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Rosie Huntington-Whiteley in Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Photo: Paramount Pictures When you’re creating a female character for your film, you’ve got a lot of choices. For instance, do you make her a lithe, leggy blonde — or a lithe, leggy brunette? That’s a joke, but it’s also not really a joke, as producer Ross Putman’s new Twitter account @femscriptintros attests. The account tweets out horrible character descriptions of the female leads in movie scripts Putman reads, in which the women are described as sexual props first, and actual interesting characters second. (For privacy’s sake, he changes every name to “Jane.”) Read some of the lowlights below, just as soon as you get done dancing naked on your bed. You know, for fun. JANE stands next to it (30's) dressed in a paramedic's uniform - blonde, fit, smokin' hot. — Ross Putman (@femscriptintros) February 10, 2016 A gorgeous woman, JANE, 23, is a little tipsy, dancing naked on her big bed, as adorable as she is sexy. *BONUS PTS FOR BEING THE 1ST LINE — Ross Putman (@femscriptintros) February 10, 2016 All heads turn to find JANE (28) in the doorway: stunning and trying her best to hide it. — Ross Putman (@femscriptintros) February 10, 2016 Behind a steamy shower door is the indistinguishable but sexy silhouette of JANE showering. — Ross Putman (@femscriptintros) February 10, 2016 This is JANE. She’s lithe, leggy, spirited, outgoing, not afraid to speak her mind, with a sense of humor as dry as the Sonoran Desert. — Ross Putman (@femscriptintros) February 10, 2016 His wife JANE is making dinner and watching CNN on a small TV. She was model pretty once, but living an actual life has taken its toll. — Ross Putman (@femscriptintros) February 10, 2016 JANE (late 20s) sits hunched over a microscope. She’s attractive, but too much of a professional to care about her appearance. — Ross Putman (@femscriptintros) February 10, 2016 She turns and we see her face for the first time. This is the very beautiful, very troubled JANE. — Ross Putman (@femscriptintros) February 10, 2016

One last bit about the Rose Bowl and then we can turn toward Tampa and hoops. But I can't move on without mentioning it: Penn State fans, you got the true Big Ten Pasadena experience this time in all its gory Technicolor detail. By that, I mean you were initiated into the conference brotherhood of heartbreak at the hands of USC. It's a birthright for anyone at Michigan or Ohio State, losing an excruciating game to the Trojans at the world's most enchanting athletic venue. There is no more bittersweet experience in sports than attending a Rose Bowl, gazing agape at the vividness of the beauty all around you. The colors all seem richer even when it's cloudy, the air like velvet even when it's chilly. The Rose Bowl Then your team makes a valiant effort, you think victory is at hand and at the very end it's snatched away by the Evil Empire in cardinal and gold. Ask anyone in Ann Arbor or Columbus. This is a rerun they've lived through over and over. As a kid back in the 1960s and '70s, I watched Woody Hayes take four different teams into the Rose Bowl to meet USC. Two of those ended in just such a painful manner. Then, when I was an OSU undergrad, yet another narrow defeat at the very end in the post-1979 game. Michigan folks can tick off the Pasadena losses to USC: 1969, 1976, 1978, 1989, 2003, 2005. Northwestern (1995) fans of a certain age know the feeling, too. And though they never play at the Rose Bowl, Notre Dame folks know all about it. Like some of the OSU and Michigan defeats, I don't think Penn State's post-2008 loss qualifies because it was never in doubt. Which is sort of a prerequisite for real agony and the unique pain yet to come. And what's that nadir moment? The sound of the Trojan band in their war-helmeted outfits piping up when their triumph is clear. And I don't mean the little ditty they play the whole game after defensive stops like Florida State's tomahawk chop tune. Or the Fight On song they strike up after touchdowns (both in the video below). I mean their victory march. Just hearing it brings on dark memories from my childhood, recollections I keep in the back of the mind's bottom drawer with moving days and dying pets. It's the dirge from a recurring nightmare. USC's band only plays the song when they know they've won. It's called Conquest and the reason it sounds like the soundtrack out of a 20th Century Fox epic from the '40s is that's exactly where it came from. It's their version of Red Auerbach's victory cigar and the I Believe chant begun by Navy midshipmen. It's worse, though. Because it drips with a special arrogance. And as much as you hate it, you know it's a great piece of music. The conductor uses as his baton a gilded gladius, the stubby sword of ancient Greek and Roman foot soldiers, stabbing it in the air with the marching cadence. In the back of your mind you know this is the band that played Tusk behind Fleetwood Mac. It's the band that crossed over into the record industry and show business. All the while the damn horse is prancing around. He's not just a horse, of course. He has to be white. Like Dr. Evil's cat. But you know what the very worst part is? You take in the whole scene in despondence, the USC fans mimicking the trumpet flourishes with their "Oh-oo-oh-ooooo" and the incomparable Song Girls in their white sweaters calmly punching the air with a V for victory in all their confident perfection. And you allow yourself the fleeting thought: If you'd been born into their tribe and their golden land, you'd love being one of them. That's the worst part! That's the part that drives you nuts. Because you'll have to think about this loss for nine months. You're flying home the next day. Winter has only begun. Meanwhile, they'll be in California. And they'll probably forget about it tomorrow when they leave work early for the beach. God, I hate that song.

