extent of phone hacking across the three titles and rule on the level of damages for each of the claimants. The other claimants involved in the case are TV soap stars Lucy Taggart, Shane Richie and Shobna Gulati, flight attendant Lauren Alcorn and TV producer Robert Ashworth. Frost is alleged to have been hacked on a daily basis, morning and evening, in part because she was married to fellow actor Jude Law and was good friends with the model Kate Moss. She described having her voicemails intercepted as like being “monitored and hunted down by a sort of secret police, who were digging into our lives as much as they could in order to discover every possible detail about our private lives, as well as our professional ones, to use against us”. Sherborne said the “most deeply private” information was intercepted and published by journalists, including Frost’s attendance at AA meetings, Richie’s financial problems, Ashworth’s divorce, and Taggart’s relationship with actor Steve McFadden. Of the stories that Mirror Group has admitted were the result of phone hacking, 49 were printed in the Sunday Mirror, 40 in the Daily Mirror and 23 in the People between June 2000 and October 2006. “Strangers were deliberately picking through this, sifting for things they could get away with publishing,” Sherborne said. “No one imagined that all this private information, this treasure trove about just the sort of people who filled these newspapers in their millions, could be accessed and listened to in this way, let alone plundered as a source for stories.” Frost, for example, was hacked at least twice daily by Evans because, like Yentob, she was deemed a particularly fruitful source of stories and was on his so-called “back pocket list” of targets. In Frost’s case, this hacking resulted in 27 articles that Mirror Group has admitted were gleaned unlawfully from her private messages. By comparison, Sienna Miller received £100,000 in damages from the News of the World publisher in 2011 over 11 articles based on hacking by that newspaper. MGN has admitted that 99 articles relating to the eight celebrities would not have been published without phones being hacked, the court heard. Landline call records show that Yentob had his voicemails intercepted 330 times from July 2002 to March 2005, although the court heard that the true extent was likely to be much greater when hacking from pay-as-you-go phones was included. James Hipwell, a former Daily Mirror journalist, said Yentob was a principal target of showbusiness journalists and that his voicemails would be used in hacking tutorials. Journalists would sing an amended version of a Spike Milligan song while eavesdropping on his messages, Hipwell claimed. In a witness statement, the BBC executive said he felt “violated on a truly massive scale” by the hacking. Sherborne said: “It is abundantly clear that the documentary evidence before the court is only likely to reveal a tiny proportion of the total wrongdoing committed by MGN as against each of the claimants – merely the very tip of the proverbial iceberg.” Lawyers for the victims pieced together a picture of hacking at Mirror Group using evidence including landline call data, expenses receipts for pay-as-you-go telephones, internal emails from the Sunday Mirror and the People and witness statements from former exployees including Evans and ex-reporters James Hipwell and David Brown. Evans, who will give evidence as a witness in the trial, was allegedly instructed not to refer to telephones or voicemails explicitly in emails. Instead, he used the euphemism “getting the muppets” to stand up a story. In one email read to court, a Sunday Mirror journalist told his bosses that an unnamed celebrity “sounds so cute on the voicemail”. In another email, a senior editorial staff member warned colleagues not to telephone a TV producer because “he’s answering” – meaning the journalists would not be able to access his voicemails and may be rumbled. The court also heard that senior journalists made in-jokes about a hacked voicemail alleged to have been the source of a scoop revealing Sven-Göran Eriksson’s affair with Ulrika Jonsson. In Mirror Group’s written defence statement, Matthew Nicklin QC said the group had published a public apology and had written privately to the eight victims before the start of this trial. However, he said the discovery of hacking could not be said to have caused the victims serious long-term, life-changing suffering like that in personal injury cases. Nor could their hurt be equated with the kind of traumatic lengthy bullying suffered in harassment or discrimination cases. The publicly listed publisher had strenuously denied any wrongdoing until September last year, when it made limited admissions in court. The newspaper group has since set up a £12m compensation fund for hacking victims and last month printed an apology in its three papers for “an unwarranted and unacceptable intrusion into people’s private lives”.

Causes and symptoms of fish TB. Mycobacterium marinum. Possible treatment. There is some danger to humans when servicing Tuberculosis was once a dreaded disease in Europe as well as North America and virtually everyone knew someone who had succumbed to ‘consumption’, the commonly used name for the disease caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis is still widespread in most third world countries and after the fall of the Soviet Union, the numbers of tuberculosis patients have sky rocketed in Russia as well as in many other post-soviet states. What few of us know, however, is that a bacterium closely related to Mycobacterium tuberculosis called Mycobacterium marinum can be present in wild caught as well as captive bred fish and stay lurking in our aquariums without us ever realizing it. After all, when one of our fishes goes belly up, few of us drag out the Petri dish and starts growing bacterial cultures to find out exactly what caused its demise. Since Mycobacterium marinum is so closely related to Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the disease it causes is commonly referred to as fish tuberculosis of fish TB. Learning more about fish tuberculosis is recommended for all aquarists since it can be lethal to our beloved fish. What’s even worse, Mycobacterium marinum can spread to the aquarist and cause serious health problems. It can also spread to other animals and is capable of surviving in both soil and water without any host for prolonged periods of time. Don’t be fooled by the word “marinum” – this nasty little organism will survive just as well in freshwater conditions. Susceptibility Certain types of fish seem to be more at risk of carrying, or at least succumbing to, fish tuberculosis. This group includes the labyrinth fishes, among which you will find many popular aquarium fishes such as Bettas and Gouramis. Symptoms in fish The main symptoms of fish tuberculosis are loss of scales, loss of color, lesions on the body, wasting, and skeletal deformities such as curved spines. Diagnosing Looking a slides of infected tissue under a microscope is sometimes enough to recognize Mycobacterium marinum, but in most cases a bacterial culture will be necessary. Both Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Mycobacterium marinum are acid fast, which means that they stain bright pink against a blue background. Treatment Treating fish tuberculosis is really difficult and euthanizing the fish a probably less painful for the fish than forcing it to go through endless treatments that may not have any effect on the disease. Euthanizing all the fish in the infected aquarium is also the best way of preventing the disease from spreading. If you decide to try and treat your fish, keep in mind that Mycobacterium marinum can infect you as well. The risk of being infected can however be decreased dramatically by following a few simple safety guidelines. You can read more about this further down in this article. Fish can be treated with the same drugs as humans get when they become infected by Mycobacterium marinum, e.g. Kanamycin. Since this is a very resilient microbe, normal treatment involves administering at least two different medications over the course of at least three months. A lot of aquarium problems can be fixed by performing frequent water changes, increasing the water temperature and adding some salt to the water, but fish tuberculosis is not one of them. Raising the water temperature may even worsen the problem since Mycobacterium marinum prefers warm water (their ideal temperature is 30°C). Prevention Since curing fish is virtually impossible once the disease begins to manifest, preventative measures are highly important. Keeping your fish healthy, happy and well-fed will boost their immune system and make it possible for them to handle limited exposure to Mycobacterium marinum. Wounded or otherwise weakened fish should be moved to quarantine tanks where they can be treated and given time to recuperate, since weak fish that is left in the main aquarium can serve as a breeding ground for all sorts of malicious microorganisms that may eventually grow numerous enough to attack even the healthy fishes. New fish should ideally be quarantined before you allow it into you main aquarium. Plants, substrate, equipment etcetera should be sterilized to kill of potentially harmful bacteria before being introduced to the aquarium. See the plant section for more info about how to sterilize plants without causing injury to them. An aquarium that has had an outbreak of fish tuberculosis should be meticulously cleaned out with bleach and left to dry before you restock it. Fish tuberculosis and the aquarist Prevention When aquarists become infected by Mycobacterium marinum, it is usually because the carry out maintenance work when they have cuts or other skin problems on their hands or arms. Our skin is remarkably good at keeping malevolent microorganisms out, but as soon as the skin gets injured, an important part of the body’s defense system has been breached. It doesn’t have to bee a large wound; a simple paper cut or eczema can be enough for Mycobacterium marinum to slip through. When handling an aquarium where you suspect that Mycobacterium marinum may be present, it is consequently important to use protective gloves. You may have a tiny sore that you haven’t even noticed, such as a torn cuticle. Some aquarists prefer to use gloves all the time, or at least when they have damaged skin, since it is impossible to know if Mycobacterium marinum exists in an aquarium before the fish start to show symptoms of fish tuberculosis. You can also catch fish tuberculosis by using your mouth to start a siphon. Washing your hands and lower arms with soap after handling fish and aquariums is naturally always recommended. Symptoms and treatment When aquarists become infected with fish tuberculosis, it normally starts as a skin problem. Mycobacterium marinum is a slow growing mycobacterium and it can therefore take several weeks before you notice any symptoms. The first sign is normally small purple lesions or “bumps”. The lesions will grow and spread and Mycobacterium marinum can proceed to destroy the soft tissue under the skin, including tendons and joints. In severe cases, fish tuberculosis can spread to the bones and cause symptoms similar to arthritis. Most doctors never come in contact with fish tuberculosis and if you show up with some strange lesions on your hands, they might not realize what is causing it and put you on a general oral antibiotic that will not kill Mycobacterium marinum. It is therefore very important to inform your doctor that you are an aquarist and that you may have caught fish tuberculosis or some other disease from your aquarium. Mycobacterium marinum can be successfully treated but only if the right combination of drugs are used. Just as with Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the treatment will normally need to be carried out over the course of several months. In serious cases, intravenous administration of antibiotics may be required. Didn't find the info you were looking for? Register for free and ask your question in our Aquarium forum ! Our knowledgeable staff usually responds to any question within 24 hours Related Articles - Summary of the fish disease argulus- Information on diagnosing and treating anchor worms.- An article about how to avoid diseases by buying healthy fish- An introduction to the more common fish diseases your fish might get.- Information on diagnosing and treating Chilodonella.- Information on diagnosing and treating constipation in fish.- Information on diagnosing and treating costia.- How to recognise the the existence of ill health in a fish.- Information on diagnosing and treating the dreaded dropsy.- Information on diagnosing and treating ergasilus- Information on diagnosing and treating eye problems in fish.- How to examine dead fish for evidence of external parasites or internal problems.- Information on flukes and how to trat flukes.- Information on diagnosing and treating fungis in fish.- Information on diagnosing and treating anchor worms.Natural methods to cure ich- Information on diagnosing and curing glugea and henneguya.- Information on diagnosing and treating hexamita.- Information on diagnosing and treating hole in the head disease.- Information on diagnosing and treating Ichthyosporidium.- Information on how to care for injured fish- How to prevent and control leeches in your aquarium.- Information on diagnosing and treating lymphocystis.- Information on diagnosing and treating the saltwater disease "marine velvet".- Information on diagnosing and treating nematodes.- Information on diagnosing and treating neon tetra disease.- Various fish parasites, some normally free-swimming organisms, and various species of algae can become a problem.- An article about how you can prevent diseases among your fish.- An introduction to Quarantine Aquariums.- Information on diagnosing and treating red pest.- Information on diagnosing scale protrusion and how to treat it.- Information on the different causes of swim bladder problems and how the problem can be treated.- Information on diagnosing and treating tail an fin rot.- Summary of treating fish disease argulus- Symptoms of Ich, its life cycle, and treatments using either malachite green or aquarium salt.- An introduction to the art of treating fish that suffers from a disease.- Information on tumors in fish- Information on diagnosing and treating Uronema marinum.- Information on diagnosing and treating velvet

He sees the global West, led by the US, Britain, and Nato, as guilty of unprovoked aggression against Russia. He supports the separatist movement in east Ukraine, but repeats the Kremlin’s (long debunked) line that there is “no proof” of Russian involvement in the war there. And he harbours a near-religious veneration for the Second World War as the foundation of a sense of Russian exceptionalism – the nearest thing contemporary Russia has to an official state ideology. A sign of just how far the convergence of hawkish public ideology with football terrace nationalism came after the now infamous assault on England fans in Marseille Old Port and Velodrome stadium in June. The discipline, brutality, and obvious preparation of those attacks provoked outrage in Britain, but barely disguised glee amongst some Russian officials in Moscow. Mr Khuslyutdinov says this was pure political opportunism, rather than evidence of collusion between hooligans and the state. “They were just saying what the broad electorate wanted to hear. With the exception of Vladimir Putin’s personal rating, these officials have basically no popularity. So allegedly supporting us is a way of showing they are in tune with the public mood,” he said. “Besides, the day before that Russian and English fans were on the same side fighting some of the French, and no one mentions that.” And he vigorously rejects the suggestion that the Marseilles hooligans included soldiers sent by the Kremlin in an act of "hybrid warfare." In fact, he claims, they were not even Russia's best hooligans. “You have to make a distinction. There’s the kids and there’s real fighters, the osnova,” he says, using a word that roughly translates as “the base” or “foundation.” This praetorian guard of Russian hooliganism is made up of older, more experienced men who train hard, seldom drink, and follow health and fitness regimes that make them the diametric opposite of “getting drunk and having a go.” “These are the best fighters, the first line. They’re people who never run from a fight. But they stayed away because we expected a much more serious policing operation from the French, especially given the recent terror attacks there.” To prove the point, he sketched a map of Marseilles' Old Port and described in detail how the Russian attackers missed an opportunity to outflank French riot police and failed to set a second ambush. “I could see those mistakes immediately just by watching on TV, and no experienced fighters would have made them,” he said. “In Marseilles it was kids, youngsters.” “If we’d known the policing would be so limp-wristed a lot of other guys would have gone, and it would have been a very different story.” To illustrate the point, he pointed out a well-built but far from muscle-bound man strolling past the training ground. “He’s in the osnova. He once killed a man with one punch and did five years inside for it. Now, you can imagine what it would have been like if they were there.” “The authorities don’t really know what attitude to have to us. We have a lot of people who just don’t like the system, they don’t recognise the state, its authority, or anything like that. And people like that cannot be ruled,” he said. “On the one hand we’re useful to the government, because they can point at us and say ‘you see how terrible and violent and scary these people are? that’s why we need so many police!’” “But at the same time, some people in power are very fearful that this ‘army’ could be turned against them.” As a result, Russian police have pursued a no-nonsense crackdown on domestic hooliganism in recent years that has seen mass brawls mostly banished from stadiums and many hooligans jailed. “That’s why there will be no trouble at the 2018 World Cup. We will be strongly repressed in advance,” said Mr Khuslyutdinov. “There will be no repeat of what we’ve seen in France. It’s impossible.”

Obamacare! The War on Drugs! A War on Poverty! Prohibition! The idea that government will bring social progress isn't new. Europe's monarchs believed in big government long before there was a Soviet Union or a welfare state. Eighteenth-century philosopher Voltaire praised "enlightened" monarchs like Prussia's Frederick the Great. Since the nineteenth century, so-called "progressives" have wanted government to get ever larger. They got their wish. The results were not so good for people. Today pundits and protesters moan about fiscal "austerity" in nations like Greece. But if austerity means cuts in government, there hasn't been much of it. Sure, Greece cut spending, but only by 3 percent. One in four Greek workers still works for government (vs. one in seven in the U.S.). Greek politicians run government "businesses" that employ politicians' cronies. In other words, Greece has barely begun what I would call austerity. Paul Krugman deceitfully trashes real cuts and writes that he wants to see "some example, somewhere, of austerity policies that succeeded." But there are plenty. The Cato Institute's Chris Edwards and Dan Mitchell discussed some at FreedomFest, a giant gathering of people who care about free markets held last week in Las Vegas. Mitchell points out that Ireland, New Zealand, Sweden, Canada and the Netherlands cut government spending and were quicker to recover from economic problems. In the mid-90s, Canada was going broke, so the government cut its budget by about 10 percent. The growth that followed allowed Canada to cut its debt dramatically -- from about 68 percent of GDP to 28 percent. During that same decade, unemployment shrank. Canada's economy grew faster than that of every other G7 nation. Good things happened not because government spent more, but because it spent less. The U.S. contains its own version of the Greek debt crisis in the form of Puerto Rico. A recent island governor tried to cut Puerto Rico's bloated government. Luiz Fortuno fired thousands of workers and made it easier to open a business. The economy improved. But firing workers isn't popular. Fortuno lost the next election and his successor increased spending and raised taxes. Of course that didn't work. Now Puerto Rico can't pay its $70 billion debt. "Are there any success stories based on tax hikes or bigger government? The answer is no," warns Mitchell. Progressives pretend they have a technical fix for problems. On a national level, their fixes always involve giving more power to Washington, D.C. That soothes the left, since they love the idea of centralizing decision-making. For a while, around the start of the twentieth century, technology advanced while government grew. Intellectuals thought the two things must go hand in hand. Government electrified rural areas! It can do anything! Well, government can do some things, mostly expensive, obvious things, like building interstate highways, guarding borders and going to war -- though government doesn't do those things efficiently. Almost all its projects end up way over budget and behind schedule. "Centralization of government spending in Washington over the past century has severely undermined good governance," argues Edwards on the site he edits, DownsizingGovernment.org. "Citizens get worse outcomes when funding and decision-making for education, infrastructure and other things are made by the central government rather than state and local governments and the private sector." Politicians rarely notice the millions of tiny opportunities for people to make progress via new inventions and smarter ways of doing things -- the new app, the robotics start-up, the do-it-yourself metalworking printer. Instead, politicians' limited imaginations lean toward big government-run projects like building bigger airports (needed or not), more welfare and micromanaging every private workplace. "Politicians and lobby groups constantly complain that America does not spend enough," writes Edwards. "But they rarely discuss how to ensure efficiency in (government) spending, or cite any advantages of federal spending over state, local and private spending." Government shovels more money into its big, dumb projects and pretends to build the future. But our future is more likely to be built by thousands of entrepreneurs who make the countless contributions that quietly improve our lives.

Having met the author on his battlefield tours - Gary Weight has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Normandy campaign and the units involved - I eagerly awaited this book and it did not disappoint from the view of a wargamer and modeller with an interest in the NW European campaign. The number of photos of personnel and the detail on personnel, training, locations in the UK and overseas, and movements will appeal in particular to relatives of veterans wishing to follow the paths of their families. It is long (498 pages), well indexed, and concentrates absolutely on the 2nd Battalion the Lincolnshire Regiment, including only where necessary the minimum of background on the wider operations the unit took part in. Given the very large number of more or less general books, especially on the Normandy Campaign, this focus is welcome, as is the use only of photographs that are specific to the unit. There are two 'prelude' sections on the history of the Lincolnshire Regiment (1685-1857 and 1857-1939), then 14 chapters on the 2nd Lincs part in: Entering France with the BEF; the Blitzkrieg in Flanders; the Dunkirk evacuation; Two on rebuilding, training and preparation in the UK; Normandy 1 June-6 July (covering the landings and operations inland from Sword beach); Normandy 6 July- 11 July (covering Operation Charnwood)s Normandy 12 July - 31 July (Covering operation Goodwood); the battle of Pont-de-Vaudrey; crossing the Escaut Canal; The Battle of Overloon and Venray; fighting in the Maas Salient; Into Germany and Operation Heather; and Crossing he Rhine until the German surrender. An Epilogue contains a selection of photos of personnel taken immediately after the war, the Roll of Honour, and seven appendices cover Awards and Citations, a note on assault river crossings, background on two particular individuals, the War Establishment (organisation) of a British Infantry Battalion at various stages throughout the War, and the order of Battle (names where known of key personnel and their roles in the battalion command structure). Overall the book strikes the right balance between business-like but sympathetic coverage of the Battalion and their actions, and helps redress the balance of the majority of books on the big operations and armoured warfare. It really brings home the unrelenting grind of day-to-day infantry work, punctuated by short but bloody battalion level attacks. Appropriate weight is given to the various sections, with the emphasis on the key battalion level engagements. It is not padded out with an overview of the campaigns and is mercifully free of generalisations about the strategic arguments around the Normandy fighting and the capabilities of various German weapons. The (30!) maps deserve special mention and are an object lesson in how to present maps in books of this genre. There are wide overviews of movements, the theatre and annotated contemporary maps but the jewels are, firstly, the annotated and faintly colourised contemporary air recon photos of the areas of detailed actions and, secondly, and presumably where suitable photos were not available, original maps by the author that bring out every detail referred to in the text.

It’s no trick: Anoka’s famed Halloween parades will be free of Tootsie Rolls, Starburst and other sugary treats this year, with event organizers citing safety concerns as the reason behind a new candy ban. Stormy debate and criticism have swirled on social media over the recently announced rule change. The new ban means no more candy handouts at the Grand Day Parade. It’s a marquee event in a city that Congress has proclaimed the “Halloween Capital of the World,” with Anoka’s spooky celebrations tracing back nearly a century. Event organizers say worries over children mobbing parade vehicles for sweets, as well as a dip in volunteers able to patrol for this behavior, resulted in the decision to forgo candy giveaways. The annual festival — which includes two other parades where handouts were already prohibited — is put on by Anoka Halloween Inc., a nonprofit made up of volunteers. “I don’t know what else to do,” said Liz McFarland, the festival’s parade chair. “Something is going to happen with a child because people aren’t watching their children.” While there have been no injuries reported, previous parades have resulted in “close calls,” McFarland said. The Halloween hullabaloo over the ban has prompted calls to City Hall and some barbed posts on social media, which range from “Candy IS Halloween!” to “How about parents actually parent their children?” Costumed children walked down Main Street during Anoka’s Halloween festivities in 2015. “It was a very swift uprising of people in response to that announcement,” said Colleen Halligan, secretary of this year’s Anoka Halloween board of directors. A Facebook post made Friday about the rule change on the Anoka Halloween page had attracted about 250 comments as of Tuesday. “We had hoped that the floats and bands were why people were coming to our parade,” the post read, “but we are learning that candy is very important.” Before this latest rule change, parade organizers say they had already barred tossing treats from floats, limiting candy to handouts by groups walking along the route. They had also tried restricting candy to certain sections of the parade and imposing minimum age requirements for those handing it out. “I’m out of ideas,” McFarland said. “We had to regroup this year.” Some found out about the new ban after parade applications became available online earlier this month. Jeremy Anderson, who owns a local construction and retail business, said he has decided not to participate in this year’s parade, despite it being a favorite tradition among his employees’ families. He said his business, Countryside Services of MN, typically buys a pallet of candy from Costco and spends thousands of dollars on goodies for parade revelers. “It’s just a bummer,” Anderson said. “It’s like every year they keep taking the fun out of it.” The outcry has festival organizers pondering ways to safely bring back the treats. They say they’re now working to recruit more volunteers and fielding ideas. “I hope to bring candy back,” McFarland said. “It’s Halloween. But safety is our No. 1 concern, and I don’t want to be part of an accident.”

By Tom Bell Arya Esfandmaz has declared he intends on showing the world what both he and the UK is capable of on the competition mats when he flies out to Abu Dhabi next month to compete in the World Pro Jiu Jitsu Championship. Esfandmaz won an all expenses paid trip to compete in the prestigious event after taking gold at the British National Pro Jiu Jitsu Championships in Birmingham, securing the $8000 package in the male +95kg division, which was a mix of black and brown belts. Arya also took bronze in the brown/black absolute. The Lucio ‘Lagarto’ Rodrigues brown belt coaches and trains out of Gracie Barra Knightsbridge and is known for his acrobatic, entertaining style, with many trademark flying submissions on his competitive resume. With a background in Judo, training at the famed Budokwai from a young age, Esfandmaz has declared he wants to fly the British flag and show what the UK has to offer on a world stage. Speaking to Jiu Jitsu Style, he said: “The tournament was really nice for me, I got to achieve one of my dreams in fighting black belts, as I always wanted to test myself at that level. I did well, I got lucky, and I ended up taking gold so it shows great improvement in myself. “I also want to give a shout out to British BJJ because man, we had some good guys there like Bradley Hill and Viking Wong – they were very unlucky. They both drew Alan ‘Finfou’ Nascimento, so yeah, the UK smashed pretty much the whole thing and it showed that BJJ is improving a lot in the UK and it’s really nice to see. I couldn’t be more happy man. I just want to fly out there, do my best and bring home some medals.” Speaking passionately after training, the brown belt nostalgically spoke of early Jiu Jitsu in the UK and believes the country has an immense talent pool that we should be proud of compared to larger nations. He intends to show what the UK is capable of. “I want to fly the flag, of course I do,” says Arya. “I want to show that we aren’t some random small island that only likes to drink tea, we’re quite handy on the mats too. “It’s funny, I remember back in my Judo days, I walked past Roger Gracie’s first gym and it was like a garage man, it was really run down and that was only like ten, fifteen years ago and you look at his academy now. “It shows how much we’ve improved and it shows how respected we are and I think we’re top in Europe man, yeah, you have some Scandinavian countries coming through but I think we can smash it and to help fly that flag is something I want.” Those familiar with the competitive circuit will know of the influx of Scandinavian talent Esfandmaz talks of, with the likes of Sebastian Brosche, winner of the Toukon Challenge Brown Belt Grand Prix and Eiren Cathrine Nygren who took double gold at brown belt at this year’s Europeans. “California alone is bigger than the UK,” explains Arya. “If you look at some Californian academies, they have nice facilities, loads of training space and lots of training partners.” The entire UK holds a population of around 64 million people over a total area of 243, 610km2, however the Jiu Jitsu hotbed of California alone is home to 38 million over an area of 423, 970km2. You can fit the UK into the US around 38 times and there are just short of five Americans to every Brit. “Man, in London, if you try and find some space to open an academy it’s like, super hard,” says Arya. “People want space, people want apartments, they don’t want to sell you space to put some mats down. It’s hard to find the perfect training space here, so we need to appreciate our talent, look at the things that are actually against us and see how we’ve done – it’s really cool.” Esfandmaz now looks forward to hard training with his master, Lagarto, and his partners at Gracie Barra Knightsbridge ahead of making his trip to the United Arab Emirates and is excited about the opportunity ahead of him. “I always watched Abu Dhabi’s championships, like, it is super professional,” states Arya. “The fighters get a proper walkout, you even get a body guard to escort you. It’s televised too, so that’s an opportunity that’s awesome to have, you know. “It’s a really big opportunity and I’m lucky enough to go into it training under Lagarto and Paul Hartley, as well as everyone else at Gracie Barra Knightsbridge. Man, I’ve been waiting and I’ve been training my ass off and now I’m getting that confidence to go out there and be the best I can. Although Lagarto has called me out about doing cool moves, he wants me to win above everything else. “I’m like ‘Lagarto! I’m gonna do this, I’m gonna flying armbar this guy’, but he’s like ‘Arya! Go for the win first!’ so I’m going to do everything I can to take this opportunity for myself and for the UK.” Check out our latest issue HERE with cover star, Garry Tonon!

10 years ago Limbaugh took aim at Powell's comments about the GOP. WASHINGTON (CNN) – Rush Limbaugh fired back at Colin Powell for his critical comments earlier this week, saying Wednesday that the former secretary of state should join the Democratic Party. "What Colin Powell needs to do is close the loop and become a Democrat instead of claiming to be a Republican interested in reforming the Republican Party," Limbaugh said on his radio show Wednesday. Limbaugh also took aim at Powell's decision to endorse President Obama over John McCain during the presidential election, repeating his earlier sentiment that Powell's move was "solely based on race." "He's just mad at me because I'm the one person in the country who had the guts to explain his endorsement of Obama," Limbaugh said. "It was purely and solely based on race." During a speech on Monday, Powell said the "the Republican Party is in deep trouble" and said the GOP would be better off without Limbaugh, according to a report by the National Journal. "I think what Rush does as an entertainer diminishes the party and intrudes or inserts into our public life a kind of nastiness that we would be better to do without," Powell said. Earlier: Powell: GOP 'polarization' backfired in election

Kim Richards is staying out of jail ... for now. The ex-Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star, 51, was on the hot seat Wednesday linked to a probation violation after she was convicted of shoplifting more than $600 worth of merchandise at a Van Nuys Target store in August of 2015. While officials said she had not made good on the 30 days of community service and 52 Alcoholics Anonymous meetings the court ordered her to fulfill, on deadline, as part of her sentence, TMZ reported that her legal team was able to prove that she had completed both tasks late. Back on the red carpet: Kim Richards, 51, was allowed to remain a free woman Wednesday amid accusations the ex-RHOBH star had violated her probation in her 2015 shoplifting conviction The presiding judge continued the matter until November, at which time the Southern California socialite - who remains on probation for the humiliating incident - must prove she's up-to-date on all of her court-ordered responsibilities. The mother-of-four's shoplifting arrest came nearly a year ago, on August 2, 2015, when the former child actress was busted outside the retailer by a security guard with a swiped haul that consisted of children's-related items such as stickers, crayons and coloring books. Kim, whose sister Kyle Richards remains a key cast member on Bravo's hit show set in the 90210, kept a low profile on Twitter Wednesday, with her last post having come Tuesday, in which she wished her youngest daughter, Kimberly Jackson, a happy 21st birthday. Rock bottom: Kim's humiliating arrest came in August of 2015, when she was nabbed outside of a Van Nuys Target store with more than $600 in stolen merchandise Reality bites: Kim's substance abuse issues were often the focal point of her storylines on RHOBH Hard times: It's been a rough two years for the Los Angeles socialite, who was arrested twice in embarrassing circumstances, then lost her ex-husband and confidante Monty Brinson this past January to cancer As reality TV viewers might remember, Jackson has been one of Kim's biggest supporters, as the dynamics of their nurturing - and sometimes-tragic - parent-child relationship were laid bare on Lifetime's The Mother/Daughter Experiment: Celebrity Edition. Viewers of the program saw Jackson admit that she's often forced into a 'caretaker' role over her mother, who was also arrested in April of 2015 in connection with public intoxication and more after a drunken, belligerent run-in with a police officer after she was kicked out of the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Sisterhood: Kim posed in 2014 with sister Kyle, 47, who remains one of the key players on RHOBH On the Lifetime program, Jackson said she was overwhelmed at times dealing with her mother, who she called 'fragile, physically and emotionally.' A teary-eyed Richards, after seeing her daughter's frustration, admitted, 'I need to remember how my decisions do affect Kimberly.' On the show, Kim, who's also related to Kathy and Paris Hilton, seemed to believe that her time on Bravo's RHOBH 'really hurt me because I was struggling with certain things.'

Julia Flynn Siler | The House of Mondavi | 2007 | 14 minutes (3,328 words) For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to feature an excerpt from The House of Mondavi, Julia Flynn Siler’s book about a family that turned a Napa Valley winery into a billion-dollar fortune. Thanks to Siler and Gotham Books for sharing it with the Longreads community. Download .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks) * * * Crush: 1966–1972 The first few months at the Robert Mondavi Winery were chaotic. Carpenters, masons, plumbers, electricians, and the winemaker, Warren Winiarski, were all working on top of one another. By late summer, there were walls, but still no roof, catwalks, or ladders to reach the tops of the new stainless steel fermenters. Parts were missing and there was no place to do any lab work—let alone a lab technician to do it. Since there were no desks or offices or tables, Winiarski worked from a clipboard. Robert, who had a small office in a trailer, was seldom in one place for long. Winiarski would see him early in the morning and late in the day; the rest of the time, he was a whirlwind of energy, conferring with the builders, making deals for grapes, consulting, and purchasing equipment. Robert’s energy was infectious and his aspirations heady. But he was strongly motivated to start making wine. Fired from Krug without any significant severance pay, Robert was under severe financial pressure. With construction costs mounting, he sought to produce cash flow as quickly as possible. So he set an ambitious timeline. He was determined to bring in the harvest that first year and crush grapes to make the Robert Mondavi Winery’s first vintage. From groundbreaking to crush, he had two, or perhaps three, months at most. Although Robert had probably not fully formed his intentions for the new winery in 1966, even by then the people who were helping him to make it happen recognized that his dreams were lofty. “It was not meant to be a small winery and it was not meant to be a family winery.” “From the beginning, the Robert Mondavi Winery was meant to reach out,” says Winiarski. Once again, the friendships that Robert had built after twenty years in the valley came to his rescue. William Bonetti, by then the production chief at Charles Krug, helped Winiarski with some lab work, allowing him to come over and use the Krug lab to run simple analytical tests of the fermenting juice, as well as to borrow equipment and chemicals. Winiarski had assumed that Bonetti had gotten Peter’s implicit, if not explicit, permission to help out his brother, but it wasn’t exactly clear, since neither brother had spoken openly to Winiarski of the simmering feud. Krug also crushed grapes for the Robert Mondavi winery’s first year, sold it yeast, bottles, and a labeling machine, and loaned the new winery a bottling machine free of charge. As a safety net, Peter and Rosa agreed to pay Robert a $9,000-a-year consulting fee after he was fired, although he never performed any consulting services for Krug. While they didn’t welcome Robert as a competitor, they also didn’t want him to fail. As Peter later explained, “We felt that he needed some support from the family inasmuch as he ventured, and we wanted to see him make a success of what he was doing.” Louis Martini and the winemakers at Beaulieu also pitched in to help out their old friend. And when the time came to design the winery’s first label, Robert again turned to people he had worked with at Krug: a well-known local printer named James E. Beard and a graphic designer named Mallette Dean. Dean had done beautiful work over the years for Krug, including a delicate woodcut of a farmer tending grapevines that had graced the masthead of the Krug newsletter “Bottles & Bins.” The label the pair created for the new Robert Mondavi Winery captured its spirit centered around Dean’s wood engraving of the Cliff May building, with its elegant arch and wings. But Dean struggled with a lack of vertical balance in the frame, which he eventually corrected by adding a flank of poplar trees to the scene. In the real setting, a series of trees planted on the walkway had failed to flourish in the 1970s, so eventually, to match the reality to the image on the label, the winery ended up planting poplar trees where Dean had imagined them. Dean’s label for the Robert Mondavi Winery quickly became one of the iconic images of Napa Valley. Photo: aphasiafilms, flickr The cool weather that year also came to Robert’s aid, pushing harvest back by several weeks. Fieldworkers picked the last Cabernet grapes on Veterans Day, November 11, in a season marked by tule fog and cool evenings that often cloaked the valley until ten or eleven in the morning. To the astonishment of some of the friends and rivals who’d called him crazy, Robert managed to make wine that first year. In 1966, the new Robert Mondavi Winery crushed about 490 tons of grapes—even though there was nothing even close to resembling a building on the site yet. By the time the crush rolled around, there were only concrete slabs on the ground, foundations for the fermenting tanks. In the open air, Robert pumped the juice from the fermenting tanks into other tanks. As summer became autumn, workers were plastering the walls of the newly erected building, even as Warren Winiarski made the wine. Returning to the rituals and ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church, Robert marked his winery’s first crush of the grapes surrounded by his immediate family and his most supportive friends on a sunny morning in mid-September. Robert halted the whirl of painting, plastering, and sanding for a few hours. On a concrete platform surrounded by dirt, a group of a few dozen people gathered on the north side of what would become the winery. Father Levinus of the nearby Carmelite monastery, wearing a long black robe that fell to his ankles and a white cassock over that, faced the gondola that held the grapes. Marcia Mondavi, with her short-cropped dark hair and a ladylike knee-length skirt and sleeveless blouse, bowed her head and clasped her hands together. The priest began his benediction in English sprinkled with Latin words. Photo courtesy of Robert Mondavi Winery In the background, Winiarski operated the lift that raised the gondola filled with grapes and tipped them into the hopper. From there, the fruit moved along a conveyer belt to the crusher. The mechanics of the moment only hinted at the deeper transformations that would take place as the grapes moved toward their transfiguration into wine. The atmosphere was solemn: There was no round of applause or cheering as Robert’s partners Fred Holmes, Bill Hart, and Ivan Shoch stood watching, their families beside them. Also present was Charles Daniels and two of his sons. Daniels had been distributing Krug’s wines since the 1940s and was close friends with Robert. He wanted to support him in his new venture and offered to distribute his wines when they were released in the spring of 1967, even though he knew that support would infuriate Peter. For growers such as Holmes and Hart, crush is a moment of death as well as birth. The life that they have nurtured from bud break through harvest is coming to an end; another is about to begin. “There is a death taking place here,” reflects Warren Winiarski, who later became one of the valley’s most famous winemakers. “It’s the death of the grape. I never saw a grower sad, but solemn. They’re glad that it’s happening but it’s a mixed feeling. They’ve worked all that season to make these grapes what they are and now they are being crushed, being destroyed in order to be reborn into a different substance. They’re glad but also a little bit mindful of destruction.” But that moment of solemnity passed. Robert said a few words about a new beginning. The group included workmen clad in overalls and hats to shield them from the sun. Marjorie began pouring the white wine that had waited for the group beneath a folding card table in a plastic tub filled with ice. Looking cool and elegant, with her blond hair pinned into a chignon, Marjorie, like her daughter, had dressed for the heat, in a conservative A-line skirt that stopped just below the knee and white flats, even though miniskirts and go-go boots were shocking the nation elsewhere. After the ceremony, the Holmeses, Shochs, and Mondavis gathered for a group photo in front of the grape-filled gondola. The adults held long-stemmed wineglasses. Robert smiled at Marjorie. Timothy, fair-haired and with the gangly look of a teenager, wore black-and-white-laced Converse sneakers. Then just fifteen years old, he, too, held a wineglass in his hand. Marcia, looking contemplative, sat below the row of standing adults. Perhaps in a foreshadowing of the family drama to come, Robert’s elder son was absent on that momentous day. * * * The new Mondavi winery was the most significant to be built in the valley since Prohibition, and with barely three dozen bonded wineries operating in the valley at the time, the groundbreaking marked a key turning point. “The construction of the Robert Mondavi Winery marks the effective beginning of American wine’s rise in both quality and prestige,” wrote the wine historian Paul Lukacs. “What happened there helped ignite the revolution in American tastes.” “It also helped change broad public attitudes toward wine in general and American wine in particular.” That fall, however, the significance of Robert’s bold new winery—a venture that some dismissed as “Robert’s Folly” and others as an example of his hubris—seemed to offer concrete proof of the fissure between the proud and talented Mondavi brothers. Fellow vintners watched the rising feud between Robert and Peter with a mixture of sympathy and dismay. After all, Robert was building his winery just five miles south of Krug on Highway 29. The brothers were barely on speaking terms. Other vintners in the valley didn’t talk about it much; mostly, they looked the other way. But what also caught everyone’s attention and provoked some amused comments was that almost as soon as he started his own winery, Robert began pronouncing his surname differently than Peter, Rosa, and the rest of the family. He restored it to “Mon-dah-vee,” which was how the name was pronounced before Cesare had Americanized it after immigrating to the U.S. Meanwhile, Peter and the rest of the family continued to pronounce their last name as they always had done: “Mon-day-vee.” However slight the change, the new pronunciation had the intended effect of distinguishing Robert from his younger brother. When his longtime friend Charles Daniels asked Robert why he’d changed it, Robert explained with a straight face: “That’s the proper Italian pronunciation.” Daniels also recalled that around that time, some people in the valley began asking, “What is it with this Mondavi business?” referring to the rift between the brothers and Robert’s startling decision to Europeanize his last name. Robert never formally announced the change in pronunciation; it just spread through usage. In later years, his sister Helen would even jokingly introduce herself as “Helen Mon-dah-vee Mon-day-vee.” And soon enough many people—and especially newcomers to the valley—started referring to the entire family as “Mon-dah-vees”—a galling, frequent reminder to Peter of Robert’s linguistic coup over the rest of the family. The Robert Mondavi Winery’s growing reputation was built on fine wines, meaning expensive wines made almost exclusively from Napa Valley grapes. It was also built on Robert’s gift for hiring talented winemakers. Keeping those winemakers was another matter, though. For Robert faced an ongoing problem: With one son in the business and another likely to join, the family would always get the credit for the elegant wines that were produced at Oakville, even though it was often the staffers doing much of the work. And although Robert would pay employees 10 to 15 percent above other wineries’ wages and offered such perks as weekly wine tastings, there was a ceiling to any career ambitions that a staffer without the last name Mondavi might entertain at the winery. The family openly acknowledged this. Michael, upon his return, worked hard and earned just $650 a week. To try to drum up business, he would sometimes drive slowly down Highway 29 from Rutherford to Oakville, waiting for cars to stack up behind him. Driving a pickup truck borrowed from his father-in-law, he’d then slowly make the right-hand turn into the winery. When a car or two followed him, as they often did, he’d jump out of his truck and stick out his hand, saying, “Hi there, I’m Michael Mondavi. Would you like a tour?” Yet, Michael also clearly enjoyed an advantage because of his last name, even joking about it at times. On meeting Michael for the first time for a job interview, one applicant asked if he minded that the applicant’s wife also worked at the winery. Robert’s elder son leaned back in his chair and grinned: “Nepotism can be a good thing.” But this practice carried a sizable cost for the company: Ambitious employees often ended up quitting for better opportunities elsewhere. The first to go was Warren Winiarski, the academic refugee from the University of Chicago. Winiarski worked through the first two crushes at the Robert Mondavi Winery, amid the chaos of construction, and left shortly before the third in 1968. This first year, Winiarski did much of the lab work himself as well as supervising crush, fermentation, and aging of the reds. Michael was doing his National Guard duty for much of the first year as the Vietnam War raged, so Winiarski took his guidance from Robert. In terms of the day-to-day production, Winiarski was in charge, without any sort of directions in terms of style from either Robert or Michael to produce, for example, Bordeaux-style wines. Because so much else was going at the winery—completing construction, negotiating grape contracts, and selling their first year’s wine—Winiarski was left mostly to his own devices. Yet by 1967, Michael had returned from the National Guard and become, in title at least, the winemaker at Mondavi. That proved frustrating for Winiarski, who, despite his differences with Lee Stewart, had embraced his old boss’s style of paying close attention to even the seemingly most minor details of winemaking. Michael, in turn, had no formal training in enology or chemistry and while he had absorbed a general understanding of winemaking from his days as a cellar rat at Krug, he was not by nature highly detail-oriented. So when incidents occurred in Winiarski’s second and third years at Mondavi, such as Michael taking the valves off the tanks and not replacing them, thus inadvertently exposing the wine to air, Winiarski started to wish he had more control. “There were things he didn’t see because he didn’t care,” says Winiarski. “He liked wine but it wasn’t his passion.” Winiarski had borrowed money in 1965 to buy fifteen acres of his own up on Howell Mountain, where he hoped to plant a vineyard. His first season in 1967 was a disappointment but he didn’t give up. The following year, his plans to start a vineyard of his own started to come together. So, hoping he could support his family as a freelance winemaker and consultant, he announced he was quitting the Robert Mondavi Winery, shortly before the crucial time of harvest. As Winiarski tells it, Michael was not happy about the timing of his departure. But “I didn’t come to California to be the number-two man in a two-man winery,” recalled Winiarski, referring to his relatively short stay at Souverain Cellars. “The same thing was true at Mondavi.” While Winiarski learned an extraordinary amount at both places, he bridled at working under someone else.“Everyone who is devoted to making something wants to have control of the material—finally and completely—and that couldn’t happen there because of Mike and Robert. It was their material,” meaning it was ultimately their grapes, yeast, barrels, and wine. It didn’t take long for Robert to recruit Winiarski’s replacement: a talented Croatian immigrant named Miljenko “Mike” Grgich, who was then working at Beaulieu Vineyard for André Tchelistcheff, the quality-driven winemaker who demanded high standards of cleanliness and precision from his staff. Tchelistcheff was about to retire, but ironically his own son had applied for his job, which seemed to suggest that Grgich was unlikely to become the next winemaker at Beaulieu, the most revered producer of fine wines in the valley. Robert knew of Grgich’s situation and thought he might be looking for a new position. So the men arranged a chat in the fall of 1968, just a few weeks after Winiarski had left. Grgich made the short, two-mile drive down Highway 29 and met with Robert on a wooden bench, near the Robert Mondavi Winery’s mission-style arch. It was a sunny fall day and Robert’s enthusiasm was infectious, as he explained to Grgich his dream of making French-style wines with the newest and most technologically advanced equipment available. Robert also explained that his son recently had returned from duty in the National Guard and was the vice president of winemaking. “I need someone to help my son Michael, who is very young,” Robert told Grgich. While his job title would be head of quality control, in fact he would run the winemaking operation for the family and be the actual winemaker, in a deus-ex-machina fashion. In return, Robert offered Grgich the opportunity to build his reputation as one of the finest winemakers of his generation. “Mike, if you join my company, I’ll make out of you a little André Tchelistcheff!” he promised him. It was an irresistible offer, made more so because of Robert’s evident passion to make the Robert Mondavi Winery America’s finest. Grgich accepted and got to work, introducing—among other methods he had learned at Beaulieu—malolactic fermentation, a technique that lends a soft, buttery quality to wines by converting hard malic acids into soft lactic acids. Every Monday, led by Robert, the staff would have their own blind tastings of Mondavi wines against the best from France. It entered into company legend that the winery was California’s largest importer of French grand crus because of these competitive tastings. Robert showed up at the winery nearly as early as Grgich, at six or seven each morning during crush, to taste the progress of the fermenting juice from the barrels or discuss a technical issue with his winemaker. The very first Cabernet Grgich made for the winery, the 1969, was entered in a blind tasting—which meant that the wine labels would be hidden from the judges—against several other Cabernet Sauvignons from California. Organized by the Los Angeles Times’s wine writer, Robert Lawrence Balzer, the judges, who included Tchelistcheff and Robert, had made most of the wines being tasted that day. When the judges voted the 1969 Robert Mondavi Winery Cabernet as the very best, that decision led to a rush of favorable publicity for the young winery, catapulting it overnight into the ranks of such revered wines as those made at Beaulieu. Though Grgich had made the wine, Robert took credit for it. The Balzer tasting, as it came to be known, was the first big publicity breakthrough for the winery, sending its sales soaring. It helped attract the attention of the European wine trade, which, a few years later, in 1976, would organize a blind tasting that would have an even more significant impact on Napa Valley. * * * From The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty by Julia Flynn Siler (juliaflynnsiler.com). Published by arrangement with Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA), LLC. Copyright © 2007 by Julia Flynn Siler. Photo: flydolce, flickr