Unless the life chances of children raised by single mothers suddenly improve, the explosive growth of the U.S. Hispanic population over the next couple of decades does not bode well for American social stability. Hispanic immigrants bring near–Third World levels of fertility to America, coupled with what were once thought to be First World levels of illegitimacy. (In fact, family breakdown is higher in many Hispanic countries than here.) Nearly half of the children born to Hispanic mothers in the U.S. are born out of wedlock, a proportion that has been increasing rapidly with no signs of slowing down. Given what psychologists and sociologists now know about the much higher likelihood of social pathology among those who grow up in single-mother households, the Hispanic baby boom is certain to produce more juvenile delinquents, more school failure, more welfare use, and more teen pregnancy in the future. The government social-services sector has already latched onto this new client base; as the Hispanic population expands, so will the demands for a larger welfare state. Since conservative open-borders advocates have yet to acknowledge the facts of Hispanic family breakdown, there is no way to know what their solution to it is. But they had better come up with one quickly, because the problem is here—and growing. The dimensions of the Hispanic baby boom are startling. The Hispanic birthrate is twice as high as that of the rest of the American population. That high fertility rate—even more than unbounded levels of immigration—will fuel the rapid Hispanic population boom in the coming decades. By 2050, the Latino population will have tripled, the Census Bureau projects. One in four Americans will be Hispanic by mid-century, twice the current ratio. In states such as California and Texas, Hispanics will be in the clear majority. Nationally, whites will drop from near 70 percent of the total population in 2000 to just half by 2050. Hispanics will account for 46 percent of the nation’s added population over the next two decades, the Pew Hispanic Center reports. But it’s the fertility surge among unwed Hispanics that should worry policymakers. Hispanic women have the highest unmarried birthrate in the country—over three times that of whites and Asians, and nearly one and a half times that of black women, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Every 1,000 unmarried Hispanic women bore 92 children in 2003 (the latest year for which data exist), compared with 28 children for every 1,000 unmarried white women, 22 for every 1,000 unmarried Asian women, and 66 for every 1,000 unmarried black women. Forty-five percent of all Hispanic births occur outside of marriage, compared with 24 percent of white births and 15 percent of Asian births. Only the percentage of black out-of-wedlock births—68 percent—exceeds the Hispanic rate. But the black population is not going to triple over the next few decades. As if the unmarried Hispanic birthrate weren’t worrisome enough, it is increasing faster than among other groups. It jumped 5 percent from 2002 to 2003, whereas the rate for other unmarried women remained flat. Couple the high and increasing illegitimacy rate of Hispanics with their higher overall fertility rate, and you have a recipe for unstoppable family breakdown. The only bright news in this demographic disaster story concerns teen births. Overall teen childbearing in the U.S. declined for the 12th year in a row in 2003, having dropped by more than a third since 1991. Yet even here, Hispanics remain a cause for concern. The rate of childbirth for Mexican teenagers, who come from by far the largest and fastest-growing immigrant population, greatly outstrips every other group. The Mexican teen birthrate is 93 births per every 1,000 girls, compared with 27 births for every 1,000 white girls, 17 births for every 1,000 Asian girls, and 65 births for every 1,000 black girls. To put these numbers into international perspective, Japan’s teen birthrate is 3.9, Italy’s is 6.9, and France’s is 10. Even though the outsize U.S. teen birthrate is dropping, it continues to inflict unnecessary costs on the country, to which Hispanics contribute disproportionately. To grasp the reality behind those numbers, one need only talk to people working on the front lines of family breakdown. Social workers in Southern California, the national epicenter for illegal Hispanic immigrants and their progeny, are in despair over the epidemic of single parenting. Not only has illegitimacy become perfectly acceptable, they say, but so has the resort to welfare and social services to cope with it. Dr. Ana Sanchez delivers babies at St. Joseph’s Hospital in the city of Orange, California, many of them to Hispanic teenagers. To her dismay, they view having a child at their age as normal. A recent patient just had her second baby at age 17; the baby’s father is in jail. But what is “most alarming,” Sanchez says, is that the “teens’ parents view having babies outside of marriage as normal, too. A lot of the grandmothers are single as well; they never married, or they had successive partners. So the mom sends the message to her daughter that it’s okay to have children out of wedlock.” Sanchez feels almost personally involved in the problem: “I’m Hispanic myself. I wish I could find out what the Asians are doing right.” She guesses that Asian parents’ passion for education inoculates their children against teen pregnancy and the underclass trap. “Hispanics are not picking that up like the Asian kids,” she sighs. Conservatives who support open borders are fond of invoking “Hispanic family values” as a benefit of unlimited Hispanic immigration. Marriage is clearly no longer one of those family values. But other kinds of traditional Hispanic values have survived—not all of them necessarily ideal in a modern economy, however. One of them is the importance of having children early and often. “It’s considered almost a badge of honor for a young girl to have a baby,” says Peggy Schulze of Chrysalis House, an adoption agency in Fresno. (Fresno has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in California, typical of the state’s heavily Hispanic farm districts.) It is almost impossible to persuade young single Hispanic mothers to give up their children for adoption, Schulze says. “The attitude is: ‘How could you give away your baby?’ I don’t know how to break through.” The most powerful Hispanic family value—the tight-knit extended family—facilitates unwed child rearing. A single mother’s relatives often step in to make up for the absence of the baby’s father. I asked Mona, a 19-year-old parishioner at St. Joseph’s Church in Santa Ana, California, if she knew any single mothers. She laughed: “There are so many I can’t even name them.” Two of her cousins, aged 25 and 19, have children without having husbands. The situation didn’t seem to trouble this churchgoer too much. “They’ll be strong enough to raise them. It’s totally okay with us,” she said. “We’re very close; we’re there to support them. They’ll do just fine.” As Mona’s family suggests, out-of-wedlock child rearing among Hispanics is by no means confined to the underclass. The St. Joseph’s parishioners are precisely the churchgoing, blue-collar workers whom open-borders conservatives celebrate. Yet this community is as susceptible as any other to illegitimacy. Fifty-year-old Irma and her husband, Rafael, came legally from Mexico in the early 1970s. Rafael works in a meatpacking plant in Brea; they have raised five husky boys who attend church with them. Yet Irma’s sister—a homemaker like herself, also married to a factory hand—is now the grandmother of two illegitimate children, one by each daughter. “I saw nothing in the way my sister and her husband raised her children