A roundup of every time Jason Louv has appeared with Duncan Trussell on the Duncan Trussell Family Hour to talk about magick! Hey there! Over the last couple years I’ve been very honored and grateful to team up with psychedelic avenger Duncan Trussell and become a regular guest on his show. About once a year I show up to do a “Magick Class With Jason Louv” spot, and Duncan and I travel across the multiverse to discuss the heavens and hells of psychedelic and magical consciousness. Here’s the shows, in chronological order: Duncan Trussell Family Hour #114 In my first appearance on Duncan’s show, we talk about the occult nature of the media; if there actually is a massive conspiracy to constrain human consciousness or if people are just that way all on their own; the nature of the Qliphothic Hell Realms and lots, lots more. This one starts off dark and just gets darker, but worry not, there’s LVX at the end of the tunnel! Duncan says: Magician, author, and mystic Jason Louv (Monsanto Vs. The World, Queen Valentine, Generation Hex, The Psychick Bible) discusses the dangers and potential benefits that come from walking the magickal path! Duncan Trussell Family Hour #160 I follow up my previous appearance with a good general talk on the nature of Magick and the critical importance of laser-pointed consciousness in our fragmented, mentally scattered world. How to jump across multiple dimensions by shifting your focus is also discussed, so there’s that, too. Duncan says: Jason Louv, Ultraculture, magick.me, returns to the DTFH to teach Duncan about the secret arts!! Duncan Trussell Family Hour #230 In my latest appearance, we talk about the great Renaissance magician Dr. John Dee, the deeper history of the Western occult tradition and the nature of the universe itself as the embodied mind of God. These are all fun subjects you can discuss with your family around the dinner table after listening intently! Duncan says: A deluxe episode with an exclusive new song from award winning mega-band Win Streak Bonus Star along with a deep conversation with author and occultist Jason Louv. We explore John Dee, the Enochian angels and the magical arts. (Check it out at Duncan’s site here, it’s not on YouTube currently.) If you’re inspired to learn more about magick after listening to these shows, you check out my free course on chaos magick here!

All Montgomery County and City of Rockville facilities will be closed and no programs will operate on Dec. 25 and Jan. 1. Holiday hours for city facilities are as follows: Rockville City Hall will be closed Christmas Day and New Year's Day. Rockville Senior Center will close at 5 p.m. on Monday and on Dec. 31 and will be closed Christmas Day and New Year's Day. Lincoln Park Community Center, Thomas Farm Community Center and Twinbrook Community Recreation Center will be open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Monday, on Wednesday, on Dec. 31 and on Jan. 2. The centers will be closed Christmas Day and New Year's Day. Croydon Creek Nature Center will be closed on Monday and on Dec. 31. The center will be open from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Dec. 26. The center will be closed Christmas Day and New Year's Day. Glenview Mansion will be closed Christmas Day and New Year's Day. F. Scott Fitzgerald Theatre be closed Christmas through New Year's Day. Rockville Swim and Fitness Center will be open 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Dec. 24 and 31 and closed Christmas Day and New Year's Day. Recycling and refuse collection for Monday and for Dec. 31 will not be affected. Collection for the remainder of each week will shift forward one day, with Friday collection made on Saturday. The city also is recycling cut and artificial Christmas trees. Click here for details. Parking will be free at city-owned meters and garages on Christmas Day and New Year's Day. For payment information on Rockville Town Square parking garages, go to rockvilletownsquare.com/parking. For more information about city facilities or programs call 240-314-5000 or visitwww.rockvillemd.gov. The following county and state facilities will be closed on Christmas Day and New Year's Day: Montgomery County government offices. Offices also will be closed Monday. State offices and courts. Montgomery County Public School administrative offices will be closed Dec. 22-25 and Jan. 1. County libraries. Branches also will be closed on Monday. Branches will close at 6 p.m. on Dec. 31. Olney Express Service will be closed Dec. 23 through Jan. 1. Gaithersburg Interim Library will be closed Dec. 24-25, Dec. 31 and Jan. 1. All recreation facilities will be closed on Monday, on Christmas Day and on New Year's Day. All county community and neighborhood recreation centers will be closed Monday through Jan. 1. County senior centers will be closed Sunday through Jan. 1. County liquor stores. Stores will be open 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Monday and on Dec. 31. Shady Grove Processing Facility and Transfer Station. The station will close at 5 p.m. on Monday. Recycling and refuse collection for Monday and for Dec. 31 will not be affected. Collection for the remainder of each week will shift forward one day, with Friday collection made on Saturday. Parking will be free at county public garages, lots and curbside meters on Monday, on Christmas Day and on New Year's Day. Transportation services are running on modified schedules on Christmas Day and New Year's Day: Ride On: Sunday schedule. Service ends early Monday, Christmas Eve, with last buses departing terminals around 10 p.m. Metrobus: Sunday schedule. Metrorail: Sunday schedule. TRiPS Commuter Stores near Silver Spring and Friendship Heights Metro stations will be closed Christmas Day and New Year's Day.

In this guest blog, Caroline Nielsen explores how war changed the lives of women on the home front not just in terms of their daily work, but in the clothes they wore to do it. One day in early 1915 in the pit village of Horden, County Durham, 22 year-old Elizabeth “Lizzie” Holmes set off to post a letter for her father-in-law. She was on her way home from work, and the Post Office was on the way. This seemingly innocuous errand ended with her being mobbed by children. Why did Lizzie inadvertently become the centre of attention that day? Lizzie was wearing men’s work clothes. Her heavy shirt, leather trousers and boots was the standard gear of all above-ground pit workers. Along with a number of her friends and neighbours, Lizzie had taken a labouring job at the local pit operating the coke ovens. For the first time, the children were confronted with a woman wearing an outfit that they had previously only associated with their fathers, grandfathers and older brothers. For one brief moment, Lizzie reminded all who saw her that the war had changed fundamentally changed British industry as they knew it. Women were taking men’s jobs in all industries, including in the male-dominated coal industry. That the simple act of wearing men’s work clothes was evidently so shocking seems odd to modern audiences. But in 1915, trousers were an exclusively male garment. That doesn’t mean that women did not periodically wear trousers albeit in very limited contexts. Women’s fashion had toyed with the idea of trousers for at least three decades before Lizzie set off on her errand. A small number of Victorian and Edwardian ladies adopted baggy trousers and “bifurcated skirts” (long culottes) as part of their campaign against the restrictive fashions of the time. In spite of their efforts, trouser-wearing was not widely adopted until the late 1920s and 1930s when masculine tailoring became a staple of haute couture. Even the sportiest Edwardian lady pilots and racing-car drivers preferred to tie their long skirts modestly around their ankles. Male impersonators were also a regular feature on British music hall circuits where performers like Vesta Tilley drew large audiences. These women performed risqué songs while dressed as young men. Part of the thrill was that audience could see their legs! Lower-class women had, of course, been wearing work trousers for centuries. During the Victorian era, leather trousers were associated with the “pit brow lasses” of Lancashire. Women who chose to wear “men’s clothes” outside of these contexts risked a more negative response from their communities. Cross-dressing was a moral issue. By the early twentieth century, dressing in masculine clothes was gradually being associated with lesbianism. Trousers were associated with clear contexts: politicised fashion and distinct regional trades. They were not associated with respectable miner’s wives, at least not in the Durham area. The fact that it was Lizzie, a woman who may have already attracted negative comments from her community, probably added to the children’s response. She was an extrovert and in her own words, “a bit rough and ready”. She had tattoos, liked a drink, and on at least one occasion ended up in a fight, an event which she enjoyed describing when she was interviewed in her mid-80s. Lizzie revelled in the notoriety of being proclaimed “the first woman in Horden to wear trousers!”. We will never know if this title was truly deserved. However, her story demonstrates how the First World War expanded the employment opportunities available to women. Lizzie was offered the opportunity to work in a trade that had previously been barred to her as a married woman in a County Durham village. The Northern Coalfield was almost exclusively male. The 1911 census shows how shocking the arrival of female coke oven workers would have been in Horden: officially there were only 13 female coke workers recorded in the entire Durham area. While this figure was definitely an under-estimate, it explains why the children were so surprised! Lizzie’s time in the coal industry was short-lived. Like most women who joined heavy industry during the First World War, Lizzie saw her wartime job as a temporary expedient. She expected to leave the job once her miner husband came home from the front. The majority of married women never entered the labour market during the war, believing that their place was at home with their families. The Government, trade unions and employers similarly saw women’s employment only as temporary. The end of the war saw the mass withdrawal of women from the labour market. Some went voluntarily like Lizzie. Many others were summarily dismissed. Some trade unions began lobbying for a ban on the employment of married women, concerned that the war had all too readily demonstrated that women were able to compete with their male counterparts. Women were encouraged to return to more “gender appropriate” trades like domestic service. Lizzie spent the rest of her working life as a charwoman, raising her family and caring for her wounded husband Jimmy. Click here to view an image of Lizzie (front row, far right). Lizzie was interviewed in 1976 as part of the Peterlee Development Project, a collaboration between the artist Stuart Brisley, Peterlee Council and the Artists Placement Group. Some of the materials from this are now available on through Durham County Records Office and their People Past and Present Archive.

In his book, "The Clintons' War on Women," high-profile Donald Trump campaign strategist and noted conspiracy theorist Roger Stone claims Chelsea Clinton — daughter of Democratic nominee Hillary and former-President Bill — had four plastic surgeries in order to look less like her biological father, Webb Hubbell. Promoting the book in what looks like a hotel banquet hall over the weekend, Stone reasons, "Hillary admits in her own book that a large football player-sized man taught her the proper way to hold a baby. Who could that be?" Advertisement: Hubbell — who was associate attorney general during Clinton's presidency — played offensive tackle for the University of Arkansas Razorbacks and was drafted by the Chicago Bears before a knee injury ended his career. "And if you look at her, she doesn’t look anything like Bill," Stone continued. "She looks just like her daddy, despite four plastic surgeries, the youngest one when she’s only 18. What 18-year-old gets plastic surgery unless you’re trying to, I don’t know, thin out the lips and make you look less like your daddy?" Watch below, via MediaMatters:

+1 Share 2K Shares Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, one of the premier pediatric hospital systems in the southeastern U.S., announced Tuesday that they would be able to support a plan by State Representative Allen Peake (R-Macon) to introduce a medical marijuana bill. While not a rousing endorsement of medical marijuana, Children’s says they are in support of the bill because of the research opportunities that will come along with it. In a statement to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Children’s said “there has not been enough evidence-based research around the use of (cannabis oil) studying its safety and tolerability in children with seizure disorders and thus should not be used generally.” However, they said they were “in support of legislation that would allow clinical research by academic institutions to further investigate this compound for the treatment of intractable seizures in children.” Rep. Peake was expected to introduce his bill today but that got postponed when snow started falling and the House of Representatives adjourned until 1:00 PM Wednesday. It is expected that Rep. Peake’s bill will place a heavy emphasis on medical marijuana in the form of CBD drops and tinctures.

RIM CEO Thorsten Heins is sort of like the captain of the Titanic, except the Titanic was popular and people were sad when it sank. But unlike Captain Edward Smith, Heins is either crazy or a liar. Or both. This week, while most of America was either preparing for or in the midst of a beer-and-meat-induced catatonic state, RIM's current and final chief executive took a frosty page from the old Iraqi Information Minister, telling the world that the sky was not falling, but if it were, it was a chocolate sky. Lift up your mouth and let the delicious death spiral sprinkles fall into your mouth! Everything is lovely, nothing harmed, the children of tomorrow smile, palms upward, waiting for a new BB10 device. They tie ribbons in their hair and wait. He also spit out a salvo of statements diametrically opposed to the fabric of reality. Here's all the proof you need to decide that RIM isn't just fucked, but not even due for an enjoyable fucking. The man in charge is full of shit. To wit, from an op-ed in the Globe and Mail that will make you weep: 1. "Don't count BlackBerry out." Sorry, everyone has. It's over. And a weak cliche of ra-ra-ism isn't going to change that. Advertisement 2. "We believe RIM is a company at the beginning of a transition that we expect will once again change the way people communicate." There is nothing we've seen of BB10 that suggests it would've been anything more than a catchup grab at iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. There is zero about BB10 that's of the future. Advertisement 3. "As we prepare to launch our new mobile platform, BlackBerry 10, in the first quarter of next year, we expect to empower people as never before. BlackBerry 10 will connect users not just to each other, but to the embedded systems that run constantly in the background of everyday life - from parking meters and car computers to credit card machines and ticket counters." This would be a grandiose statement even from Google or Apple. 4. "We are working diligently on BlackBerry 10 in order to provide a compelling experience for our loyal enterprise customers and consumers. While we are in a very competitive and constantly changing market, customers benefit from this competition and continued innovation." Advertisement "Customers" do, but not RIM customers. Nobody who wants a BlackBerry will benefit by waiting for an operating system that will almost certainly not see the light of day. 5. "As has been reported, RIM has hired outside advisers to help me and the other members of the executive team think about the business in new ways and to explore a range of alternatives that leverage our core strengths and build on the BlackBerry brand." Translation: we have brought in consultants to figure out how we can die gracefully. Okay, actually that's the sanest thing he's said in months. Minus the "build on the BlackBerry brand" part. Advertisement 6. "In response to our tough quarterly results last week, our employees received thousands of e-mails from around the world from retail customers, carrier partners, developers, family, friends and neighbours expressing their support and loyalty to BlackBerry. They are - like many of us - BlackBerry people by choice." How many BlackBerry users have any brand loyalty beyond their job requirements? And how many of those "thousands" of cheery messages, if they are real, were matched by thousands of messages from the thousands of RIM employees you laid off because your company is dying? Advertisement But it might be a recent interview that shows just how detached Thorsten Heins is from anything you could call the real world: 7. "There's nothing wrong with the company as it exists right now," Heins said on CBC's Metro Morning radio show. 8. "I'm not talking about the company as I, kind of, took it over six months ago. I'm talking about the company (in the) state it's in right now." Advertisement But Thorsten, you yourself speak of "tough quarterly results," how yours is a "challenging job," and how the company needs to "start to surface." From one side of your mouth you downplay RIM's necrosis, and from the other side, deny it altogether. At least Nero had the decency to fiddle while Rome burned—Heins just plays the bullshit saxophone. We get that RIM needs to puff itself up if it wants to attract buyers for an inevitable corporate butchering—like a diseased peacock that still needs a mate—but this is just unseemly. If, for whatever reason, you need more evidence that the man is unfit to see RIM droop and splinter in its last gloomy days, consider the fact that, at one point, Thorsten Heins said—without a shred of irony: Advertisement 9. "Let's rock and roll this!" That is all.

Welcome To The Pittman Center Community Volunteer Fire Department Serving and Protecting since 1983 BURN PERMITS ARE REQUIRED OCTOBER 15TH THRU MAY 15TH. Visit: burnsafetn.org to obtain a permit online or to see regulations for outdoor burning. Please call 865-429-7020 to obtain a permit by phone. ORDER YOURS TODAY! Now accepting donations on line. Click on the "Donate" button. Free Smoke Detector If you need a Smoke Detector click on "Smoke Detector Request ", fill out the form and click submit. We will come to your home and install the Smoke Detectors FREE OF CHARGE. If you do not live in our response area, we will pass on your information to your responding fire department. Station 2 is available for parties and meetings. Click on "Station Rental" for details

We hear a lot about what could be done with the Blockchain, this decentralized ledger which record permanently and almost instantly information from all around the world. This is the first time in our history that we created such a ledger, it's not about chatting with someone else, it's about agreeing on facts with everyone else every couple of minutes. However we don't hear much about the actual projects the big corporations are working on. Let's see the 7 most important: 1. IBM and Samsung - IoT Would you like to see your fridge, your phone and your car transact with other things? IBM and Samsung are working on a project unveiled at CES 2015 called ADEPT which will serve as a ledger of existence for billions of devices that will autonomously broadcast transactions between each other’s. 2. NASDAQ, NYSE – Stock Exchange Or how to bypass Automated Clearing House which take days to record wall street transactions. "As Blockchain technology continues to redefine not only how the exchange sector operates, but the global financial economy as a whole, Nasdaq aims to be at the center of this watershed development." said Bob Greifeld, CEO, Nasdaq 3. Deloitte - Audit & Consulting Real time auditing, land registry and reconsolidation between trading partners, this is just the top of the iceberg Deloitte is building with its new platform called Rubix. Deloitte is also working internally on a stealth solution to automate some of its auditing processing 4. BNP, Barclays, City, UBS, Société Générale, Goldman Sachs, Santander - Banks Do you know that your banks depends heavily on some protocol to transfer money? Using the Blockchain will allow them to get rid of VISA, Mastercard and SWIFT. 5. Minecraft - Games and Virtual reality Every game has it's own currency system and some become so important that you can find a stable exchange rate with fiat currencies. This is the case with World of Warcraft gold or Second Life Linden dollars. Blockchain bring to these world a currency that they can use inside the game and trade on Amazon at the same time. Some servers of Minecraft already implemented such systems. 6. Western Union - Money transfer solutions The famous dinosaur of money transfer is facing a big threat with the new Fintech startup and want to face it with the same weapon. They already set up a lab with Ripple to study the Blockchain technology and improve their cross border payment. Will they adapt? 7. Honduras, Isles of man - Governments We would expect the Blockchain to be used for a voting system, but it seems the first aspect interesting for government is registries. Registry of lands in one case, registry of companies in the other one, notaries might not be such an important job in the future. If you want to know more and discuss details, let me some comments or send me a private message. I would also be pleased to hear some more examples !

Passengers were stuck in the train without lights for about five minutes, and were guided to the station as much as 40 minutes from the time the train broke down, an eyewitness says. SINGAPORE: Some passengers found themselves walking on the Light Rail Transit (LRT) tracks in near-darkness in Sengkang on Tuesday evening (Mar 29), due to a train fault. LRT passengers forced to walk on track after train fault in Se... Sengkang LRT breakdown: Up to 30 people had to walk on the LRT tracks in near-darkness after a train fault.Full story: http://bit.ly/1Rp0gEg(Video: Mohann) Posted by Channel NewsAsia on Tuesday, 29 March 2016 Advertisement Off-duty cameraman Rajamohann Alrum Murugaiah said he was on the train travelling from Sengkang station to Renjong station at about 7pm when it stopped suddenly about 150m to 200m from Renjong station. He said the lights and ventilation fans went out for about five minutes, before coming on again. Facebook video: What it was like to walk on tracks in near-darkness SBS Transit first announced the disruption on Twitter at 7.57pm, saying there was no service on the East Loop of the LRT, and that free bridging bus services were available. It later stated at 8.22pm that services on the West (outer loop) of the LRT were also unavailable. At 8.31pm, SBS Transit said full LRT service resumed. Advertisement Advertisement Mr Rajamohann said while there were announcements on the train about the disruption, SBS staff only arrived about 20 minutes after the breakdown. They tried but failed to restart the LRT train, before two or three staff finally asked passengers to alight from the carriage and guided them towards Renjong station at around 7.30pm to 7.40pm. There were about 30 people inside the train, but Mr Rajamohann said he did not observe any panic among his fellow passengers. "It was after work ... I think they were just tired and frustrated," he said.

It’s Friday, making it much easier to get distracted by something more interesting than work on the Internet. If you’re looking for something great to watch today, then Google has put up a video of Garry Kasparov talking at Google this week. Kasparov was the highest-rated chess champion for more than 22 years. In the chat that lasts just over an hour he discusses how he still feels IBM cheated in his match with Deep Blue. He also says the dismantling of Big Blue right after the match was equivalent to IBM removing the only partial witness to his claims. He hasn’t even got logs of the game from IBM to look at. It’s a great watch with Kasparov giving some amusing responses to some of the questions asked. For example, when asked how to get better at chess without dedicating your life to it (18 minutes in), he responds by simply saying: If you don’t have time to devote your life for chess, why do you want to improve at the game? via YouTube

MSNBC HOST: The New York Times is reporting yesterday that Goldman Sachs has paid Hillary Clinton $675,000 for three speeches in recent years. She was paid millions more by other Wall Street firms. Along with her husband, they've been paid more than $125 million for paid speeches since 2001. That is, of course, not the kind of money that most Americans can relate to. Were the speeches a mistake, senator? SEN. JEANNE SHAHEEN, D-NH: Listen, voters are angry, and I don't blame them, because they've been watching a Washington that has been divisive, that hasn't worked together. And I believe we need a candidate who's not going to further divide this country but who's going to unite it. But that's not my question, senator. That's one of the reasons I'm supporting Hillary. Well, your first question was, are voters angry, and I would say yes. MSNBC HOST: No, I never asked that question. I think that's well established. The question was, are the speeches, were the speeches a mistake? Did it make sense to accept close to -- SHAHEEN: Look, it doesn't matter whether you support that or not. The fact is, that's in the past, just as Bernie's socialism, he claims, is in the past. So, the question is, what do voters want to see now from the candidates, and who can deliver? And that's what I believe the difference is between the candidates in this race. On both, on the Democratic side and on the Republican side.

While staying quite about the game for a while I was busy preparing things for bringing the game to E3, showing the game to journalists and the world in the Devolver parking lot. I'm happy to report it all went really, really well, and I'm so grateful for having gotten this opportunity, and I'm so so grateful people really seem to enjoy the game! If you haven't already, check a look at the trailer above! And as if just the adventure of going to E3 wasn't enough, the game got nominated for "Best of E3" by PC Gamer and CGM! It also got nominated for "Best Action Game" by IGN! And it won "Best Indie Game" by Resetmx! Incredible. And don't forget all of these nominations happened next to big AAA titles. Feels really surreal. Oh yeah, and there was actual Pedro swag! (As you might spot in the lower left corner of the above image) IGN posted a gameplay video and it's already got over a million views. Check it out here: There are also a bunch of video interviews floating around, some of which you can find here: Thank you all for being part of the journey up to this point, and here's hoping you'll stick with the game until the actual release! Oh, and if you haven't already, feel free to wishlist the game on Steam: Store.steampowered.com Cheerio! Victor

On Monday Mr Hollande said he had not yet decided whether to host Mr Putin, saying that pro-government forces in Syria troops had committed a "war crime" in the city of Aleppo with Russian support. "I asked myself the question... Is it useful? Is it necessary? Can it be a way of exerting pressure? Can we get him to stop what he is doing with the Syrian regime?" Mr Hollande said in a television interview. Jean-Marc Ayrault, the French foreign minister, said on Monday that France would ask prosecutors at the International Criminal Court in the Hague to consider an investigation into suspected Syrian and Russian war crimes. Mr Ayrault visited Moscow last week for talks with Sergei Lavrov, his Russian counterpart, in an attempt to win support at the UN for a French draft resolution for a ceasefire in Aleppo.

A team of hackers that target governments, the military and journalists has turned its attention to the iPhone, according to Trend Micro. The computer security company says it has discovered new spyware that infects iPhones, gathers large amounts of personal information and sends it to a remote server. The spyware, called XAgent, is delivered via a phishing attack using a technique called island hopping. In that, the phones of friends and associates of the true target are first infected and then used to pass on the spyware link. It’s based on the assumption that the target is more likely to click on links from people they know than from strangers. Once installed, XAgent will collect text messages, contact lists, pictures, geo-location data, a list of installed apps, a list of any software processes that are running and the WiFi status of the device. That information is packaged and sent to a server operated by the hackers. XAgent is also capable of switching on the phone’s microphone and recording everything it hears. XAgent runs on both iOS 7 and iOS 8 phones, whether they’ve been jailbroken or not. It is most dangerous on iOS 7 since it hides its icon to evade detection. On iOS 8 it isn’t hidden and needs to be manually launched each time the phone is rebooted—a process that would require the user to purposely reinfect their phone each time. For that reason, Trend Micro believes the spyware was written before iOS 8 was launched last year. Serenity Caldwell The iPhone 6 running iOS 8. While close to three quarters of Apple mobile devices are using iOS 8, a quarter are still running iOS7, according to data published by Apple this week. “We’ve been monitoring the actors behind this for quite some time,” said Jon Clay, senior manager of Global Threat communication at Trend Micro, in a phone interview. “The criminals have introduced [the iOS app] as part of their campaign to move further into the [targeted] organization, using this rather than PC malware.” While the identity of the hackers isn’t known, Trend Micro says it believes those behind what it calls “Operation Pawn Storm” to be a pro-Russian group. Past targets have included military organizations, defense contractors, embassies and media groups. Clay says the group might have targeted iOS because it discovered or assumed that a lot of its targets use Apple devices, either as work phones or secondary personal devices. Security software such as that offered by Trend Micro will detect XAgent, he said. Users can also look through phone logs, but manual detection of the spyware is quite difficult. His best advice is the same that’s been offered for years: don’t click on links that appear to be suspicious, especially when they involve downloading software or entering passwords. “The good thing for users is that this isn’t something that can be automatically done,” he said. “There are steps you have to do as a user to install this.”

GOALTENDER ZANE McINTYRE NAMED CCM/AHL AWARD WINNER FOR DECEMBER Providence, RI - The American Hockey League announced today that Providence Bruins goaltender Zane McIntyre has been selected as the CCM/AHL Goaltender of the Month for the month of December. McIntyre was a perfect 9-0-0 in nine appearances during December, sporting a 1.65 goals-against average and a .947 save percentage while stopping 269 of 284 shots. McIntyre allowed two goals or fewer in eight of his nine starts last month, despite facing at least 30 shots seven times. After returning to Providence on Dec. 1 from an extended stay in Boston, McIntyre opened the month with a 31-save performance in a 6-2 win vs. Binghamton on Dec. 2, and he matched a career high with 38 saves in a 2-1 overtime victory over Springfield on Dec. 4. McIntyre stopped 31 of 32 shots and all three shootout attempts to earn a 2-1 victory over Hartford on Dec. 11, and he made 35 saves as Providence defeated Utica, 3-1, on Dec. 21. McIntyre closed out the month with 29 saves as the Bruins went to Wilkes-Barre/Scranton and beat the league-leading Penguins, 5-2, on Dec. 30. A 24-year-old native of Thief River Falls, Minn., McIntyre is 10-0-0 in 12 appearances for Providence this season and leads the AHL with a 1.41 goals-against average and a .951 save percentage. McIntyre, a sixth-round pick by Boston in the 2010 NHL Entry Draft, also made his NHL debut earlier this season and appeared in three games with the parent Bruins. The University of North Dakota product has played 43 AHL games over his first two pro seasons, going 24-8-7 with a 2.32 GAA and a .914 save percentage. Also selected as AHL award winners for December are Chicago Wolves forward Kenny Agostino as the CCM/AHL Player of the Month and Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins forward Jake Guentzel as the CCM/AHL Rookie of the Month. Each monthly award winner will be presented with an etched crystal award prior to an upcoming home game in recognition of his achievement.

EXPLAIN IT WITH MOLECULES-- SOAP MOLECULE What is Soap? Soaps are mixtures of sodium or potassium salts of fatty acids which can be derived from oils or fats by reacting them with an alkali (such as sodium or potassium hydroxide) at 80°–100 °C in a process known as saponification. fat + NaOH ---> glycerol + sodium salt of fatty acid CH 2 -OOC-R - CH-OOC-R - CH 2 -OOC-R (fat) + 3 NaOH ( or KOH) both heated ---> CH 2 -OH -CH-OH - CH 2 -OH (glycerol) + 3 R-CO 2 -Na (soap) R=(CH 2 ) 14 CH 3 Note about 3D molecules -- Our files on this page now use Jsmol instead of Jmol . These files make use of Javascript which permits viewing of molecules on tablets, phones and easier use on Macs. - Jsmol is best viewed with the Chrome browser. Try this!! Click the right mouse button with the cursor over the image--> Labels --> Element Symbols Click on the left mouse button and rotate the soap structure. Notice that one end of the molecules is made up of a hydrocarbon chain -- the other end is a very polar structure containing oxygen and sodium. Soap molecules have both properties of non-polar and polar at opposite ends of the molecule. How does Soap Work? Nearly all compounds fall into one of two categories: hydrophilic ('water-loving') and hydrophobic ('water-hating'). Water and anything that will mix with water are hydrophilic. Oil and anything that will mix with oil are hydrophobic. When water and oil are mixed they separate. Hydrophilic and hydrophobic compounds just don't mix. The cleansing action of soap is determined by its polar and non-polar structures in conjunction with an application of solubility principles. The long hydrocarbon chain is non-polar and hydrophobic (repelled by water). The "salt" end of the soap molecule is ionic and hydrophilic (water soluble). When grease or oil (non-polar hydrocarbons) are mixed with a soap- water solution, the soap molecules work as a bridge between polar water molecules and non-polar oil molecules. Since soap molecules have both properties of non-polar and polar molecules the soap can act as an emulsifier. An emulsifier is capable of dispersing one liquid into another immiscible liquid. This means that while oil (which attracts dirt) doesn't naturally mix with water, soap can suspend oil/dirt in such a way that it can be removed. The soap will form micelles (see below) and trap the fats within the micelle. Since the micelle is soluble in water, it can easily be washed away. [Micelle shown using the Jsmol Molecular dynamics simulations of dodecylphosphocholine D. P. Tieleman, D. van der Spoel, H.J.C. Berendsen] --File shown without water molecules When you mix soap into the water the soap molecules arrange themselves into tiny clusters (called 'micelles'). The water-loving (hydrophilic) part of the soap molecules points outwards, forming the outer surface of the micelle. The oil-loving (hydrophobic) parts group together on the inside, where they don't come into contact with the water at all. Micelles can trap fats in the center. Try this ---> click right mouse button over image --> spin --> on Micelle (above) shown with water molecules. Multiple Choice Questions 1. Water is considered a polar molecule because a) the molecule has a net positive charge b) the molecule has a net negative charge c) the molecule has a net zero charge d) the ends of the molecule have partial negative and positive charges 2. Soap is formed from: a) two hydrophobic compounds b) a physical change when fats are heated c) two hydrophilic compounds d) oils or fats by reacting them with an alkali 3. Which statement is correct about hydrophobic and hydrophilic compounds a) hydrophilic are water-hating and hydrophobic water-loving b) hydrophilic are water-loving and hydrophobic water-hating c) both hydrophobic and hydrophilic compounds are polar molecules d) both hydrophobic and hydrophilic compounds are non-polar molecules 4. Soap acts by a) digesting the fat molecules b) forming micelles and trapping the fat within the micelles c) releasing sodium and potassium into water d) a chemical change 5. Which of the following statements is not correct a) the soap molecules work as a bridge between polar water molecules and non-polar oil molecules b) soap forms micelles c) soap is an emulsifier d) soap is made of just carbon and hydrogen atoms

When asked if a conflict similar to the events inciting World War I could happen today, Indy Neidell responded, “There are an awful lot of similarities in the world today with the world of 1914.” “Of course that kind of question is really impossible to answer,” he acknowledges, “but I wouldn’t at all rule it out.” In an AMA (Ask Me Anything) discussion on Reddit, the historian host of The Great War YouTube series invited users to challenge his knowledge of the first World War, inquire about what he hasn’t covered in the show’s first 234 videos, and get his historical perspective on the United States’ current political climate. While Neidell began his YouTube series in July 2014 on topics you’d expect to find in a standard WWI curriculum—the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, early trench warfare, propaganda, the Red Baron—the show has since branched out to give a much more comprehensive look at the “Great War,” detailing everything from soldiers’ diets and salaries to what’s wrong with EA’s Battlefield 1 trailer: As the series nears its $10,000 Patreon goal to enable its crew to “start planing trips to the European theatres of World War 1 and tell their stories in a completely new way,” Neidell teased what history buffs can expect to see in upcoming episodes. And for fans unable to help the crowdfunding effort, Neidell’s social media manager Flo joined him in his AMA to share this open invitation: “You can always help with research if you want.” Lesser-Known WWI History Teaching WWI Historical Twist on a Classic Question If He Could Watch Any Moment… What’s Next? To read all of Neidell’s answers to redditors questions, check out the original AMA discussion. And to catch up on your “Great War” history in time just in time for Trivia Night, head over to The Great War YouTube channel.

Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. Aug. 22, 2016, 8:10 PM GMT / Updated Aug. 22, 2016, 8:10 PM GMT By Maggie Fox Researchers have developed a way to make a mouse transparent — by removing the liquids and fats from its tissue. They hope their method can be used to make a complete, unsliced model of a human brain, with all the delicate nerve connections untouched. And they say their see-through mouse might reduce the need for lab scientists around the world to kill living mice just to study their organs. Researchers in Germany have made mice see-through with a special method of dissolving skin that makes "see through" mice for lab research. Ali Ert?rk Ludwig / Maximilians University of Munich “Now, for the first time, we have a powerful tool that can make the human brain transparent and reduce it size to fit an imaging microscope for mapping,” Ali Ertürk, a brain researcher at Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich in Germany, said in written comments. "I believe that now, using uDISCO, scientists can start to build whole body atlases for various biological systems such nerves, vasculature and immune cells." The method, described in the journal Nature Methods, is called ultimate DISCO (short for 3-D imaging of solvent-cleared organs). It not only makes it possible to see entire structures in place, but shrinks the body so that it fits under a microscope. “We expect that this method is easily applicable to small monkeys, even to a whole human brain in the near future,” Erturk wrote. “We all know the big fuss (rightfully) around mapping the human brain. But so far there is not any approach that even comes close to mapping any part of human brain at individual neuron level.” A mouse with its skin removed during various stages of examination, taken with a bright field camera. Cell, Yang et al / AP The technique might also save the lives of at least some lab animals, Erturk said. “In research, we usually sacrifice the animals to collect a small piece of their tissue,” he wrote. “The rest of the animal actually is wasted. I believe that now, using uDISCO, scientists can start to build whole body atlases for various biological systems such nerves, vasculature and immune cells innervating whole body. This will at least provide the basic knowledge about how a healthy organ is organized in terms of these mapped systems (nerves, vessels etc.). This information will be available to everyone.” The team first anesthetized living mice, and used various agents to make it possible to image the desired systems using fluorescent light or other processes — akin to getting, for instance, an infusion of a contrast agent before getting an MRI or heart catheter scan. Once the contrast dye or agent was pumped though the tissue, the mice were killed and their tissues cleared of water and fat. Water and lipids scatter light, making tissue opaque. Scientists have come up with good images of organs and event whole bodies by slicing tissue very thinly, imaging it, and then recreating a 3-D version using a computer. But even the thinnest slices can disrupt delicate neurons and their connections, Erturk noted. “That means, while their cell body resides in one side of the brain, it can make connections to the other side of the brain (several centimeters away) or even to the spinal cord, which might be more than a meter long," he wrote. "Therefore, when we want to study brain diseases such as Alzheimers’s disease or schizophrenia, making thin sections of biological specimen would degrade important information on neuronal connectivity."

TREASURE ISLAND — A Florida man was charged with aggravated battery after whacking a visiting tourist with a shovel in a dispute over digging at the beach. WTSP-TV reported Sunday that 53-year-old Christopher Carosella from Tampa argued with 18-year old Christian Geis over a large hole he had dug. Carosella on Friday evening allegedly got upset when the Lexington, Ky., teenager refused to comply with his order to stop digging. Drew Geis, Christian's father, told the station that 45 minutes later, Carosella took the shovel his son had left on the beach and then attacked him when he was walking back to his hotel room. The station reported the Treasure Island Police Department said Carosella struck Christian Geis twice, causing bruising and abrasions. The station said that Carosella was later released from the Pinellas County Jail on a $2,500 bond. Court records do not list an attorney.

1 people found this review helpful Customer Review Rated Bad 8 - 8 out of 10 For a well-worn song title ‘Paparazzi’ is certainly a perfect vehicle for the Gee Gee girls; flashing cameras, intrusive attentions and story spins are inevitable when world domination is at stake, and a locale’s paparazzi must be spazzing out to high heaven when the GG girls are in town. Anyway, this new Japanese single for SNSD is an okay dance song, and the video stage setting is elaborately befitting (with some ‘Singing in the Rain’ on the MV version). But this ‘Paparazzi’ (Mi Youn Kan and Lady Gaga did one, too) is really only a moderate dance song with more of that allurement factor going on. Wink wink. The same repetitive 'seduction' merry go round, getting ‘bad publicity’, staging the double dark dance of camera and ‘star’ into a swirl of premeditated social and pop culture media. Yes, the paparazzi are in town, and it’s all vexingly watching the famous girls ‘luring’ the boys into their ‘come up and see me sometime’ world again (via TV camera) for the paparazzi to ‘scandalize’. Why are the girls so bad, the boys so bad? Its only theatre, smoke and mirrors, right? The Modern Tribal Cynical Sophistication Disco Dance, giving the masses their social tonic. Okay, okay, this is the theatre I’m on about, not exactly SNSD themselves, more their personas and what’s in the lyrics. But ‘Paparazzi’ is another similar slant in modern pop perspectives to take sides on. The ‘bad’ paparazzi who scandal (run devil run? It’s a job isn’t it?), the good girls who might see their mirror image tarnished. But it could be the other way around, the ‘bad girl’ alluring the camera boy or the dance club DJ? That sort of thing; seducing and dividing. Template soft anger pop. But instead of the Jets and the Sharks that are verses, it’s the press and the famous, the VIP and the excluded, good/bad (or whatever). The concept’s okay, what the heck, it’s supposed to be fun. But a new song meaning to the words Girls’ Generation would be welcoming. For SNSD I really would love them to do…something spiritually unifying. “The Boys” album has strong songs and it’s a nice album, but SNSD should do something really different in their pop music now. This limited edition is a landscape packaging with CD/DVD but there’s no inner booklet with mucho photo here. I preferred this cover version, too, to the main edition; the girls look all pensive and moody, a bit 'edgy' maybe, and its alright. I like SNSD I really do, as I like Kara, T-ara and many others. No divisions.

Dear Reader, As you can imagine, more people are reading The Jerusalem Post than ever before. Nevertheless, traditional business models are no longer sustainable and high-quality publications, like ours, are being forced to look for new ways to keep going. Unlike many other news organizations, we have not put up a paywall. We want to keep our journalism open and accessible and be able to keep providing you with news and analysis from the frontlines of Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World. A Palestinian gunman shot dead two Israeli parents in a shooting attack on their vehicle in Samaria, between Elon Moreh and Itamar on Thursday night; Four of their young children survived the attack without injury and were rescued by emergency responders from the bullet-ridden vehicle. Magen David Adom paramedics and IDF units pulled the children out of the car near the Palestinian village of Beit Furik, and paramedics declared the parents dead on the scene after failing to detect vital signs. A 4-month-old baby, a 4-year-old boy, a seven-year-old boy and a nine-year old boy survived the attack without physical injury, after witnessing their parents being shot dead before their eyes.Boaz Malka, a MADA paramedic who arrive on the scene, said, "It was a very difficult scene. We saw a car in the middle of the road, and next to it, a man in his 30s lay on the ground with upper body gunshot wounds. Inside the car a woman sat, with severe upper body wounds. They had no vital signs and to our sorrow we had to declare them dead on the scene."The IDF was sweeping the area for suspects.Reacting to the shooting, Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon said "this murderous terror attack this evening is a clear continuation of the incitement against the State of Israel and its civilians, and repeated attempts to carry out terror attacks.""The war against terrorism requires determination from us, a steel hand, and patience. We are fighting against a blood-thirsty relentless enemy, and with great sorrow we sometimes absorb losses on the way. At this time, the IDF and the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) are pursuing the murderers. We will pursue them and we will not be silent until we place our hands on the murderers, and those who sent them."In light of the shooting, right-wing politicians accused Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas 's incitement for the attack, which came a day after he threatened to stop abiding by all agreements with Israel in a fiery speech to the United Nations General Assembly.Likud Minister Miri Regev said, "24 hours after the violent speech of the arch-murderer Abu Mazen [Abbas], a husband and wife were killed in Israel."She called on Israel to take harsher steps against Palestinian terror.Education Minister Naftali Bennett (Bayit Yehudi) said that Abbas's "call to arms was taken up tonight in Israel, and it is red with blood."Bennett added that "A people whose leaders encourage murder will never have a state, and this must be made clear. Now the time of talking is done and the time for action has come."Meanwhile, Hamas praised the "heroic terror attack" and called for more "quality attacks."The group said that "Zionists will pay the price for [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu's criminal policies everywhere." Join Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>>

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Rep. Nancy Pelosi was emphatic. Mitt Romney’s refusal to release more than two years of his personal tax returns, she said, makes him unfit to win confirmation as a member of the president’s Cabinet, let alone to hold the high office himself. Sen. Harry Reid went farther: Romney’s refusal to make public more of his tax records makes him unfit to be a dogcatcher. They do not, however, think that standard of transparency should apply to them. The two Democratic leaders of the Senate and the House of Representatives are among hundreds of senators and representatives from both parties who refused to release their tax records. Just 17 out of the 535 members of Congress released their most recent tax forms or provided some similar documentation of their tax liabilities in response to requests from McClatchy over the last three months. Another 19 replied that they wouldn’t release the information, and the remainder never responded to the query. The widespread secrecy in one branch of the government suggests a self-imposed double standard. Yet while American politics has come to expect candidates for the presidency to release their tax returns, the president isn’t alone in having a say over the nation’s tax laws. Congress also stands to gain or lose by the very tax policies it enacts, and tax records – more than any broad financial disclosure rules now in place – offer the chance to see whether the leaders of the government stand to benefit from their own actions. “Senior public officials, especially members of Congress and presidential candidates, should be required to disclose their tax returns so that the public can monitor potential conflicts of interest,” said Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen, a nonpartisan watchdog group. The question of taxes is particularly pressing this year, as Congress debates whether to extend all or some of the Bush-era tax cuts that are set to expire Dec. 31. At the same time, tax returns reveal assets and investments. Absent tax information, members of Congress aren’t fully transparent, said Daniel Auble, who heads the personal finance project for the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks financial disclosures by members of Congress and appointees confirmed by Congress. “Having a clearer picture of lawmakers’ interests . . . is definitely important in making available to the public what possible influence there could be,” he said. “In terms of transparency, it would be helpful to have more information.” Among those who did disclose their tax returns: Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the senior Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee and a co-author of the Dodd-Frank law tightening regulations on Wall Street. To Pelosi and some other top Democrats, the focus is on Romney, the Republican presidential candidate, who’s released his 2010 return and 2011 estimates and plans to release his 2011 return when it’s completed, but refuses to release any more. They say the very refusal to release more suggests that he’s hiding something. "He could not even become a Cabinet member for that lack of disclosure, and now with that lack of disclosure he wants to be president of the United States,” said Pelosi, the House minority leader, who’s from California. “We’d like to know what’s in those tax returns that he refuses to show to the American public. Did he pay any taxes?” Reid asked in an impassioned speech to the Senate on July 11. Days later, Reid, who’s from Nevada, suggested that Romney’s refusal to release more than two years of tax returns would make him ineligible to serve even as dogcatcher. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, also has harangued Romney for refusing to release more tax returns, calling it a “penchant for secrecy.” All three refused repeated requests from McClatchy to release their own returns, requests that started before the flap over Romney’s records. Pelosi aides refused, saying she’s disclosed all that Congress requires. “The leader has filed a complete financial disclosure report as required by law that includes financial holdings, transactions and other personal information,” Pelosi spokesman Nadeam Elshami said. “There has been no question about where Leader Pelosi and Democrats stand on tax policy: We must extend the middle-class tax cuts and end tax breaks for millionaires and use the revenues to pay down the deficit.” Challenged at a recent news conference to release hers, Wasserman Schultz said she wouldn’t because she wasn’t running for president. “I file full financial disclosure required under the law,” she said. What’s required by law is written by Congress itself, a broad financial-disclosure statement that offers no direct information on tax liabilities and no requirement for reporting spousal income other than the source – but not the amount – of any income above $1,000. There’s little way of knowing whether that spousal income is $1,001 or $1 million. Several members of Congress married into money or have wealthy spouses. Topping that list are Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, whose wife, Linda, is an heiress to the Clear Channel Communications fortune, and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., whose wife, Teresa, is the heiress to the Heinz ketchup fortune. Pelosi’s husband, Paul, heads Financial Leasing Services Inc., a San Francisco-based venture capital and real estate firm. When it comes to the valuation of investments or reporting of income on the annual disclosure forms, what’s required are broad numbers such as between $250,000 and $500,000 or $1 million and $5 million. That makes it hard to determine how much benefit a lawmaker might get from competing tax plans. “They just don’t provide the same level of detail as a tax return,” said Darrell West, a specialist on governing and a vice president of the Brookings Institution, a center-left research center in Washington. Most members won’t release that kind of detail. Only 17 members shared their detailed tax information with McClatchy. Another 19 refused, but the majority of them stressed that they comply with congressional disclosure requirements. Of the lawmakers who shared their tax returns, most got large deductions for interest on personal and investment real estate. That’s useful information for taxpayers, since a revamp of the tax code is expected in the next few years. McClatchy isn’t releasing the tax returns under the terms of the agreement with the lawmakers. Reporters requested the returns to examine in detail how members would be personally affected by changes in tax laws being debated in Congress including income tax rates, as well as taxes on capital gains and dividends and deductions for such expenses as home mortgage interest. In exchange for sharing their returns, members were told their actual returns would not be made public. Most lawmakers, however, chose to keep their tax liabilities a secret. “First your publishers and editors and execs should publish their tax returns. They have great influence over public policy,” Rep. Gary Ackerman, D-N.Y., said in an emailed response. Ackerman, who was dogged in 2010 by allegations of a sweetheart stock purchase, isn’t seeking re-election, so his term ends in January. “Are you guys asking the president to turn over his college records? Or asking him to turn anything over of any kind?” responded Allen Klump, the communications director for Rep. Jeff Duncan, R-S.C. “Thanks, but we will not give you Sen. Rockefeller’s tax return. Good luck on the project,” said Vincent Morris, a spokesman for Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., whose family surname is synonymous with wealth. Several lawmakers said they’d disclose what’s required and no more. Rep. Renee Ellmers “files a financial disclosure form each year in accordance with House ethics rules and this is publicly available,” said Tom Doheny, a spokesman for the North Carolina Republican. Rep. Joe Wilson “has submitted a financial disclosure form, which is required by law and available to constituents as a matter of public record,” said Caroline Delleney, a spokeswoman for the South Carolina Republican. Constituents generally know where their particular lawmakers stand on the issue of the expiring tax cuts because the two major political parties have well-defined views. But there’s more at stake than just tax brackets, and voters often have little feel for whether their members of Congress would benefit or be harmed by changes that are under consideration. From the financial disclosure forms, constituents can, with some work, surmise how lawmakers’ investment income might be taxed under competing plans. Given their salaries, lawmakers would fall into the higher tax bracket for dividends, but it’s unclear where they’d fall individually on the income scale. “There are clearly some people above (the $250,000 threshold). There’s a bunch of people who might or might not be affected, and you can’t tell,” said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, which is run by the Brookings Institution and the centrist Urban Institute. Tax data isn’t always a panacea, however. Missouri Democrat McCaskill was one of the few senators who provided McClatchy with a tax return. Her 1040 form lists her as married filing separately, showing an adjusted gross income of $193,384. But her husband, Joe Shepard, is a wealthy businessman whose investments sometimes have put her in an unpleasant spotlight. His investment in a reinsurance company in Bermuda – the same country in which a Romney investment has been criticized by Democrats – brought allegations from Republicans in 2009 of tax dodging. Shepard no longer hold the investment. McCaskill does report dozens of her husband's investments in her annual financial disclosure statement, with more detail than required. But each still is listed only under ranges of values, not precise amounts. That’s another reason advocacy groups think that financial-disclosure reporting should be expanded to capture spousal income more fully, and argue that tax data would be a useful, albeit imperfect, tool. “As public officials, potential conflicts of interest caused by their wealth and assets are a public concern,” said Holman, the Public Citizen lobbyist. Kaz Komolafe and Farah Mohamed contributed to this article.

Pirelli has overhauled its tyre concept to reduce degradation for 2017, as requested by the new rules, allowing drivers to push harder in a philosophy that is a departure from the policy it has followed since it became F1's tyre supplier in 2011. Pirelli motorsport chief Hembery has previously said F1 could end up with processional racing this year because the rules shake-up, which includes significant tweaks to aerodynamics, will spread the field out. Speaking at an event in Turin to mark Pirelli's 110th motorsport anniversary, Hembery told Motorsport.com that if the new tyre concept does not deliver a good show, the blame should not lie with the Italian company. "You can't please everyone and you can only go in one of two directions," Hembery said. "We did something from the outset which was desired, then there was a decision to go in another direction. "We're just following what the sport asks us. All we ask is that they tell us what they want. There's no point in complaining that we deliver what we have been asked to deliver. "As a sport we're moving in a different direction, and if it works as people say then we should get good racing." While the modified 2015 mule cars Pirelli used for testing failed to deliver the required amount of downforce expected in 2017, the tyre supplier was able to fall back on simulation data. "The biggest challenge is if you don't have downforce, you might not be able to get the tyres working as intended, because we worked to a level of downforce given by the simulation," he said. "It's true the mule cars were some way off in terms of performance levels, but we do have the simulation data. "That's the question, how close will the cars be to that data – maybe they will have more and go much quicker." Hembery feels while there may be fewer pitstops, the change in the rules should create a situation where overtaking possibilities are increased. "We'll see fewer stops," he said. "That comes with less degradation. You come into the pits either because of performance loss [due to degradation] or wear, and in this case we are reducing both. "We'll see a lot more one-stop races but if we deliver with the aerodynamic package cars that are closer together, and the tyre's not overheating on the surface, drivers will be able to push and lead to a scenario where overtaking is improved."

In March 1987 Daniel Morgan, a private detective, was murdered in Sydenham in south east London, just as he was reportedly close to revealing police corruption with links to the News of the World. You might ask why we would want to look at a murder that took place 25 years ago, but it’s important to understand that the collusion between the police and press that’s being uncovered now isn’t just about events that took place in the past few years, but a pattern of corruption that goes back many decades, and that many of the people involved with past corruption are still involved with the Hackgate scandal even now. After repeated failed police inquiries into the murder which themselves have been mired in corruption the family of Daniel Morgan are still seeking justice, and have spent the past two decades running the Justice 4 Daniel campaign. Southern Investigations In 1984 Daniel Morgan and Jonathan Rees Jonathan Rees set up the detective agency Southern Investigations Jonathan Rees is alleged to have had a “network of corrupt police who were involved in widespread criminality and used Southern Investigations as a conduit for drugs and money”, and that Rees “counted many officers as friends. One of his specialities was to use his "friends" in the force to provide information which he sold to tabloid newspapers.” On the other hand Daniel Morgan’s role “involved him acting as a bailiff or utilising his particular talent for remembering car registration plates and telephone numbers”. It is believed that at the time of his murder Daniel Morgan was planning to expose police corruption, described by his brother as “police involvement with criminals, involvement with drugs and weapons importation." More recently, Tom Watson MP alleged in a Commons adjournment debate that Daniel Morgan has approached Alex Muranchak of the News of the World with a story making allegations about police corruption a week before he died, and was offered £40,000 for the story. He described the relationship between Jonathan Rees and Alex Marunchak as "a close association between Rees and Marunchak ... a relationship that was so close they both had companies registered at the same address". Watson also stated that "thanks to a Guardian investigation we also know that Southern Investigations paid the debts of Marunchak ". Alex Marunchak would go on to deny those allegations , as well as other allegations made by Tom Watson. The death of Daniel Morgan At 9.30pm on Tuesday March 10th 1987 Daniel Morgan’s body was discovered next to his BMW in the parking lot of the Golden Lion pub. An axe, wrapped in Elastoplasts to obscure fingerprints, was protruding at a right angle from his face, his pockets torn open, with notes he had been seen writing missing, but with his wallet and watch still on his body, and he was still holding the two packets of crisps purchased inside the pub. He had let the Golden Lion pub at 8:55pm after meeting with Jonathan Rees to discuss an issue that was putting pressure on their already fraught relationship. Rees had claimed he had been robbed while transporting £18,000 for a client of Southern Investigations, Belmont Car Auctions, with at least one moonlighting police officer. Both Morgan and Belmont Car Auctions believed this was a lie, and Rees and his associates had taken the money for themselves. At the 1988 inquest into the murder the Southern Investigations accountant Kevin Lennon said that Jonathan Rees had told him “I've got the perfect solution for Daniel's murder. My mates at Catford nick are going to arrange it” and went on to say "He went on to explain to me that if they didn't do it themselves the police would arrange for some person over whom they had some criminal charge pending to carry out Daniel's murder." The initial police investigation into the murder Detective Sergeant Sid Fillery at Catford police station was assigned to the case, failing to reveal to his superiors that he had been working for Southern Investigations At the 1988 inquest Kevin Lennon said Rees wanted Morgan dead after a row: "John Rees explained that, when or after Daniel Morgan had been killed, he would be replaced by a friend of his who was a serving policeman, Detective Sergeant Sid Fillery", and eventually would end up in business with Jonathan Rees at Southern Investigations, recruiting corrupt police officers, and was later convicted for the possession of child pornography. Sid Fillery and Jonathan Rees would later be arrested in 1987 on suspicion of murder , along with the brothers Glenn and Garry Vian and two Metropolitan police officers, but eventually all of them were released without charge. Inquiries into the murder Over the next 20 years five investigations would look into the murder of Daniel Morgan . The initial investigation into the murder by the Metropolitan Police focused on Sid Fillery and Jonathan Rees, both who denied involvement in the murder. This was followed by an inquiry by Hampshire Police in 1988 focusing on Jonathan Rees and another man, but the charges were dropped because of a lack of evidence, with the Hampshire inquiry's 1989 report to the Police Complaints Authority stated that "no evidence whatsoever" had been found of police involvement in the murder. During this period Sid Fillery left the police to join Southern Investigations as Jonathan Rees’ business partner. In 1999 Operation Nigeria began to investigate Southern Investigations, with bugs being placed inside the Southern Investigations offices by the police. The operation ceased when Jonathan Rees was recorded conspiring with a corrupt police officer to plant cocaine on an innocent woman in order to discredit her during a custody battle, and in December 2000 he was jailed for seven years. In 2002-2003 a fourth inquiry began, involving the bugging of a suspect’s car and the home of Glenn Vian. The investigation obtained evidence that linked a number of individuals to the murder, but the Crown Prosecution Service decided there was insufficient evidence to proceed with a prosecution. The fifth inquiry took place in 2006, headed by Detective Superintendent David Cook was set up in secret after Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair declared that the first investigation had been compromised by the involvement of Sid Fillery. Concerns over connections between Masonic Lodge members and the murder required the 36 police officers involved with the case to state they had never been Freemasons, with Cook describing the murder as being one of the worst kept secrets in south-east London, claiming “a whole cabal of people” knew the identity of at least some of those involved. He also claimed attempts had been made to smear Daniel Morgan’s character and there had been attempts to link him with Colombian drug dealers. He identified the main suspects as "white Anglo-Saxons". Yet again bugs were placed, Jonathan Rees, Sid Fillery, and Glenn and Gary Vian were arrested, along with a builder, James Cook, all on suspicion of murder, plus other related charges. This time however, the suspects made it to court. The 2011 Old Bailey trial The trial was badly handled by the prosecution , with 3 supergrass informers being dismissed as key witnesses, resulting in a stay of prosecution for Sid Fillery and James Cook being discharged. In March 2011 the Director of Public Prosecutions abandoned the case and all remaining charges were dropped. The case had yet to reach the stage where it would look at the murder as it was still dealing with preliminary issues when the prosecution collapsed. The judge noted the case’s vastness and complexity, and considered that the prosecution had been principled and right to drop the case, but the police had “ample grounds to justify the arrest and prosecution of the defendants”. A massive amount of evidence had been gathered, over 750,000 documents, with four more crates of evidence being discovered after the trial collapsed. Links to the News of the World After the trial collapsed it was revealed that Jonathan Rees had been working for the News of the World, earning £150,000 supplying illegally obtained information about figures in the public eye. After serving the prison sentence for perverting the course of justice after the Operation Nigeria inquiry Andy Coulson , then editor of the News of the World, hired Jonathan Rees, and worked regularly with the Sunday and Daily Mirror as well. Andy Coulson was later hired by David Cameron as director of communications despite warnings about Andy Coulson’s hiring of the convicted criminal Jonathan Rees. Using a network of corrupt police officers he illegally obtained information on a variety of public figures, including the Royal family, and was also alleged to have commissioned burglaries on behalf of journalists. However, despite detailed evidence the Metropolitan Police failed to pursue any action against Rees, even to the point of taking the News of the World at their word that Clive Goodman had worked alone when he was convicted for intercepting phone calls from Clarence House. [Forward to The Leveson Inquiry] [Index]

The government’s move to link one billion of these numbers to bank accounts and mobiles is fraught with security risks. Studies say that digital security must be beefed up before this happens Alarm bells have been ringing in the ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY). This was ever since Union finance minister Arun Jaitley announced on August 28 that the linking of one billion Aadhaar IDs with bank accounts and mobiles is very much on the cards. The minister, speaking at a function to mark the completion of three years of the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojna, said that the linkage would ensure “financial inclusion” which will be “nothing short of a social revolution”. Officials in MeitY, are a worried lot. The ministry has been entrusted with the onerous task of ensuring cyberspace security in the country and managing the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) which deals with hacking and related crimes. More importantly, it is also directly responsible for the functioning of the Unique Identity Authority of India (UIDAI) which operates the Aadhaar database. It will have an important role to play once the linkage referred to by Jaitley covers all Aadhaar cards—virtually the entire adult population in the country. STOLEN DATA A MeitY official told India Legal: “The finance minister has talked about a social revolution but we will need a cyber security revolution if the grand plan has to take off without floundering and losing its way. As things stand now, there are too many holes in the security set up which are being exploited by hackers. We have to prepare ourselves for a flood of cyber-related crime once the linkage happens. To make matters worse, no one is clear about the volume of Aadhaar data that has already been stolen or accessed by the wrong people.” According to him, there are several reports with the ministry which point to the urgent need for a complete overhaul of the cyber security apparatus in the country. This will be a time-consuming process, but he feels it nevertheless needs to be done before any major three-way linkage is even attempted. “A new financial division of CERT-In has been promised. It has to be set up and tested. No system is fool-proof. The basic problem with Aadhaar is that the safety of data was not thought through when it was launched. Much of what is being done is a post facto response,” he added. MeitY sources also point out that according to official data, 164 government websites were hacked during 2015. There have also been instances where government departments have placed Aadhaar numbers in the public domain. The problem, they say, has several dimensions. And laws alone cannot deter the criminals. Prevention and detection are key aspects in any fight because the cyber-criminal floats in cyberspace and may operate from a foreign land outside India’s jurisdiction.

Some time ago, I posted the cover art for the ebook editions of The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. For the sake of comparison, here is the art for the US hardback editions. All of these covers were done by Darrell K. Sweet except for the last book, A Memory of Light, which was done by Michael Whelan. Click each image to see a larger version. Prequel — New Spring cover art 1. The Eye of the World — outside cover art The Eye of the World — inside front cover art 2. The Great Hunt cover art 3. The Dragon Reborn cover art 4. The Shadow Rising cover art 5. The Fires of Heaven cover art 6. Lord of Chaos cover art 7. A Crown of Swords cover art 8. Path of Daggers cover art 9. Winter’s Heart cover art 10. Crossroads of Twilight cover art 11. Knife of Dreams cover art 12. The Gathering Storm cover art 13. The Towers of Midnight cover art 14. A Memory of Light — Darrell K. Sweet unfinished concept art Mr. Sweet passed away before finishing the cover. A Memory of Light cover art — Michael Whelan Wheel of Time Cover Art for the US Hardback Editions

Seller Notes: “ Museum Condition-meaning VGC for something that was USED (though minimally) in real life-NOT showroom or MINT condition! Driven over 1300 miles since November 1, 2018-mainly to test/sort all the issues out. Was stored for about 10 years prior to that. Shake down driving worked! Issues replaced! New: Distributor, Coil, Ignition Control Module, Fuel Pump, Tune-Up, Oil Filter, Air Filter, In-Line Fuel Filters, Valve Cover Gaskets and probably a few other things in that time. Tires have only about 1500 miles on 5 meaty bias plies. Originally from KY, and though not "southwest pristine" has very minimal rust. All known interior auxiliary electrical works, but interior electrical outlets unknown-all wiring intact, but not sure how system works, and not an electrician, so don't want to push my luck. Minor paint chips or pin-stripe imperfections. 4x4 works as of 12/2018. About as good as something 37 years old that WAS driven 32,000 mile can be! Great for Van Life Expedition Van build out ”

Hawaii may have been the fiftieth state to join the U.S., but when the calendar flips over to 2016 after midnight tonight, it will become the first state to raise the legal smoking age to 21. Back in April, Consumerist reported that Hawaii was poised to become the first state to raise the minimum age for smoking to 21 after a bill changing the age requirements passed the Hawaii Legislature. Governor David Ige then signed the bill, which bars people under the age of 21 from smoking, buying, or possessing both traditional and electronic cigarettes. Anyone caught in violation of the law would be fined $10 for the first offense, with subsequent incidents prompting a $50 fine or mandatory community service. Businesses that are caught selling tobacco products to people under the age of 21 will be fined $500 for their first violation and up to $2,000 for subsequent offenses, Buzzfeed News reports. While Hawaii is the first state to raise the legal smoking age to 21, a number of municipalities, including Hawaii County and New York City, have done so on a local level. Washington state, Utah, and Colorado have also considered boosting the legal minimum age. Proponents of such laws say raising the legal age to buy cigarettes to 21 would result in fewer smokers. In Hawaii, the state’s Department of Health says 5,600 kids try smoking every year, with 90% of daily smokers starting the habit before they turn 19. [via BuzzFeed News]

Dutch and Canadian technology could be key to managing UK pigs more effectively, including the use of sound to sense the early signs of disease. Technology that detects how pigs are feeling will be used on farms within years to help producers find ways to manage them more effectively, according to a leading scientist. Precision farming tools will measure the mental state of individual animals, allowing farmers to make decisions about rearing pigs, from the way they are housed to the feed they are given. Daniel Berkmanns, professor in bioengineering at KU Leuven in Belgium, says real-time monitoring of pigs’ actions, movements and interactions could help improve the health, welfare and performance of herds. See also: Farmer Focus: Pig performance improves just in time for hog roasts “I am convinced we will see the mental state of animals being monitored on a commercial basis in the next few years,” he says. “Pigs are intelligent animals and we should use their intelligence. If you put animals in a pen they will behave like stupid animals, but if we recognise that they are individuals with different needs and responses, we can react accordingly. “It will enable us to make things more interesting for them and us, and potentially result in better outcomes.” Prof Berkmanns says the technology is almost ready to be introduced into broiler units, and it is only a matter of time before it could be used on pig farms. “The technology is just at the beginning,” he adds. “Continuous, real-time monitoring through image analysis, sound analysis and sensors could have a huge array of uses such as monitoring health and welfare.” Prof Berkmanns says researchers at the University of Ghent have devised a system to analyse the sounds pigs make to detect illness. “Most disease in pigs is respiratory. With some diseases you can detect signs just three hours after infection,” he says. “The system detects a sick cough and sends an SMS message to the farmer, who can go out and decide if they need to call a vet. This kind of system reduces the use of antibiotics on farm.” Another system being tested involves monitoring pigs’ drinking behaviour. “We can create models to estimate water use to within 92% or 200ml over 13 days,” Prof Berkmanns says. If water use drops, farmers are alerted and inspect what is happening on the unit. “This technology doesn’t mean that farmers will be replaced by the technology,” he adds. “It has to be part of the management system. “The idea with monitoring is that daily checks are taken over by the technology and the farmer enters to solve the problem, not find it. “It doesn’t have a value if it is just interesting technology, it has to be able to help the farmer make improvements.” Tailored diets could cut feed costs Feeding pigs diets tailored to their individual daily needs can slash feed costs and ensure the sustainability of the UK pig industry, say scientists. Using precision farming technology to ensure pigs are only provided with the nutrients they need can result in feed costs being cut by as much as 10%, research at the Department of Agriculture and Agri-Food in Canada found. While traditional three-phase feeding aims to maximise growth by ensuring the top-performing animals have the nutrients they require, it does not take into account that every pig’s nutritional needs are different on different days, says the department’s Candido Pomar. Often pigs are overfed nutrients, which are excreted in faeces and urine, creating a waste of feed and a negative effect on the environment, he says. Instead, investing in technology that will allow pigs to receive formulations based on their real-time needs will vastly improve efficiency. “Precision technologies help get the right amount of feed to the right pig at the right time,” says Dr Pomar. “It is a total shift in pig nutrition. Instead of basing their nutritional requirements on estimations collected from data, feeding with technology depends on an individual animal’s health, genetics and nutritional status, as well as external factors such as stress and management systems.” In experiments run by Dr Pomar and his team, 60 pigs were fed diets with varying amounts of lysine from automatic feeders. Each pig was tagged and identified by the feeder and given a serving of 15-25g of feed. The pigs could return to the feeder as many times as they liked. During the experiment, the pigs visited the feeder up to 110 times a day, but the overall amount of feed they consumed was 8-10% lower than traditional three-phase feeding. Further trials discovered that typical lysine use could be reduced by as much as 27% without having any effect on growth performance, resulting in a 50% reduction in nitrogen excretion, Dr Pomar says. “Precision farming is an effective approach to improving efficiency, reducing nutrient excretion and reducing costs,” he adds. Sound sensors could detect some diseases within three hours of infection and alert farmers by text. More from from the Bpex Pig Innovation Conference 2014

Croatia's independent presidential candidate Bandic talks to his supporters after release of first unofficial results at his campaign headquarters in Zagreb Thomson Reuters ZAGREB (Reuters) - Croatian anti-graft police arrested the mayor of Zagreb, Milan Bandic, and several of his associates on Sunday on suspicion of corruption and abuse of office, Croatian media reported. The police and the state prosecutor said only that several people from the Zagreb administration had been arrested but did not name them, in line with usual practice. But all local media and the national televisions named Bandic as one of those arrested. Reports have linked Bandic to a number of corruption probes in the past decade but he has never been interrogated or detained until now. "After several months of a complex criminal investigation, several persons have been arrested on suspicion of illegal activities in the city of Zagreb and the Zagrebacki Holding (the city's company in charge of communal services)," the state prosecutor's office DORH said in a statement on its website. It gave no details of possible charges, saying only that "a number of corruption crimes are being investigated". Bandic, a former Social Democrat who left the party in 2009 to run as an independent candidate in the presidential election that year, has been at the helm of the Croatian capital since 2000. Zagreb has almost a quarter of the country's 4.4 million people and is the financial and economic capital of the former Yugoslav republic, which joined the EU in July last year. Croatia launched an extensive anti-corruption drive in 2010 to boost its faltering EU membership bid. It has since tried and convicted several top state officials, including the former Prime Minister Ivo Sanader. (Reporting by Zoran Radosavljevic; editing by Andrew Roche)