to explain it,” Irma says. “She gave them everything.” One of the fathers of Irma’s young nieces has four other children by a variety of different mothers. His construction wages are being garnished for child support, but he is otherwise not involved in raising his children. The fathers of these illegitimate children are often problematic in even more troubling ways. Social workers report that the impregnators of younger Hispanic women are with some regularity their uncles, not necessarily seen as a bad thing by the mother’s family. Alternatively, the father may be the boyfriend of the girl’s mother, who then continues to stay with the grandmother. Older men seek out young girls in the belief that a virgin cannot get pregnant during her first intercourse, and to avoid sexually transmitted diseases. The tradition of starting families young and expand- ing them quickly can come into conflict with more modern American mores. Ron Storm, the director of the Hillview Acres foster-care home in Chino, tells of a 15-year-old girl who was taken away from the 21-year-old father of her child by a local child-welfare department. The boyfriend went to jail, charged with rape. But the girl’s parents complained about the agency’s interference, and eventually both the girl and her boyfriend ended up going back to Mexico, presumably to have more children. “At 15, as the Quinceañera tradition celebrates, you’re considered ready for marriage,” says Storm. Or at least for childbearing; the marriage part is disappearing. But though older men continue to take advantage of younger women, the age gap between the mother and the father of an illegitimate child is quickly closing. Planned Parenthood of Orange and San Bernardino Counties tries to teach young fathers to take responsibility for their children. “We’re seeing a lot more 13- and 14-year-old fathers,” says Kathleen Collins, v.p. of health education. The day before we spoke, Scott Montoya, an Orange County sheriff’s deputy, arrested two 14-year-old boys who were bragging about having sexual relations with a cafeteria worker from an Olive Garden restaurant. “It’s now all about getting girls pregnant when you’re age 15,” he says. One 18-year-old in the Planned Parenthood fathers’ program has two children by two different girls and is having sex with five others, says health worker Jason Warner. “A lot of [the adolescent sexual behavior] has to do with getting respect from one’s peers,” observes Warner. Normally, the fathers, of whatever age, take off. “The father may already be married or in prison or doing drugs,” says Amanda Gan, director of operations for Toby’s House, a maternity home in Dana Point, California. Mona, the 19-year-old parishioner at St. Joseph’s Church, says that the boys who impregnated her two cousins are “nowhere to be found.” Her family knows them but doesn’t know if they are working or in jail. Two teen mothers at the Hillview Acres home represent the outer edge of Hispanic family dysfunction. Yet many aspects of their lives are typical. Though these teenagers’ own mothers were unusually callous and irresponsible, the social milieu in which they were raised is not unusual. Irene’s round, full face makes her look younger than her 14 years, certainly too young to be a mother. But her own mother’s boyfriend repeatedly forced sex on her, with the mother’s acquiescence. The result was Irene’s baby, Luz. Baby Luz has an uncle her own age, Irene’s new 13-month-old brother. Like Irene, Irene’s mother had her first child at 14, and produced five more over the next 16 years, all of whom went into foster care. Irene’s father committed suicide before she was old enough to know him. The four fathers of her siblings are out of the picture, too: one of them, the father of her seven-year-old brother and five-year-old sister, was deported back to Mexico after he showed up drunk for a visit with his children, in violation of his probation conditions. Irene is serene and articulate—remarkably so, considering that in her peripatetic early life in Orange County she went to school maybe twice a week. She likes to sing and to read books that are sad, she says, especially books by Dave Pelzer, a child-abuse victim who has published three best-selling memoirs about his childhood trauma. She says she will never get married: “I don’t want another man in my life. I don’t want that experience again.” Eighteen-year-old Jessica at least escaped rape, but her family experiences were bad enough. The large-limbed young woman, whose long hair is pulled back tightly from her heart-shaped face, grew up in the predominantly Hispanic farming community of Indio in the Coachella Valley. She started “partying hard” in fifth grade, she says—at around the same time that her mother, separated from her father, began using drugs and going clubbing. By the eighth grade, Jessica and her mother were drinking and smoking marijuana together. Jessica’s family had known her boyfriend’s family since she was four; when she had her first child by him—she was 14 and he was 21—her mother declared philosophically that she had always known that it would happen. “It was okay with her, so long as he continued to give her drugs.” Jessica originally got pregnant to try to clean up her life, she says. “I knew what I was doing was not okay, so having a baby was a way for me to stop doing what I was doing. In that sense, the baby was planned.” She has not used drugs since her first pregnancy, though she occasionally drinks. After her daughter was born, she went to live with her boyfriend in a filthy trailer without plumbing; they scrounged food from dumpsters, despite the income from his illegal drug business. They planned to get married, but by the time she got pregnant again with a son, “We were having a lot of problems. We’d be holding hands, and he’d be looking at other girls. I didn’t want him to touch me.” Eventually, the county welfare agency removed her and put her in foster care with her two children. Both Jessica and her caddish former boyfriend illustrate the evanescence of the celebrated Hispanic “family values.” Her boyfriend’s family could not be more traditional. Two years ago, Jessica went back to Mexico to celebrate her boyfriend’s parents’ 25th wedding anniversary and the renewal of their wedding vows. Jessica’s own mother got married at 15 to her father, who was ten years her senior. Her father would not let his wife work; she was a “stay-at-home wife,” Jessica says. But don’t blame the move to the U.S. for the behavior of younger generations; the family crack-up is happening even faster in Latin America. Jessica’s mother may have been particularly negligent, but Jessica’s experiences are not so radically different from those of her peers. “Everybody’s having babies now,” she says. “The Coachella Valley is filled with girls’ pregnancies. Some girls live with their babies’ dads; they consider them their husbands.” These cohabiting relationships rarely last, however, and a new cohort of fatherless children goes out into the world. Despite the strong family support, the prevalence of single parenting among Hispanics is producing the inevitable slide into the welfare system. “The girls aren’t marrying the guys, so they are married to the state,” Dr. Sanchez observes. Hispanics now dominate the federal Women, Infants, and Children free food program; Hispanic enrollment grew over 25 percent from 1996 to 2002, while black enrollment dropped 12 percent and white enrollment dropped 6.5 percent. Illegal immigrants can get WIC and other welfare programs for their American-born children. If Congress follows President Bush’s urging and grants amnesty to most of the 11 million illegal aliens in the country today, expect the welfare rolls to skyrocket as the parents themselves become eligible. Amy Braun works for Mary’s Shelter, a home for young single mothers who are homeless or in crisis, in Orange County, California. It has become “culturally okay” for the Hispanic population to use the shelter and welfare system, Braun says. A case manager at a program for pregnant homeless women in the city of Orange observes the same acculturation to the social-services sector, with its grievance mongering and sense of victimhood. “I’ll have women in my office on their fifth child, when the others have already been placed in foster care,” says Anita Berry of Casa Teresa. “There’s nothing shameful about having multiple children that you can’t care for, and to be pregnant again, because then you can blame the system.” The consequences of family breakdown are now being passed down from one generation to the next, in an echo of the black underclass. “The problems are deeper and wider,” says Berry. “Now you’re getting the second generation of foster care and group home residents. The dysfunction is multigenerational.” The social-services complex has responded with barely concealed enthusiasm to this new flood of clients. As Hispanic social problems increase, so will the government sector that ministers to them. In July, a New York Times editorial, titled young latinas and a cry for help, pointed out the elevated high school dropout rates and birthrates among Hispanic girls. A quarter of all Latinas are mothers by the age of 20, reported the Times. With the usual melodrama that accompanies the pitch for more government services, the Times designated young Latinas as “endangered” in the same breath that it disclosed that they are one of the fastest-growing segments of the population. “The time to help is now,” said the Times—by which it means ratcheting up the taxpayer-subsidized social-work industry. In response to the editorial, Carmen Barroso, regional director of International Planned Parenthood Federation/Western Hemisphere Region, proclaimed in a letter to the editor the “urgent need for health care providers, educators and advocates to join the sexual and reproductive health movement to ensure the fundamental right to services for young Latinas.” Wherever these “fundamental rights” might come from, Barroso’s call nevertheless seems quite superfluous, since there is no shortage of taxpayer-funded “services” for troubled Latinas—or Latinos. The schools in California’s San Joaquin Valley have day care for their students’ babies, reports Peggy Schulze of Chrysalis House. “The girls get whatever they need—welfare, medical care.” Advocates for young unwed moms in New York’s South Bronx are likewise agitating for more day-care centers in high schools there, reports El Diario/La Prensa. A bill now in Congress, the Latina Adolescent Suicide Prevention Act, aims to channel $10 million to “culturally competent” social agencies to improve the self-esteem of Latina girls and to provide “support services” to their families and friends if they contemplate suicide. The trendy “case management” concept, in which individual “cases” become the focal point around which a solar system of social workers revolves, has even reached heavily Hispanic elementary and middle schools. “We have a coordinator, who brings in a collaboration of agencies to deal with the issues that don’t allow a student to meet his academic goals, such as domestic violence or drugs,” explains Sylvia Rentria, director of the Family Resource Center at Berendo Middle School in Los Angeles. “We can provide individual therapy.” Rentria offers the same program at nearby Hoover Elementary School for up to 100 students. This July, Rentria launched a new session of Berendo’s Violence Intervention Program for parents of children who are showing signs of gang involvement and other antisocial behavior. Ghady M., 55 and a “madre soltera” (single mother), like most of the mothers in the program, has been called in because her 16-year-old son, Christian, has been throwing gang signs at school, cutting half his classes, and ending up in the counseling office every day. The illegal Guatemalan is separated from her partner, who was “muy malo,” she says; he was probably responsible for her many missing teeth. (The detectives in the heavily Hispanic Rampart Division of the Los Angeles Police Department, which includes the Berendo school, spend inordinate amounts of time on domestic violence cases.) Though Ghady used to work in a factory on Broadway in downtown L.A.— often referred to as Little Mexico City—she now collects $580 in welfare payments and $270 in food stamps for her two American-born children. Christian is a husky smart aleck in a big white T-shirt; his fashionably pomaded hair stands straight up. He goes to school but doesn’t do homework, he grins; and though he is not in a gang, he says, he has friends who are. Keeping Ghady and Christian company at the Violence Intervention Program is Ghady’s grandniece, Carrie, a lively ten-year-old. Carrie lives with her 26-year-old mother but does not know her father, who also sired her 12-year-old brother. Her five-year-old brother has a different father. Yet for all these markers of social dysfunction, fatherless Hispanic families differ from the black underclass in one significant area: many of the mothers and the absent fathers work, even despite growing welfare use. The former boyfriend of Jessica, the 18-year-old mother at the Hillview Acres foster home, works in construction and moonlights on insulation jobs; whether he still deals drugs is unknown. Jessica is postponing joining her father in Texas until she finishes high school, because once she moves in with him, she will feel obligated to get a job to help the family finances. The mother of Hillview’s 14-year-old Irene used to fix soda machines in Anaheim, California, though she got fired because she was lazy, Irene says. Now, under court compulsion, she works in a Lunchables factory in Santa Ana, a condition of getting her children back from foster care. The 18-year-old Lothario and father of two, whom Planned Parenthood’s Jason Warner is trying to counsel, works at a pet store. The mother of Carrie, the vivacious ten-year-old sitting in on Berendo Middle School’s Violence Intervention Program, makes pizza at a Papa John’s pizza outlet. How these two value systems—a lingering work ethic and underclass mating norms—will interact in the future is anyone’s guess. Orange County sheriff’s deputy Montoya says that the older Hispanic generation’s work ethic is fast disappearing among the gangbanging youngsters whom he sees. “Now, it’s all about fast money, drugs, and sex.” It may be that the willingness to work will plummet along with marriage rates, leading to even greater social problems than are now rife among Hispanics. Or it may be that the two contrasting practices will remain on parallel tracks, creating a new kind of underclass: a culture that tolerates free-floating men who impregnate women and leave, like the vast majority of black men, yet who still labor in the noncriminal economy. The question is whether, if the disposition to work remains relatively strong, a working parent will inoculate his or her illegitimate children against the worst degradations that plague black ghettos. From an intellectual standpoint, this is a fascinating social experiment, one that academicians are—predictably—not attuned to. But the consequences will be more than intellectual: they may severely strain the social fabric. Nevertheless, it is an experiment that we seem destined to see to its end. Tisha Roberts, a supervisor at an Orange County, California, institution that assists children in foster care, has given up hope that the illegitimacy rate will taper off. “It’s going to continue to grow,” she says, “until we can put birth control in the water.”