Sabrina Bicknell (1757 – 8 September 1843), better known as Sabrina Sidney, was a British foundling girl taken in when she was 12 by author Thomas Day, who wanted to mould her into his perfect wife. Day had been struggling to find a wife who would share his ideology and had been rejected by several women. Inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's book Emile, or On Education, he decided to educate two girls without any frivolities, using his own concepts. In 1769, Day and his barrister friend, John Bicknell, chose Sidney and another girl, Lucretia, from orphanages, and falsely declared they would be indentured to Day's friend Richard Lovell Edgeworth. Day took the girls to France to begin Rousseau's methods of education in isolation. After a short time, he returned to Lichfield with only Sidney, having deemed Lucretia inappropriate for his experiment. He used unusual, eccentric, and sometimes cruel, techniques to try to increase her fortitude, such as firing blanks at her skirts, dripping hot wax on her arms, and having her wade into a lake fully dressed to test her resilience to cold water. When Sidney reached her teenage years, Day was persuaded by Edgeworth that his ideal wife experiment had failed and he should send her away, as it was inappropriate for Day to live with her unchaperoned. He then arranged for Sidney to undergo experimental vocational and residential changes—first attending a boarding school, then becoming an apprentice to a dressmaker family, and eventually being employed as Day's housekeeper. Having seen changes in Sidney, Day proposed marriage, though he soon called this off when she did not follow his strict instructions; he again sent her away, this time to a boarding house, where she later found work as a lady's companion. In 1783, Bicknell sought out Sidney and proposed marriage, telling her the truth about Day's experiment. Horrified, she confronted Day in a series of letters; he admitted the truth but refused to apologise. Sidney married Bicknell, and the couple had two children before his death in 1787. Sidney went on to work with schoolmaster Charles Burney, managing his schools. In 1804, Anna Seward published a book about Sidney's upbringing. Edgeworth followed up with his memoirs, in which he claimed Sidney loved Day. Sidney herself, on the other hand, said she was miserable with Day and that he treated her as a slave. Early life [ edit ] The now-demolished Foundling Hospital, where Sidney was abandoned Sidney was born in 1757 in Clerkenwell, London, and was left at the Hospital for the Maintenance and Education of Exposed and Deserted Young Children (more commonly known as the Foundling Hospital) in London on 24 May 1757 by an anonymous individual. This person left a note explaining that the baby's baptismal name was Manima Butler and that she had been baptised in St James's Church, Clerkenwell. Her name was likely a misspelling of Monimia but there were no baptismal records for any spelling of the name at the parish. One of the requirements of the Foundling Hospital was that babies were to be less than six months old at the time of admittance, but the hospital did not keep more accurate records of age. Another requirement was that foundlings were given a new name and a reference number, so Sidney became Girl Ann Kingston no. 4759. She was taken in by a wet nurse, Mary Penfold, who brought her to Wotton, Surrey, where she remained until 1759, when she was two years old. Although it was usual for foundlings to remain with their wet nurse until the age of five or six, the Foundling Hospital had received an influx of new babies and moved many children who no longer required nursing, including Sidney, to the Shrewsbury branch of the Foundling Hospital. The Shrewsbury building was not completed until 1765, so in the meantime Sidney and another foundling were cared for by a nurse, Ann Casewell, at her home. Day's experiment [ edit ] Background [ edit ] Thomas Day in 1770 Thomas Day was a bachelor who had inherited his fortune from his father when he was an infant. Described as having a face pockmarked from smallpox, a brooding personality, and a short temper, Day attended Corpus Christi College, Oxford, to study philosophy. It was there that he decided to dedicate his life to becoming a virtuous man, shunning luxury and focusing on altruism. Around the same time he developed a list of requirements for his future wife, that she should be subservient and pure but also able to discuss philosophy and live without frivolities. These high standards, combined with his generally unlikeable personality, meant that his advances were rejected by several women while he was at university. Day was introduced to the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau by his friend Richard Lovell Edgeworth; the pair shared a particular affinity for Rousseau's work on education in the book Emile, or On Education. On leaving Oxford, Edgeworth and Day attempted to teach Edgeworth's first son, Dick, in the style of Emile, a learning-by-doing approach. Accompanying Edgeworth to Ireland as Dick's tutor, Day fell in love and was spurned first by Edgeworth's sister, and then by at least three other women in quick succession. Day came to the conclusion that he would not be able to find a wife who would meet his high standards and largely blamed women's education for this. Inspired by the character of Sophie in Rousseau's Emile, he resolved to "create" his ideal wife by raising her from adolescence, using the techniques laid out in the book. Day was approaching financial independence, when he would have full access to the money left to him, and conspired with his barrister friend, John Bicknell, to find two girls who could be taken into his care to be groomed as a perfect wife. Choosing the girls [ edit ] Shrewsbury Orphan Hospital, which now forms part of Shrewsbury School Just after Day's 21st birthday in June 1769, he and John Bicknell travelled to the Shrewsbury Orphan Hospital to choose the first girl for his experiment. Sidney was 12 years old at the time, described as "a clear auburn brunette, with darker eyes more glowing bloom and chestnut tresses". She was slender, and had long eyelashes and a pleasant voice. Day was struggling to choose a girl for the experiment, and Bicknell quickly picked her out. The pair did not tell the orphanage secretary, Samuel Magee, about the planned experiment. Instead they told him that she was to be indentured as a servant at Edgeworth's country house in Berkshire, waiving the £4 (equivalent to £545 in 2018) fee they would have received for the apprenticeship. In line with the orphanage's requirements that responsibility be held by a married man, Edgeworth would be legally accountable for Sidney, despite him not being present nor even aware of the arrangement. The apprenticeship was approved by the governors of the orphanage on 30 June 1769; Day and Bicknell collected Sidney on 17 August. She was brought to lodgings in London, where she met Edgeworth for the first time. Day changed her name to Sabrina Sidney: Sabrina, the Latin name for the River Severn, which her orphanage overlooked; and Sidney after Algernon Sidney, one of Day's heroes. Day became a benefactor, and subsequently governor, of the Foundling Hospital, and on 20 September 1769 he chose another girl for his experiment, renaming her Lucretia after the Roman matron. Day had Bicknell draw up a contract to define the terms of the girls' indenture. Within one year, he would choose which girl he intended to marry, and the other would be given as an apprentice to a woman in a trade, along with a fee of £100 (equivalent to £13,630 in 2018). He would give a further £400 (equivalent to £54,519 in 2018) upon the girl's marriage or if she were to start her own business. He would marry his intended bride or, if he decided not to, would gift her the sum of £500 (equivalent to £68,149 in 2018). Bicknell acted as guarantor for the contract. Education in France [ edit ] Day wished for the girls to be isolated from external influences while he educated them so, at the beginning of November 1769, he decided to move them to France. It is also possible that he did this to protect himself from the legal ramifications of his experiment, as well as societal gossip. The trio travelled over 600 miles to Avignon, renting a house in le quartier des fusteries. The girls could speak no French and Day employed no English-speaking servants, to be sure that he would be the only person to influence them. Day focussed on the girls' education, in the style of Emile. He expanded on the teaching they had received from the Foundling Hospital in reading and basic arithmetic, and also taught them how to write. He believed that the girls should be able to manage the house, so they were charged with cooking and cleaning as well as other housework. Finally, he wanted to be able to debate complex concepts with them, so he taught them rudimentary theories in physics and geography, tasking them with observing the changing of the seasons, and recording details of sunrises and sunsets. He also imparted to them Rousseau's philosophical contempt for luxury. During his stay in France, Day regularly corresponded with Edgeworth. He said that both girls were passionate about their studies, Sidney more so. Day also related anecdotes, one concerning a trip on the Rhone where the boat overturned and he rescued both girls single-handedly as neither could swim. He described an incident in which he challenged a French Army officer to a duel, even producing a set of dueling pistols, simply as a manner of engaging or encouraging conversation with his young students; the officer apologised and explained he did not mean any offence, calming the situation. Accounts by 19th-century historians suggest that Day grew impatient with the girls when they became bored with their lessons and began to squabble, and that he also spent significant time nursing them through a bout of smallpox. These accounts may have been exaggerated as both girls had been inoculated against smallpox, and their strict upbringing meant they would not have rebelled excessively. Return to England [ edit ] While in France, Day struggled over which girl to choose to take forward with the experiment. Both were beautiful; Lucretia was more cheerful, Sidney more reserved and studious. The trio returned to England in spring 1770, by which time Day had finally decided that he would carry on with Sidney's training. Edgeworth explained that each of Day's projects with Sabrina had been successful, but he had come to the conclusion that Lucretia was "invincibly stupid". Day apprenticed Lucretia to a milliner in Ludgate Hill, and took Sidney to Stowe House in Lichfield, where her training could continue. The household would have had no more than a couple of servants, leaving Sidney to maintain the four floors of the house. Her tutoring continued at the same time, with one-on-one lessons from Day on a variety of subjects. Stowe House, Day's Lichfield residence, viewed across Stowe Pool, the lake into which Sidney waded Day extended his tutoring to fortify Sidney against hardship, again based upon his interpretation of Rousseau's Emile. The book explains the concept of "negative education", protecting a person from vices rather than teaching them virtues. Day interpreted this to mean that submitting Sidney to tests of endurance would help to create a woman with hardened nerves. One example given by Rousseau was helping Emile become accustomed to explosions such as fireworks by firing pistols with small amounts of powder near him, gradually increasing the amount of powder. Day, on the other hand, fired a pistol loaded with powder directly at Sidney's petticoat, not telling her that there was no shot in it. In an attempt to increase her resistance to pain he would drop hot sealing wax on her back and arms or stick pins in her, commanding her not to cry out. He would test her ability to keep secrets by telling her that his life was in danger and she should tell no one. To increase her resistance to the cold, Day instructed Sidney to wade into Stowe Pool until the water reached her neck, then lie in the nearby meadow until her clothes and hair had dried in the sun. Finally, to test her resistance to luxury, he gave her a big box of handmade silk clothes and had her throw them on a fire. Day had limited success with these techniques. Sidney became able to endure hot wax dripped on her arm without flinching, but she did tell others of his secret techniques, and could not help screaming whenever he fired his gun at her. During their time at Stowe House, Day introduced Sidney to members of the local intellectual circle, including the priest at Lichfield Cathedral, Thomas Seward. Seward and his wife hoped that Day might be a suitor for their daughter, Anna, and Anna's writings of the time show her interest in Day. Anna was also enchanted by Sidney, who became the link between Day and the Seward family. Anna took a keen interest in Sidney's story, as her father had taken in Honora Sneyd when Sneyd's mother had died. Moving away from Day [ edit ] Anna Seward, acquaintance of Day who questioned the propriety of his relationship with Sidney By 1770, Sidney began to question Day's techniques and to complain about the chores she had to perform. In December, the propriety of Day's arrangement with Sidney was questioned by the local community, especially Anna Seward. Edgeworth joined Day for Christmas at Stowe, and convinced him that his experiment had been unsuccessful. He also persuaded Day that Sidney was too old to live with him without a chaperone. Day appeared to accept Edgeworth's point of view, as he paid for Sidney to attend Sutton Coldfield boarding school in Warwickshire early in 1771. She remained at the boarding school for three years, including weekends and holidays, with infrequent visits from Day. The school normally focused on preparing high society daughters for marriage, with subjects such as needlework and the arts. Day stipulated that she was to be taught academic subjects but should not dance or learn music. In 1774, Day visited Sidney to inform her that she would be apprenticed to the Parkinsons, a family of dressmakers, as Day believed the profession would not expose her to temptation. She was delivered to the family with the stipulation that she should work hard at chores and be denied luxuries. The Parkinsons, however, treated Sidney well, to the extent that Day later chastised them for not instilling "industry and frugality" in her. Less than a year later the Parkinsons' business went bankrupt, leaving Sidney without an apprenticeship and nowhere to live. Day arranged for her to stay with his friends, the Keir family, and implied that she could take on the role of housekeeper at his own home. Day again considered Sidney, who was now 18, a potential wife, but did not let her know of his intentions, nor that her upbringing was part of his experiment. Broken engagement [ edit ] Over the next few months, Day returned to moulding Sidney to meet his requirements for the ideal woman, choosing what she would wear, and pushing his ideas of frugality upon her. Sidney took on all the ideas willingly and Day believed he had finally created a woman who would meet all his requirements. He was so confident that he talked openly of marrying Sidney, though she was unaware of his intentions. Eventually one of Day's friends let her know that he hoped to marry her. Sidney confronted Day about the rumours and he admitted they were true, neglecting to mention that he had hoped to marry her since the day he met her. Sidney did not refuse the proposal, so Day planned the wedding while she considered it further and eventually agreed. During the preparations, Day left Sidney with friends for a few days, giving her strict instructions on what she should wear. When he returned to find her in an outfit that did not meet his requirements, he flew into a rage and Sidney fled for a few hours, so Day called off the engagement. Sidney was sent to a boarding house in Birmingham and given a stipend of £50 per annum (equivalent to £6,180 in 2018). Day resolved never to see her again. Marriage [ edit ] "I never thought I had a right to sacrifice another being to my own good or pleasure; but whatever else ensued you would be placed in circumstances infinitely more favourable to happiness than before" Day's explanation of his behaviour to Sidney After her engagement to Day ended, Sidney spent eight years at boarding houses around Birmingham. Day met and went on to marry an heiress, Esther Milnes, in 1778. Sidney met an apothecary, Jarvis Wardley, who proposed marriage in an acrostic poem. She contacted Day for advice, and he told her in absolute terms not to marry Wardley, even writing an acrostic poem for her to use in turning him down. In 1783, she had become a lady's companion in Newport, Shropshire. It was there that she was approached by Day's friend, the man who helped choose her at the foundling hospital, John Bicknell. Bicknell was single and had spent the majority of his earnings from his law career in gambling dens. He had not paid much attention to Sidney since selecting her with Day, but proposed marriage immediately. Sidney again consulted Day on the prospective engagement. Day did not approve, claiming the age difference was too great, although Bicknell was only two years older than Day. Bicknell decided to tell Sidney the truth about the experiment, that she was hand-picked to be Day's wife from childhood, and that all of Day's actions were designed to further his goal of turning her into the ideal bride. Horrified, Sidney wrote to Day to confront him over Bicknell's statements. Day admitted the truth but refused to apologise. After a series of letters, Day gave his consent to the marriage, telling her that the letter would be his final communication with her. Final residence of Sabrina Bicknell, at 29 Gloucester Circus, Greenwich Bicknell and Sidney married on 16 April 1784 at St Philip's Cathedral, Birmingham. The same day, Day paid the £500 wedding dowry he had stipulated in the contract he had set up with Bicknell, ending his £50 (equivalent to £6,009 in 2018) per year stipend. The couple bought a house in Shenfield and had two children, John Laurens Bicknell and Henry Edgeworth Bicknell. Bicknell carried on with his gambling habits, squandering the remaining money over the following three years. On 27 March 1787, after three years of marriage, John Bicknell died of a paralytic stroke. Sidney and her two children were now left without an income. Day sent her a new stipend of £30 per year, (equivalent to £3,708 in 2018) which was matched by Edgeworth. Her husband's barrister friends raised £800 (equivalent to £98,873 in 2018) for the widow and her children. Sidney found a role as housekeeper for Charles Burney, as well as general manager of his schools in Chiswick, Hammersmith, and Greenwich. It was at his Greenwich school that her own children were educated. Day's widow, Esther, continued paying Sidney's allowance after his death in 1789, and Sidney carried on her work with Burney until she was 68. By this time she was living in a four-storey house in Gloucester Circus, Greenwich, with her own servants. On 8 September 1843, Sidney died at her home of a severe asthma attack. She was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery. Legacy [ edit ] Sidney asked her friends not to discuss her past as she believed her humble beginnings, and Day's mistreatment of her, would tarnish her reputation. Anna Seward nevertheless wrote about Sidney's upbringing in her 1804 work Memoirs on the Life of Dr. Darwin. As Seward publicly identified Sidney in the book, it was criticised by the press, and Sidney's son John was very angry to learn of his mother's past. In his 1820 memoirs, Edgeworth stated his belief that Sidney and Day made a good match and that she loved him. Sidney disagreed with these accounts, saying that Day had made her miserable, and that she had effectively been a slave. Sidney's education has been compared to George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, which may have been inspired by her story. Strong parallels have also been drawn between Sidney's upbringing and two novels of 1871: Henry James's Watch and Ward, and Anthony Trollope's Orley Farm. The story of her life has been told in Wendy Moore's 2013 book How to Create the Perfect Wife and dramatised in the 2015 BBC Radio 4 play The Imperfect Education of Sabrina Sidney. References [ edit ]

The Alabama-Coushatta tribe plans to hold a job fair soon for their new Class II casino, Naskila Entertainment near Livingston, Texas. On Tuesday April 19 Tribal members are invited for either of two sessions to be held at the Tribal Multi-Purpose Center (Gym). Tribal Members and the general community are welcome to attend on Wednesday, April 20th. The Multi-Purpose Center is located at 333 State Park Rd 56. Tuesday’s job fair will be held from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 pm and 4:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. with Wednesday’s running from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 pm and 3:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. The Job Fair will be facilitated by Naskila Management along with Tribal departmental staff. The open meetings will allow interested people to get face to face time and learn more about career opportunities. A variety of positions are available from managerial and technical to service and support. A flyer, also posted on the Entertainment Center’s Facebook page offers a phone number for those with questions. Our phone calls Friday and Saturday went directly to voice mail and a Friday email has not been returned yet. We are monitoring social media and local news outlets for updated information in regard to an opening date, but expect the venue to open on or before May 1st. The tribe has not offered Class II slot machines since 2002, since being forced by court decisions to close a lucrative operation that generated about $1 million per month for the tribe and ran less than a year. The only other tribal casino to operate in the state is the Kickapoo Lucky Eagle Casino in Eagle Pass, which has been open since 1996. Texans, not in the “Deep East” also have a casino cruise ship available out of Aransas Pass – otherwise the state’s denizens are forced to travel out of state to “get their spin on” across the border at other tribal casinos like the Chickasaw Nation’s WinStar World Casino and Resort in Oklahoma. In October 2015 the National Indian Gaming Commission ruled that the tribe, along with the Tigua Tribes (aka Ysleta Del Sur Pueblo) in Texas, had been restored to federal recognition a year before the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act was passed; affirming both tribes’ jurisdiction over their sovereign lands. On November 3, 2015 the tribe announced that they had received federal approval to resume electronic gaming. The casino is located at 540 State Park Road 56, in Livingston, Texas and will offer 15,000 square feet of entertainment space with about 10,000 of that devoted to gaming on over 350 machines. A restaurant is also planned for the refurbished center. The state’s Charitable Bingo operators have been losing money for the last several years with some being shut down by the state for not generating positive income. They are staunchly opposed to the state’s tribes self-determination on sovereign land on which the state has no jurisdiction to enforce its draconian gambling laws. The Charitable bingo operators were also heavily influential in getting the Texas Racing Commission to kill regulations allowing so-called Historical Racing machines. Statewide, the only legal gambling outlets are a state lottery, parimutuel wagering, and charity bingo.

Four minutes from the end of Manchester City's remarkably comfortable win over QPR on Sunday, the entire Etihad stadium rose to its feet to applaud an oncoming player. Yun Suk-Young was replaced by former City star Shaun Wright-Phillips and there was a show of respect for the winger, as there had been earlier in the game for Richard Dunne, to mark just how much the fans remember his efforts while playing at Eastlands. That team also included Joey Barton, although he's since become something of a pantomime villain. That's likely to do with the number of indiscretions to his name at City, including his acrimonious departure after an incident with Ousmane Dabo, and then his attempts to "take some of them with [him]" as he went berserk in that game in 2012. The thing is, those City fans that applauded Wright-Phillips onto the turf on Sunday were pleased to see him back. He epitomised everything supporters love to see, back when he was one of the club's only shining lights. Throughout the end of the Kevin Keegan era and the start of the Stuart Pearce reign, there wasn't a lot for those in the stands to cheer. FA Cup exits, relegation battles, European near-misses; all of these came and went and the pitch was filled with mediocrity. Except on the right flank, where an academy product could beat three or four players and smash an effort into the top corner from range. In one moment, he could inject some energy into a dour performance and give the dwindling atmosphere a buzz. He was going to be an England regular, too. As was the way for City back then, they were a selling club, although they have since benefited from the flip side of that coin. If there was a player performing well who was "too good" for them, then a decent bid from a top side would no doubt result in a transfer. That's exactly what happened. Pearce's side was desperate for investment, but the club had no money whatsoever and was actually close to going under. So when Chelsea bid £21 million for the England prospect in 2005, the manager's hands were tied and the offer was accepted. Even now, the money the club received for the winger is their highest, although it will soon be surpassed when the sale of Alvaro Negredo to Valencia is triggered at the end of the season. The fans were devastated to see Wright-Phillips leave, and it only later emerged in an interview with the Blue Moon Podcast that he was just as upset to be on his way. "I didn't actually have a choice," he said. "Everybody seemed to think it was something that I wanted to do, but I was happy playing for City. I didn't want to leave, but [staying] wasn't an option I had. City were in a bad situation and the money they were offered was hard for them to refuse. "In the car on the way down I was crying because I didn't want to go." Shaun Wright-Phillips applauds the Manchester City crowd as he receives an ovation while warming up at the Etihad. That puts Wright-Phillips' remarks that re-signing for Mark Hughes' Manchester City was like "coming home" into more context, even if throughout his second spell it always felt for the fans like things were never quite the same. The time away had left him unable to be the influence he once was. That's not to say he was poor when he came back, just that he never hit his previous heights. It was almost as if his move back to the north was what he needed to inject some life back into his career, much the same way he used to do to City's performances in 2003. He scored four times in three seasons at Chelsea, a tally he'd equalled in his sixth game after his return. As much as Wright-Phillips was a crowd hero, he never really got to experience the good times he probably deserved with City. He played a bit part in the 2011 FA Cup-winning side, but had moved on by the time the title came to the Etihad the next season. By a bizarre quirk of fate, though, he was on the pitch when Roberto Mancini's side snatched the championship, playing for QPR that afternoon. The applause reserved for those players who were loyal to the club and did their best to brighten up another gloomy day in Manchester will always remain strong. Although for Wright-Phillips, you can't help wondering whether things might have been different if he'd never been shown the door a decade ago. David Mooney is ESPN FC's Manchester City blogger. Twitter: @DavidMooney

Turner Broadcasting System Inc. will cut its workforce by about 10 percent, or 1,475 workers, in the coming weeks through layoffs, buyouts and other measures, the company announced Monday. Atlanta-based Turner, which is owned by Time Warner, said 975 of the job reductions will be in metro Atlanta, which is taking the brunt of the cuts. In addition to TNT, Turner’s holdings include CNN, TBS, Cartoon Network, truTV, HLN and other networks and online sites. The company said fewer than 300 of the job cuts will be at CNN Worldwide. The company said the cuts are being made to reduce redundancies, focus resources and prioritize investment in programming, monetization and innovation. “It’s our responsibility as business leaders to focus Turner’s talent pool where individuals and groups will deliver the greatest return for the company, for Time Warner and for our shareholders,” Chief Executive Officer John Martin said in an internal memo to employees, obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed said he expected Turner to preserve as many jobs locally as possible. “For more than 30 years, Turner Broadcasting System (TBS) has served as the leading news, entertainment, and animation company in our city, state and region,” Reed said in a statement. “Despite Turner’s decision to reduce staff globally, including operations in Atlanta, we are confident that its leadership team will work to preserve as many of the 5,500 full-time positions located in the city where TBS was founded.” Turner said the cuts from among 14,000 full-time positions worldwide will come at all levels from across the company’s news, entertainment, kids, young adult and sports networks and businesses, as well as corporate functions, in 18 Turner locations around the world. The cuts are being made through a combination of voluntary buyouts, layoffs and other measures. Employees whose positions are directly impacted will be advised over the next two weeks and will be offered severance pay for transition, the company said.

What is Twitter marketing? It’s what you want it to be. Want to learn more about your customers? Make your brand a little more human? Build buzz about your new product? Make an influencer’s day? Provide lightning-fast customer support? Start mopping up after a PR disaster? Publicly humiliate trolls? Twitter’s got you covered. Whatever your goals, there’s no question Twitter can be a powerful tool to help you achieve them. If you’re just starting out with Twitter, this guide will show you how to craft a winning strategy. If you’re already using the platform to grow your business, jump to our section on smart Twitter tips for business. Bonus: Download the free strategy guide that reveals how Hootsuite grew our Twitter following to over 8 million users and learn how you can put the tactics to work for your business. How to create a Twitter marketing strategy A well-crafted strategy is the foundation for success—and it’s what separates the most effective brands on Twitter from the also-rans. Without a clear plan, you will waste time and money tweeting without a clear understanding of how your activities are helping your organization meet its goals. And when it comes time to review your performance, you’ll struggle to prove what you’ve achieved. And that will make it hard to make the case for increasing your team size or budget. Every hour you spend on research and strategy will pay off tenfold. We promise. Here’s what you need to do: Define success and set goals Okay, so you’ve got a good answer ready when your boss asks, “Why are we on Twitter?” Then come the two follow-up punches: “Are we on track to meet our goals? And… what are they again?” Answering these questions isn’t hard if you do your homework. Start with a list of your organization’s current high-level business objectives, such as: Generate leads and sales Increase customer loyalty Build brand and product awareness Decrease customer support costs From these objectives, craft specific and measurable goals. This will make it easy for you to evaluate progress and prove success. For example, if your objective is to provide your sales team with high-quality leads through social, your goal might be “use Twitter to drive 30 email sign-ups per month.” With objectives and goals in place, remember to take time to benchmark the current state of your team’s performance. This will help you measure your progress toward your goals, proving that your strategy is producing real, measurable results for your business. Defining and measuring success on social media can be challenging, so taking the time to do this right will really set you apart. Our guide to the ROI of social media breaks down the process for you. Research the competition Gathering information about your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses on social is critical. Not sure where to start? Read our quick guide, and then use this competitive analysis template to design a social marketing strategy that will leave your competitors in the dust. Identify your target audience Your brand can’t be all things to all people on Twitter—nor should you want it to be. Know who you’re targeting and craft a strategy that focuses on delivering real value to them. This will encourage them to engage with your brand and eventually become customers and advocates. While you’re at it, check out our guide on how to attract and engage more Twitter followers. Audit and take charge of your Twitter accounts Depending on the size of your company and your goals, you may want to use a single Twitter account or multiple accounts for different departments or functions. If multiple people in your organization are already using Twitter, auditing and consolidating existing accounts is key. How important is this? When the Vancouver Canucks hockey team deleted rogue accounts and launched official social media channels as part of their social strategy, they were able to strategically grow their Twitter fan base by 800 percent. Integrate Twitter with overall social strategy Teams working in large (or growing) organizations can find themselves working in silos. If you find this happening to your social marketing team, make sure you keep tearing down those silos and stay connected to other teams. Their work can be a rich source of information and assets to share with your followers. And they may be gathering insights that can open up new opportunities for your Twitter strategy. Keep your Twitter presence unique While it’s possible—and easy—to post the same content to multiple social networks, cross-posting isn’t an approach we recommend. Each network has its own unique characteristics and user base, so while applying the same strategy to multiple networks might seem like a shortcut, it might cost you more in engagement and authenticity than it saves you in time and effort. Nail your strategy on one network at a time, keeping it unique and fresh. For a head start charting your strategy, download our social media templates that cover everything from social media strategy and audits to content calendars and bulk message uploading for Hootsuite. 10 useful Twitter marketing tips for business 1. Use Twitter tools to get more done Twitter’s website and apps are great for sending the occasional tweet or direct message—but to manage your Twitter marketing at scale, you need the right tools for the job. Our list of 33 Twitter tools you can use in your marketing strategy is broken down by function to help you find the tools you need to market your business more efficiently on Twitter. Here are just a few of the things these tools will help you do faster and better: Generate leads by learning more about the people engaging with your brand, why they’re sharing your content, and who they’re sharing it with. by learning more about the people engaging with your brand, why they’re sharing your content, and who they’re sharing it with. Find industry influencers to connect with. to connect with. Analyze your competition to find detailed information on their tweets, mentions, hashtags, followers, and more. to find detailed information on their tweets, mentions, hashtags, followers, and more. Find trending topics by content, hashtags, search terms, sources, and more. by content, hashtags, search terms, sources, and more. Edit and add images to your tweets. to your tweets. Manage who you follow (and unfollow) to add valuable new information to your Twitter feed—and remove inactive and spammy followers. (and unfollow) to add valuable new information to your Twitter feed—and remove inactive and spammy followers. Time your posts for maximum impact with tools that analyze both your tweets and your followers’ tweets. With your Twitter toolbox stocked and ready, it’s time to turn your attention to crafting a world-class profile. 2. Build a great Twitter profile A complete, strategically crafted Twitter profile does far more than put a pretty face on your organization’s Twitter account—it can build trust with your audience, improve how your business appears in search results, and give your customers a direct, real-time channel to reach out to you with questions and kudos for your company. Here’s how to do it right: Write a great bio Twitter lets you use a few less characters in your bio than in your tweets (160, compared to 280), but you’ll still want to get maximum impact from every word (and hashtag). Whether you’re writing writing a new bio from scratch or looking to freshen up an existing one, we’ve got a list of world-class Twitter bio ideas to increase your follower count. Image via Hootsuite on Twitter. Complete and optimize your profile A strategically optimized Twitter profile can do far more than just share your name, handle, and description. With a few quick tweaks, you can boost the visual impact of your profile; target a precise physical location or general area; help customers find other Twitter profiles your company manages; and make it easier for people to interact with your brand and start conversations about your products. For all the details, see our video on optimizing your profile settings on Twitter. Get verified When people see that you are verified by Twitter, they know that they can trust your content—and your brand. Learn how to get verified on Twitter and earn that small but highly valuable blue “verified” checkmark next to your account name. Show it off Of course, after investing all this work in crafting a great profile, you’ll want to make sure people actually find it. Add your Twitter handle to your website, email signatures, the side of your delivery truck, and wherever else it makes sense to show it off. 3. Listen and learn If your strategy is focused on using Twitter to broadcast content to your followers, you’re not taking advantage of Twitter’s massive potential as a platform for social listening. As our CEO Ryan Holmes explains, “For businesses that pursue social listening seriously, the benefits can be significant: real-time intelligence on competitors; instant feedback on how your own brand is being perceived; and actionable data for designing or tweaking marketing campaigns.” You need to know what your Twitter community is talking about, whether people are directly mentioning your brand or not. What topics are they interested in? What kinds of content do they respond to? Who do they engage with? These are all important factors to consider when participating in social media listening. Things to listen for include: Your brand’s name (including misspellings) Your brand’s product names (including misspellings) Your competitors (again, including misspellings) Industry buzzwords Brand slogans Your CEO or public representative’s names (and misspellings) Campaign names or keywords Another key reason to listen on social is to find influencers and experts in your field. Nearly 40 percent of Twitter users say they’ve made a purchase as a direct result of a tweet from an influencer, and 49 percent say they rely on influencers when looking for product recommendations. For more information on how to find influencers on Twitter and build valuable relationships with them, take a look at our complete guide to influencer marketing on social media. Our guide to social media listening lists tools you can use: Twitter Advanced Search lets you narrow down your searches, search by negative or positive sentiment, explore relevant hashtags, and much more. For more information, see our guide on how to use Twitter’s Advanced Search for lead generation. Hootsuite makes it easy to set up streams that allow you to not only monitor conversations and keywords, but respond or assign the response to someone else on your team. And with Hootsuite Insights, you can monitor social media networks, news sources, and blogs to stay on top of trends, understand the conversations happening around your brand, and discover which content is resonating with your audience. Social Mention monitors over 100 sources and “allows you to easily track and mention what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time.” TweetReach offers basic listening tools, and helps you monitor tweets about your brand, and industry conversations. Cision Social Edition (formerly ViralHeat) allows you to listen to conversations around your brand across social networks and then “identify trends to drive insights around your social media performance.” 4. Create great content While it’s true that you’ve only got 280 characters to worry about at a time, you should still strive to write tweets that are on brand, easy to read, and likely to resonate with your audience. If you’re looking for help or inspiration, check out our great list of 8 writing resources for non-writers. Here are the basics for writing a great tweet: Help your audience To create content your audience will actually read and use, it helps to never stop learning about their interests, needs, and fears. In addition to reading their tweets and engaging directly with them, you can also use apps like Trendspottr to find and share trending content. We're responding to storms & tornadoes that blew across the Midwest. For shelter info, visit https://t.co/IwTsENcx2z or call 1-800-768-8048. — American Red Cross (@RedCross) April 30, 2017 Keep it short Yes, the limit is 280 characters—but you don’t have to use all those characters every time to create a great tweet. Mix up the length of tweets, and remember to use a URL shortener (like Ow.ly, available in the Hootsuite dashboard) to prevent links from taking up more space than necessary (and make it easier to include UTM parameters without creating clutter). Incorporate content curation You curate content when you sort through the massive amount of content online and share the best of it with your followers in an organized, meaningful way. At Hootsuite, we share the best content we find with our followers using the hashtag #ChoiceContent. For tips on incorporating content curation into your overall strategy, see our guide to using curated content on Twitter. Use hashtags Hashtags ensure that your content is being seen by as many followers as possible. Hashtags enable you to classify content so that your tweets are grouped with other relevant Twitter content. This helps other Twitter users find your content easily, just as it can help you find influencers and others in your industry. The art and science of using hashtags has evolved substantially in the past few years, and if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can wind up using hashtags incorrectly and sounding tone-deaf or worse. Get up to speed with our comprehensive guide on the do’s and don’ts of how to use hashtags. 5. Use multimedia to drive more engagement The popularity—and effectiveness—of multimedia continues its meteoric rise on social media. A survey of Twitter users found that the majority (82 percent) watch video content on Twitter, and that users want to see more videos from celebrities, other users, and brands. Why not offer your followers more of what they’re asking for? Video According to Wyzowl’s State of Video Marketing 2017 report, 79 percent of consumers would rather watch a video to learn about a product than read text on a page—and 84 percent of consumers have been convinced to make a purchase after watching a brand’s video. You might tweet out videos your organization has created, retweet relevant video content your audience would find valuable, or explore ways to share real-time video on Twitter. Images Among all the options for sharing images and photos online, don’t forget to share them on Twitter too. Include relevant images to catch the eye of your community and encourage engagement. If you’re sharing photos of people, you can also tag up to 10 people per image, as described in our post on Twitter best practices. GIFs Ah, GIFs. With users sharing over 100 million GIFS on Twitter in 2016, they can be a great option for adding some relevant fun to your tweets. If some cheeky animated joy is on-brand for your organization, try out Twitter’s integrated GIF search. And for a wealth of ideas, you can check out our GIF guide for social media marketers. 6. Post at the right time Tweets don’t last. According to Wiselytics, a tweet has a half-life of just 24 minutes and reaches 75 percent of its potential engagement in less than three hours. That means you need to tweet at the right time to reach the most potential followers and maximize engagement. Tweet regularly We recommend tweeting at least once a day to attract and engage Twitter followers. Experiment with posting more than that, and then pay attention to how your followers react to find the frequency that works best for you. Start with industry best practices Research has shown that the best posting times are generally 12 p.m., 5 p.m., and 6 p.m. Consider posting at these times in your initial strategy, then flesh out your schedule as you learn more about what times get the best results with your followers. Use analytics to fine-tune your approach Use engagement data from Twitter Analytics to adjust your timing once you’ve gathered some data about how followers are engaging with your tweets. Schedule your tweets Once you know the best times to tweet for optimal engagement, you can use Hootsuite to schedule your tweets, which will save you time and ensure you’re getting the best bang for your buck with each tweet. With Hootsuite, you can schedule your Twitter messages manually or in bulk, and you can even set up Hootsuite to automatically post at optimal times. For more information on exactly how to do this, see our post on scheduling posts through Hootsuite. And if you’re looking for templates for bulk uploads, we’ve got those too. 7. Engage with your audience It’s easy for marketers to get obsessed with the number of followers we collect on Twitter. But without engagement, your follower number is just that—a number. From the start, Twitter has been designed to help people connect and engage on a personal level. Use that strength to your advantage and engage daily with your audience. Follow your network— Your followers’ tweets can provide a wealth of information about their interests, needs, preferences, and so on. Follow and learn from them. Your followers’ tweets can provide a wealth of information about their interests, needs, preferences, and so on. Follow and learn from them. Respond quickly— According to one social media research study, 42 percent of consumers expect a 60-minute response time on social media. Respond quickly and naturally to customers, as you would in person or over the phone. According to one social media research study, 42 percent of consumers expect a 60-minute response time on social media. Respond quickly and naturally to customers, as you would in person or over the phone. Retweet, like, and follow— It feels good when people take a moment to retweet and like your tweets or follow you on Twitter. Return the favor and keep your followers happy. It feels good when people take a moment to retweet and like your tweets or follow you on Twitter. Return the favor and keep your followers happy. Use @mentions and tag people— When you mention followers, influencers, or other brands in a tweet, including an @mention is a nice way to drive a little traffic their way. You can also tag people in photos when it’s appropriate to do so, as covered in our post on Twitter best practices. When you mention followers, influencers, or other brands in a tweet, including an @mention is a nice way to drive a little traffic their way. You can also tag people in photos when it’s appropriate to do so, as covered in our post on Twitter best practices. Ask for a little help— It’s okay to occasionally ask followers to retweet, mention, or like your tweets. It’s okay to occasionally ask followers to retweet, mention, or like your tweets. Get interactive—Tweet a question and see how your followers respond, or run a Twitter Poll for customer service feedback, quick product or service opinions, and direct social listening opportunities. We're at #CES2016 & letting you choose what we cover. Vote now and watch our Periscope tomorrow! — Amazon.com (@amazon) January 7, 2016 Keep listening for opportunities and pain points. If you’re looking for a little inspiration on how to kick-start engagement with your Twitter followers, try our 5-day plan for increasing your Twitter engagement. 8. Monitor your business and brand You’ve seen the news about companies mishandling PR disasters on social—but whether you’re monitoring social networks to mitigate major risk or just to keep an eye on overall sentiment about your brand, it’s vital to know what people are saying and sharing on Twitter. Follow your competitors— This one’s easy. Find your competitors on Twitter and follow them to know what they’re sharing—and what people are saying about them. This one’s easy. Find your competitors on Twitter and follow them to know what they’re sharing—and what people are saying about them. Get organized to listen more effectively— Twitter lists can be a great way to organize the people you follow on Twitter. If you use Hootsuite, you can easily set up streams to listen to your competitors right from your dashboard. Twitter lists can be a great way to organize the people you follow on Twitter. If you use Hootsuite, you can easily set up streams to listen to your competitors right from your dashboard. Monitor your brand/company keywords— Twitter Analytics and other tools make it easy to do this. For a more comprehensive approach, you can Hootsuite Insights to monitor social media networks, news sources, and blogs to make sure you stay on top of trending content that matters to you. Twitter Analytics and other tools make it easy to do this. For a more comprehensive approach, you can Hootsuite Insights to monitor social media networks, news sources, and blogs to make sure you stay on top of trending content that matters to you. Have a crisis communications plan—As our CEO Ryan Holmes pointed out in a LinkedIn post on “tone-deaf” brands, companies that haven’t embraced the concept of social listening risk opening themselves up to full-blown PR disasters on social. Learn from their cautionary tales and put a plan in place for crisis communications—and then hope you never need to use it. 9. Measure results Measuring your Twitter marketing results allows you to evaluate your success, see what kind of content your community engages with, and shows you opportunities for areas to further refine your Twitter strategy. Here are a few ways to get the data you need: Use Twitter Analytics Twitter Analytics gives you an overview of how your tweets are performing, who is engaging and when, influencers in your network, and metrics for individual tweets. You can track your followers’ activity over time, their interests, demographics, and (if you’re running a Twitter Ads campaign) ad performance. Image via Twitter. Use analytics tools from Hootsuite Hootsuite’s analytics tools feature real-time dashboards to help you monitor performance, spot trends, and track engagement across channels. You can tag tweets connected to campaigns or events, then track, analyze, and report on their performance. Bonus: Download the free strategy guide that reveals how Hootsuite grew our Twitter following to over 8 million users and learn how you can put the tactics to work for your business. 10. Elevate your strategy with advanced tactics Now that you’ve mastered the basics, why not try a few more advanced tactics? Advertise on Twitter As great as your social media strategy may be, there are times when it makes sense to supplement your organic efforts with paid advertising to achieve your objectives on Twitter. Depending on the specific goal you’re working toward, you can promote your individual tweets, your account, or even a trend you’d like to amplify and associate with your business. When you’re ready to get started, check out our complete guide to Twitter Ads. Host a Twitter chat Hosting a Twitter chat is a great way to show thought leadership in your field while building advocacy, loyalty, and community. Using a shared hashtag, users meet online to catch up on industry news, discuss issues, and share ideas. To learn more, see our step-by-step guide on how to run a Twitter chat. Here at Hootsuite, we engage with our community through #HootChat, our weekly Twitter chat. We collaborate with influencers in the industry and encourage questions and discussion with our Twitter community. Q3. What are some tips to writing engaging captions? #HootChat pic.twitter.com/lA7BfrC1G4 — Hootsuite (@hootsuite) May 18, 2017 Broadcast live video Brands have been sharing live video on Twitter for some time now, and companies like AirBNB are even experimenting with 360° livestreaming channels. Given the exploding popularity of video on social media, adding live video to your Twitter strategy is definitely a promising area to explore. Experiment with Twitter Moments Twitter launched Moments in 2015 as a curated list of the day’s big tweets. In 2016, they opened the tool to everyone on mobile, and marketers have been using it to round up recipes, collaborate with influencers, and even create fan recaps for TV series. From serious to silly, Twitter Moments offer new ways to put Twitter to work for your business. Offer social customer service With 67 percent of customers in the U.S. turning to social media for customer service, there’s a very good chance your customers expect to be able to do the same. Whether you use your primary Twitter account or a devoted one for support will depend on the size of your organization and the type of support you offer. You could do worse than to follow the example of our favorite brands leading the way in social customer support. So sorry, Lia. Mind sending us a DM with your contact info and the ingredients you need? Thank you! — Whole Foods Market (@WholeFoods) May 17, 2017 With rich opportunities for researching your market, engaging with followers, and building your brand, Twitter has come a long way since its 2006 debut as a simple platform for answering the question “What are you doing?” in 140 characters. It’s a powerful platform for building meaningful relationships that will drive the success of your organization—one follower at a time. Use Hootsuite to execute your Twitter marketing plan alongside all your other social media activity. From a single dashboard you can monitor conversations, grow your followers, schedule tweets, and much more. Try it free today. Get Started

VIRGINIA BEACH — Like most political discourse in recent months, Rep. Scott Taylor and his constituents have embraced the digital sphere to foster conversation. Those who don’t live within a short distance of his two offices can use his Facebook page to stay informed. On Jan. 30, Taylor held his first Facebook Live town hall from Washington D.C., giving his nearly 55,000 Facebook followers a chance to listen and ask questions in real time. “It’s a very effective way of communicating with a lot of people at one time, for no cost, essentially,” Taylor said. But some constituents say they have been blocked from communicating with Taylor via Facebook. Lulani Mae, of Virginia Beach, said she voted for Taylor in the Nov. 8 election because she thought his military background would lend to his ability to successfully represent Virginia’s 2nd district. At the Feb. 20 Kempsville town hall, Mae, who is affiliated with the local Together We Will group, told Taylor she’s been blocked from posting or participating in conversations on his Facebook page. “I’m no longer allowed to post on your Facebook page,” Mae told Taylor at the town hall, “and it’s very disappointing.” After Taylor suggested that Mae had been blocked by staff members for inappropriate behavior, she said her only recent comment was when she expressed disappointment with his representation of the district. “He told me he was sorry and that he would unblock me, but that hasn’t happened yet,” Mae said in an interview with Southside Daily. Mae isn’t the only constituent to make such a claim. Three more congressional district 2 residents allege the same treatment by Taylor and his staff. Mary Meade Holtz, a Hampton resident and president of the Virginia Peninsula National Organization for Women, said that she was also blocked from posting or commenting on Taylor’s Facebook page. After Taylor posted a photo on his Facebook profile in which he was posing with President Donald Trump, she commented and asked him what he planned to do about attacks on sanctuary cities within his district. The next time Holtz went back to the social media page, she found herself in the same situation Mae had. She could no longer speak to her congressman via Facebook. “I called his office in D.C. and asked about it,” Holtz said. “They took my email and name and said they would get back to me but I haven’t heard anything yet.” Holtz said she tried to make a post from her own page to ask about why she had prevented from speaking on his page. She tagged the congressman in her post, trying to determine if there was an alternative form of communication with him about it. Her post went unanswered. Williamsburg resident Sheila Ann Glennon told Taylor at a Yorktown town hall that she is frustrated she cannot participate in legislature-related surveys or queries posted by his staff, especially in light of Taylor’s stance that it’s important for constituents to use social media to share their policy opinions. Like other constituents, Glennon is unable to comment or post. Glennon said she was blocked from the page after posting a comment that called the travel ban “religious discrimination.” She said that while she doesn’t believe her first amendment rights have been violated, she thinks that being barred from participating is contradictory behavior. “He himself said at that town hall that he uses Facebook to gauge his constituents’ reactions to policies,” Glennon said. “If comments are being deleted and people are being prevented from commenting, how is he serving all of his constituents?” Glennon said, as a backup plan, she bought a stack of postcards. Every time she wants her voice to be heard on an issue, she slips another card in the mail to Taylor’s office. “I know that at least those will get through,” Glennon said. “I pay my taxes. I do have a right to be represented.” Anne Tucker founded the political action group Indivisible 757. She lives in Virginia Beach and recently visited Taylor’s local office with a friend who uses a wheelchair. Tucker said that when the pair arrived at the office, there wasn’t a push button on the door to assist handicapped visitors. Concerned, she asked Taylor’s staff if they would consider adding the feature or asking the building’s owner to do so. “I wasn’t sure they understood what I was asking so I tried to send Taylor a message on Facebook,” Tucker said, adding that she wasn’t able to because she’d been blocked. Like Glennon, Tucker said she is frustrated because she also heard Taylor tell town hall attendees that he uses social media to monitor his constituents’ comments. “If you are censoring the public voice of the people who you are representing, then you’re not able to truly have an informed view,” Tucker said. But Taylor says he’s not censoring his constituents on Facebook. Taylor said that members of his staff have the authority to block users from his Facebook page if their behavior is “out of line.” He added that the groups Tucker and Holtz belong to are organized to “disrupt things.” “There are some people who get on there and all they’re doing is just attacking and all that stuff,” Taylor said. “Whether you do or don’t agree with it, they’re not censored.” Each of the women said they never used profanity or attacked other commenters. Each said they used the Facebook page to make their stances known to Taylor. “I never said anything nasty or name-called or anything of that nature,” Holtz said. “I don’t know if a carefully crafted response is just more threatening than name-calling.” Last month, the Maryland branch of the American Civil Liberties Union responded to similar accusations against Maryland Governor Larry Hogan. Seeing the action against Hogan, Tucker said she decided to follow suit. “I contacted the Virginia ACLU and let them know what was going on,” Tucker said. “If you can’t take it when someone disagrees with you, then you should stop using Facebook in an official capacity.” Poulter can be reached at amy@localvoicemedia.com

Vasko Kohlmayer is at it again. It was not too long ago that he wrote an article in the Washington Post claiming that there is no such thing as an Atheist. Well here we go again, another silly Washington Post article from Mr Kohlmayer. Apparently he has now decided, in stark contrast to his previous article, that Atheists do actually exist, and are simply illogical. So how does he establish this? Well, he starts out like this … …let us turn to the Secular Web (formerly Internet Infidels) which is the most widely frequented atheist website on the internet. He then proceeds to pick one … count them … one single argument from a long list and proceeds to demolish it. Incidentally, it took me some time to actually find what he was attacking, I’ll not bore you with the details, but if truly curious, it comes from Number 7 on this page. There are two of immediate key points. 1) I personally don’t gave a toss about proofs that God does not exist, and many others hold a similar view. It is not our problem to worry about disproving nonsense. Instead the burden of proof rests with the believers to present some credible objective evidence … so far that has been exactly zero. 2) Mr Kohlmayer is guilty of quote mining. He has plucked the argument away from the surrounding text and then proceeds to demolish it in isolation and so implies the author was being incoherent. What he fails to tell you is that the author expresses some concern regarding this specific argument, but nevertheless includes it for completeness. For example the author writes … “not all nontheists would accept…” … and also explains … “All such arguments, though, would lead into the same sort of difficult and controversial issues as does the Nonphysical-vs.-Personal Argument, and so should not be regarded to be among the most forceful of the various atheological arguments available” The fact that Mr Kohlmayer is prepared to quote-mine and so craft a strawman is no surprise, it’s the sort of dishonesty and lack of integrity we have come to expect from believers, nope no surprise there at all. But he does not stop with that, he then goes on to claim that this is part of an atheist worldview because it comes from a popular web-site, and of course every breathing atheist considers every word on this website to be the absolute truth, especially when quote-mined and taken out of context … yea right. OK, lets pause for a moment, what the heck is an atheist worldview? He keeps using that term, but I honestly have no idea what that actually means. Atheism is not a worldview, instead it is a conclusion ..no evidence has been presented to verify the claim that there is a god, so we simply reject the assertions regarding god. In other words, it’s the null hypothesis, that’s it, nothing more. It’s not a belief, it’s not a religion, it says nothing about how you should live, it says nothing about what is right and wrong … it is just the rejection of silly claims about supernatural gods due to zero evidence (So how many times need I repeat it before they get it? … many more I suspect). In the end what am I to conclude? Well Mr Kohlmayer is well qualified, he has earned degrees in philosophy and literature, and has written for a number of newspapers, so what we learn is that being smart does not in any way prevent you from being either irrational or a complete kook, instead you simply think up really smart ways to justify nonsense. Links Share this: Facebook Twitter Reddit Tumblr Pinterest LinkedIn Pocket Skype WhatsApp Email Print Like this: Like Loading...

Thank you for supporting the journalism that our community needs! For unlimited access to the best local, national, and international news and much more, try an All Access Digital subscription: We hope you have enjoyed your trial! To continue reading, we recommend our Read Now Pay Later membership. Simply add a form of payment and pay only 27¢ per article. *Introductory pricing schedule for 12 month: $0.99/month plus tax for first 3 months, $5.99/month for months 4 - 6, $10.99/month for months 7 - 9, $13.99/month for months 10 - 12. Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99/month begins after first year. *Introductory pricing schedule for 12 month: $0.99/month plus tax for first 3 months, $5.99/month for months 4 - 6, $10.99/month for months 7 - 9, $13.99/month for months 10 - 12. Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99/month begins after first year. *Introductory pricing schedule for 12 month: $0.99/month plus tax for first 3 months, $5.99/month for months 4 - 6, $10.99/month for months 7 - 9, $13.99/month for months 10 - 12. Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99/month begins after first year. *Introductory pricing schedule for 12 month: $0.99/month plus tax for first 3 months, $5.99/month for months 4 - 6, $10.99/month for months 7 - 9, $13.99/month for months 10 - 12. Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99/month begins after first year. Thank you for supporting the journalism that our community needs! For unlimited access to the best local, national, and international news and much more, try an All Access Digital subscription: We hope you have enjoyed your trial! To continue reading, we recommend our Read Now Pay Later membership. Simply add a form of payment and pay only 27¢ per article. Thank you for supporting the journalism that our community needs! For unlimited access to the best local, national, and international news and much more, try an All Access Digital subscription: We hope you have enjoyed your trial! To continue reading, we recommend our Read Now Pay Later membership. Simply add a form of payment and pay only 27¢ per article. “Ultimately our goal is to raise between 25 and 30 million dollars in additional capital, through a mix of debt and equity, over the next number of months,” John Arbuthnot said on Monday. Delta 9 will issue eight million new shares at $0.65 per share to raise as much as $5.2 million, and is seeking more capital to finance future expansion plans. Twenty-seven-year-old Arbuthnot, who co-founded Delta 9 Bio-Tech with his father Bill Arbuthnot, will become CEO of the publicly-traded company, which will be renamed Delta 9 Cannabis. Bill Arbuthnot will be president and chairman of the board. Delta 9 Bio-Tech, one of only two Manitoba firms licensed by the federal government to produce cannabis for medical users, could make its debut on the TSX Venture Exchange as soon as today. The listing has received conditional approval from the exchange, said Delta 9 co-founder John Arbuthnot, who is confident his firm will be listed by the end of the week. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 30/10/2017 (483 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 30/10/2017 (483 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Delta 9 Bio-Tech, one of only two Manitoba firms licensed by the federal government to produce cannabis for medical users, could make its debut on the TSX Venture Exchange as soon as today. The listing has received conditional approval from the exchange, said Delta 9 co-founder John Arbuthnot, who is confident his firm will be listed by the end of the week. Twenty-seven-year-old Arbuthnot, who co-founded Delta 9 Bio-Tech with his father Bill Arbuthnot, will become CEO of the publicly-traded company, which will be renamed Delta 9 Cannabis. Bill Arbuthnot will be president and chairman of the board. Delta 9 will issue eight million new shares at $0.65 per share to raise as much as $5.2 million, and is seeking more capital to finance future expansion plans. "Ultimately our goal is to raise between 25 and 30 million dollars in additional capital, through a mix of debt and equity, over the next number of months," John Arbuthnot said on Monday. "And all of that will be deployed over the next few years in our Winnipeg-based production, distribution, and hopefully ultimately retail operation." Arbuthnot said he and his father will be the controlling shareholders of the publicly-traded firm, holding between 55 and 60 per cent of the shares. The deal is being underwritten by investment bank Canaccord Genuity. Currently, 68 companies are licensed by Health Canada to produce cannabis for medical users. Delta 9 was among the first crop of companies to receive a production licence from Health Canada, in 2014. The company employs about 55 people, primarily at its production facility in Winnipeg. More than 2,000 clients are registered to purchase mail-order cannabis from Delta 9, Arbuthnot said. As of June 30, there were 201,398 medical cannabis clients registered with Health Canada, including 3,598 in Manitoba. Some clients are registered to purchase from more than one licensed producer, and registered clients may sign up with any licensed producer in any province. Registering with Health Canada and signing up to purchase cannabis from licensed producers requires a recipient to get a medical document from a physician. In cities across Canada, a number of specialized medical clinics have sprouted up to connect potential medical cannabis users with physicians who may be willing to recommend cannabis. Delta 9 has launched its own such clinic in Winnipeg, the Delta 9 Lifestyle Cannabis Clinic at 478 River Ave. Delta 9’s production licence from Health Canada allows it to devote up to 80,000 square feet of space to growing cannabis, said Arbuthnot. Right now, the company is using roughly 14,000 square feet, leaving plenty of room to grow before additional licensing is required. Delta 9 cultivates its pungent crop in 28 specially-modified shipping containers inside its Winnipeg facility. The expected influx of capital from the public offering will allow Delta 9 to add between 40 and 60 new shipping container grow rooms, Arbuthnot said. "What comes with that expansion is more jobs being created in the community here in Manitoba, increased production capacity allowing us to continue to bring on more and more registered patients both here in Manitoba and outside, and hopefully also the first steps in really positioning ourselves towards taking a hard look at the recreational market for next year." Federal legalization of cannabis for recreational use is expected by July 1, 2018. Under the federal government’s proposed Cannabis Act, which is not yet law, only licensed producers such as Delta 9 will be able to supply cannabis to the legal market. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the day’s breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every morning. By 2020, Arbuthnot said, Delta 9 plans to use its new capital to increase production drastically — from about 1,000 kilograms a year to 17,000 kilos a year. Like other players in Canada’s legal cannabis industry, Delta 9 is not yet profitable. "I think most investors who are looking in the space right now are looking past the short-term financial performance towards some other metrics that are very important for the space," Arbuthnot said, citing his company’s as-yet-unused licensed production capacity as a potential selling point. "We would encourage investors to look forward at things like capacity, as well as to look at some of the other points of our operations, including that we are one of Health Canada’s oldest licensed producers," he said. "And with that comes several years, now, of actual cultivation, processing, distribution, and sale experience." After being listed on the TSX Venture Exchange, Delta 9 Cannabis will trade under the stock symbol "NINE". solomon.israel@freepress.mb.ca @sol_israel

Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption David Sillito explores how Lowry was influenced by his surroundings The works of LS Lowry will continue to divide opinion within the art establishment, predicts the co-curator of a major new Tate exhibition. "He became a football in a certain kind of culture wars - and I think that will go on being the case," said Professor Tim Clark. Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life opens at Tate Britain on Wednesday. The show is the first to be held by a public institution in London since Lowry's death in 1976. Born in 1887, Lowry is best known for his paintings of the industrial landscapes of the north of England. Many works depict the factories and terraced houses - and their working class inhabitants - around Salford and Pendlebury where Lowry lived and worked. "He is not an artist who fits into the Home Counties, Eton and Oxbridge view of England and Englishness," said Professor Clark, speaking at a preview of the Tate show on Monday. Image caption Two of Lowry's Industrial Landscape paintings from the 1950s on display at Tate Britain "He is not a subscriber to the cult of the countryside, country manors or the ambiguity or fatality of Empire. His subject is industry and the form of life that it made. "It puts him outside things - it makes him very hard for the actual cultural elite of England to take seriously." The exhibition, co-curated by art historians Clark and Anne Wagner of the University of California, features more than 90 works - including loans from public and private lenders. Highlights include Ancoats Hospital Outpatients Hall (1952), painted in the early years of the NHS, and The Cripples (1949), which shows people disabled by war and illness. The paintings include the Tate's own Coming Out of School (1927), The Pond (1950), Industrial Landscape (1955) and Hillside in Wales (1962). LS Lowry 1887-1976 LS Lowry is known for his paintings of the industrial landscapes of the north of England. Lowry was born in Stretford, Manchester on 1 November, 1887 to middle class parents. On leaving school in 1904, he began work in Manchester as a clerk with a firm of chartered accountants, studying painting and drawing in the evenings. In 1910 he became a rent collector and clerk with the Pall Mall Property Company in Manchester; he remained a full-time employee and eventually chief cashier until his retirement in 1952. He drew inspiration from his surroundings, particularly Pendlebury, near Manchester, where he lived from 1909 to 1948. From 1948 until his death he lived in the same small, unmodernised house in Cheshire. Lowry died on 23 February 1976, aged 88, at Woods Hospital, Glossop, following an attack of pneumonia. In September 1976, the largest exhibition of Lowry's work to date took place at the Royal Academy. Your Paintings - LS Lowry The Lowry exhibition comes after critics from the art world called on Tate to show its collection of paintings or put them up for sale. Some had questioned whether the gallery on London's Millbank had purposely not shown the Manchester artist's work because he was "too northern". Speaking on Monday, Tate Britain director Penelope Curtis said the Lowry exhibition was for "believers and also for cynics". "What we'd like to think is this show will delight people who love Lowry, but also open the eyes to those who thought that Lowry was not part of mainstream painting," she said. The exhibition also explores Lowry's connections with French art and shows his work alongside French-themed paintings of Vincent van Gogh and Camille Pissarro. The French impressionist, Adolphe Valette, taught Lowry in Manchester for many years. Lowry's works online Watch a slideshow of L.S. Lowry's works, and discover more about this intriguing artist at BBC Your Paintings "The myth says Lowry's an isolated weirdo completely off on his own," said Professor Clark. "Actually he very early on decided he was more likely to get sympathetic attention in Paris than in London." He added: "Lowry's a very English artist indeed, but in order to have the confidence to take on the industrial scene he built on his understanding of the French painting of modern life." Hidden painting The Tate revealed on Monday that a little-known painting on the back of another work at the exhibition shed new light on the way Lowry would revisit and refine his favourite scenes over the years. The unnamed painting on the wooden panel behind The Mission Room (1937) is an earlier version of two works featured in the exhibition: Our Town (1941) and A Town Square (1928). "What this tells us is that Lowry was perfecting and developing his compositions with great care," Professor Wagner told the BBC. "He is possessed with certain compositions throughout the years - he can't get them out of his mind. It's not that he had a paucity of invention, but that these are the works he wants to depict." Image caption The Pond (left) is one of Lowry's large urban panoramas on display The final room of the exhibition brings together, for the first time, seven large-scale panoramas of northern industrial landscapes and the Welsh mining valleys. "They represent a step up in style and a move forward to a deliberate effort to lay hold of this stage industrial society as it was passing away," said Professor Clark. "The paintings do have a valedictory, memorialising tone, though I don't think they are relentlessly glum and gloomy," he added. Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life is at Tate Britain from 26 June - 20 October.

Published: Monday 1 October 2012 Tags: Boroughs agree to fund Freedom Pass for over 60s FREE travel on London's buses, Tubes and Overground services is to be brought back for the over 60s, despite the government trying to push up the age at which the Freedom Pass kicks in. The new 60 starting age for the 24-hour pass begins on 1 November and is expected to benefit an extra 10,000 people a month. It costs £10 to join the scheme. For the last two years, the starting age for the Freedom Pass has been 61, a side-effect of the official plan to raise the retirement age to 68 instead of the 60 for women and 65 for men it is at the moment. But London's boroughs have now clubbed together and agreed to stump up the £320 million it takes to bring the qualification age down to 60 once again. "From November, hundreds of thousands of people will be armed with their 60+ London Oyster card, enjoying all our great city can offer," said London Mayor Boris Johnson

Senior citizens may stand to pay a substantial cost in lost services if Gov. Tom Corbett’s effort to privatize the Pennsylvania Lottery’s management goes nowhere. Already, the costs of the consultants hired to assist the Corbett administration in that endeavor exceed $2.85 million, said Elizabeth Brassell, a spokeswoman for the Department of Revenue, which oversees the lottery. Unless another funding source is found, that money will come out of the lottery profits that are used to pay for senior programs, she said. To understand the impact that would have if it came out of the lottery fund, information available from the state indicates that $2.85 million is enough to: Assist seniors in paying for 137,681 prescriptions through the PACE and PACENET programs, Pay for 1.1 million free transit rides for seniors, Provide 6,055 rebates through the state’s property tax and rent rebate programs, or Cover 576 months of nursing home care, the equivalent of paying the tab for 48 people to stay in a nursing home for a year. Brassell said the consultants’ tabs could grow even higher as the administration continues to explore ways to salvage the contract with United Kingdom-based Camelot Global Services PA, LLC, that Attorney General Kathleen Kane rejected in February. Kane said the contract was unconstitutional and ran counter to state laws. But that didn’t deter Corbett. Instead, he ordered his team to negotiate an extension on Camelot’s bid through June 30 and try to revise the contract to address Kane’s concerns without having to rebid the project. The administration has touted the lottery management privatization as a way to generate $3 billion more for lottery-funded programs for a growing senior population over the next 20 years than the current public management would raise. By 2030, one in 4 people will be over the age of 65, according to Department of Aging. If a contract with Camelot were executed, the private lottery manager would pick up the consultants’ fees. Brassell said that possibility should not be ruled out just yet. But as it stands now, the commonwealth would be stuck paying the tab. Senate Democratic Leader Jay Costa, D-Allegheny, is concerned about the rising costs that will grow the longer the Corbett administration spends trying to address the attorney general’s concerns. “This is throwing good money after bad at the expense of our seniors,” Costa said. “We’d be better served as a commonwealth by pulling the plug on this and driving those resources back into programs for seniors.” But Brassell said even if a contract is not executed with Camelot, “the payments to consultants would be justified by the insight the commonwealth gained through the process.” She said all three of the firms that had expressed interest in the management contract proposed Keno as an opportunity to boost lottery sales and maximize profits. “That industry unanimity and expertise is what ultimately led the administration to decide to pursue Keno,” Brassell said. “Once it's determined how best to approach Keno, that aspect alone stands to contribute about $200 million to lottery profits annually, once fully implemented.” She said a number of other lessons have been learned from marketing and product mix to expanding the player base from the money spent on this pursuit that will benefit the lottery whether it moves forward under public or private management. House Republican spokesman Steve Miskin said the administration’s ultimate goal was to grow lottery profits to support services for an increasing senior population. “If you keep the status quo as Democrats are advocating, money is going to run out very soon,” Miskin said. To date, neither legal consultant DLA Piper of Baltimore, Md., nor financial consultant Greenhill & Co. of Chicago have been paid, Brassell said. But their meters are running. For work performed through mid-March, she said DLA Piper’s costs are in the neighborhood of $2 million. And the firm continues to advise the commonwealth through the contract revision, Brassell said. “We won’t know exactly what will be paid to them until their work on the project is complete,” she said. “We can’t say at this point exactly how much they are owed or will be paid.” As for Greenhill, its contract was built around payments tied to the project achieving certain milestones. At this point, Brassell said it is owed $850,000. But if a contract were to be executed with Camelot, Greenhill – a firm where former Gov. Ed Rendell serves as a senior adviser – stands to receive a success fee that will be in the millions. Administration officials have said all consulting fees would be no more than $30 million if a privatization contract is executed. Not included in the $2.85 million tab are the additional legal fees being paid to the Philadelphia law firm Blank Rome. That is the firm the administration hired to defend it in a pending lawsuit filed by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 13, some Democratic lawmakers and senior citizens over the lottery privatization. That firm’s contract is for $200,000 and to date, it has been paid $116,504 out of the lottery fund, Brassell said. That amount is enough to cover 5,628 prescriptions through the PACE/PACENET program, 46,415 free transit rides for seniors, 247 property tax and rent rebates, or nearly a full year of nursing home care for two individuals. The Pennsylvania Area Agencies on Aging was among the senior citizen organizations that supported the privatization pursuit as a way to boost lottery profits. But Crystal Lowe, executive director of the Pennsylvania Association of the Area Agencies on Aging, said the $3 million spent on consultants would go a long way to whittling down the 6,200 to 6,400 seniors on a waiting list for Area Agency on Aging services. Still, Lowe doesn’t fault the administration for hiring outside experts to help it work through the complicated privatization effort. “I understand the need to get financial and legal expertise in order to do this,” she said. “The lottery is far too precious for it to be at risk. So many people depend on it and we don’t want to do anything that in the long-term compromises that.”

The proposal by 50 Conservative MPs follows plans to turn Britain’s passports blue after Brexit Fifty Conservative MPs are pushing ministers in Theresa May’s cabinet to create a new lottery to raise funds for a £120 million royal yacht to promote post-Brexit Britain. It follows plans to replace the country’s passports, which are currently burgundy and bear EU markings, with a blue British one after Brexit. A new yacht would “showcase post-Brexit Britain and bring trade to our shores”, the MPs said. In a letter sent to the Government, the MPs said that a new national lottery game would allow ordinary Britons to feel “the pride of having a stake” in the boat, which would also “project our humanitarian role across the globe” after Brexit. But the proposal met with an immediate backlash on Twitter, as the MPs faced accusations of being “out of touch” with the public. Angry social media users pointed to the number of homeless people on the streets and the cash-strapped National Health Service, as they questioned the Conservatives’ priorities in spending £120 million on a new yacht. Number of people sleeping rough has DOUBLED since the Tories took over in 2010 and these MPs are focusing on buying a new royal yacht? If you vote Tory you have a hand in this. — Ian M (@Ian_McKinley) December 28, 2017 Prominent Brexiteers such as Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, and Liam Fox, the international trade secretary, were among the recipients of the letter. Defence secretary Gavin Williamson and culture minister Tracey Crouch also received the letter. Royal Yacht Britannia was decommissioned in 1997 by the then-Prime Minister, Tony Blair, on account of its high costs. Until then, it had been regularly used by the Queen and members of the Royal family on their overseas trips. Over the course of 40 years, it took part in almost 1000 official tours and travelled over a million miles at sea. The MPs called on ministers to “right the wrong” of Labour’s decision on the vessel, saying: “As we leave the European Union, there has never been a better time to consider how Britain projects herself on the world stage. “We believe that now is the time to commission a new Royal Yacht Britannia as a new symbol of global Britain, designed and built domestically to showcase the best of UK shipbuilding and industry, and as a platform for promoting trade.” _______________ Read more: Brexit to turn British passports blue British firms fear fate worse than Brexit Year in Review: Populism was on the march in 2017 _______________ It added: “Our country needs and deserves a floating Royal Palace that can be used to host meetings and exhibitions to showcase the best of British business and project our humanitarian role across the globe.” The letter insisted that the replacement vessel would not add a burden to departmental budgets, thanks to the proposal to establish a new national lottery to help pay for it. “It would be the people of the UK through the unique funding method who would have the pride of having a stake in her,” it said. The note was signed by four former ministers, including Andrew Murrison, a former defence minister, and Anne-Marie Trevelyan, a Parliamentary private secretary in the defence department. It was written by Conservative MP Craig Mackinlay, who was previously a member of the UK Independence Party. The campaign was supported by Anthony Morrow, the last captain of HMY Britannia, who said: “A new initiative for a Royal Yacht to replace Britannia is to be warmly welcomed and it would be wonderful to see this come about.”

University of Illinois point guard Jaylon Tate was arrested in Champaign, Ill. early Saturday morning on domestic battery charges, public records show. Champaign police Sgt. Bruce Ramseyer said on News-Gazette.com that the 19-year-old victim, also a University of Illinois athlete, confirmed to police she had been hit once in the face by Tate. MORE: NCAA basketball live scoreboard | UConn clock controversy Ramseyer said the responding officers could see she was spitting blood and had a swollen face. She went to a local hospital's emergency room to be evaluated. Police arrested Tate without incident and he was booked in Champaign County Jail at 6:15 a.m. Tate, 21, will remain in the county jail until at least Sunday morning, when he is expected to make a bond court appearance. He has denied any physical contact with his girlfriend, Ramseyer said. Tate has been indefinitely suspended by Illinois. Athletics Director Josh Whitman and head coach John Groce released the following statement. Tate has started at times during his career at Illinois. He averaged 1.8 points and 2.5 assists per game as a junior. He's the third Illini basketball player to be arrested since August.

Research suggests the majority of women arrested in domestic violence incidents are themselves victims of ongoing abuse from their male partner. The research, by the anti domestic violence group Shine, analysed the arrests of 60 women in Auckland City between April and September last year. The report's author, Deborah MacKenzie, says of 35 women who assaulted their male partners, 19 used violence in response to ongoing abuse. Dual arrests, where both parties are taken into custody, featured in nine out of the 35 cases. Ms MacKenzie says this indicates the police sometimes have difficulty in identifying who the dangerous person is in the relationship. She says officers should be trained to identify which party is most at risk. Ms MacKenzie says in some cases men want to be the first person to call police, knowing they will be treated as the victim rather than the offender.

When you’re depressed, it’s easy to lie in bed and consider staying there forever – here are some suggestions for owning the world you might be scared of Text Beth McColl I wasted most of my time when I was depressed. I stared at walls instead of doing my essays. I got in from work and lay face-down on the floor instead of getting started on dinner, putting my clothes in the wash, or calling someone who loved me. I watched two seasons of Nashville before I realise how much I hated Nashville. Then I watched the third season of Nashville. It was so fucked up. Point is – in the midst of soul-crushing depression, wasting time is easy. It’s understandable. When you’re in the deepest dark of depression your only job is to survive. It’s enough to begin and end each day alive. Getting out of bed is almost impossible, getting a glass of water takes 45 minutes. You weigh up the pros and cons of leaving your room to pee. ‘Could I pee in that cup?’ you think. ‘Is that a thing I could do?’ But what about after? What about when the depression lifts – and it will lift, it will, it will. What about then, when you’re standing almost healed among the wreckage, wondering how to begin building it into a life worth living? This was me last year. I’d gotten over the worst of the breakup that felt like it would kill me. I was taking my Prozac on time, every day. I was putting an end to those harmful behaviours that had kept me locked in a depressive state for two years. I was eating. I was taking walks. Basically, I was only a little bit depressed, instead of full blown suicidal. Progress, sure, but six months after this turning point, I was still sort of in the same place. My self-destructive behaviours had morphed into inertia. I was so afraid of ever going back to The Worst Place that I didn’t dare to take any risks on myself, didn’t dare to take a step forward in case I stumbled and brought the world crashing back down. I didn’t write, I didn’t date. In short, I didn’t Do. But here’s the thing. The best of life is in the Doing. It’s in the Deciding To Apply For That Job. It’s in the Finally Learning How To Knit. It’s in the Healing. It’s in the Getting Up Everyday To Do Yoga. We could do these things, right? We survived the worst of the worst, these things should be easy. So why aren’t we doing them right now? Why are we keeping them undone? Maybe it’s because we’re avoidant idiots with hearts of gold. Maybe it’s because we’re just not ready (which is fine). But maybe it’s simply because, undone, they can’t be proven undoable. It’s like the promise of a feast at the end of a long day. It both starves and sustains us. And the real terror is that you can stay hungry forever. It’s a possibility. It happens. What’s to stop it happening to you? IT’S YOU THAT DECIDES IT CAN’T HAPPEN You can calmly accept that, if you want to have something, you will need to reach out and take it. You will have to fill your own belly with food. It is as terrifying and as easy as that. Your best life will not be handed to you by the universe. But that’s OK. Because the universe doesn’t know what you want. The universe is like that great aunt you have who smells like medicine and knits you a jumper for Christmas that’s two sizes too big and has three sleeves and says ‘From Your Aunt Morgaret’ on the front even though that’s not her name. That’s nobody’s name. MAKE LISTS Take it as lightly as you can. Be nice to yourself. Hold your own hand. Understand that these are things that need to happen. They’re things that can happen. You can make the phone calls you need to make, you can fill out the forms that need filling in, you can learn what needs to be learned. You can push through the panic and do what you need to move forward. You can do these things, not because the world will fall apart if you don’t, but because you are as important as any other person on this planet, and your life will be better and more enjoyable if you try your best to get to where you want to be. Also because it’s what Aunt Morgaret would have wanted.

Israel’s foreign minister on Wednesday said it's not the business of the United States whether his country decides to attack Iran. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said that warnings from the United States and Russia about an attack would not affect Israel’s decision-making. ADVERTISEMENT “[It] is not their business,” Lieberman said in an interview with an Israeli TV station Wednesday, according to The Associated Press. “The security of the citizens of Israel, the future of the state of Israel, this is the Israeli government’s responsibility,” he said. Lieberman’s comments come after Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey said Sunday that an Israeli attack would be “destabilizing” for the region. President Obama has said that the United States will not allow the Iranians to obtain a nuclear weapon, but Israeli officials say their country’s existence is threatened by a nuclear Iran. The Israelis have suggested they might attack Iran to stop its nuclear program with or without U.S. assistance. Iran says that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only, but Israel, the United States and their allies believe Iran is striving to create a nuclear weapon. U.S. officials have pushed Israel to wait for sanctions against Iran to have an impact on the country that could convince the Iranians to abandon their nuclear pursuits. U.S. National Security Adviser Tom Donilon just returned from a visit to Israel, where he met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other top Israeli officials. Netanyahu and Obama have a meeting scheduled March 5 at the White House while Netanyahu is in the country for the AIPAC convention.

Singaporean retail service provider (RSP) MyRepublic has called "bull****" on claims by Australian National Broadband Network (NBN) CEO Bill Morrow that consumers don't need and wouldn't use 1Gbps broadband, and has announced that it is launching a "gigatown" to prove customers' desire for higher speeds. "It's absolute bull****," MyRepublic Australia managing director Nicholas Demos said in an interview with ZDNet. "Australians want faster internet ... it is just a ludicrous statement to say there is not a requirement for it." Demos argued that 82 percent of NBN's users are on speeds of 25Mbps or less only because the incumbent RSPs have simply moved customers from their existing plans and price points onto the same plans and pricing on NBN services. In the 12 weeks since launching as an NBN RSP, Demos said MyRepublic has signed up 10,000 customers to its high-speed plans, which proves that customers do want faster services -- as does the fact that 40 percent of its New Zealand customers are already on 1Gbps plans. Arguing in November that the NBN had not yet properly launched, because RSPs are simply offering the same services, speeds, and pricing as before, MyRepublic offers just one package at one price on the highest possible speed tier available for each customer. Demos blamed the lack of 1Gbps NBN products on the network company's connectivity virtual circuit (CVC) charge, which reserves a consumer's bandwidth from the point of interconnect and is priced depending on usage of data. "The CVC pricing that the NBN are charging, it's not economical," he told ZDNet. "Yes, they do offer retailers such as us a product with CVC pricing -- a one-gig product -- but it's just priced out of the market and no consumer will buy it at that price in Australia." MyRepublic has announced that it plans to convince NBN of the desirability of 1Gbps broadband by bearing the cost of connecting consumers in one Australian town with 1Gbps services and gauging uptake of the service. "We're launching a one-gigabit town in Australia ... just to show there is demand for it, it does work, people want it, but it's the [NBN] product that is wrong, which is why you can't offer it to the mass market at the moment," Demos told ZDNet. The RSP will on Friday put out the call for consumers to express their interest in receiving a 1Gbps broadband connection, which will inform MyRepublic's decision on which town to connect -- although it would have to be in an area with full fibre-to-the-premises connectivity, Demos conceded. The 1Gbps pricing will remain the same as MyRepublic's other packages, at AU$60 per month, with the gigatown to be launched in the next few months. MyRepublic's statements follow Morrow's claim during NBN's financial results presentation on Thursday that RSPs are not offering 1Gbps packages to consumers due to a lack of demand. "We have roughly a million and a half homes that can have a technology to get a gigabit-per-second service capability today. We have a product that we can offer the retailers, should they want to sell it," Morrow said. "The reality is that a couple of the retailers have signed up for a trial ... but they have chosen not to offer that to the consumers. "I will presume it's because there isn't that big of a demand out there for them to actually develop a product to sell to those end users." On its fixed-line network, NBN again reported the majority of its users as being on the 25/5Mbps speed tier as of December 31, with 51 percent of users choosing these speeds, while 31 percent were on the 12/1Mbps speed tier; 13 percent were on 100/40Mbps; 4 percent were on 50/20Mbps; and 1 percent were on 25/10Mbps. Calling 1Gbps "a lot of bandwidth", Morrow claimed NBN has "scoured" the globe to speak with RSPs and carriers that have 1Gbps products that have seen limited uptake due to consumers not needing those speeds, or not wanting to pay for them. "We asked the question, 'Has anybody actually used that amount of bandwidth?' And the answer was unanimously 'no'," Morrow said. "There are not that many applications that warrant much above the products that are being sold on NBN today, so I suspect that's the main reason. 'If I have to pay for it to move from 100[Mbps] up to a gigabit per second, I don't really have the application or the need for it, so why would I pay more to do that?' I believe that's the market dynamic that is occurring today." Morrow acknowledged that there will be applications in future that will need more bandwidth, such as alternate reality, artificial intelligence, and 8K video, but said the demand is not there now. "All of these other things could certainly drive up more of that consumer need, but we haven't seen that as of yet," NBN's chief executive said. "Even if we offered it for free, we see the evidence around the world that they wouldn't use it anyway." NBN has since claimed that Morrow's statements were taken out of context. "NBN is disappointed to see media coverage today has taken comments on internet speeds by our CEO out of context," an NBN spokesperson told ZDNet. "While the NBN network does offer 1Gbps wholesale services to retailers, to date no retailer has elected to sell these services. That is a commercial decision for the retailers." Morrow's statements came despite the City of Adelaide last month putting out a call for providers for its 10Gbps fibre broadband network; Telstra launching a 1Gbps 4G mobile network; and the majority of RSPs in New Zealand offering a 1Gbps service as of the end of last year across the New Zealand government's NBN equivalent. In Singapore, 10Gbps broadband services have been offered by both Singtel and M1 for a year.

To celebrate International Women’s Day 2017 we take a look at some inspirational and bold Welsh women from our history. 5. KATE ROBERTS Kate Roberts was our “Queen of Letters” and one of ‘the most important Welsh woman of the 20th century’ according to her biographer Alan Llwyd. She was a prominent author, a prolific journalist and a major benefactor. Kate Roberts was one of the earliest members of the National Party and was the owner of Y Faner. She served Wales on various committees and in eisteddfods, and was prominent in several national and local campaigns, including the one to establish Ysgol Twm o’r Nant school in Denbigh. She lived a varied and industrious life, but also a life that was filled with tragedy and sadness. 4. MARGARET JONES Margaret Jones (1842-1902), was a woman from Rhosllannerchrugog, north Wales, who became famous in the nineteenth century as “The Welsh Lady from Canaan”. She travelled extensively and spent time living in Paris, Jerusalem, Morocco, the United States and Australia. She published two books of her observations, “Llythyrau Cymraes o Wlad Canaan [The Letters of a Welsh Lady from Canaan] (1869) and “Morocco, a’r hyn a welais yno” [Morocco, and what I saw there] (1883). 3. ZONIA BOWEN Zonia Bowen is an Englishwoman who embraced the Welsh language and became a key figure in the period leading up to the establishment of Merched y Wawr. She came to Wales at age 17, married a Welsh man and learnt Welsh – well before the days of Welsh lessons for adults. 2. ESME KIRBY Esmé Kirby was the conservationist who formed the Snowdonia National Park Society. Her career began as an actress, and at 23 she married Thomas Firbank, whose bestselling book, I Bought a Mountain (1940) tells of their married life at Dyffryn, a 3,000-acre farm near Capel Curig. Their marriage ended as the Second World War began but Esmé continued to farm on her own in the rugged Snowdonia landscape and made a success of it. She remarried and became a volunteer conservationist and formed the Snowdonia National Park Society, to ensure the mountains were protected from future development. The local farming community saw her strength and determination, and helped her to succeed… She made a success of Dyffryn against all the odds, leaving a lasting legacy. 1. KATE BOSSE GRIFFITHS Kate Bosse-Griffiths, of German-Jewish descent, succeeded in fleeing from Germany to the Britain in 1937. She fell in love, married, began writing in Wales and established Cylch Cadwgan whilst the Nazis made life in Germany and Europe hell on Earth. Her family was persecuted. A few tried to become a part of the system, others struggled in spite of the system, and some self-sacrifed in opposition of the system. In Oxford she met fellow Classics scholar and Egyptologist J. Gwyn Griffiths and they soon settled as a married couple in Rhondda where Kate established the Cadwgan Literary Circle. She fled the brutal regime of the Nazis and became one of Wales’ leading academic and literary figures. The story would have been lost forever if it wasn’t for the thousand and more pages that have been kept by the family; letters, diaries and documents. They give an account of the attacks during Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass), life under the insane regime, details of prison camps, fleeing to Shanghai, suicide, imprisonment and killing. Hers is a story of love and hatred, protection and persecution, yearning and terror during the most destructive period in European history. Read more at ylolfa.com Advertisements

EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn. — When Minnesota Vikings coach Mike Zimmer canceled the last session of minicamp as a reward for the team’s offseason work, most players were surprised and delighted by the early start on summer vacation. Moritz Böhringer wasn’t so sure. More Vikings coverage "I wanted to practice," Böhringer said, smiling wryly, "because it’s always good to get some more reps." Nobody on the 90-man roster needs more training than Böhringer, the rookie wide receiver from Germany who became the first draft pick in the history of the NFL to come directly from a country outside the United States. His deficiencies haven’t been for a lack of dedication, though. This is simply the situation he’s in, having discovered the sport about five years ago through YouTube videos of Vikings running back Adrian Peterson. He has played competitively for merely three seasons at a level nowhere near as sophisticated or intense as the league is entering. "He’s starting from way, way, way behind," offensive coordinator Norv Turner said. For the Schwabisch Hall Unicorns in 2015, Böhringer had 16 touchdown receptions and an average of 20.9 yards per catch in 21 games on his way to the German Football League’s rookie of the year award. The Unicorns only ran 70 or 80 plays out of five or six formations, paling in comparison to the complexity of Turner’s playbook with the Vikings. Naturally, Böhringer’s helmet has been spinning this spring in his attempt to grasp the route concepts, blocking responsibilities and advanced footwork technique required to excel at his highly skilled position. He threw up on the field during his first practice in Minnesota, last month at rookie minicamp. Throughout the workouts with the full team over the past three-plus weeks, Böhringer has dropped plenty of passes. "Most of the time it’s a mental thing, because I’m not 100 percent comfortable with the playbook," Böhringer said Thursday after the Vikings wrapped up their offseason program and adjourned for six weeks until training camp. "But I think it’ll come after time." The Vikings have raved about the 22-year-old’s acuity, despite his inexperience. General manager Rick Spielman declared Böhringer "off-the-charts smart," fully confident he can grasp the intricacies of American football with time. "You want to start at the grassroots and work your way up, and we’ve been doing that with him. He’s extremely intelligent, so he catches onto things pretty well," wide receivers coach George Stewart said. "He understands exactly what I’m trying to communicate to him. He has a great understanding of the language." FOLLOW US FS North on Facebook FS North on Twitter FS North on YouTube FS North on Instagram Culture hasn’t been an issue, either, beyond a couple of predictable hiccups. His golf debut didn’t go so well — "I don’t think it’s my sport, but I tried," he said with a laugh — and he was unaware of the American custom of tipping restaurant servers that is uncommon in Europe. "We go out to eat almost every night, so that’s something that was kind of eye-opening for him and he’s still kind of getting used to," said quarterback Joel Stave, his roommate this spring. "Every once in a while, he’ll leave a dollar and we’ve got to cover it for him." Böhringer and Stave have formed a playbook study group with another rookie, tight end David Morgan. "He’s getting more comfortable with the offense, he’s getting more comfortable with just football here, and he’s getting more comfortable with the guys," Stave said. "He seems more confident, and it seems like he’s having more fun. It’s been a lot of fun getting to know him and a lot of fun getting to talk to him and see what it’s like coming from a different background like that." Targeted as a prospect through the NFL’s expanding international outreach program, Böhringer blew away the scouts at Florida Atlantic University’s pro day workout with a 4.43-second 40-yard dash. His 6-foot-4, 227-pound frame stoked the buzz around the league. Spielman called Stewart into his office one day during the pre-draft evaluation process at team headquarters to watch a YouTube highlight video of Böhringer’s GFL games . They were sold. Rather than risking a wait to sign him after the draft, the Vikings took him in the sixth round. "There are not a lot of receivers who are as big as me and have athletic ability. I think this combination is pretty unique," Böhringer said. He’s equally aware of the marketing implications accompanying his arrival. "I think that’s the best way to spread the game, having players from other countries be as role models," Böhringer said. Soon he’ll report to training camp and put the pads on, bringing a new bunch of challenges. "I still have to get used to that it’s my job now," Böhringer said, "and not just a hobby."