to glorify and praise God together as a group A Muslim leader said the gathering allowed for A street outside Lakemba Mosque was closed for hours to Tens of thousands of Muslims have gathered at Lakemba Mosque in Sydney to honour a man's willingness to sacrifice his only son in God's name. Muslim residents caused road closures outside Lakemba Mosque, in Sydney's south-west, as they participated in the Eid Al Adha prayer, which marks the end of the annual pilgrimage or Hajj to the Saudi holy city of Mecca. Between 20,000 and 30,000 men and women were pictured standing stoically on prayer mats laid across Wangee Road, which was closed between 5am and 9am, with sounds of prayers echoing through the streets as an Imam lead the service from inside the mosque. Scroll down for video Thousands of devoted Muslims have gathered in the streets of Western Sydney to honour a man's willingness to sacrifice his only son in God's name Muslim residents caused road closures outside Lakemba mosque as they participated in the Eid Al Adha prayer, which marks the end of the annual pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca A police spokespersons said the single road was closed for around four hours, with extra police deployed to direct traffic around Punchbowl Road during the service. Men and women mingled outside the mosque before and after prayer time, however they were segregated as they offered their Eid Al Adha prayer. Muslim community spokesperson Keysar Trad, who led prayers in Zetland, south of Sydney's CBD, said the celebrations were one of the biggest events in the Islamic calendar and marked the breaking of a nine day fast. 'The Eid Al Adha prayer has an additional prayer and a sermon - the rest of the time you are supposed to glorify and praise God together,' he told Daily Mail Australia. Men and women mingled outside the mosque before and after prayer time, however they were segregated as they offered their Eid Al Adha prayer Some gathered in a nearby rugby ground (pictured) to offer their Eid Al Adha prayer The men stood in neat rows and bowed their heads as an Imam lead the sermon They knelt on prayer mats during the service which is one of the biggest in the Islamic calendar 'Many people would have been fasting for the last nine days between the break of dawn and sunset,' he added. He said his sermon touched on examples about the prophet Ibrahim who was willing to sacrifice his only son at God's request. The celebration is observed internationally, with pictures of Filipino Muslims at Luneta Park in Manila emerging that show women offering their prayers to commemorate Ibrahim's faith. The women were seen in head scarves bowing on prayer mats behind a barbed wire fence outside the Blue Mosque, some with young children laying or praying beside them. Animals were slaughtered and split into three parts during the 'Feast of the Sacrifice', with worshippers honouring tradition by offering one portion to their family, one to friends and another for the poor or needy. The celebration, also known as the 'Feast of the Sacrifice', is observed internationally (Pictured: Women in Manila) Thousands gathered at the Blue Mosque in Taguig city, east of Manila, in the Philippines, on Monday morning A young child suckles on a bottle of milk as his mother kneels beside worshippers at Eid al-Adha in the Philippines The women were seen in head scarves bowing on prayer mats behind a barbed wire fence, some with young children laying or praying beside them Many children were seen participating in the service which makes the holies of the two Muslim annual holidays A woman uses her smart phone to take a 'selfie' after attending the morning prayers near Manila A Muslim spokesperson said his sermon touched on examples about the prophet Abraham who was willing to sacrifice his only son at God's request The service was projected on to a large screen so the Imam's instructions were visible to worshippers outside the mosque Mr Trad said between 20 and 30 thousand worshippers travelled to Lakemba Mosque (pictured) for the event Volunteers offered to help clean the space on Sunday before the sacred prayers took place The sun shone down on worshippers who gathered early Monday morning Police stand watch as thousands of Chinese worshippers line the streets in preparation for the Eid Al-Adha prayer A woman in Shanghai with a lace veil over her head holds her phone to her ear before the sacred annual prayer commences Chinese Muslims sit in neat rows as a police dog circles worshippers on a street outside a mosque in Shanghai Three Indonesian Muslims use their prayer mats to shelter from the rain as they arrive for morning prayers to mark Eid al-Adha on the sand-dunes of Parangkusumo beach, in Yogyakarta, on the island of Java Many women in Yogyakarta wore crisp white veils for the occasion which is one of two Islamic holidays celebrated worldwide Worshippers are required to place their hands over their ears during the Eid al-Adha prayer, which differs from the daily routine Men and women on the sand dunes of Parangkusumo are separated as they offer their prayer during Eid al-Adha Acehnese men stand beside a reflective pool of water as they lay out their mats in preparation for prayers at Blang Padang Park, Banda Aceh, Indonesia Thousands gathered at Malang, the second largest city in East Java, Indonesia for Eid al-Adha or 'the feast of sacrifice' Indonesian Muslims bow their heads during prayer in Medan, North Sumatra, Indonesia, as a balloon floats in the crowd The women are dressed in modest veils, many choosing to wear white, during the Muslim holiday of Eid Al-Adha Technology and tradition meet in Blang Padang Park, Indonesia, as women take 'selfies' to commemorate the occasion A mosque in Jakarta is inundated with devoted worshippers who have risen early to pray for the end of fasting A child peeks through the railings from an upper level of Istiqlal Mosque, the largest mosque in Southeast Asia The sheer volume of worshippers could not be contained and some must line up on adjoining road to take part in the prayer Women and men are divided as they take the time to glorify God as a group on the holiday of Eid Al-Adha Worshippers observing the holiday also sacrifice animals and distribute meat to the poor during the sacred day A cat bolts past the line of people as they sit on mats during the Eid al-Adha holiday at Jakarta's Senen Market in Indonesia Muslims can be seen crossing their arms across their navel - which is a part of the practice during Eid al-Adha Controversial figure Salim Mehajer posted a pictured outside Lakemba Mosque on Monday morning, offering his followers wishes of 'Eid mubarak' - which is a traditional Muslim greeting that means 'blessed celebration' in Arabic. He posted an image reading from the Quran to his Instagram account on Sunday. 'Whist the pilgrims go to Arafat from Mina, for the most important part of the Hajj; we sit back and try to redeem the importance of this day,' he wrote. Controversial figure Salim Mehajer posted a pictured outside Lakemba mosque (pictured) on Monday morning, offering his followers wishes of 'Eid mubarak' - a traditional Muslim greeting that means 'blessed celebration' in Arabic

While the decision to adopt 2011's population statistics can be debated and argued over, as done so by Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah, who urged his south Indian counterparts to resist, to give it political colour is not healthy A lot has been written about the North versus South divide since the constitution of the 15th Finance Commission. Several commentators have argued that one of the terms of reference (ToR), which mandates that figures from the 2011 Census be used instead of the 1971 Census, will benefit north Indian states at the expense of their south Indian counterparts. This is a departure from the ToRs for previous Finance Commissions which made recommendations on the basis of the 1971 Census. It's being argued vociferously that such a move creates a clear divide between southern states, which have adopted population control measures, and north Indian states which have burgeoning populations because they failed to implement family planning measures. As per the 2011 Census, the south Indian states will receive a smaller chunk of central revenues on account of their low population growth. While the fairness of adopting 2011 population figures for devolution of funds can be argued on economic grounds, to suggest that such a move is politically motivated and intentionally discriminatory against southern states is stretching it a bit too far. To