An unfakeable test for cocaine use that only requires a single fingerprint has been developed by scientists. It is the first of its kind to test for ingestion of the drug, and is sufficiently developed that its creators expect it to be miniaturised into a portable device and in the hands of law enforcement agencies within ten years. By using mass spectrometry, the test is able to detect the presence of chemicals excreted as cocaine metabolises in the body, providing immediate confirmation of a suspect’s cocaine use. Such a device would be a revolution for law enforcement, as it would enable police, prison officers and other agents to establish if a person had taken the drug at the scene, without the need for invasive blood or urine tests. It would also remove the need for specialists and safe storage and disposal of bodily fluids, reducing costs and rapidly speeding up the process. It is likely become a commonly used device, akin to the breathalyser, that police use during standard stop-and-searches and raids. The test, which was developed by scientists from the University of Surrey with support from researchers from the Netherlands Forensic Institute, the UK’s National Physical Laboratory, King’s College London and Sheffield Hallam University, is notable for ability to test for ingestion of cocaine, rather than just skin contact. “When someone has taken cocaine, they excrete traces of benzoylecgonine and methylecgonine as they metabolise the drug, and these chemical indicators are present in fingerprint residue,” explained study lead author Dr Melanie Bailey, from the University of Surrey. “For our part of the investigations, we sprayed a beam of solvent onto the fingerprint slide (a technique known as Desorption Electrospray Ionisation, or DESI) to determine if these substances were present. DESI has been used for a number of forensic applications, but no other studies have shown it to demonstrate drug use.” The scientists verified the test’s efficacy by comparing its results to standard saliva tests, thus demonstrating that it would be reliable enough to use in real-world situations. As it tests using a fingerprint, the device could also simultaneously verify the subject’s identify, meaning it would be – at least in theory – impossible to fake. “The beauty of this method is that, not only is it non-invasive and more hygienic than testing blood or saliva, it can’t be faked,” said Bailey. “By the very nature of the test, the identity of the subject is captured within the fingerprint ridge detail itself.” Detailed in research published today in the journal Analyst, the test only requires miniaturisation before it can be used by law enforcement. And due to advances in this area, the researchers are confident this will be a quick process. “We are only bound by the size of the current technology. Companies are already working on miniaturised mass spectrometers, and in the future portable fingerprint drugs tests could be deployed,” added Bailey. “This will help to protect the public and indeed provide a much safer test for drug users.” However, the public reaction to the device remains to be seen. In a world where increasing police powers and control are a genuine concern, a fingerprint scanning device of this type could be met with considerable suspicion and resistance.

The problem with Xbox Kinect - aside from a decent range of top-drawer titles - is the inability to play without a large living room and yards of space. Gaming accessories manufacturer Nyko seeks to change all that, though, with this badboy accessory. The Nyko Zoom for Kinect reduces the space required to play Kinect by up to 40 per cent. By my calculations, that means the recommended distance required to stand away from the sensor can be lowered from 8ft to under five. The Zoom clips on top of the sensor without any modification and effectively makes Kinect look the wrong way through a pair of binoculars. It also comes bundled with iBoutique Zoom Lens Cleaner, a brush-like device of which the name is fairly self explanatory. The Nyko Zoom will see its UK release on 31 August. Amazon is now taking pre-orders for £36. ®

The use of the word “toon” to describe MMORPG characters is a contentious one, with fans divided over its annoyance or acceptance. But when it came to one MMORPG, it was nothing but proper terminology to call all characters just this. Toontown Online was one of those “kiddie MMOs” that you probably ignored unless you happen to fall within its demographical clutches back in the day. While it lasted for about a decade, the game’s operation would be notable for its repeated transformation and uncertain status. With a silly, cartoon-like look and theme, this MMO attempted to bring a levity to a genre that was often marinating in deep fantasy lore and statistical theorycrafting. But when you wanted to eschew dragon fighting for slapstick pie throwing, there was no better game out there. Let’s take a look! M.I.C.K.E.Y. MMO.U.S.E. The year 2003 witnessed an explosion of MMORPGs that had been in development after the first generation of graphical MMOs rose to such prominence in the late 1990s. Tucked among Star Wars Galaxies, EVE Online, Shadowbane, Lineage II, and PlanetSide was an odd little title from the Mouse House itself. Disney had been looking to take its brand online since 1996 (with the proposed yet never-developed HercWorld). Around that time, one Imagineer named Jesse Schell created a virtual game of tag between Mickey and friends as a proof-of-concept that gained traction among the company. Disney’s Internet Zone at its Epcot theme park incorporated the Toontag game for a decade and led to the idea of a family-friendly online game that would be safe and fun for all ages. The pitch that the internal team gave to its higher-ups was that of a “Massively Multiplayer Online Theme Park,” which obviously appealed to Disney’s sensibilities. But the “20 MMOs in one” concept was too expensive — to the tune of $100 million — and so the team started working on an Atlantis: The Lost Empire MMO as an alternative. This project didn’t make it to launch (fortunately, considering that the movie floundered at the box office), and the team moved on to creating a town full of cartoon characters in the vein of the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit? With about six million dollars budgeted, Toontown began production in 2000. Having run its beta (or “sneak peek”) since late 2002, Toontown Online was ready to go prime time with its launch on June 2nd, 2003. Disney Online marketed the game as a “non-violent” alternative to other MMOs that incorporated the experience from Disney’s famous theme park Imagineers. “We made Toontown a place for everyone, much like our theme parks, so it would appeal to a mass audience. In addition, and in the tradition of the Disney theme parks, this online attraction will grow over time, continuously offering our guests an ever-changing adventure,” said Managing Director Ken Goldstein. A cartoony community In the game, players would take on the role of colorful Toons who were attempting to defend their town against soulless “Cogs” — robots who wanted to turn everything into dull grey structures. The only way to fight back was to employ slapstick gags as weapons, such as spritzers, megaphones, or good ol’ fashioned pies in a turn-based showdown. Either the Toons would prevail with their hilarity or the Cogs would overwhelm them with sadness. Housing, parties, and minigames were also par for the course when a player Toon didn’t want to go out to tackle the Cogs. Interestingly enough, while the game was an official Disney product and featured several licensed characters, the player Toons themselves looked like they came straight from the Looney Toons library. Toontown Online was specifically designed to encourage players to be social and varied in their activities. They had to farm jellybeans from minigames to purchase gags for combat, and to play those minigames and progress in fights, they needed friends. “It was almost a religious thing with us: If this is going to be an online game, everything about it should be about playing with other people,” said Schell. ToonFest and SpeedChat While no massive hit, Toontown Online nevertheless became a modest success both critically (it was awarded “MMORPG of the Year” in 2003 by Computer Gaming World) and among its growing crowd of fans. A subscription fee of $9.95 a month kept the title somewhat affordable for families and kids, and a “safe” communication system called SpeedChat. In design, SpeedChat would select pre-made sentences to keep kids from getting harassed, and grouping could only happen if kids exchanged special codes in-person with their friends. Not surprisingly, players found a way to pass out these codes in game even so, arranging housing decorations to form the letters and numbers. Sony Online Entertainment, a major player in the MMORPG market in the 2000s, got in on the action in 2005. A subsidiary of SOE called Platform Publishing helped to get Toontown Online to retail shelves in an attempt to grow the game’s market. By 2006, 15 million characters had been created for the game. To its credit, Disney threw a lot of support behind Toontown Online, including hosting a couple of player conventions that it called ToonFest. The first ToonFest was staged in 2006 and got a major publicity bump by the Disney Channel, with a second festival to follow in 2007. Another cool event was an in-game charity event in 2004 in which players recovered Cog-captured buildings to raise money for the Starlight Starbright Children’s Foundation. The end (or is it?) The long-running MMO stumbled to a halt on September 19th, 2013, almost 10 years after it first released. No specific reason save that of “shifting development” from Disney was given for the closure, although the company encouraged players to check out its other titles (such as Club Penguin). CNN put the blame for the shutdown on Toontown Online’s declining population but reported that thousands of players had signed a petition to get Disney to change its mind. The news outlet noted that the game had a special significance to certain gamers: “Because Toontown was a family game open to anyone seven and older, many of its more dedicated users started as children and grew into young adults while playing the game, making it an integral part of their childhood.” It wasn’t as though Disney was trying to ditch and forget about Toontown Online entirely, however. Rumor was that the title wasn’t making enough money in its current format, and whispers of a mobile port surfaced soon after the shutdown. As of today, any further plans with the game have yet to be unveiled. Toontown Rewritten Not willing to let a good thing die, the Toontown fan community gathered the perishing title into its arms and breathed a single word in its ear: “Emulator.” This, mere months after Toontown Online was canceled, Toontown Rewritten started alpha testing. “We know that it has been a long time since we originally promised the Toontown Rewritten alpha, however we do have good reason for the delays,” the project team posted in October 2013. “The more we worked on Toontown Rewritten, the more we saw that this game is severely outdated and needs a big rework. These past three months we have been setting groundwork to make sure that this game is not only revived, but revived so that it will last.” This hard work paid off, as Toontown Rewritten progressed through alpha, beta, and finally launch. The fan emulator, which publicly distances itself from the Disney moniker, has been running and delivering new content for four years now. It really goes to show that you never know how certain MMOs can make a lasting imprint in the minds and hearts of fans and how these games can become virtual homes that players never want to leave.

Having broken into the England Test side the player’s decision to walk away from the game aged 25 caused quite a stir but he explains that, for him, there is a lot more to life than cricket Professional sport is scarred by stories of ageing athletes clinging to faded glory, or by bleak tales of their struggles in retirement, and so Zafar Ansari stands out in shimmering contrast. Ansari played three Tests late last year, his debut in Bangladesh and two in India, picking up five wickets and grinding out a highest score of 32. It was a start in the hardest arena of cricket and so Ansari’s retirement in April, at the age of 25, seemed unusual. Of course those who knew him felt no shock. Alec Stewart, the director of cricket at Surrey, for whom Ansari had played since the age of eight, was supportive. “It’s a brave and considered decision,” Stewart said. “He was always open and honest.” County cricket: Yorkshire v Surrey and more as day-night matches begin – live! Read more Stewart alluded to Ansari’s academic background, for the left-arm spinner had obtained a double first in social and political science from Trinity Hall, Cambridge, as well as a subsequent MA in history. “When Zafar was reading a novel, the rest of our boys would be doing a colouring-in book,” Stewart said in his homespun way. Kevin Pietersen, who played with Ansari at Surrey, tweeted amusingly: “Way too clever to be a cricketer!” Over the last six weeks I have got to know Ansari a little better. It is striking to receive some beautifully written emails from a sportsman, whether young or retired, about subjects stretching from I Am Not Your Negro, the recent James Baldwin documentary, to Ansari’s encouraged and flowing analysis of Labour’s unexpected election results. Books and writing have been at the heart of our exchanges, from Hisham Matar’s The Return to Norman Mailer’s The Fight. It seems fitting that Ansari suggests we meet at the National Theatre, rather than The Oval, so he can talk for the first time in detail about his reasons for leaving cricket. After we have chatted for an hour he relives the quietly dramatic moment when he told his Surrey team-mates he was retiring a month into a new season: “There definitely were a few tears. I was choking up, and eventually crying. Other guys were also in tears. Alec Stewart choked up and Kumar Sangakkara said some lovely things. A physio I’ve known a long time was crying his eyes out. It was tough.” Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ansari appeals unsuccessfully during the County Championship Division One match between Surrey and Lancashire at The Oval in April. It was to be his last game as a professional cricketer. Photograph: Jordan Mansfield/Getty Images Ansari smiles at his bittersweet memory. “It’s difficult when you don’t have a Twitter account, and are reserved in your public output, because these are very hard decisions you spend hours talking about with your family. But once you stop playing it’s natural there are lots of things you’ll miss. So it was reassuring it felt difficult. “It would actually be inhuman to think that you’d just forget. You can’t move away from something you did for so long without an ache. But I’m fortunate this is my choice – rather than a decision forced on me by injury or age. It happened over a long period as my competitive instinct was diminishing – and there was a fundamental sense I needed to be not only obsessive about cricket but obsessive about constantly improving my game. I started to tire of the complete immersion demanded by cricket.” Ansari’s involvement with England’s Test team underlined that consuming focus – while making him regret the way in which international sport isolated him from real life. “I don’t want to make it sound negative but being an England cricketer requires a single-mindedness about cricket I lack. At Surrey, having lots of disparate things in my life helped my cricket. But this approach was not appropriate with England. The standard of cricket and the intensity of being abroad for 12 weeks, with the press around you, meant I could not be myself. I was missing out on things that are authentic to me.” He was proud to have become a Test cricketer and Ansari knew he should be thinking more about bowling to Cheteshwar Pujara and Virat Kohli than worrying about Donald Trump. But such a restricted worldview did not make sense. “It was a very politically significant time. Trump was elected on the first day of our opening Test in India. I was batting at 10 and we weren’t allowed our phones in the dressing room. I was getting snippets of information from security but I felt so disconnected from something I would have been hyper-connected to here. The combination of playing very difficult cricket, while missing things that mattered so much, made me think more clearly about my future. Pink balls at night may not be every County Championship batsman’s delight | Vic Marks Read more “I heard the news about Trump at the end of that day’s play. We got our phones and it was a shocking moment. I expected [Hillary] Clinton to edge it and found it difficult to accept. I’ve since focused most on the policy – like changes to healthcare provision, the attempted Muslim ban, as well as the ramping up of immigration and deportations – rather than just thinking of Trump as the clown he often appears. It’s important to be less hysterical about the person but more hysterical about the political implications.” Could he talk about such concerns to his England team-mates? “Yeah, and I think they enjoyed the fact we had conversations around the breakfast table that we wouldn’t normally have as cricketers. They are by no means apolitical but their focus is inward a lot of the time. So we had some interesting discussions and there was a range of opinions. “I don’t know if there were any people who were pro-Trump. But some were definitely sympathetic to things he was saying. I took it as a positive that there was space for these conversations. But when you have a degree there’s this expectation you can provide answers to questions you have no idea about. I’m just not that well-read so sometimes it was quite funny.” Facebook Twitter Pinterest Zafar Ansari bowls during his Test debut for England against Bangladesh at the Shere Bangla National Stadium in Dhaka in October 2016. Photograph: Philip Brown/Popperfoto/Getty Images Just as people expect Ansari to be the proverbial boffin, it was assumed by some that he would leave cricket for a career in the City. “People were really supportive of my decision to retire. Mike Atherton wrote a really nice piece – as did Ali Martin in the Guardian. But there can be the assumption that because you’ve been to Cambridge you’d only give up cricket to earn a lot of money. My girlfriend and friends found that quite funny – because they know how far it is from the truth. Cricketers don’t get paid like footballers but I was earning more than my parents – and they have been academics for 40 years. So if money was a motivation I would have stayed longer in cricket.” Ansari smiles when he outlines his plans for the next year. “I’m going to work for a charity, starting in September, which supports young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. It’s called Just For Kids Law and they’re in north London. They work with young people involved in the criminal justice system. These are kids from disadvantaged backgrounds with educational difficulties, exclusions and immigration cases. I’m doing a year there as a trainee youth advocate while taking an evening law conversion course. It’s a great opportunity to develop new skills and, hopefully, help a few people.” Compassion for others, and curiosity about their lives, beats just as strongly inside Ansari as his intelligence. “There are many people in cricket who are cleverer than me,” he suggests. “I think what perhaps differentiated me from other players wasn’t necessarily my ‘intelligence’ but rather my wider interests. I love going to the cinema, I love listening to podcasts and hearing people talking about politics and broader social issues.” Did he sometimes feel unhappy as a cricketer? “It sometimes felt claustrophobic with a sense of me wanting to be doing other things. It was a restlessness rather than an unhappiness. I was tussling with it for two years and I worried about letting people down who had invested a lot in me. Alec Stewart had always been very good to me so I was concerned that, because of his own passionate commitment to cricket, he would struggle with me walking away at 25 – and saying that there is more to my life than wanting to be an international cricketer. But it was absolutely the opposite. Alec and everyone at Surrey understood – which really helped. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ansari receives a Surrey youth cricket award from the former Surrey and England captain Adam Hollioake in 2003. Photograph: Adam Davy/Surrey County Cricket Club/Press Association Images “Since retiring it’s become obvious that the temporality of cricket is so distinctive when you’re a player. You spend five days a week from 9am to 7pm at the ground watching cricket, surrounded by cricketers. But since I’ve stopped playing I’ve started to follow the game more at home. I’ve followed England the last few weeks – and I’m engaging with it most days. I look at the scores online and I might watch 20 minutes of highlights. So that’s 40 minutes a day where I’ve followed cricket for pleasure. I didn’t do that as a player.” Have there been days when he regretted his decision? “No. I’ve been back to The Oval a few times, as I’m still involved with Surrey’s charitable arm, and I’ve been up to the dressing room during games. It’s felt very comfortable.” Ansari can now savour his three Test appearances. “Absolutely. The crowds weren’t that large in India [in Rajkot and Visakhapatnam] or Bangladesh – but they were intense and exuberant. The atmosphere made it special and I am more and more proud of those five wickets and the 49 runs I scored. My first Test wicket in Bangladesh was quite magical and it meant a lot when I was handed my cap. Mark Ramprakash [England’s batting coach] and I had played a little cricket together and he spoke incredibly kindly about me. That sense of entering an exclusive group is something to be proud of.” Eoin Morgan says dropping himself from series decider was a ‘tough call’ Read more Did his more expansive interests outside cricket help him cope with failure better – when he dropped a catch or bowled poorly? “I probably felt those failures as much as anyone. In the moment of failure, or even the day of the failure, it hurt. But I could rationalise the situation a little more easily. I could genuinely say to myself that there are things that are more important in my life.” Ansari flummoxed many whenever he was asked to pick his dream slip cordon. In 2015 he listed Malcolm X, Rosa Luxemburg, Chimamanda Adichie and Angela Davis. He laughs. “We get asked to do them every year and it’s funny how people pick up on that particular selection. Malcolm X is definitely someone I’m fascinated by but the last one I did included Rihanna and James Baldwin. It’s just fun.” There is a seriousness, however, to Ansari’s interest in race and politics. His Masters’ thesis explored the legacy of the Deacons for Defense – an obscure 1960s black civil rights group in Mississippi and Louisiana. “They were more conservative than the Black Panthers. But they were based in the deep south and reflected their geography. The Black Panthers had a more coherent leftist ideology but the expressive politics of the Deacons for Defense were very powerful. Considering America today, with Black Lives Matter, I looked back and tried to assess all the Deacons of Defense had done.” Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I started to tire of the complete immersion demanded by cricket,’ says Ansari, who will start working for a charity and studying at a law conversion course in September. Photograph: Sarah Lee/for the Guardian The world today is even more fractured and dangerous. With a white mother and having been born in Ascot and gone to Cambridge, Ansari stresses that: “I obviously had a privileged upbringing. But I think I look at the urgent questions we face today through my father’s eyes, to some extent, an Asian man and a Muslim. He arrived in the UK from Pakistan in the early 1960s, aged 14, and I always try to consider things from his perspective. “Society is in a concerning place whatever your background. There are troubling questions about inequality and the atomisation of people – the way in which societies are splitting up socially and economically. There are 3.1 million Muslims in this country and it’s often very difficult to have conversations about divisions in British society after devastating attacks on all communities. But it’s important we keep having those conversations.” Cricket is a wonderful diversion – and, as Ansari makes clear, it can also play a part in uniting communities. “It was a special moment this winter when we had four very different England players with a Muslim background in Moeen Ali, Adil Rashid, Haseeb Hameed and me on tour. They will continue to be great representatives for England.” Ansari will make his own lasting contribution in very different fields. At 25 it’s impossible to know yet where his best work will unfold – but it is easy to believe that, beyond cricket, so many more people will benefit from his intelligence and concern for the world around him. Zafar Ansari’s real life, after all, has only just begun.

Image caption The Titan Arum is endangered in its natural habitat of Sumatra's tropical forests The National Botanic Garden of Belgium is staying open late to give visitors a chance to see one of the world's largest and smelliest flowers. The Titan Arum rarely blooms, though the Brussels specimen is said to have done so three times since 2008. The flower rises 2.44m (8ft) off the ground and is expected to wane on Wednesday after only three days. The Titan Arum is also known as the "corpse flower" because of the strong stench of rotting meat it gives off. When the plant is ready to attract pollinators, the spike heats up and gives off the smell which, while revolting to humans, is very alluring to insects. It then develops a fruit which attracts birds before ending its life. It is endangered in its natural habitat of the tropical forests of Sumatra. A spokesman for the Jardin de Meise said it was "exceptional" that its specimen had flowered so frequently.

Last week, Minneapolis-based utility Xcel Energy proposed its fourth wind farm in the Upper Midwest since mid-July. If approved, the 150-megawatt Border Winds Project would be developed in North Dakota near the U.S.-Canadian border and produce enough electricity to save customers an estimated $45 million over its lifetime while reducing annual carbon dioxide emissions by about 320,000 tons. In July, Xcel Energy — the nation’s top utility for wind-based power — proposed to add 600 megawatts of wind energy through three wind farms in North Dakota and Minnesota. With the addition of the Border Winds Project, Xcel could save customers more than $220 million and add a total of 750 megawatts of wind power to its existing Midwest portfolio, which would bring its wind capacity total in the region to 2,550 megawatts — or enough power to serve over 750,000 homes. “These projects will lower our customers’ bills, offer protection from rising fuel costs, and provide significant environmental benefits,” Dave Sparby, CEO of Xcel subsidiary Northern States Power Co., said in a statement last month. “Wind prices are extremely competitive right now, offering lower costs than other possible resources, like natural gas plants.” Xcel has submitted the four projects to the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission and the North Dakota Public Service Commission for consideration and expects to hear the regulators’ decisions by late fall. If approved, construction will begin immediately in order for the projects to qualify for the federal renewable energy Production Tax Credit (PTC). Advertisement The PTC, which was set to expire at the end of 2012, was extended in January to projects that begin construction by the end of 2013. The tax credit provides 2.2 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity produced over the first ten years of operation. The Upper Midwest is not the only region that’s benefiting from Xcel’s aggressive push to add more wind power before the PTC expires. In Colorado, Xcel has asked regulators to approve a 200-megawatt wind farm that would save customers more than $142 million in fuel costs over the 20-year contract term. Xcel also proposed three projects totaling nearly 700 megawatts that would be built in New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas, citing a lower price per megawatt-hour for wind energy generation than their own natural gas-fueled generation. These projects are expected to save customers $590.4 million in fuel costs over 20 years. Altogether, Xcel is awaiting approval on about 1,650 megawatts of wind power that could come online before the end of the 2016, which would increase its overall wind capacity by 30 percent. “We are committed to meeting our customers’ needs in clean and affordable ways,” said Ben Fowke, Xcel Energy’s chairman and CEO. “Wind power is simply the cheapest resource available right now, and we are taking the opportunity afforded by the PTC extension to further shape our systems for the future.”

It’s happening. In just a few hours, Conor McGregor will be stepping in a boxing ring to take on Floyd Mayweather for the belt of the moneyweight division. This monumental moment in sports, that has captured the attention and drawn the interest of millions, is finally here and it will go down on Saturday night in Las Vegas, Nev. To breakdown all the chapters and layers of this cultural phenomenon, MMA Fighting caught up with arguably the best welterweight boxer on the planet and one of the most analytical minds of the sweet science. Current undefeated unified 147-pound champion Keith “One Time” Thurman weighed in on all of the ins and outs and the build up of Mayweather vs. McGregor. The impact of Mayweather vs. McGregor on combat sports Danny Segura: First thing, first. Are you surprised these two are actually fighting? Keith Thurman: No, I’m not surprised that it got made. I mean it’s the year 2017 and hey, money talks. This is not your typical boxing event, and it’s almost not your typical sporting event although it’s being placed as a typical boxing event in a typical boxing ring. What you’re witnessing is a crossover extravaganza. How much of a build up has there been in the past seven years or whatever, just throwing a number out there, of what is better, boxing or MMA? You’ve had some guys like Kimbo slice, rest in peace, that crossed over got defeated, won some matches, but nothing major came from it. But what you have here, and why this really manifested, and why Floyd even allowed it to happen is because his name is Floyd “Money” Mayweather, so whatever makes money makes sense to him. Segura: Do you think this is the biggest fight in combat sports history? Thurman: I don’t know, man. I mean, Muhammad Ali back in the day in Africa that was big. It was also broadcasted to everyone for free. But of our generation, my lifetime? Shoot, is this bigger than any fight Mike Tyson ever had? I would say so. I’m my lifetime, from 1988 to 2017, I would say this is the biggest event. Segura: Do you think we’ll now see more MMA fighters crossover to boxing? Thurman: It’s interesting. I do see the possibility for a few more crossovers in the future, but I don’t think they will ever be of this kind of stature. I don’t think it will ever be like this because, I mean, it’s Floyd Mayweather. He’s been at the top of the game for over a decade, you know, he’s dominated since he was an Olympian. So people really understand Mayweather and have watched his whole career manifest. Mayweather is a truly rare athlete, he’s a rare specimen, and to have him go up against the most rumbustious, most entertaining, biggest loudmouth Irishman on the planet, you know. So I don’t think no matter what kind of crossover they do, I don’t think it could ever compare to this crossover. So I think it’s cool that this is the first time and the best you’ll ever get to witness. But then again, if they do some heavyweight crossover, that could be interesting. People love heavyweights and whenever those guys fight is just lightning and thunder. So that could be interesting, but just as overhype and everything, I don’t think anything can get bigger than this. NAC approves the switch to eight-ounce gloves Segura: Are you surprised the fight is happening in 8-ounce gloves? Another handy 12 rounds today. We are prepared to destroy Floyd. Pick whatever size gloves you want as well little man. I fight with 4oz. I don't give a fuck about the size of the glove. I am coming sprinting at you with bricks. Know that. Brittle hands. A post shared by Conor McGregor Official (@thenotoriousmma) on Aug 2, 2017 at 4:27am PDT Thurman: I told everybody that they would fight in whatever Floyd Mayweather wanted to fight in. Segura: Have you ever seen a case where the commission overrides the rules regarding glove size? Thurman: The funny thing is that I competed in Florida early in my career, and when I competed at a catch weight of 152 pounds, the commission gave my opponent the option of eight or 10-ounce gloves. So I will say that there are times where it becomes negotiable to say the least. I knew with Floyd and McGregor that a lot of people were intrigued whether it was going to be with eight-ounce or 10-ounce gloves. Segura: Well, so is there a difference between 8 and 10-ounce gloves? Thurman: It does make a difference. If it didn’t make a difference, heavyweights would wear 8-ounce gloves. The more ounces McGregor has to wear the more it will negate from his power. The more ounces Floyd has to wear, the more it can assist in his defense. Real fighters know that the smaller the glove, the easier it is to slip one in. You might have your guard up, but the punch might still come through and you might think you’re covering everything, but there is still that other inch unprotected. McGregor’s beef with Paulie Malignaggi Segura: So, the drama with Paulie Malignaggi. What did you make of that situation? A post shared by Paul Malignaggi (@paulmalignaggi) on Aug 3, 2017 at 8:07pm PDT Thurman: You know how like sometimes people have beef but then you go and fight face to face and then you kind of squash your beef. Well, this is one of those situations where they had beef, they met each other, and now I think they got even more beef than they did before. That’s their own story. I think it’s kinda funny, and I wonder how personal it’s going to get for Paulie when he ends up commentating on the fight. DS: What do you think actually happened in the sparring session? Thurman: There are a lot of rumors about what really happened in that sparring session with Paulie. Paulie ultimately said that McGregor has some growth in his boxing technique but there isn’t really enough time to allow him to grow enough for the Mayweather fight. That sounds like a true statement regardless of whether the guy got beat up or not. Paulie Malignaggi was a retired fighter that went into your training camp out of shape. And whenever you call somebody into your training camp, you have to understand that you will be in better shape than they are. And another thing is that I’ve never sparred a single sparring partner for 12 rounds. So you don’t make the guy that just got off a plane and who’s not ripped and shredded like you are, you don’t make that dude spar 12 rounds with you. For example, back in the day when me and Shaun Porter were sparring partners before we were battling for these titles — and it looks like he might end up being my next opponent as a rematch — I was preparing for Marcos Maidana, that’s why we were sparring because of Porter’s aggressive style. That was before Maidana pulled out. Me and Porter never even sparred 10 rounds, we would only spar a maximum of five rounds at a single time. We would always spar four rounds and then my other sparring partner would come in next. So being able to get the best of a sparring partner in a training session, I mean, and you’re talking about a retired fighter. When I look at the photos of Paul Malignaggi in that training camp, he was overweight, but still went 12 rounds with the guy. So it is what it is, he’s not fighting Paulie, he’s fighting Mayweather. Segura: Did McGregor’s side break any code or etiquette by releasing the photos and sparring footage? Thurman: A little bit, yeah. But at the end of the day, this motherf*cker is trying to create hype to make this fight worth watching. So you see Paulie Malignaggi on the ground and you’re like, ‘oh he’s messing up this world class fighter; I can’t wait and see what happens when he fights Floyd.’ So with that going on, I’m not really going to, I mean, it’s not my thing. But man, if you don’t want them to be releasing shi*, don’t give them anything good to release. The breakdown Segura: Is there an actual chance here for McGregor to pull off the upset? Thurman: Well, it’s a fight, and when you’re in a fight, there is always a chance. Especially because, you don’t have to call McGregor a boxer, but you have to admit he’s used to hand-to-hand combat and his preference is hand-to-hand combat, not submissions or anything like that. We can say that McGregor has hit enough people in the face that it’s a skillset. For me, he became a boxer when he defeated Nate Diaz. The reason I say that is because whenever he struck Nate Diaz with a straight-left hand that knocked him down to the ground, he (McGregor) didn’t take advantage of the MMA rules, which allow him to keep attacking Nate Diaz while he’s still on the ground. He simply stood up and kept telling Diaz, ‘stand back up, stand back up.’ I’m wondering why the referee ain’t just giving them a 10 count, and if he doesn’t stand up in 10 then the fight is over, so that looked like a boxing match to me. So what I’m intrigued in seeing is, what happens when McGregor lands that straight left? Can he land the straight left? Muhammed Ali said, ‘yeah, Frazier is strong. But he ain’t going to hit me, so it doesn’t matter if he can’t hit me.’ Segura: Do you think there could be a case where Mayweather is the one that scores a stoppage? Thurman: Mayweather hasn’t knocked anybody out since what, Ricky Hatton? Victor Ortiz was a freebie, hands down. So I’ve made this statement a lot the many years I was rising through the ranks and I wanted to have an opportunity to put my skills against Floyd Mayweather, the best boxer of our generation. I always said, ‘you don’t have to be scared of Floyd knocking you out.’ I mean, you can look forward to a 12-round fight with Floyd. I mean, I’d put my grandma in the ring and not think she’ll get knocked out, so that’s not the question. The question is, can you beat the man? Segura: So this could be a long night for McGregor. Do you expect his conditioning to be ready for a 12-round bout? Thurman: A lot of boxing guys believe that McGregor doesn’t have a 12 rounds in him. If Floyd targets the body in the early rounds, some believe McGregor will gas out in the later rounds because he gassed out in Nate Diaz fight. In my opinion, he gassed out in both fights, but he handled it better in the second fight, although he was still gassing out towards the end of that fight. So I hope his team really upped their strength and conditioning, especially the conditioning part, in preparation for this fight. Prediction Segura: So who wins this fight and how do you think it goes down? Thurman: I never really care about fights that I’m not involved in so the outcome can be anything for my concern. I’d like to stay open minded, but I think a defensive 12-round victory for Floyd. I don’t see McGregor winning a 12-round victory. I don’t see McGregor walking away with seven out of 12 rounds. As long as you get seven of the 12 rounds in the books on the judges scorecards, you have a unanimous decision. So I don’t see McGregor achieving that. Floyd Mayweather boxing’s style is one that makes sure no fighter achieves that because that’s his goal and he knows you’re not allowed to win seven rounds. You can win five rounds and look good, but he doesn’t allow you to win six or win seven. So yeah, McGregor needs a knockout to really shock the world.

It's Time to Slay the Revenant Keynes Share This: Naturally, many prominent economists are viewing this development with horror. "People are saving! The economy will collapse! We've got to get them spending! Paradox of thrift!" The I think I have finally learned where such silly notions arise. I recently read an article by an Austrian economist (alas, I've forgotten who, so I can't give proper credit) that explained it thus: in the Keynesian view, an economy is driven by consumption, whereas in the Austrian view, an economy is driven by production (and savings). So to a Keynesian, an economy is healthy as long as people spend, spend, spend...even if they have to borrow, borrow, borrow to do it. And if they stop spending, they must be made to spend more. And if they refuse, then the government has to do the borrowing and spending for them. (Somehow freedom of conscience never seems to be honored in the economic sphere. Can't I be a conscientious objector to Keynesian stimulus?) This, despite the fact that to the best of my knowledge, the theories of Keynes have never been scientifically proven or even substantiated. No Keynesian intervention has ever been shown to work. So why are they always the first resort? Because whether or not they work, Keynesian prescriptions are convenient for those in power. They give the state a plausible cover, that the citizens will accept, to enlarge its power. So, it's time to slay the revenant Keynes. Like Karl Marx, his half-baked theories reach from beyond the grave to strangle societies and ruin people's lives. It's Ptolemaic crackpottery which is long overdue for refutation. It enjoys what I call "academic celebrity" -- not "famous because it is famous", but rather "accepted because it's accepted." Alas, I don't think Keynesianism will be discredited unless the economy suffers a total collapse. And from the rubble, I'm sure we'll hear the whine of the last Keynesian: "It's because we didn't stimulate enough!" Back to category overview Back to news overview Older News Newer News Printer Friendly Brad - Thursday 05 March 2009 - 13:56:26 - Permalink I saw a few days ago that the U.S. savings rate has increased to 5%. To my mind, this is Good News: people are starting to get responsible about their finances, starting to pay down their debt, and starting to put some cash away for hard times. I figure this is exactly what's needed to get out of the credit swamp and back to a sustainable economy.Naturally, many prominent economists are viewing this development with horror. "People are saving! The economy will collapse! We've got to get them spending! Paradox of thrift!"The "paradox of thrift" holds that what is good for every individual (thrift and saving) is bad for the economy at large....rather as if the economy were one gigantic Prisoner's Dilemma . Mainstream economists love citing this, perhaps because it sprang from the mind of the exalted J. M. Keynes.I think I have finally learned where such silly notions arise. I recently read an article by an Austrian economist (alas, I've forgotten who, so I can't give proper credit) that explained it thus: in the Keynesian view, an economy is driven by consumption, whereas in the Austrian view, an economy is driven by production (and savings).So to a Keynesian, an economy is healthy as long as people spend, spend, spend...even if they have to borrow, borrow, borrow to do it. And if they stop spending, they must be made to spend more. And if they refuse, then the government has to do the borrowing and spending for them. (Somehow freedom of conscience never seems to be honored in the economic sphere. Can't I be a conscientious objector to Keynesian stimulus?)This, despite the fact that to the best of my knowledge, the theories of Keynes have never been scientifically proven or even substantiated. No Keynesian intervention has ever been shown to work. So why are they always the first resort? Because whether or not they work, Keynesian prescriptions are convenient for those in power. They give the state a plausible cover, that the citizens will accept, to enlarge its power.So, it's time to slay the revenant Keynes. Like Karl Marx, his half-baked theories reach from beyond the grave to strangle societies and ruin people's lives. It's Ptolemaic crackpottery which is long overdue for refutation. It enjoys what I call "academic celebrity" -- not "famous because it is famous", but rather "accepted because it's accepted."Alas, I don't think Keynesianism will be discredited unless the economy suffers a total collapse. And from the rubble, I'm sure we'll hear the whine of the last Keynesian: "It's because we didn't stimulate enough!"

David Villa isn’t going anywhere. There was speculation that Villa would retire after his three-year contract expired at the end of this season, but New York City FC silenced those rumors Wednesday by signing the reigning MLS MVP to a one-year extension that will keep him in The Bronx. “I am so happy to play [at NYCFC],” Villa told The Post. “I am fit, the club spoke about joining for one more year and it was one of the easiest things I’ve done in my life.” Villa’s contract extension was formally announced at P.S. 49 in The Bronx, where the former World Cup winner from Spain fielded tough questions from youngsters, like what’s his favorite pregame meal (pasta or rice) to whether he enjoys playing soccer (obviously). After all, the 35-year-old could have easily called it a career after this season, but he’s not ready to hang up his boots just yet. “I think I’ve improved [at NYCFC],” said Villa, who’s missed just seven matches since NYCFC’s inaugural season in 2015. “With experience, games, with minutes on the pitch and outside the pitch, I keep learning. I’m a better player [now].” Villa signed a three-year Designated Player contract in 2014 and, since then, he’s been everything NYCFC could have asked for. Arguably one of the best Designated Player signings in MLS history, Villa never took his foot off the gas, especially last season, when he scored 23 goals to win MLS MVP honors and led NYCFC to their first ever playoff appearance. “When I look back to those first days in 2014, it’s really amazing to see how far we’ve come in such a short space of time,” said Villa, who is NYCFC’s all-time leading scorer with 46 goals. “And to know that there is so much potential for us to continue growing, on and off the field.” The World Cup winner has shown no signs of tired legs this season, leading NYCFC (13 points) with five goals in seven appearances. For Villa, coming to NYCFC hasn’t been a mistake. “There were no sacrifices,” Villa said. “I always dreamed of being a soccer player. I can say I sacrificed nothing playing soccer.”

Advertisement CBO: GOP health care bill would reduce number of people with comprehensive health insurance 'by millions' Share Shares Copy Link Copy The Congressional Budget Office released its preliminary analysis of the Graham-Cassidy bill on Monday saying that millions of people with comprehensive health insurance would lose coverage under the new bill. “That number could vary widely depending on how states implemented the legislation, although the direction of the effect is clear,” said the analysis. The non-partisan scoring agency estimates that between 2017 and 2026, "the legislation would reduce the on-budget deficit by at least $133 billion and result in millions fewer people with comprehensive health insurance that covers high-cost medical events."The report is not as detailed as previous CBO scores, however.It does not give a more specific number of how many Americans would lose health care coverage under the health care law sponsored by Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana nor does it include information on how Graham-Cassidy would affect the cost of premiums throughout the country.According to CBO, the reduction in the number of insured people relative to the number under current law would result from three main causes. 1. Enrollment in Medicaid would be substantially lower because of large reductions in federal funding for that program.2. Enrollment in nongroup coverage would be lower because of reductions in subsidies for it.3. Enrollment in all types of health insurance would be lower because penalties for not having insurance would be repealed.Senator Susan Collins from Maine, who reportedly said she was waiting for the report to come out before making her decision, said shortly after the analysis was posted that she was a no.Collins tweeted a full response as well saying, "This is simply not the way that we should be approaching an important and complex issue that must be handled thoughtfully and fairly for all Americans."The agency announced weeks ago that it would not have adequate time to release coverage numbers and instead would only be able to release a "preliminary" report."CBO will not be able to provide point estimates of the effects on the deficit, health insurance coverage, or premiums for at least several weeks," the agency said in a statement about the bill.The CBO score's main purpose is to ensure that the legislation meets its saving targets required under reconciliation, the process that allows Senate Republicans to pass the health care bill with 51 votes.The non-partisan agency's score is also of the first version of the bill. Changes were made to the legislation over the weekend and released Sunday night. Those tweaks include a recalculation of how much money rural states would receive under Graham Cassidy as well as a further roll back on protections for people with pre-existing conditions. The CBO's latest score does not include the changes.CNN has contributed to this report

A new survey on Jewish Americans released just now by the Pew Research Center shows what we’ve come to expect from these reports: They are becoming less religious overall, with Millennial Jews even less religious than their older counterparts: A Pew Research reanalysis of the 2000-2001 National Jewish Population Survey suggests that at that time, 93% of Jews in that study were Jews by religion and 7% were Jews of no religion (after some adjustments to make the NJPS and Pew Research categories as similar as possible). In the new Pew Research survey, 78% of Jews are Jews by religion, and fully 22% are Jews of no religion (including 6% who are atheist, 4% who are agnostic and 12% whose religion is “nothing in particular”). Though the two studies employed different question wording and methodologies and are thus not directly comparable, the magnitude of these differences suggests that Jews of no religion have grown as a share of the Jewish population and the overall U.S. public. The new Pew Research survey finds that approximately 0.5% of U.S. adults — about 1.2 million people — are Jews of no religion. Laurie Goodstein of the New York Times highlights this change in her report and brings up another relevant point: Non-religious Jews aren’t passing down their religious traditions to their children, meaning the trend is likely to continue: … the percentage of “Jews of no religion” has grown with each successive generation, peaking with the millennials (those born after 1980), of whom 32 percent say they have no religion. “It’s very stark,” Alan Cooperman, deputy director of the Pew religion project, said in an interview. “Older Jews are Jews by religion. Younger Jews are Jews of no religion.” … But Jews without religion tend not to raise their children Jewish, so this secular trend has serious consequences for what Jewish leaders call “Jewish continuity.” Of the “Jews of no religion” who have children at home, two-thirds are not raising their children Jewish in any way. This is in contrast to the “Jews with religion,” of whom 93 percent said they are raising their children to have a Jewish identity. What we’re seeing more than anything else is a rise in secular Judaism as opposed to religious Judaism. It’s the non-religious traditions that are being passed down to the next generation, if that. The report also shows a rise in Jews who marry non-Jews, another sign that religious faith is taking a backseat to other qualities. The strangest finding, though, may be just how many Jewish people believe that you can be a Jew while believing that Jesus was the Messiah… I would jokingly say 34% of Jews didn’t go to Hebrew school… but I don’t think that’s a joke.

'Pray at the Pump' activist: 'We shall overcome' high gas prices Nick Langewis Published: Sunday August 17, 2008 Print This Email This Divine intervention, not the market, is bringing gas prices down, one campaigner says. 59-year-old Rocky Twyman of Rockville, Maryland has garnered worldwide attention after holding prayer meetings at gas stations across the United States since April as part of his "Pray at the Pump" drive. Recently, to celebrate a drop in the average price of gasoline to $3.80 a gallon, Twyman led a group meeting at their inaugural Washington service station, singing a version of "We Shall Overcome" whose words were changed to "We'll have to lower gas prices." "We believe not just in prayer," Twyman said, "because we believe that faith without works is dead. So we've encouraged people to car-pool more and organise their days more, because it's a combination of faith with these other factors." "God is the only one we can turn to at this point," Twyman said during an April stop in San Francisco. "Take it to the real CEO," Alabama DJ Todd Baker said during a recent prayer session at a Huntsville Texaco station on the heels of ExxonMobil's posting of a second-quarter profit of about $11.7 billion. Twyman also recently prayed for Tonight Show host Jay Leno, who mentioned him in a July 29 monologue: "Hey, have you heard about this group called Prayer at the Pump? They're a prayer group that sprang up, and they go to gas stations and they hold hands and they pray for lower gas prices. Otherwise known as the Bush energy plan." Twyman's involvement in the community also includes the recruitment of about 14,000 minority individuals into the national bone marrow registry since 1992, for which he received honors from Montgomery County, Maryland in April. He also led a petition drive in 2005 to nominate Oprah Winfrey for the Nobel Peace Prize. "We're just really impressed," Twyman told People Magazine, "with what she has done to raise the level of consciousness about hunger, poverty, homeless, women's issues and, of course, the issue of AIDS."

That's bad policy for Americans as well as Cubans, and it's based on a disingenuous argument. The putative reason for the change is that Cuba still violates the human rights of its own people, including jailing dissidents and independent journalists. But hasn't the Trump administration been moving the U.S. away from its focus on human rights around the world? Pressing foreign governments to end oppression has been a mainstay of U.S. foreign policy for decades under Republican and Democratic administrations — but Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told State Department employees last month that the U.S. would no longer put such a premium on human rights issues because such considerations could interfere with our national interests. Trump has vowed to put "America first" and has been loathe to criticize foreign leaders publicly for their violations of human rights.

INDIA will send a strong squad to Zimbabwe for its five-match One-Day International (ODI) series against the hosts to give the series the zest coach Andrew Waller’s men have been yearning for. Staff Writer There were fears India would dampen the series by sending a second-string side as it did in 2010, but the tourists have since forwarded a squad list that, barring any injuries, should tour Zimbabwe this month. All the big names that toured England for the International Cricket Council Champions Trophy and are currently engaged in a triangular series in the West Indies with Sri Lanka, are in the squad expected to arrive in Zimbabwe on July 21. Skipper Mahendra Singh Dhoni captains a 15-men squad that has been submitted to Zimbabwe Cricket. Champions Trophy player of the tournament Shikhar Dhawan, who had a dream tournament by scoring 363 runs, will be travelling to Zimbabwe. The spin duo of Ravindra Jadeja and Ashwin Ravichandran, one of India’s success stories, is also part of the squad. Zimbabwe has been in camp for a month preparing for this tour, which comes ahead of Pakistan’s visit, and also includes a two Test series. Zimbabwe and India play the first three ODIs in Harare on July 24, 26, and 28 before travelling to Bulawayo for the final two matches on July 31 and August 3. India Squad for Zimbabwe: Mahendra Singh Dhoni; Shikhar Dhawan; Dinesh Karthik; Murali Vijay; Virat Kohli; Amit Mishra; Suresh Raina; Rohit Sharma; Ashwin Ravichandran; Ravindrasinh Jadeja; Bhuvaneshwar Kumar; Ishant Sharma; Umeshkumar Yadav; Vinay Ranganatha and Irfankhan Pathan

Republican lawmakers are threatening to put the nation’s financial health at risk over a ritual vote to raise the debt ceiling, but they don’t actually object to throwing away money. Case in point: they seem to relish spending taxpayer dollars on the plainly unconstitutional Defense of Marriage Act. The 1996 law prohibits federal recognition of marriages between people of the same sex. It was signed – to his shame – by President Bill Clinton, and for years the government defended DOMA in court against lawsuits. But in 2011 President Obama instructed the Justice Department to relent – after Justice concluded that the law was not constitutional. Cue the budget-conscious Republicans on Capitol Hill, who authorized the spending of up to $2.75 million in public funds to hire lawyers to defend DOMA on their behalf. Apparently, that was not a big enough check, so on Jan. 4, the House Republicans raised the fee ceiling to $3 million. On Tuesday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Minority Whip Steny Hoyer sent a letter to Speaker John Boehner protesting the spending, which the G.O.P. leadership somehow forgot to mention at any of the dozens of press conferences they’ve held to preach the gospel of fiscal responsibility. “This clandestine commitment of taxpayer funds is highly irregular and objectionable, and it must end now,” they wrote, pointing out that defending DOMA is futile since it violates Constitutional guarantees of equal protection. The Defense of Marriage Act is perhaps the last example of officially sanctioned discrimination in the United States. Until Congress repeals it or the Supreme Court strikes it down, a select group of Americans will be denied the benefits and recognition provided to all other married Americans, and state laws that allow gay unions will have only limited effect.

The layout principles–columns and rows, angles and lines–that we use to build websites today are largely influenced by their print heritage. And although grid implementation on the web is getting better and more polished, web layout in general is still awkward compared to print media, especially when it comes to content flow. Magazines and newspapers have always enjoyed elegant ways for arranging content layout, such as wrapping text around, or inside, non-rectangular shapes. Multipurpose Magazine by GreenSocks Let’s explore how the CSS Shapes Module will allow us this same freedom on the web. Quick Intro to CSS Shapes CSS Shapes enable web designers to create more abstract, geometric layouts, beyond simple rectangles and squares. The specification provides us with new CSS properties which include shape-outside and shape-margin . Browser support is reasonable, though these properties are currently only available in Chrome, Opera, and Safari, with the -webkit- prefix, hence -webkit-shape-outside . The shape-outside property will cause inline content to wrap around (outside) following the element curve, rather than the box model. Initially there was also shape-inside to wrap the content inside an element; text within a circular element would be moulded into a circle shape as well. However, the implementation has been postponed for CSS Shapes Level 2. From top to bottom: shape-outside and shape-inside in action. The shape-margin property sets the margin around whichever shape is using the shape-outside . Let’s take a look at some examples. Creating a Shape The easiest way to find out how CSS Shapes works is probably through creating a circle. So, here’s a div (our circle), with several paragraphs alongside. Here’s some basic styling, including the width and the height of our circle, the border-radius to shape the element, and a float so the paragraph wraps around the element. As the we would except, the paragraphs is now wrapped around the element. However, since the border-radius property does not define the actual element shape, the paragraph wrap does not form the circle curve. If we inspect the element through our browser DevTools, we will find the element is, in fact, still a box. So, even though our div has the appearance of a circle, the border-radius has done nothing to the actual shape of the element. Notice the rectangular highlight around the element. In order for our paragraph to adhere to the circular shape, we need to change the actual element shape through the shape-outside property; in this case, we’ll add one with the circle() function passed as the value. Our paragraphs now wrap neatly around the circle’s circumference. Additionally, if we now inspect the element through DevTools, we’ll see that the element is properly rendered into a circle. Notice the darker highlight. With some margins, look how it might enhance a simple layout: Customizing the Circle The circle() function takes a couple of values for defining the radius and the center coordinate respectively: circle(r at x y) . By default, the radius value is derived from the element size; if the element is 300px wide, for instance, the radius will be 150px (the radius being half of the circle’s diameter). Similarly, the x and y coordinates are measured relative to the element’s size, and they are by default set at 50% 50% ; right at the centre of the element. The circle is positioned at the center of the element. These two values will come in useful when you want to resize the shape, while keeping the actual element size, or move the shape while retaining the element position. In the following example, we’ll reduce the circle radius down to 60px and set the center coordinate to 30% 70% , which should move the circle to the bottom left of the element box. The paragraphs now pass through the element box following the circle size. View the demo. It is worth noting that when modifying the circle both the center coordinate and the radius have to be explicitly defined; adding only one of the them is invalid. Shape Box Model CSS Shapes inherit the same box model principle as the element, but applied outside the scope of the element itself. This allows us to separately set the element, say, to border-box while setting the shape to padding-box . To change the shape box model, add one of the box model keywords, content-box , margin-box , border-box , or padding-box after the function. The default box-model of the shape is set to margin-box . And in the following example, we’ve changed it to padding-box to tell the browser to exclude the element margin when determining the shape size or span. Now we should find the paragraph pass through the border, and immediately touching the padding of the element. The orange square is the margin, the yellow square is the border, and the green square is the padding, I highly recommend checking out our free course on the Basics of CSS Box Model for more about how the box-model works in detail. Creating More Shapes The CSS Shapes specification comes with a few more shape functions: ellipse() : As the name implies, this function will create an ellipse shape. We can configure the ellipse radius and move the shape center coordinate as well. But unlike the circle() function, the ellipse() function applies two radius measurements, horizontal and vertical, hence ellipse( 100px 180px at 10% 20% ) . : As the name implies, this function will create an ellipse shape. We can configure the ellipse radius and move the shape center coordinate as well. But unlike the function, the function applies two radius measurements, horizontal and vertical, hence . polygon() : This function enables us to create more complex shapes like triangles, hexagons, as well as non-geometrical shapes. Using polygon is not as easy as creating a circle, but the Path to Polygon Converter tool makes it a bit more intuitive. Wrapping Up In this tutorial, we looked into the basic application of CSS Shapes; we created a shape, customized the size, the position, and the box model. At the time of the writing, several aspects of CSS Shapes are still very rough around the edges, which is probably why we don’t see it used widely just yet. As mentioned earlier in this tutorial, the CSS Shapes shape-inside property, which allows us to wrap and shape content inside an element, has been put on ice. property, which allows us to wrap and shape content inside an element, has been put on ice. The CSS Shapes specification provides a separate property named shape-box to define the shape box-model, though it currently seems inapplicable to any browsers. to define the shape box-model, though it currently seems inapplicable to any browsers. Safari requires the -webkit- prefix, highlighting that this feature is experimental. Nonetheless, despite slow progress and disparity across browsers at the moment, I’m looking forward to CSS Shapes! Once the major browsers pick it up I can’t wait to see some really creative layouts on the web!

The venerable British medical journalhasretracted a 1998 study suggesting a link between autism and childhoodvaccination with the measles -mumps-rubella MMR vaccine . The Lancet tells WebMD that it has retracted "10 or 15" studies in its 186-year history. The retraction follows the finding of the U.K. General Medical Council (GMC) that says study leader Andrew Wakefield, MD, and two colleagues acted "dishonestly" and "irresponsibly" in conducting their research. The Lancet specifically refers to claims made in the paper that the 12 children in the study were consecutive patients that appeared for treatment, when the GMC found that several had been selected especially for the study. The paper also claimed that the study was approved by the appropriate ethics committee, when the GMC found it had not been. "We fully retract this paper from the published record," The Lancet editors say in a news release. The retraction means the study will no longer be considered an official part of the scientific literature. BMJ, formerly known as the British Medical Journal, has competed with The Lancet since 1840. BMJ editor Fiona Godlee says she welcomes the Lancet retraction. "This will help to restore faith in this globally important vaccine and in the integrity of the scientific literature," Godlee says in a news release. In 2004, 10 of Wakefield's 13 co-authors disavowed the findings of the 1998 study. Although the study never claimed to have definitively proven a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, sensational media reports ignited a public panic . MMR vaccinations fell dramatically. More rigorous studies have found no link between autism and the MMR vaccine . Last year, the U.S. "vaccine court" rejected U.S. lawsuits claiming that there was a plausible link between the vaccine and autism. Wakefield continues to proclaim his innocence and defends his earlier work. He now resides in Texas, where he is executive director of an alternative medicine center for autism treatment and research. By Daniel DeNoon Reviewed by Louise Chang ©2005-2008 WebMD, LLC. All rights reserved

There are world championships and then, well, there are world championships. The magic of the race for the rainbow jersey is its uncanny unpredictability. Because riders compete on their national teams rather than their trade teams, and because the race route changes from year to year, the event can sometimes smile on lesser-known riders. Words and Images by James Startt But while upsets are frequent, the epic world championship races are the ones captured by great champions over grueling race routes. Greg LeMond’s second world title in Chambéry, France, only weeks after winning the 1989 Tour de France, certainly goes down as one of the best. Another was the impressive victory taken in 1980 by French champion Bernard Hinault, who almost single-handedly demolished an elite field in his native France. And in what can only be heralded as a “Babe Ruth” move, Hinault promised national team director Richard Marillier that he would win the race three years earlier—when he discovered that the worlds would be held in France. The anecdote, although rarely cited, calls to mind “The Babe” pointing to the bleachers moments before blasting a home run to the very spot. Hinault came to the start in Sallanches, a small town in the French Alps, prepared to deliver. On that day, the riders tackled the rugged Côte de Domancy—the main climb on the final time trial to Megève in this year’s Tour de France—no less than 20 times. Lap after lap Hinault assumed his role as pre-race favorite, forcing the pace and splintering the pack. Italian Gianbattista Baronchelli, the final rider capable of following Hinault’s tempo, was having the race of his life. But he was no match for the ferocious champion that was Hinault, often known as “The Badger,” who dropped the Italian on the final climb. Hinault won solo, a minute ahead of the Italian and almost five minutes before the seven-man “peloton.” Only 15 riders finished the 268-kilometer race. It is a day etched in Hinault’s own memory, and one the ever-candid Frenchman shares with Peloton only a week before this year’s title race. _____________________________________________________________________________________________ Peloton: Bernard, you won one of the most memorable world championships in history. Why do you think your victory in Sallanches is so etched in cycling history? Bernard Hinault: Well, firstly, because the course was just so hard! Peloton: It was a race that we rarely have seen since. You were one of the big favorites, the leader of the French national team, yet you attacked already on the first lap and basically won the race from the front. We just don’t see that in modern-day racing? Hinault: Again, the course was so hard. It was a race for the strongest. You had to be one of the strongest just to be able to follow the pace. When you are the strongest on a course like that, well, you can just drop everybody, à la pédale! I was super well-trained and I was at the summit of my career. If the world championship circuit had been that difficult for the next four years I would have been world champion for the next four years! On race day, I just told my teammates to keep me at the front for the first 10 laps and then I would take care of the rest. And that is what I did. The Côte de Domancy was just so hard. It was ideal for me. I didn’t need a lot of strategy. The final five or six laps up the hill I just rode a steady tempo like I did in the mountains until, finally, nobody could follow. I didn’t have any help. I just went to the front each time we hit the climb. Each lap, more and more riders dropped—bing, bing! And finally the last rider, Baronchelli, blew about 500 meters from the summit of the final ascension and I rode in to victory. Peloton: Yeah, but you withdrew from the Tour de France that year due to tendinitis. You weren’t worried that you would lose the needed condition? Hinault: No, I just sat out for eight days, the time for the swelling to subside and then I started riding again. Don’t forget, I had won Liège-Bastogne-Liège that year as well as the Tour of Italy, and I withdrew from the Tour de France with the yellow jersey. So I was really in great shape. As long as I didn’t take too long to recover, I knew that I would be okay, and that was the case! After I got back on my bike, the condition returned quickly. I used the Tour of Germany to prepare that year and felt really good there. So I was confident going into the race. Peloton: You were so confident that, according to legend, you promised the national team coach three years earlier that you would win the world championships that year. Is that really true? Hinault: Absolutely. I didn’t know where exactly the race would be. I didn’t know it would be on such a hard circuit. But I knew it would be in France and I was going to do everything to win it there. Peloton: Bernard, you’ve won so many great races, all of the grand tours, monuments like Liège-Bastogne-Liège and Paris-Roubaix. How does your world title resonate today? Hinault: Like all of the others. We ride to win the great races. And each time we do, it’s a great satisfaction. And winning the worlds remains one of my great victories. You just always want to give your best in this race. It brings out the best in riders! Peloton: What is it like wearing the rainbow jersey all year long? You instantly become a marked rider. Is it harder to get results? Hinault: Ah, no. It’s a great honor. Not everybody gets a chance to wear it. And because I had the rainbow jersey, I made sure I was in shape earlier the following season. As a result, I won races earlier in the season. That was the year that I won Paris-Roubaix. Usually I wasn’t competitive so early in the season. Peloton: True, it was a race you truly disliked. And yet you won it with the world champion’s jersey! You once called Paris-Roubaix a…what kind of race? Hinault: A shit race! Paris-Roubaix was just too dangerous for me. When you know that you can win a race like the Tour de France, you don’t think about Paris-Roubaix. If you crash there, your season can be finished! Peloton: This year’s world championship is going to be very different. Hinault: Well, it won’t be hard like in Sallanches. That is something that is not going to be the case in Doha this year. It’s completely flat. Peloton: That’s for sure, although many people are saying that the wind could really blow things apart! Hinault: Sure, but all good sprinters at the professional level know how to ride in the wind, or at least they should! In addition, the race finishes on a circuit in the city, so there is plenty of opportunity for the race to come together again. And now they are talking about reducing the length of the race to only 107 kilometers if it is too hot—well, then, the world championships will be reduced to a virtual criterium! No, I think regardless of the conditions, all the big sprinters will be there at the finish and it is going to be a big mass sprint. If indeed they cut the race distance from nearly 260 kilometers down to 107, it won’t have the same value. You just won’t be able to compare the race to other world championships. There are going to be a lot more riders capable of winning a race that is so short. That said, you still have to win it!

THIS WEEK 6 | NewScientist | 20 July 2013 BONES. That is all the passing millennia have left us of the Neanderthals and the more elusive Denisovans. Until recently, the main insights gleaned from these bones have been physical: what our cousins might have looked like, for instance, and how they moved. But cutting-edge genetic science is changing that. We can now see, for the first time, which genes are switched on in humans but were not in Neanderthals and Denisovans, and vice versa. The findings point to subtle differences between our brain structure and function, and theirs. The research, presented last week at the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution meeting in Chicago, reveals that after our ancestors split from Neanderthals and Denisovans, they evolved differences in genes connected with cognitive abilities. Many of those genes are associated with mental disorders in modern humans. Working out which genes are switched on or not involves looking at the epigenome, or the chemical “methyl” tags attached to genes. Genomes, in contrast, show only the basic sequence of genes. Liran Carmel at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and colleagues analysed the epigenomes of Neanderthals and Denisovans and compared them with those of modern humans (s ee “What’s good about decay”, top right). Altered methylation patterns are frequently associated with disease, particularly cancer and mental disorders. So Carmel’s approach has the potential to give us unprecedented insight into the – Dem bones got something to say – The first look at which genes were switched on and off in our extinct cousins is allowing us to peer into their minds Inside the brain of a Neanderthal Sara Reardon, Chicago “The approach could offer unprecedented insight into the mental abilities of extinct hominin species”

The sounds a modern car makes are deliberate, designed, and a deception: the clicking of the turn signal isn't a mechanical tick-tock; it's an MP3 of a mechanical tick-tock, played back through hidden speakers. The engine's rumble is tuned with active noise-cancelling that mutes the tones that jangle the ears. But as you reduce the speed that the drive shaft is rotating, you lower the frequency of the sound it’s making. There comes a lower limit where the engine is making what Gordon calls “groan-y and moan-y” noises which people find unpleasant. The car sounds broken. So cars had to keep the engine’s RPM above a certain level, hurting their fuel efficiency, or risk alienating customers. GM’s solution was to implement active noise cancellation, the same technique used in some headphones to quiet ambient noise. Microphones in the body listen to the ambient sounds the car and engine are making, and the car plays the opposite of that over the vehicle’s speakers. The sound waves from the engine are cancelled out by the sound from the entertainment system, netting a quieter ride that can be more fuel efficient without being so bothersome. Some sounds in the car are completely artificial. The telltale clicking of a turn signal was once an artifact of the mechanical process that turned the light on and off. But that mechanism has long since been replaced by an electronic circuit that operates silently. Still, audible feedback is valuable so the car plays an MP3 file of a turn signal over the speakers.

Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Homes, businesses and vehicles were damaged in the clashes Riot police and army troops have been deployed in southern Sri Lanka following an outbreak of violence between Buddhists and Muslims, and a curfew has been imposed for the second night running. Nineteen people were arrested when clashes erupted in Galle province, after a traffic accident. Homes and businesses were attacked and several properties damaged. Authorities say the sectarian violence has now been brought under control. "Additional police battalions, the police Special Task Force, the anti-riot squad and the military were called in last night to bring the situation under control," Law and Order Minister Sagala Ratnayaka said in a statement. He also warned people not to stir up sectarian hatred on social media. MP Manusha Nanyakkara told the BBC that 10 vehicles were destroyed, the majority of which were owned by Muslims, and 62 homes and businesses were attacked. He said the 6pm-6am curfew was imposed as a security measure to prevent further violence. Image caption A damaged motorbike is discarded in the street following the violence Image caption Several properties in Galle province were vandalised The outbreak of street violence between majority Sinhalese Buddhists and minority Muslims started after an incident involving a Muslim woman and a motorbike driven by a Buddhist man. A police spokesman said people were arrested after "spreading false messages and rumours on social media" that contributed to the escalation in violence. Similar clashes in a nearby area three years ago forced thousands of Muslims to flee their homes.

Earlier this month, KrebsOnSecurity published The Reincarnation of a Bulletproof Hoster, which examined evidence suggesting that a Web hosting company called HostSailor was created out of the ashes of another, now-defunct hosting firm notorious for harboring spammers, scammers and other online ne’er-do-wells. Today, HostSailor’s lawyers threatened to sue this author unless the story is removed from the Web. Obviously, I stand by my reporting and have no intention of unpublishing stories. But I’m writing about HostSailor again here because I promised to post an update if they ever responded to my requests for comment. The letter, signed by Abdullah Alzarooni Advocates in Dubai — where HostSailor says it is based — carries the subject line, “Warning from Acts of Extortion and Abuse of the Privacy of Third Parties.” It lists a number of links to content the company apparently finds objectionable. Could this same kind of legal pressure be why security industry giant Trend Micro removed all reference to HostSailor from the report that started all this? Trend hasn’t responded to direct questions about that. Astute readers will notice in the letter (pasted below) a link to a Twitter message from this author among the many things HostSailor’s lawyers will like me to disappear from the Internet. That tweet to HostSailor’s Twitter account read: “Potential downside of reporting ISIS sites: The hosting firm (ahem @HostSailor) may share your info/name/report with ISIS. Opsec, people!” I sent that tweet after hearing from a source with whom I’ve been working to report sites affiliated with the jihadist militant group ISIS. The source had reported to HostSailor several of its Internet addresses that were being used by a propaganda site promoting videos of beheadings and other atrocities by ISIS, and he shared emails indicating that HostSailor had simply forwarded his abuse email on to its customer — complete with my source’s name and contact information. Thankfully, he was using a pseudonym and throwaway email address. HostSailor’s twitter account responded by saying that the company doesn’t share information about its customers. But of course my tweet was regarding information shared about someone who is not a HostSailor customer. This isn’t the first time KrebsOnSecurity has been threatened with lawsuits over stories published here. The last time I got one of these letters was in Sept. 2015, from a lawyer representing AshleyMadison’s former chief technology officer. The year before, it was Sony Pictures Entertainment, whose lawyers lashed out a large number of publications for too closely covering its epic and unprecedented data breach in 2014. Prior to that, I received some letters from the lawyers for Igor Gusev, one of the main characters in my book, Spam Nation. Mr. Gusev’s attorneys insisted that I was publishing stolen information — pictures of him, financial records from his spam empire “SpamIt” — and demanded that I remove all offending items and publish an apology. My attorney in that instance laughed out loud when I shared the letter from Gusev’s lawyers, calling it a “blivit.” When I apparently took more than a moment to get the joke, he explained that a “blivit” is a term coined by the late great author Kurt Vonnegut, who defined it as “two pounds of shit in a one-pound bag.” Only time will tell if this letter is a blivit as well. I’ve taken the liberty of sanitizing the PDF document it came in, and converting that into two image files – in case anyone wants to take a look. Tags: Abdullah Alzarooni Advocates, blivit, HostSailor, Kurt Vonnegut, trend micro

The National Security Agency's headquarters in Fort Meade, Md. (NSA) Chris Finan is a former Obama administration official who has come to have serious doubts about the National Security Agency's role in domestic surveillance and cybersecurity efforts. In the past, policymakers looked to the NSA for its unparalleled expertise in cryptography and computer security. But Finan argues that rapid improvement in private-sector cybersecurity expertise has made dependence on the NSA unnecessary and, especially in the wake of Edward Snowden's revelations, potentially dangerous. He argues that domestic counterterrorism efforts should depend more on civilian agencies and the private sector, not military agencies such as the NSA. Finan draws on a wealth of experience developed over several years of high-level government service. Finan served in the military during the Iraq war. After spending two years at a startup, he joined the Obama administration in 2009. He worked on cybersecurity policy, first at the Pentagon and then at the White House. He left government service in 2012 and now works for a Silicon Valley startup that helps companies protect their customers' accounts from being hijacked. We spoke Thursday. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity. You're skeptical about the NSA's large role in domestic cybersecurity and surveillance activities. Why is that? One of the themes of the 2012 cybersecurity debate was thinking about how to leverage the technical crown jewels that are NSA and bring that incredible technical capability to bear on this domestic security problem. Inherent in that assumption is that only NSA has the technical capability to aid our law enforcement and homeland security community. But technology paradigms have changed. There's an enormous amount of data the federal government collects. They're parsing through that data to generate leads, looking for correlations to potential terrorists overseas, other leads the law enforcement community is looking for, etc. It used to be you needed enormous supercomputer infrastructure to do that well. Now, due to faster computers and parallelization, anyone can do it. Thanks to Amazon Web Services or Rackspace, if you have access to the Internet, you have access to a supercomputer. [The private sector] can do a lot of the big data capabilities that used to be an inherently government function in the past. These big data analytics are driving the American economy right now. So to think that a government agency is going to do this better than our tech innovators in this country I think is fallacious. I think it was an old paradigm, it was an old assumption that needs to be challenged. Still, the NSA has a lot of technical expertise and powerful hardware, right? Why not use that to address domestic security problems? I don't believe that Americans are comfortable with the military intelligence community having such a central domestic role. We should come up with a strategy to divest the military and intelligence community and instead look for ways to leverage this [private sector] advantage. I think there's a way to leverage our competitive advantage in big data in a way that also is consistent with the Fourth Amendment. We also have an over-classification problem. I don't condone what Ed Snowden did. He made a commitment to protect classified information. Breaking that commitment was wrong. However, he did bring to light this classification problem, which needs to be debated as a society. The problem with over-classification is you create an inherently closed system. Closed systems are prone to failure. In fact it's not just technology. Think of the political system. Closed totalitarian systems are inherently weaker than open egalitarian systems. There's a principle called Kerckhoffs's principle, which states that if a code system is open and the only thing that's protected is the key, that's the most secure system. I wish our cryptology guys would think about [that principle in the cybersecurity sector]. It doesn't make sense that we'd have a closed system rather than open it up. Taking a centralized approach to this problem and having a single agency serve as the central aggregation point doesn't scale. That to me is the assumption that I go back to in thinking about ways to open up. This gets to a larger point. People like Director of National Intelligence James Clapper claim that more transparency will give the terrorists our playbook. I think you can acknowledge the existence of programs without giving away sensitive sources and methods and giving away our counterterrorism playbook. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, right. (Susan Walsh/AP) So is your proposal that a civilian agency at the Department of Homeland Security would do the kind of dragnet surveillance the NSA is doing today? No, I'm not in favor of or proposing the continuation of dragnet surveillance. I don't believe that's necessary. I think we've taken an axe approach when scalpels would be more consistent with the Fourth Amendment. I think the FISA Amendments Act and the Patriot Act are overly broad. I favor a more targeted approach, using warrants to collect the data when we absolutely need it. [Instead, civilian agencies should focus on] providing [information to the private sector.] If the government gets information because of its foreign government intelligence apparatus, it should be able to quickly send that out to the private sector. Primarily as a one-way communicator. Here are threats we're seeing overseas. There's been some of this in the past, but they haven't scaled it up. [The government has] more of an interest in making it a quid pro quo, government receiving information and then giving information back. The private sector is going to be able to operationalize it much better than the U.S. government. Some of the career officials are hesitant to scale [public-to-private sharing] up because they want to use it as a chit to get access to more data. I think that's the wrong approach. Government should give this threat information to the private sector. We shouldn't adopt the mentality that the government knows better how to do this. Some in Congress have said we need to promote information sharing. I think that's code for many career national security officials to weaken privacy laws so they can get access to more domestic data. I'm all for pushing information out. I'm all for making it easier for companies to share information between each other, which may require more explicit legal language. I think if we can do that without weakening consumer protections, you can do that. I want to ensure that kind of sharing is restricted to threat information. I'm all for looking at how to do that, and as long as you keep the liability protections fairly narrow, that would work. What else can be done to shore up Internet security? Congress should look at aligning market incentives. For example, publicly traded corporations should report cyber risk as a material risk. I'd like Congress to make sure this is being done at scale across the private sector. That would go a long way toward improving cyber-security, because it would make shareholders more aware. A third thing is securing critical infrastructure. I was a proponent of some kind of standard for critical infrastructure. There was no appetite for that on Capitol Hill. I think there's certainly more that we can do. The problem though is that many on the Hill immediately look to [the NSA] as the solution. That's just myopic because it doesn't leverage our private sector innovators. There's no way that can scale. Defenders of the NSA say getting the NSA completely out of domestic surveillance is unrealistic because terrorists increasingly use American services like Gmail. Isn't that an argument for continuing the NSA's role? [Spying on terrorists' Gmail accounts] should be done by civilian law enforcement agencies with a warrant. It shouldn't be a military agency without a warrant. That's completely inconsistent with the values of this country. I don't care if it's a treasure trove of terrorists. It doesn't matter. There's something fundamentally wrong if that's our strategy. There's got to be a better approach. There's no way we have to rely on the military to be able to do that. I feel like we've allowed post-9/11 inertia to drive us to the point where we are now. Let's reverse that. Let's think about that deliberately. Let's design a system that can scale to meet that threat. Focus our military and intelligence agencies outward.

David Donald sees rainy days as an opportunity and every hill as a workout. Foodora's head of cycling operations has been cycling for 38 years and now offers road-tested advice to the professional cyclists, students and second-income earners who have taken jobs with the food delivery service. Sydney's city streets are not particularly bike friendly however Deliveroo and Foodora riders are becoming more common. Credit:James Brickwood "Rainy days are when you have to suck it up and get out there," he said. "Shiver a bit and you might get a bigger tip." The likes of Foodora and Deliveroo have burst onto Sydney's streets from nowhere, an army of fuschia and aqua on wheels. Panting uphill, through downpours, hot spells and often on low-quality bikes, the bicycle delivery people are, against the odds, fast becoming a part of inner-city Sydney life.

A 4-year-old girl is recovering in the hospital after falling out of the back of a moving bus Saturday, and the horrifying incident was caught on video. Licensed EMT and volunteer firefighter Ryan Ciampoli was driving on a busy highway in Harrison, Arkansas, when he saw the young girl swing the back door of the bus open, hanging on for a brief moment before toppling onto the pavement. His dash camera happened to be running as he witnessed the accident and immediately sprang into action. Ciampoli told KLRT-TV that the girl was initially unconscious but began waking up as he approached her. "Obviously, you want to leave her laying there if she's not in danger, but we're in the middle of a state highway so I couldn't leave her just laying there," he said. He carefully picked her up and laid her in a nearby truck bed where he assessed her condition and kept her conscious before the paramedics could arrive. "Once the adrenaline and the shock kicked in in her little body, she started kicking and screaming, and 'Where's my mommy,' things like that. Stuff like that is really heartbreaking," Ciampoli said. The young girl suffered a broken jaw and will need surgery, according to her mother, but she is expected to be released from the hospital Monday. It is unclear how the little girl managed to open the back door or why the bus driver did not stop when she fell.

A student will serve 120 hours community service after admitting to frying his flatmate's hamster while drunk to "the point of madness." James White, 21, admitted causing unnecessary suffering to the female hamster in February last year after a court could not establish if the animal was alive or not upon entering the pan. District Judge Roy Anderson said he was sentencing White- a politics and international relations student at York University- on the basis the rodent died minutes before, while he was handling it. We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras. Two veterinary pathologists gave their expert opinion on how the female Syrian hamster, which has not been named, met its death. Selby Magistrates' Court heard White had drunk so much in his flat in York he was "on the point of madness" and could not remember the incident. District Judge Anderson said it was clear the hamster did not die of natural causes and that "what happened on that night is still shrouded in mystery." He told White: "By virtue of your treatment of this small, unfortunate rodent you've destroyed your good character and acquired a criminal conviction. "It's accepted now that there was rough handling of that animal but that it couldn't be established that it was putting it in the frying pan and applying heat that caused its death. "Had that sadistic conduct been established I would be dealing with you in a far more serious way than I am." White is also banned from keeping animals for eight years and will pay £1,000 towards the £3,356 costs of the case. We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads. Subscribe now

You’re reading Back of the Envelope, an experiment that aims to bring shorter, quicker content to FiveThirtyEight. Halloween may be over, but there’s still a zombie among us: the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The TPP is the trade deal many thought was already killed off, but it just won’t go away. During the primaries, it served as a policy pinata — with Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, in particular, taking turns excoriating it as a raw deal for American workers. Hillary Clinton, once a supporter, came out against it, too. (She now says the final version of the treaty doesn’t meet her standards.) But the Obama administration, which negotiated the treaty, isn’t giving up on it. The White House is pressuring Congress to approve the 12-nation trade deal during the lame-duck session after the election. And on Thursday, Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers published a report warning that if the TPP isn’t passed, a China-backed trade agreement will take its place. That could put U.S. manufacturers at a disadvantage when they try to sell to customers in Japan and other Asian nations. The report argues that if China’s Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership goes into effect, at least 35 U.S. industries as diverse as plastics, fishing and footwear will be at risk of increased competition from China in the Japanese market. Next week’s election will affect the chances of Obama’s TPP Hail Mary. If Trump wins, all bets are off: Republicans, usually more keen to support trade deals than Democrats, aren’t likely to back a deal strongly opposed by the president their party just elected. But if Clinton wins, Obama might be able to put together a coalition of Republicans and trade-friendly Democrats to support the treaty. In other words, the TPP isn’t dead yet.

Follow us 101.6k This salad is one of my "grab & go" favourites. It's great for anyone with a busy lifestyle looking for a sating and nutritious low-carb meal they can take to work. I always have hard-boiled eggs and keto-friendly mayo in my fridge. This way I save time and money and avoid temptations. If you want to succeed with your healthy low-carb eating, you should plan your cooking at least a few days in advance. 0 hours, 0 minutes Hands-on 5 minutes Overall 5 minutes Nutritional values (per serving) 3.9 grams 1.5 grams 41.4 grams 49.7 grams 8.8 grams 626 calories Total Carbs 5.4 grams Fiber 1.5 grams Net Carbs 3.9 grams Protein 41.4 grams Fat 49.7 grams of which Saturated 8.8 grams Calories 626 kcal Magnesium 63 mg (16% RDA) Potassium 655 mg (33% EMR) Macronutrient ratio: Calories from carbs (3%), protein (26%), fat (71%) Ingredients (1 serving, large salad bowl) 1 small head lettuce, Romaine or Little Gem (100 g/ 3.5 oz) 140 g tinned tuna, drained (5 oz) 2 eggs, hard-boiled, free-range or organic 2 tbsp mayonnaise, try my home-made mayo (30 g/ 1.1 oz) 1 medium spring onion or bunch chives (15 g/ 0.5 oz) 1 tbsp fresh lemon juice 1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil salt to taste (I used pink Himalayan) Note: Use less tuna if you this recipe is too high in protein for you. Find out what's your ideal protein intake using our keto calculator. A fun way to learn about healthy low-carb eating! Take the Keto Diet Quiz Print Recipe Download Recipe Instructions Tear the leaves of the lettuce, wash and drain in a salad spinner or with a paper towel. Spread the leaves over the bottom of the serving bowl. Add drained and shredded tuna. To avoid unhealthy vegetable oils that may often be used in tuna products, get tuna in extra virgin olive oil or in brine. I avoid buying canned foods and get tuna in glass jars instead. This will minimise your exposure to toxic BPAs that may often be present in canned foods. Top with hard-boiled eggs (see instructions in this recipe to see how to hard-boil eggs), mayo mixed with lemon juice and freshly chopped spring onion. Drizzle with extra virgin olive oil and enjoy! Do you like this recipe? Share it with your friends! Pinterest Reddit Martina Slajerova Creator of KetoDietApp.com I changed the way I ate in 2011, when I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s, an autoimmune disease that affects the thyroid. I had no energy, and I found it more and more difficult to maintain a healthy weight. That’s when I decided to quit sugar, grains, and processed foods, and to start following a whole-foods-based ketogenic approach to food. More posts by Martina Slajerova

The first day of the First International Conference on Men’s Issues ended on Friday with a short speech by Paul Elam, who was introduced (twice, thanks to a troublesome microphone) by Warren Farrell. Farrell testified to Elam’s warmth and kindness, his love for his wife, and his passion for the so-called men’s rights movement. The bromance continued on Saturday, as Elam rose to introduce Farrell. The Financial Times named Farrell one of the 100 Greatest Thinkers of the 20th century, Elam said, but he would count him as one of the greatest of the 21st century too. It was Farrell’s book The Myth of Male Power that crystalized his thinking about the troubles between the genders—and that inspired him to create the movement he leads. Two years ago, Elam was posting pictures of women who had committed “offenses against men” on his Register-Her.com website and vowing to “fuck their shit up.” Today, he high-mindedly declared that his goal is to “build bridges between men and women instead of walls.” Farrell, who once served on the board of the New York City chapter of the National Organization for Women, has come in for his share of controversy and misunderstanding over the years. Renewed interest in the forty-year-old interview he gave to Penthouse about his research on the positive side of incest (cousin-cousin, uncle-niece, aunt-nephew, brother-sister, and same-sex sibling incest are beneficial, he said, in 95 percent of the cases he looked at; mother-son incest is 70 percent positive) hasn’t helped matters; the angry protesters he attracted when he spoke at the University of Toronto in November, 2012 must have stung him too (though men’s rights activists, aka MRAs, made good use of the publicity). Warren’s embrace of Elam and the corner of the Manosphere that A Voice for Men occupies seems like something of a come-down for a man who has hobnobbed with high-wattage celebrities, appeared on network talk shows, taught at major universities, written bestsellers, and taken calls from the White House. But he clearly hopes that he can help to elevate the movement’s tone—to shift its focus away from reactive hatred of feminism and empowered women, and towards a positive agenda. In his speech, he focused on issues that he believed could attract female allies to the movement, among them the crisis of boys, children’s need for both parents, the need for better communication, the development of a birth control pill for men, and the importance of veterans care. Provocatively, he suggested that the name “men’s rights activist” be retired. “You know and I know that men do need rights. We need the right to equal parenting. We need the right to not be the only gender registering for the draft. We need the right to have Men’s Studies,” he said. “But men’s rights is a tougher than necessary fight in a world that believes that men made the rules and have all the rights to begin with. It’s like asking for king’s rights.” Karen Straughan, an LGBT divorced mother of three, identified herself as a lifelong anti-feminist. Going all the way back to Seneca Falls, feminism was always wrong, forever blaming men for problems that women never had. “It is huge, huge power we have as women,” she declared, to the loudest and most sustained applause of the day. “And it’s really time that some of us stepped up and started to use it responsibly.” She was talking about women, of course, but her words echoed Warren Farrell’s admonitions to MRAs as well. Carnell Smith, a crusader against paternity fraud, told some hair-raising stories about men who had been entrapped into paying the upkeep for other men’s children; he made the point that both the men and the women who lied to them were being used by the “evil empire” of Child Support Enforcement, which collects money without regard to whether the putative father is the biological father—or whether he even has a relationship with the children. Robert Franklin, an attorney and father’s activist, eviscerated the family court system; Terrence Popp, a war hero who lost custody of his children and became homeless upon his return from Iraq, testified to his sense of betrayal by his wife and by the courts. The last speaker was the libertarian Stephan Molyneux, who reframed circumcision as male genital mutilation and turned the tables on the feminist notion that men are uniquely violent. 90 percent of a child’s brain and character are formed in the first five years, he said, when boys spend most of their time with their mothers or the mostly female caregivers in day care settings. It is women’s violence against boys—corporal punishment, yelling, shaming—that creates violent male adults, he said, referring to a study of Texas mothers, who reportedly hit their children more than 900 times a year. Mothers like those are as stressed as they are, he added, because of the bad choices they made—they picked the wrong men to have children with; they put their careers ahead of their responsibility to their children. In the good old days before the welfare state, he concluded, illegitimate children were given up for adoption to two-parent homes, where they invariably thrived. Thanks to subsidized daycare and a host of other public services, single mothers now have the wherewithal to ruin their children’s lives. Molyneux’s enthusiasm for compelled adoptions clashed a little with the sentiments of many of the other speakers, who deplored how little efforts courts made to involve unmarried fathers in their children’s lives, but there was no push-back from the attendees in the Q&A that followed. The event closed with a panel discussion on activism, which all agreed was the movement’s next phase and defining challenge. Farrell declared that he used to tell people that the men’s rights movement was embryonic, but he would say that no longer. All and all, the weekend wasn’t an unalloyed hate fest, though there was plenty of rancor, contempt, defensiveness, and anti-feminism on display. Some of the female speakers were the least restrained in that respect, especially on the contentious issues of domestic violence and sexual coercion and modern women’s infuriating desire to determine their own destinies. Many of the speakers signaled that they were chafing a little under Paul Elam’s no trash-talking rule. It will be interesting to see how much bridge-building A Voice for Men engages in from here on out—starting, perhaps, with the comments about this very post.