begin with, at Para 7 (ii), the ToR notes that the Commission may consider efforts and progress made towards achieving replacement rate of growth. Clearly, this works in favour of many south Indian states and has been duly reported. Most south Indian states have achieved replacement rate of growth and this ToR will actually work in favour of these states. Also, contrary to what is being argued, nothing in the language of this reference suggests that states which have already achieved the replacement rate of growth will not benefit and that only those states which are moving towards it will stand to gain. The 14th Finance Commission had specifically taken note of this issue and was of the view that the population figure for 2011 is a better criteria. Page 97 of the report noted: "Though we are of the view that the use of dated population data is unfair, we are bound by our ToR and have assigned a 17.5 percent weight to the 1971 population." By "dated population data", the commission was referring to figures from the 1971 Census. In fact, for purposes of grants to local bodies, the Commission recommended the use of 2011 population figures to determine grants to each state and also gave a 10 percent weightage to 2011 figures for horizontal devolution of central taxes. It is clear from a reading of the report that there is a strong economic rationale for adopting 2011 population figures as criteria for determining devolution of funds. This is not to deny that opposing arguments are not worthy of consideration and deserve acknowledgement. However, given the repeated assertion by the last Finance Commission on the unfairness of using 1971 data can be seen as sufficient evidence of the apolitical reasoning behind the move. This is further proved by the fact that contrary to what is being argued, this policy measure is likely to create winners and losers on either side of the Vindhyas and has no exclusive beneficial impact on the northern states to the exclusion of those from the South. A look at the report of the 14th Finance Commission puts things in perspective and refutes any such claims with substantial authority. Annex 8.1 of the report also provides responses of all states on this question of choosing 1971 population figures over 2011's figures. Several states from the North actually wanted the population figures of 1971 to be the basis and not 2011. These states include Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Punjab. From the West, both Maharashtra and Goa were in favour of census data of 1971 as opposed to 2011. So clearly, a switch to 2011 will not sit nicely with the interests of these states who may also lose out on quantum of devolved funds, even though they are not situated in the southern part of the country. Punjab's share, for instance, as per the 2011 Census, was at 2.330 percent as compared to 2.495 percent as per 1971 Census, as reported in Annex 8.2 of the report. On the other hand, Telangana's share actually increased from 2.913 percent to 2.956 percent going by the 2011 Census. In the world of policy making and implementation, it is almost axiomatic to assert that every policy creates some winners and some losers, and the move to use the 2011 Census figures instead of 1971 Census is no different. It's clear that the move creates winners and losers in pretty much every part of the country and therefore cannot be said to be targeted specifically at south Indian states. To reiterate, while the decision to adopt 2011's population statistics can be debated and argued over, and will no doubt be highlighted before the 15th Finance Commission as well — as done so by Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah, who urged his counterparts in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry to resist — to give it a political colour and claim it to be an exercise in discrimination is not healthy. Such pernicious presentation sows seeds of discontent among south Indian states, which are not founded in rational analysis. The author is a master in public policy candidate at LKY School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore

Ricordare gli uomini e le donne che durante la dittatura nazi-fascista e in altre situazioni drammatiche di guerra, persecuzione e violazione di diritti umani, hanno scelto la strada della solidarietà e del coraggio è il senso della Giornata europea dei Giusti istituita nel 2012, ribadito anche dalla recentissima legge del Parlamento italiano che ha dichiarato il 6 marzo “Giornata in memoria dei Giusti dell’umanità”. Se l’Italia è il primo Paese ad aderire ufficialmente alla Giornata europea dei Giusti, il Comune di Rimini attraverso il progetto di Attività di Educazione alla Memoria già da diversi anni promuove il valore della scelta politica e morale di ogni individuo ha la possibilità di compiere, anche in situazioni estreme come le dittature e le guerre. Nel 2014 il Comune di Rimini ha creato all’interno del Parco XXV aprile un giardino dedicato ai Giusti del proprio territorio, erigendo un monumento in memoria di Ezio Giorgetti (albergatore di Bellaria) Osman Carugno (maresciallo dei Carabinieri) e Guido Morganti (sarto di Cattolica), nominati Giusti fra le Nazioni dallo Yad Vashem di Gerusalemme e che insieme ad altri cittadini della Romagna e del Montefeltro dall’autunno 1943 fino ad ottobre 1944 salvarono decine di famiglie ebree in fuga dalle deportazioni verso i centri di messa a morte. Grazie alle ricerche effettuate dagli storici, tra cui Liliana Picciotto per il CDEC (Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea) – che per prima ha ricostruito la vicenda – e Patrizia Di Luca per l’Università di San Marino, è stato possibile accertare che tra Bellaria, Cattolica-Gabicce e Mondaino, 41 ebrei jugoslavi e 13 ebrei mantovani e ferraresi, furono salvati da morte sicura dal coraggio di semplici cittadini che di fronte all’emergenza di vite in pericolo non esitarono a prestare soccorso in ogni modo, coinvolgendo amici e concittadini nell’azione di salvataggio e rifugio. Il programma delle iniziative Un ricco programma di iniziative celebrerà i Giusti a Rimini, coinvolgendo gli studenti delle scuole cittadine e l’intera città attraverso conferenze e proiezioni a tema, incontri e dibattiti. A causa delle condizioni meteo avverse degli ultimi giorni, sono stati rinviati i primi due appuntamenti in calendario, inizialmente previsti per domani, giovedì 1 marzo: slitta infatti a giovedì 12 aprile l’incontro con Liliana Picciotto, fra le più importanti storiche italiane della Shoah che alla Sala del Giudizio del Museo della Città presenterà le sue ricerche sugli ebrei italiani che si salvarono dalle deportazioni, ispirandosi al suo recente libro “Salvarsi. Gli ebrei d’Italia sfuggiti alla Shoah, 1943-1945” (Einaudi, 2017). Se due terzi della comunità ebraica italiana poté sfuggire alle retate non fu solo per la bontà di quei cittadini che diedero loro rifugio e protezione, ma per ragioni complesse di cui la ricercatrice discuterà alla presenza di Laura Fontana, responsabile per l’Attività di Educazione alla Memoria del Comune di Rimini, Antonio Mazzoni, dell’Istituto storico per la Resistenza di Rimini e Patrizia Di Luca, dell’Università degli Studi di San Marino. Rinviata anche la visita degli studenti della Scuola Dante Alighieri di Rimini che saranno ricevuti in Consiglio Comunale venerdì 9 marzo dalla Presidente Sara Donati e da una rappresentanza di amministratori comunali per presentare il frutto delle loro ricerche sui Giusti del territorio ma anche per condividere le loro riflessioni sul valore politico-morale di comportarsi da giusti nel presente. Un’occasione preziosa, fortemente voluta dalla stessa Presidente Donati che ha seguito tutto il lavoro di studio degli studenti, per aprire un dialogo tra giovani e adulti e sottolineare la vicinanza tra generazioni nel tenere vivo l’impegno della memoria storica e della sua declinazione in azioni concrete nel presente. Martedì 6 marzo, Giornata in memoria dei Giusti dell’umanità, alle 11 si terrà la cerimonia solenne al Giardino dei Giusti all Parco XXV Aprile, alla presenza dei rappresentanti delle istituzioni e associazioni cittadine e di una rappresentanza di studenti. Nel pomeriggio alle 16.15, la dottoressa Patrizia Di Luca terrà una conferenza dal titolo “Rispondere al male con coraggio e solidarietà. Le donne ricordate nella Giornata dei Giusti”. L’incontro rientra tra gli appuntamenti di un seminario di formazione per gli insegnanti promosso dall’Istituto storico per la Resistenza, ma è aperto alla cittadinanza e a tutti coloro che sono interessati.