"Carlin at Carnegie" is George Carlin 's third special to be seen on HBO, recorded at Carnegie Hall , New York City in 1982 , released in 1983 . Most of the material comes from his " A Place for My Stuff ", the album released earlier that same year. Unlike the first two, this special was edited down to an hour and routines from the same show like "A Place for My Stuff" and "Baseball and Football" do not appear in this special in contradiction to many internet descriptions. The final performance of " Seven Dirty Words ," his last recorded performance of the routine, features Carlin's updated list (read from an oversized scroll): "Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, Tits, Fart, Turd, Twat, Crap, Balls, Prick, Asshole, Jackoff, Jerkoff, Scumbag, Douchebag, Hardon, Rod-on, Boner, Stiff, Pisshard, Blueballs, Nookie, Koose, Gash, Slash, Hole, Slit, Snatch, Box, Beaver, Pussy, Bearded Clam, Jism, Cum, Cream, Juice, Pecker, Peckerhead, Peckertracks, Dick, Dork, Dong, Donacker, Wang, Shlong, Schwantz, Pork, Crabs, Ass, Butt, Hiney, Tuchas, Bum, Buns, Cheeks, Screw, Lay, Diddle, Plow, Hump, Bang, Poke, Batter, Wham, Knock-up, Bugger, Brown, Juggs, Bazooms, Knockers, Knobs, Lungs, Balloons, Dildo, Joystick, Hairpie, Muff, Cornhole, Rimjob, Blowjob, Sugarbowl-pie, Suck-off, Give-head, Sit-on-my-face, Buttfuck, Fingerfuck, Clap, Kleek, 69, 71 which is 69 with 2 fingers up your ass, daisy chain, circle jerk, cockteaser, wet-dream, cunt-struck, pussywhipped, short-arm, tuna-taco, group-grope, milking-the-chicken, bulldagger, gangbang, ballbreaker, ballbuster, merkin, bananas and cream, up the old dirt road, around the world, beat-your-meat, whack-off, flogging your dong, pounding your pud, beating the bishop, poontang, dingleberry, sit on it, fudgepacker, milking the lizard, fart face, old fart, farting around, fart sniffer, ream, snake, raincoat, quickie, queer, queen, putz, put-out, push, beef-injection, dog-style, pop your cookies, bust-your-nuts, one-eyed-monster, knob, pocket pool, tail, piddle, paddle the pickle, one-man-band, snapper, notch, rod, shaft, stick, piece of ass, god damn it, pimp, fucker, punk, faggot, dyke, lezzie, box-lunch, sea-food, hand-job, hammer, hatch, head-job, hot-nuts, hum-job, prong, jellyroll, jerk-the-gerkin, lob, meat whistle, cheese, scat fan, middle-leg, wanking, booty, love-muscle, snapping pussy, ghost, bitch, bastard, clam, bite the brown, going up mustard road, bone-on, bush, button, cunt-lapper, cherry, tool, dingus, quiff, quim, get off, joint, piece, stem, root, crack, cooch, crud, eat me, fuck you, up your ass, get laid, fuck-off, piss-off, piss on you, stick it, stuff it, ram it, jam it, cram it, horny, peter, the one eyed wonder worm, piece-of-ass, little brown eyeball, golden showers, pound cake, boy in the boat, brown eye, brown nose, sloppy seconds, Mongolian cluster fuck, rod of love, copping a feel, copping a cherry, copping a joint, on the rag, flying the flag, riding the cotton pony, dipping your wick, going down on, dry hump, fist fuck, skin-flute, French job, furburger, nuts, get your rocks off, get in, get it up, hung, ginch, gobble, dieseldock, rubber, shoot, diesel dyke that was, siff, wad, cocksman, tit-fuck, tongue, rough-trade, trick, weenie, and yodeling in the gully." Track listing # Program opening # Abortion # Professional Comedian # Heart Attack # Rice Krispies # Have a Nice Day # Ice Box Man # Fussy Eater 1 & 2 # New News # The Musical Portion of the Show # Dogs & Cats # Filthy Words ee also

Home secretary defends proposals in Thursday's flagship bill following claims that they will be unfair and unworkable The home secretary, Theresa May, has defended plans to create a "hostile environment" for illegal migrants to Britain, as immigration lawyers warned her that a system of identity checks for all, including British citizens, would have to be introduced to enforce the government's moves to curb access to privately rented housing and to tackle alleged health tourists. The warnings come as she publishes her flagship immigration bill on Thursday, which will require immigration checks to be carried out before anyone can open a new bank account, be issued with a driving licence or access routine health treatment. Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, May said: "Most people will say it can't be fair for people who have no right to be here in the UK to continue to exist as everybody else does with bank accounts, with driving licences and with access to rented accommodation. We are going to be changing that because we don't think that is fair." The Home Office bill will include measures spanning six other Whitehall departments including justice, transport, business, health, local government, and work and pensions, and is designed, in May's words, to "create a really hostile environment for illegal migrants". "What we don't want is a situation where people think that they can come here and overstay because they're able to access everything they need," May has said. The Home Office confirmed the bill would: • Require private landlords to check the immigration status of their tenants. • Require temporary migrants, such as overseas students, who have only a "time-limited" immigration status, to make a contribution to the NHS. A £200 levy has been mentioned as an option. • Require banks to check against a database of known immigration offenders before opening a bank account. • Create new powers to check the immigration status of driving licence applicants and to revoke the licences of overstayers. • Introduce a "deport first, appeal later" policy for thousands facing removal who face no "risk of serious irreversible harm" from being sent back, and reduce the grounds for appeal from 17 to four. On Today, May declined to give any estimate of the scale of "health tourism" in Britain but confirmed the bill included a health levy on overseas students and other categories of short-term migrants. She gave no figure for the levy and said the Department of Health would publish detailed proposals in the next few weeks. She denied it would cost more to collect the levy than the amount it raises. "We will be asking for a surcharge; there will be a sort of levy on people who are going to be coming here, to be staying for a while, to contribute so people can feel it is fair," she told the BBC. "One of the things the NHS has always been quite bad at is charging people who they should be charging, people who don't have the right to free access to the NHS and recovering those costs from them." May did not spell out how the identity checks to establish the immigration status of those applying for health treatment, housing, bank accounts or driving licences would be carried out. But she did say that private landlords would have access to a helpline similar to that currently used by employers to help them carry out the checks. The bill will also restrict the ability of immigration detainees to apply repeatedly for bail if they have already been refused it and create stronger guidance for the courts on the use of human rights laws to prevent deportation, particularly the right to family life. There are also plans to make it easier for the Home Office to recover unpaid fines from companies who employ illegal migrants, and local authorities may face fines for letting social housing to tenants without a direct connection to a local area. However, leading lawyers, landlords, immigration welfare charities and housing organisations have warned that the bill will lead to a real risk of increased homelessness, including of families, and widespread discrimination. The Immigration Law Practitioners' Association (Ilpa) has told May her plan for millions of private landlords to face "proportionate" fines of up to £3,000 if they fail to conduct checks on the immigration status of new tenants and other adults living in their properties is unworkable. The lawyers say the combination of the new housing and health checks with existing checks carried out by employers and educational colleges amounts to a system of identity checks for foreign nationals in Britain. "What this means in practice is a system of identity checks for all, since it is necessary for British citizens or people with permanent residence to prove that they are lawfully present in the UK if and when checked," says the immigration lawyers' official response to the Home Office consultation. "British citizens, European economic area nationals and third country nationals alike would be required to produce identity documents at many turns in a scheme that would be intrusive, bullying, ineffective and expensive and likely racist and unlawful to boot," says the Ilpa response. The lawyers say the scheme is discriminatory because landlords are likely simply to say they aren't satisfied with a tenant's identity documents and refuse them accommodation. They also point out that somebody's immigration status is not necessarily straightforward, with the proposals taking no account of those who do not yet have leave to remain in Britain but have an outstanding application that clearly meets the immigration rules. The Residential Landlords Association has told the home secretary that there are potentially 404 types of European identity documents that landlords may need to know about to operate the scheme. They also warn that some landlords will simply refuse to house migrants for fear of falling foul of the new rules. Habib Rahman, of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, predicted that "these measures will divide society, creating a two-tier Britain, a return to the days of 'no dogs, no blacks, no Irish' and of ill people with no access to healthcare walking the streets of Britain. This bill is a travesty and must be stopped." But the immigration minister, Mark Harper, defended the bill, saying it would "stop migrants using public services to which they are not entitled, reduce the pull factors which encourage people to come to the UK and make it easier to remove people who should not be here".

DAN ŞOVA, a spokesman for Romania's opposition Social Democratic Party (PSD), is paying the price for his poor grasp of history. On March 5th, discussing the Holocaust live on television, he said: "On the territory of Romania, no Jew suffered". He added that "24 Jews died" as a result of the notorious government-backed Iasi pogrom of 1941. Most historians put the figure at 12,000 or more. Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks. It didn't take long for Mr Şova to feel the consequences. The PSD distanced itself from his comments, removed him from his post and dispatched him to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. Yet Mr Şova's views are hardly unique in Romania. Any newspaper kiosk is full of books and other publications that echo his pronouncements. Education is partly to blame. The Holocaust wasn't part of Romania's school curriculum until 1998, and until 2004 many textbooks followed the communist line that the killings were something that happened somewhere else. In 2004 the state-backed Wiesel Commission issued a report on the Holocaust, leading to an official acknowledgement that killings and deportations took place on Romanian territory. Since 2005 secondary-school students have been able to take a special Holocaust course. Yet no history faculty at Romanian universities offers a course on the Holocaust, notes Felicia Waldman, a professor at the University of Bucharest's Goldstein-Goren Hebrew Studies Centre. And so many history teachers graduate ill-equipped to teach the subject. More worryingly, history is often taught with the nationalist assumptions that held sway before the overthrow of communism. Romanian children are, for example, still taught that they are the direct descendants of the Romans and Dacians, an approach some historians see as simplistic. “The history that is taught is of the Romanian people, not of Romania itself,” says Ms Waldman. "Students are still taught about how hospitable the Romanian people have always been, and how they've been the victims of history, never acting as aggressors." Young and old people alike believe that Ion Antonescu, the pro-Nazi wartime dictator, was a "friend of the Jews". The Centre for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism in Romania (MCA) estimates that 270,000 Romanian Jews and 36,000 Romanies (Gypsies) were exterminated under Antonescu. There are believed to be fewer than 9,000 Jews in Romania today. Mr Şova issued a statement in which he said he regretted that his words had been misunderstood. But he failed to apologise for the content of his declarations. Now the MCA and Romani CRISS, a pro-Roma NGO, have filed a criminal complaint against him. Since 2002 Holocaust denial has been a criminal offence in Romania, punishable by up to five years in prison. But the chances of prosecution are slim. The law has been repeatedly flouted. Earlier governments have set poor examples. In 2003, the public information ministry stated: "We firmly claim that within the borders of Romania between 1940 and 1945 there was no Holocaust." (It retracted the claim a week later.) Mr Şova's dismissal may indicate that the situation has improved since then—although some think he will get his old job back after his pilgrimage to Washington. Romania has some way to go in facing up to its wartime past, and a change to the way history is taught might be a good place to start.

Donald Trump doesn't drink alcohol, but that didn't stop the owner of Yuengling beer from endorsing him. Richard "Dick" Yuengling Jr. threw his support to Trump this week. He even gave Eric Trump a tour of the popular brewery in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. Yuengling Jr. is a billionaire and head of the 187-year-old beer company, which his great-great grandfather founded. "Our guys are behind your father. We need him in there," Yuengling Jr. told Eric Trump on Monday, according to The Reading Eagle. The company did not respond to CNNMoney's request for comment. Reaction on social media has been swift. Eric Trump's tweet from the brewery has over 1,100 retweets, but there's also been backlash. Some Yuengling beer fans have vowed never to take another sip. Way to go @Yuengling_Beer ! You just alienated me and tons of people who drank you. I will never drink you again. Peace🖕🏻 — Christopher Fafalios (@chrisfafalios) October 27, 2016 "Way to go @Yuengling_Beer! You just alienated me and tons of people who drank you. I will never drink you again. Peace," one fan tweeted. So far, Yuengling Jr.'s support is verbal only. He isn't listed as a Trump donor. He has mostly given money to the campaigns of Pennsylvania congressmen -- both Republican and Democratic -- over the years, according to OpenSecrets.org. His last presidential donation was to George W. Bush in 2000. Related: Donald Trump is still ahead on this... Pennsylvania is a must-win state for Trump. The Republican candidate and his family have visited numerous times in hopes of winning blue-collar workers upset with the disappearance of a third of the state's manufacturing jobs since 2000. Thank you to Dick Yuengling for an amazing tour of the oldest brewery in the U.S! @Yuengling_Beer #PottsvillePA #MAGA pic.twitter.com/XrGVbbOiI3 — Eric Trump (@EricTrump) October 24, 2016 But Pennsylvania has been called fool's gold for GOP presidential hopefuls. It hasn't voted Republican in a presidential election since 1988. Democrat Hillary Clinton has a solid lead in the polls. Yuengling Jr.'s life story is somewhat similar to Trump's. He bought the struggling brewery from his father in 1985 and built it up into a half-a-billion-dollar-a-year business, making the lager cheap but fashionable. He's listed as No. 361 on Forbes' list of the 400 richest people in America.

Available August 25, 2015 PREORDER TODAY! http://bit.ly/RikkasRivalSF ABOUT LOVE, CHUNIBYO & OTHER DELUSIONS! -HEART THROB- Yuta Togashi thought he had problems dealing with one delusional girlfriend in the person of Rikka Takanashi, but now things are about to go totally insane as his FORMER "one true soul mate" from when he was a chuuni himself returns with a vengeance! So how bad is Satone Shichimiya's re-entry into Togashi's chuni-verse likely to be? Let's just say that she's so epically off the deep end of the chuni-scale that she prefers to use the name Sophia Ring SP Saturn VII and that she'll joyfully tear Togashi's real world to pieces in order to get him back in her imaginary one! Some girls just want to have fun and some want to break down the walls between their boyfriends and themselves. But when a girl's idea of fun is breaking down the wall between their presumed boyfriend and reality, retreating into a fantasy world might just be Togashi's best option. Especially since Satone knows where ALL the skeletons from his past are buried. Toss Rikka's equally delusional friend Sanae into the mix and girl-crazy takes on a whole new meaning in LOVE, CHUNIBYO & OTHER DELUSIONS - HEART THROB! DIRECTOR Kyle Jones ENGLISH VOCAL CAST

Here’s an understatement: Mike Will Made It had himself quite a 2013. The 24-year-old Atlanta producer has been steady climbing for a couple years now, attaching his eponymous, otherworldly drop — see here, far right, middle row — to an impeccable string of heaters, from Meek Mill’s “Tupac Back” to Future’s “Turn on the Lights” to Juicy J’s “Bandz a Make Her Dance.” With even Kanye West tapping a sword on the young man’s shoulder when he brought him in to coproduce “Mercy,” there was no doubting his ascendance would continue apace. And then “We Can’t Stop” came along, and the timeline got blown to smithereens. Herewith, Mike Will in his own words breaks down his start, his rise, and how the Year of Miley allowed him to go ahead and toss “super” in front of “producer” on the ol’ business card. I used to grind. I be telling people, you don’t grind, you don’t sell. I was like 15, 16 getting dropped off in the city by myself, with my own beat CDs. I had met Gucci [Mane] at this studio, Patchwerk. 2005 or some shit. I ain’t even know he was gonna be there. And I had gave him some beats to let him hear, and he just went in the lounge and started freestyling on all my beats and shit. Next thing you know, he saw me again: “Yo, you buddy with the beats, right? Let me buy that beat from you, man.” I got a band. [Editor’s note: A “band” as in the thing that makes her dance.] “Tupac Back” was the first single I had, but prior to that I already had 20-something songs in the street. I already had mixtapes with Gucci. But “Tupac Back” showed people, He don’t just do mixtapes, he can actually do a single. ’Cause this shit is a fucking banger. It really came in and shook the game up. It had everybody freestyling on it — to freestyle on the “Tupac Back” beat was the thing to do. I was just very consistent after that. At the end of 2011, Jeezy told me, “Man, you got the beats, you got the talent, but all I’mma tell you is spread that sound out. Don’t put yourself in a box. They been a couple young producers that came in the game and they didn’t do that.” When Jeezy told me that, he said, “People like Kanye, people like Lil Wayne, people like Jay Z gonna wanna work with you, too.” So I kept doing my thing and around March [2012], two days after my birthday, I was in Louisiana with Ludacris, and I got a call [from Kanye West’s people] wanting to fly me to New York. Kanye is one of my favorite producers and artists. I thought he wouldn’t know who I was, but I got up there, and man, he tells me, “There’s times where there’s a game-changing beat or a game-changing song, someone comes through with the crazy kicks, with the crazy sounds, changing the game to where everybody wants to be like that producer. And right now you that guy. You have what it takes to really take over the game.” It was crazy. He let me hear “Mercy” with no drums. He said, “I wanna go straight to the source. I just felt like, if you come through, you put yo fuckin’ drums on there.” I just did it like that, and in no time “Mercy” came out and took over. “We Can’t Stop” was [originally] for Rihanna, but she never heard it. I wasn’t in the studio with Rihanna but I had run into Chris Brown and I was letting him hear the stuff I was working on for Rihanna. He heard “Pour It Up” and went crazy. He said to her, “Mike Will got this crazy joint over here for you!” “We Can’t Stop” was really the first song I wanted Rihanna to hear, but it wasn’t all the way laid down yet, and “Pour It Up” was. She heard “Pour It Up,” she got locked on it, and she knocked it out. The “We Can’t Stop” beat was so pop, I always said, “Man, this shit remind me of a mature version of ‘Party in the USA.’” And then somebody had asked me, “Why don’t you give it to Miley then?” I said, “Man, that’s a good fuckin’ question.” I ain’t run into Miley yet but she hadn’t put out music in a minute. I wondered, What she doing right now? She probably won’t even fuck wit’ me; she probably got too much politics to get to her. At the time, I ain’t know where each artist was signed. I was just doing music. So I had a meeting with RCA and [CEO] Peter Edge, letting him hear a whole bunch of different songs. And he heard “We Can’t Stop,” and he was just like, “That record might work for Miley Cyrus.” Her A&R liked it too. He took it to [Miley] and let her hear it, and she said she instantly connected with it because it reminded her of parties that she had been to. Really, that song, it’s written from the perspective of someone that’s in a wild party — it’s never her saying she was in the bathroom doing lines. And really it was from the [N.E.R.D. song “Everyone Nose”] — “All the girls standing in line for the bathroom!” It just worked for her. So when she heard it, we went in the studio, she laid it down, and that same day, we did [Mike Will’s debut single] “23.” She had never rapped before. I was fucking with her lyrics, keeping her in the pocket, and that ended up dope. She listens to a lot of rap music, and she takes good direction. If I’m like, “You should re-say it like this” or “Use this tone of voice,” she’ll try it a couple of times and knock it out. I ain’t know what kind of chick she was, but she was down to try new things. But it was too early. I ain’t want that to be the first [new] thing from Miley. The vocals [on the original reference track] were by Rock City, a songwriting group that I work with. The beat was slow, it was real piano-ish. I told them, “If you can make a party record out of this, we out of here.” And then when [Miley] had did it, we had worked on it a couple times. The first version doesn’t sound like the version that actually came out: Rock City, they from the [Virgin] Islands, so the first version had more of an island melody. Miley’s version, we told her to keep her country twang tone instead of trying to sound like the reference, and it came out dope. On the second session we had, I saw her coming up the street, and a whole line of cars, just people swerving and shit. I was like, “Who the fuck are these people?” And then next thing you know, she turns into the garage, and these dudes, these grown-ass men, is tripping over each other. That was the first time for me seeing the paparazzi like that. We were recording at this one studio once and she ended up leaving late and they took a picture of her leaving late and they made up a whole story and it was like, “Ohhh so this is how your life goes.” Her album was pretty much done when we first got into the studio, but we just kept working, making dope records. I told the label, “You should let us keep going till we hit a dud. We need to keep going until we hit a brick wall.” And we never hit a brick wall. Me and her now, we still talk on the phone every day, we still constantly working on music and giving each other different ideas. I look at her like a friend. She my homey, I love her for life. So I look at it like she was already a huge celebrity, and she already had an idea of what she wanted to do, as far as dancing and twerking and shit like that. But at the same time, I told her, man, look, you already a huge celebrity, grown-ass men chasin’ you trying to take a picture … but if you come out with music that’s dope as shit then can’t nobody tell you nothing. I always had those talks with her. I always told her, “You gotta be just the illest.” Everything that we planned on, how we wanted to roll up big, everything that we foresaw in January and February ended up being just like that. Being on the cover of Rolling Stone — damn, she a rock star! She really is one of those people that doesn’t give a fuck, but at the same time she’s real smart. Smart as a motherfucker. We never had any conversation about racism, because I already knew she wasn’t racist. I feel like, “She fuck wit’ me, right?” We didn’t even keep up with a lot of that shit, but one time I was at her house, and we was watching something on TV, and they was talking about me. They was talking about we was dating or whatnot, they was talking about that’s why she twerking. But it was like, man, no, she was already twerking before that. I don’t know how to twerk! How the fuck can I teach somebody how to twerk? You see a girl that’s coming from Nashville, Tennessee, that’s a big pop artist and she can strictly carry it all the way with the white people. But she’s embracing the hip-hop community, and she’s embracing the urban culture with open arms, and what they wanna do is call that racism. She isn’t crip walkin’. She not making fun of ’em — she embracing it. All kind of girls dance and twerk. Matter of fact, go to the strip club, you see Spanish girls, white girls … She went to New Orleans, they do bounce music down there, they do a lot of twerking, and that’s when she started twerking. A lot of the time, people who write that stuff are racist themselves. They don’t wanna see white doing black. “That just doesn’t look right, she’s fuckin’ with this urban producer but really he came through with different sounds on her album, she’s on his first single, they hang out all the time, and then she dancing like this and quoting different hip-hop lyrics on her Twitter … ” They don’t wanna see that shit. I don’t even generally understand how you can say someone that’s embracing the urban culture is racist. I never got that. But you either out there — a “not giving a fuck”–type person — or you a person that’s going with the guidelines. And it’s not really a black or white thing. If Miley was doing all the way pop shit, they would have found something else about her [to get mad about]. I told every label that I had a sound that was gonna change the game. Put me in the studio with any artist that they want and we can take over the game. I’m just trying to stay consistent. I’m working on my own album. “23” is about to go platinum, and it got over 100 million views on VEVO. I been working on different designs for clothes and shit. People already loving the “23” hoodies. Jordan Brand even reached out to me to say they liked the shit. Michael Jordan reached out to me to say he liked the “23” song. I even scored the LeBron commercial. I came with the whole song and everything and got John Legend to sing on it. I don’t sleep. I’m drinking fruit juice, keeping all my nutrients, taking vitamins and shit. Making sure I got my energy up. Just exercising, juicing and shit, and just trying to keep my energy up because I know I can’t sleep. I’m trying to balance so much. I just had a show in Atlanta, I brought out Jeezy, T.I., 2 Chainz. I ain’t even promote they was gonna come and it ended up being sold out. I’m just trying to get my following right, get it all the way together. Yesterday, I slept the whole day. I got that one day where you sleep the whole entire day. Then you get back on the grind. This interview has been condensed and edited.

PARFUM! My name is Ichiya Senpai, but you can call me Officer Yuri's Second Bazonga. I'm currently working under my boss "Officer Yuri desu" who is on the quest to have everyone as his harem. Yuri Lowell is the best husbando in Tales of Link/Persona5/RuneFactory/Vesperia. My occupation is a 100% legit writer who is dedicated to write stories of Yuri's harem in the ToL community since I'm interested in you MEENNNN! My team (KissCAAM Studio) who are working on this project includes Teal, Chorong, RedHeadKitten, and myself. I will be gladly to post this cancelled fanfiction between Ray x Caam, however… Caam and Arcelle are lovers :O FRESH! After Officer Yuri saw this fanfiction, he immediately recruited me to the Yuri Lowell Corporation to have every one of you to his harem. If you're interested in Officer Yuri, contact him at (987) 456 – 9355 or (YUR) ILO – WELL. In any other case, I welcome you "THE BROKEN LINK", my honeys! The Broken Link Synopsis: Ray Kadoodles is "supposedly" a college student who is constantly being bullied due to the fact he was a loner. It could be due to the fact that his age remains unidentified, but that's not important right now . However, his life changed upon one fateful, rainy day where he met Caam, the most popular person in Bazongas University! Will he be able to connect with Caam and develop further relationship with him that is even more than romance? :O FIND OUT ON THE NEXT EPISODE OF DRAGON BALL... oops. That's not supposed to be there, no copyright infringement please :P The Broken Link: One RAYny Day Starting today is the first day of college… meanwhile Ray Kadoodles is crawled up in his blanket, contemplating on when his life was going to change. "I aaammmmm sooooooooo tiillltteed," he muttered to himself. In his high-school life, he was constantly bullied for being a loner, as well as having N/A under the category of "age" for any registration. Ray stood up to get dressed and went downstairs to have breakfast without brushing his teeth first. "Damn, out of cereal again. I guess I'll just have those dank donut that's-" Ray said until he was briefly interrupted by his younger sister Kaenai, who was only 8 years old. "Onii-chan! Thank you for those delicious donuts! You even left those donuts for my 3 dogs and 4 cats too! You're the best!" she exclaimed as she hugged him tightly. "Onii-chan! My bus is here! I'll see you later!" All Ray could think about was all those donuts that he bought, but haven't eaten any of it. "Could my day get any worse?" he cried while kneeling his head down. As he walked outside of his house, he forgot that today was the first day of college. "Oh shit! I better run over there fast!" he said. Ten minutes after he ran, the weather changed almost instantaneously from sunshine bright to heavy thunderstorm. "ARE YOU FU#*!NG KIDDING?! THIS IS TOTAL CANCER!" he shouted as he ran towards shelter. But as he turned around the corner for shelter, he accidentally bumped into a man holding an umbrella. "Oooph!" he muttered with his face flat on his chest. The two stood there for a moment, gazing upon each other's face. It was at this moment that Ray knew his life was about to change. "I'm so sorry, are you okay? I hope I didn't ruin your clothes!" he said as he got back up on his feet. "It's fine. I'm just glad that you're not hurt from that fall" the man replied. Ray's heart skipped a beat and wondered what this feeling inside of him meant. But during that time, he notices the man wearing a Teepo shirt and decided to strike a conversation. "Nice Bazongas you have there!" he blurted. The man stared at him strangely as though he had lost his sanity from a minor fall. "Thanks? Are you really okay? I can take you to the infirmary that's in my university if you'd like" he responded. "OH SORRY! I meant to say Teepo, but Bazongas was the first thing that came to mind. Ray said shyly. "Oh, where are my manners. My name is Ray Kadoodles. I also go to Bazongas University if that was the university you mentioned. What's your name?" The man was relieved that it was just a person who was in the same university as him, since he couldn't identify Ray's age. "The name's Caam. Nice to meet you Ray! Are we in the same Biology Lab class judging by the time you're leaving now?" Caam said smiling. "I guess we are! It looks like our professor's name is OFFICER YURI LOWELL. He must be like a badass character with that name, if you ever played Tales of Vesperia." Ray replied "Dude! I love that game. And yeah, we should probably be lab partners too if we ever get the chance! We have some great things in common" Caam winked. The weather changed almost instantaneous yet again from heavy thunderstorm to a sunny day. At the same time, Ray's face was full of happiness that he finally connected with someone of similar interest! "Okay!" Ray shouted with glee.

Muslim pilgrims circumambulate around the holy Kaaba during the ritual pilgrimages of Haj and Umrah at the Grand Mosque. REUTERS/Muhammad Hamed The largest bank in Saudi Arabia has decided to turn itself into a fully Islamic bank in the next five years after coming in for criticism from the country's Islamic scholars. The state-run bank's decision came amid a $6 billion initial public offer -- the largest ever equity sale in the Arab financial world. National Commercial Bank, or NCB, which has assets worth $116 billion, according to Reuters, works along Sharia-compliant Islamic banking guidelines but also follows certain Western banking conventions. NCB's decision to transform itself into a fully Islamic financial institution comes after some members of the Council of Senior Scholars, the country's highest religious body, said that it will not be possible to invest in the bank's share offer because too much of its business was non-Islamic. "Religion comes above everything," Sheikh Abdullah al-Mutlaq, one of the council members, told state television, according to Reuters. While securities analysts said that such criticism of the bank's policies will not hamper the bank's public listing, NCB held a meeting on Thursday to discuss with the components of its board, such as the bank's chief executive, chairman and other officials, on how to make it Sharia-compliant. By June, two-thirds of the bank's assets were Islamic in nature while the remaining was conventional, according to Reuters. The Sharia board has certified that 78 percent of NCB's financing deals, 92 percent of its liabilities and 73 percent of its income, were Sharia-compliant.

As Rick told Ilsa, they’ll always have Paris. But the global warming hysterics won’t, thanks to the wonderfully devastating action taken by President Donald Trump last week. As promised in his campaign, Trump announced America would call it quits with Obama’s 2016 signing of the Paris agreement on “climate change.” Condemnations of the president came thick and fast, as hard-core liberals around the world kicked off an Orwellian “Two Minutes of Hate” aimed at Trump that has, so far, lasted for four days. German newspaper headlines were of the “Earth to Trump: F*** You” variety, and a gaggle of pols and pundits proclaimed Trump’s action to be the end of American leadership in the world. But Trump’s cancellation of the deal was precisely the opposite. It was a major act of leadership that told the rest of the world that global warming — if it even exists — is a far lower priority to America than the other problems that beset the civilized world. Former President Obama told us that “climate change” was the greatest threat to our national security. Obama preached that message to the EUnuch choir and was roundly praised for it. Mr. Trump is being condemned for reminding the world that there are real existential problems that we have to solve instead of wasting time on such globaloney. The EUnuchs would rather hide from their responsibilities and worry about “climate change” than face the facts of Islamic terrorism, Russian aggression, North Korean and Iranian nukes and the rest. Think about the context of Trump’s action. Man-made “climate change,” first of all, is a myth. Earth’s temperatures shift naturally — dependent on many things such as the sun’s activity — and the warming trend that existed briefly and ended somewhere between 1986 and 1990. (Remember, please, that the term “climate change” was created instantly to replace “global warming” when it became undeniable that “global warming” wasn’t happening.) All the predictions of an environmental apocalypse are based on computer models of the weather that are neither scientifically proven nor scientifically provable. The Paris agreement set a long-term goal of liming Earth’s temperatures to below 2 degrees Centigrade above pre-industrial (1850s) levels. The signing nations agreed to do that by establishing their own carbon emission rates aimed at cooling the Earth to reach those levels. But there was no enforcement mechanism. Any nation could set a goal and then change it at will. Abiding by the agreement would have prevented the development of American oil and gas resources, raised the costs of generating electricity enormously, cost thousands of jobs and strangled our economic growth. Trump’s cancellation of the agreement will, like the agreement itself, have no effect on “climate change.” On Friday, the U.N. World Meteorological Organization said in the worst case scenario, America’s exit from the Paris agreement might cause the world’s temperatures to rise by 0.3 degrees Centigrade by the year 2100. That tiny drift in temperature is apparently enough to melt all the eco-whacko snowflakes. For decades, eco-pimps such as Al Gore have blamed all the world’s ills on “climate change.” It is supposedly responsible for floods, hurricanes, famine and disease. And so it went, on and on. When the weather was too hot, it was the result of “climate change.” So were unexpectedly heavy snowfalls, plunging temperatures, riots, famine and whatever other plagues occurred. Good weather was irrelevant, but any severe weather — whatever it might be — was “proof” of climate change. It’s fun what you can do with computer models when they’re programmed to produce the result you want. John Kerry told us that refrigerators and air conditioners were more dangerous than ISIS. Last year, crazy ol’ Bernie Sanders said“climate change” causes terrorism. He wasn’t alone in doing so, but Bernie took it one step further. He blamed “climate change” for the Brits passing the Brexit referendum. Man-made “climate change” has done no significant damage to anyone or anything, but the eager pursuit of controlling it has wasted tons of money and created extraordinarily stupid policies. Remember Solyndra? The company, a favorite of Obama (because its owners raised tons of campaign money for him), tried to market solar panels that produce electricity, its efforts funded by taxpayer-guaranteed loans. It went bust, like so many of those companies did, because there’s no market for high-priced, weather-dependent electricity. Solyndra left us stuck with about $535 million in bad loans. Ray Mabus, Obama’s last (and the worst-ever) secretary of the Navy, decided to buy “biofuels” at about $250 per gallon instead of diesel, which cost about $5 per gallon. In 2014, Obama’s idiot Secretary of Defense Chuckie Hagel issued a “Climate Change Roadmap” which, among other things, required every operational plan to make accommodation to “climate change.” That directive — N.B. Secretary Mattis — may still be in effect. It would have a lot of absurd effects that could cost lives. For example, if the Marines — America’s “kick the door in” force — need to storm a beach, they’d first have to get permission from the beach erosion experts. If you doubt that, as Casey Stengel would have said, you could look it up. By canceling America’s signature to the Paris agreement, Trump took all that away. He told the world — allies and enemies both — that we were going to deal with the real problems with real solutions instead of sitting in a corner with the EUnuchs, sucking our thumbs and whining that “climate change” — not terrorism, North Korea, Iran, China or Russia — was the greatest threat we face. Cutting carbon emissions won’t end terrorism: Unlimited war against the terrorists and the ideology that propels them will. “Climate change” solutions won’t cure cancer; medical research will. That was Trump’s implicit message. He should make it explicit right away in a major speech. President Trump could take the action he did, because the Paris agreement was nothing more than a paper agreed to by Barack Obama. It wasn’t — like so many other agreements Obama signed — submitted to the Senate for its advice and consent. The Constitution requires a supermajority of the Senate — two thirds of the members, at least 66 votes — for a treaty to become U.S. law. If a presidential agreement is approved in that manner, it becomes a part of the “supreme law of the land,” as the case law says, equal in stature to a congressionally enacted law, and subordinate only to the Constitution itself. Because the Paris agreement on climate change wasn’t submitted for Senate approval, it remains subject to actions like the one the president took. The EUnuchs have refused to renegotiate it, so the president’s announced exit from it is final. The president needs to do the same for Obama’s Iranian nuclear weapons deal. Like the Paris “climate change” agreement, the Iranian deal was never approved by the Senate and is, likewise, not a part of American law and is revocable at any time. The Iranians have already refused to negotiate it. Having warmed up on the global warming deal, Trump should tell the Iranians that the deal is off.

Man who stabbed ex-partner's Tinder date to death in Sydney jailed for 30 years Updated A man who stabbed to death his ex-partner's Tinder date in a Sydney restaurant has been sentenced to at least 30 years in jail. Jovi Pilapil was on a first date with Keith Collins at a restaurant in the Hornsby shopping centre last year when they were attacked. Alexander Villaluna killed Mr Collins after stabbing the 53-year-old 10 times in the stomach and neck with a hunting knife he had bought a few weeks earlier. Villaluna stabbed his former partner in the chest and arm before she managed to escape. He surrendered at the scene and later pleaded guilty to murder and wounding with intent to commit grievous bodily harm. For murder, the 46-year-old was sentenced to a maximum 34 years in prison. For wounding, he was sentenced to a maximum 12 years. Part of the sentences will be served concurrently. The sentences carry a combined non-parole period of 30 years. 'Cowardly and vicious' In sentencing, Justice Robert Beech-Jones described the crimes as "cowardly and vicious". "The offender is an almost text book example of a perpetrator of extreme domestic violence," he said. Justice Beech-Jones described CCTV footage of the crime. It showed Villaluna attacking Mr Collins first, then stabbing Ms Pilapil before returning to Mr Collins who was trying to get up off the floor. "Of all the cowardly and pitiless acts the offender committed on this day, his actions in returning to finish off a dying man on the ground were the most heinous," Justice Beech-Jones said. "The offender interrupted his vicious attack on his ex-partner to stab a defenceless dying man that the offender had never met and only because he dared to have dinner with a woman who did not wish to be with the offender anymore." The court heard Ms Pilapil met Mr Collins through the dating app Tinder. "The offender regarded Mr Collins as simply some intruder on his domain who he had the right to eliminate," Justice Beech-Jones said. Villaluna and Ms Pilapil separated six months before the attack after a physically abusive relationship. Justice Beech-Jones said Villaluna had shown no remorse. Topics: law-crime-and-justice, crime, murder-and-manslaughter, police, community-and-society, domestic-violence, courts-and-trials, hornsby-2077 First posted