"Thin your paints." "Remember to thin your paints." – Duncan Rhodes "THIN YOUR PAINTS" is far and away the most commonly offered painting-related criticism seen on /tg/, mostly seen in reference to some new Warhammer 40,000 player's fuzzy photographs of his first attempts to paint a model. The second most common appears to be "YOU PUT THE FUCKING PAULDRONS ON THE WRONG WAY ROUND", since new players are inevitably playing Space Marines. Trolling or not, "thin your paints!" is almost always good advice to give a new painter. However, the phrase has reached the point where it gets posted whenever something badly painted is shown on /tg/. THINNING YOUR PAINTS FOR DUMMIES [ edit ] In all seriousness, the most basic paint thinner for your miniature needs is tap water. Really, that's it. Thinner paint basically means lesser consistency. The less the paint's consistency is, the less messy it looks and the easier it is to manipulate while brushing. Alternatively some window cleaner (the blue stuff) works equally well whilst being quicker to dry. The water-to-paint ratio pretty much depends on your preferences and needs; painting a single, normal-sized mini would probably just require you to dip your brush into a cup of water every time you apply a stroke of paint, while painting entire squads or armies may warrant a bit of experimentation with the ratios and the creation of some sizable batches for convenience. Also, note that more water means thinner paint and a longer drying time, and too much water can ruin your paint's consistency entirely, so be careful when thinning large amounts or else you could be wasting time and money. It's a good idea to apply the water to the paint with an eye dropper one drip at a time so you can carefully control how thin it gets. The more intermediate thinners for painting minis are extenders and flow improvers, which are available in most art stores. They'll also cost you quite a bit if you're planning to paint an entire army. But on the upside, those products warrant much better results than ordinary tap water. Regardless of how you choose to thin your paint, an important step people always forget to mention is that you should go on to use your palette to control the amount of paint on your brush. This way, you avoid putting too much paint on the model all at once. As a last resort, you may actually save some of the details of an over-painted mini by using Nuln Oil shader or something similar. Ultimately if you feel like it's not worth the effort, some first aid alcohol and a toothbrush may help you bring your mini back to its unpainted state without destroying it in the process. Alternatively, a good option is Castrol Super Clean (You can even pretend you're manlier than you are and say it's for your car. Look in the automotive section), since it doesn't harm the plastic, and even dissolves super-glue (For those times when you go "Ill just put a little bit here on the ar-FUCK!) Be careful though and wear gloves - it causes blisters. Otherwise you might get hands covered Grandpappy Nurgle's gifts. Alternatively, alternatively, methylated spirits (AKA Denatured Alcohol in the US) is perfectly safe for plastic and metal, and has no real harmful side-effects if occasionally handled with bare hands. It does dry out and crack skin over time, however, being a highly pure alcohol, so try not to handle it with bare skin too much. Pop your minis in, pluck them out with a glove or a clothes peg, then give them a scrub with a brush. Vastly superior to alternatives like Castrol or Dettol as it's not harmless unless you chug it, and it's so foul-tasting you'd never want to swallow any anyway. You can also re-use it literally infinitely, so long as you filter out the paint flakes! You'll only ever run out after several years, as a result of natural alcohol evaporation while in use. And now we bring to you the 1d4chan's Assembling, Painting and Basing Guide Games Workshop Agrees! [ edit ] As of 7th Edition, Games Workshop has begun a series of "How to Paint" tutorials with their newest models and factions, helping newcomers into the art of thinning their paints. Everything in the videos are, of course, GW equipment, but at least Duncan Rhodes, the painter in question, shows the audience how to use it properly, and what paints need a little work to get to work well. The videos are fairly simple, but utilize a lot of different paints to get a great result (and earn some money for the Man). Duncan is also a great believer of THINNING YOUR PAINTS, as his mantra goes: "Put sum paint on ya palet, and then add a lil' drop of water, ya dun't need very much, just a lil' dip, just. Like... that." and: "You don't need very much, just...yeah...so that it goes nice and smoothly on your miniature." The real reason for this belief has finally been revealed, thanks to the new Warhammer Community website. Duncan botched up his first model he painted (a custom chapter called the Void Bringers) because "Clearly, I did not thin my paint, nor did I apply multiple thin coats!" Look upon the article, ye mighty, and despair: http://www.warhammer-community.com/2016/11/14/my-first-model-part-1-our-own-duncan-rhodes/ Duncan also made a tutorial on how to thin yer feckin paints! Painting Protip [ edit ] Don't know how much you should thin your paints? Unsure how a pair of colors will layer? Having trouble controlling your hands from drinking too much Mtn Dew? Practice painting on sprue after you cut out your models. Gallery [ edit ] This wonderfully crafted video depicts the correct way to react to these works of art. Post your own fails here!

You would be surprised at how many women use a bottle to masturbate with. There was a thread on a well known forum that asked the question “Have you masturbated with a bottle?” almost every women said that yes, they have and they still do. Let’s take this naughty mature slut, she’s home alone and horny. Bored of her dildo she wants something different inside her pussy and she wants to feel like she’s been a naughty girl. So she reaches for an empty bottle, it’s hard, thick and smooth – perfect for fucking her wet pussy with. Diana Ananta is a well known milf, a dirty milf with a hairy pussy, the kind of pussy that needs to be masturbated daily. After a few glasses of wine her pussy starts twitching, she sees the empty bottle and reaches for it. Sitting on the edge of the couch with her legs open – no panties on, just her hairy little twat waiting to be filled – she licks the bottles and slides it in to her pussy. Her eyes are closed as she focuses on the feeling of satisfaction. She keeps her eyes closed as she pushes the bottle in further as deep as she can push it in to her tiny pussy. On the bed now, her toes curl in her sandals as she fucks herself to a massive orgasm. Gallery from: Diana Ananta

A JavaScript example of sending an nUSD stablecoin payment with a MetaMask signer This JavaScript library was created to help you get started with the Havven payment engine on Ethereum. You can use it to build your own project that needs to work with payments using a stablecoin. We are constantly interrogating what we can do or build for users that will increase adoption, not just for our systems but for the blockchain space in general. We see user-focused tools and interfaces as being one of the most important steps to wider adoption, and we want to play our part and help you play yours. What can I build on the Havven payment engine? Anything you can think of with programmable money. Havven provides the stability-as-a-service and will soon be offering fx with our multicurrency release. We’ve come up with some thought starters for dApps you could create by integrating Havven’s stable payments into your projects. Crypto Games — lottery, poker, FOMO-nUSD for kicks. Crypto Ecommerce Crypto Loans Crypto Insurance Crypto Payroll Crypto Global Remittance Getting Started The havven-js Library provides a simple pre-packaged API to communicate with Havven contracts. Under the hood, havven-js uses ethers.js library and we’ve packaged some major signers with it, Trezor, Ledger and MetaMask to enable instant wallet integration. This is particularly useful for hackathon teams to quickly “npm install havven-js” and have stable payments integrated into their dApp in just a few minutes. The two main packages to do stable payments with are: StablePayments — for transfer() and payment related functions like transfer() Util — a bunch of handy utility functions for number handling and gas estimation. Some other packages for hacking with: IsssuanceController — for Token swapper/exchange functions such as ETH > HAV & ETH > nUSD Mintr — if you want to build a dApp for minting and burning stablecoins Access the havven-js Docs here havven-js is open source Got any questions? Join our community on Discord! Website | Reddit | Twitter | Discord

BenDeLaCreme will certainly go down as one of the most memorable queens in Drag Race herstory. Her initial appearance on the show in Season 6 certainly gave fans much to remember. Not only did she win the title of “Miss Congeniality”, but there was also her memorable turn as Maggie Smith in “Snatch Game”; the fact that when she landed in the bottom two, RuPaul performed the rare trick of saving both queens — specifically noting a desire to see more from DeLa; and of course her often uncanny resemblance to Drag Race judge Michelle Visage. It’s worth remembering that Visage called DeLa out during that season, critiquing that she didn’t feel like she’d gotten a sense of the queen’s identity. DeLa was hurt at the time, defending the BenDeLaCreme character as the embodiment of everything that she was. In retrospect, perhaps it wasn’t that we hadn’t gotten to know the character but that we hadn’t gotten to know the difference between her two characters. Where did realness of drag performer Benjamin Putnam end and the airy Mary sweetness of the DeLa character begin? Between Season 6 and her return on All Stars 3, each seemed to click into sharper focus. In talking head interviews as Ben — adorably attired in a purple bow tie and matching Jughead-style hat — he was smart, witty and thoughtful. Meanwhile, in drag, DeLa had become bigger, bouncier, funnier and more versatile than ever. This growth was rewarded with an incredible five main challenge wins and three “Lip Sync for Your Legacy” victories — certainly making her one of the winningest queens to ever compete on Drag Race. In our exclusive interview, DeLa offers some rare insights about both the frenzied pace of the Race and the intensity of the competition overall. She also makes a thoughtful plea to viewers of Drag Race to watch with kindness that seems prescient considering the recent spate of racially-charged social media hate directed at one of the contestants of color. And though we would have gladly seen her take the All Stars 3 crown, it’s possible that she created an even more memorable moment than winning with her controversial decision to sacrifice herself and send herself home. Regardless, DeLa, you’ll always be a winner to us. Want Metrosource LGBTQ content notifications? Sign up for MetroEspresso. drag rupaul rupaul’s drag race tv Last modified: February 14, 2019

There is nowhere else on the planet right now where the dichotomy between two potential futures – one where we address the climate change crisis, one where we ignore this momentous threat and continue with business as usual – is playing out in such a dramatic and explosive way as Australia. In the US, Donald Trump is decimating decades of hard-fought environmental and climate standards – it’s all 18th century all the time. But the ageing fossil fuel assets and recent “market failure” of the Australian electricity grid is pushing political leaders to all-out brawling, pitting conservative inaction against the demand for solution-focused action. A recent wave of blackouts and near misses and the proposal of the biggest coalmine in the world – the Adani Carmichael mine in Queensland – has created tinder-dry conditions that only needed one spark to go up in flames. The Adani mine is this generation's Franklin River. People power can stop it | Bob Brown Read more The spark finally came recently, via Twitter, from renewable energy entrepreneur Elon Musk who offered to sell the batteries that would remove the last argument against renewable power. It turned the deadlocked debate over how to fix Australia’s fossil fuel-ladenand often failing energy “market” into an open war between those backing the dying coal industry with those set on using the moment to transition to renewable energy. Indeed, one of the icons of the ageing coal fleet, the dirtiest coal power station in the developed world – Hazelwood in Victoria – turns off its turbines this week as it shuts down. The symbols couldn’t be clearer: Musk’s batteries or Adani’s mega-mine and dirty coal power. Which one represents the future? As you formulate the answer, remember that the war is of course playing out against a tragic backdrop: the ongoing destruction of the Great Barrier Reef that is Australia’s great natural treasure, the thing it’s been charged by the world to protect. That horror is a human-created disaster, caused directly by man-made global warming that is increasing ocean temperatures by an alarming rate. The decision about the future is also a decision about what kind of democracy you want. As in the US, the Aussie mining industry has for decades has a disproportionate amount of power over politicians. It cares about one thing only – not the greater good, but its own perpetuation. But now the coal industry is starting to lose its grip. And it won’t necessarily be a slow process. The fractures are running through all stratas of Australian governance: states are closing coal stations and opting for renewable energy and battery storage (a la the Musk Tweet); and companies and businesses that have traditionally been allies of the coal industry are advocating for climate policies that would essentially spell the end of coal-powered energy; individuals and communities in great numbers are breaking free of the grid. A marooned and thoroughly isolated Malcolm Turnbull is left on the losing side advocating for an industry and a coalmine we all know he doesn’t believe in to appease a small number of rightwingers in his party so he can continue to call himself the prime minister. Without a doubt, he will be swept aside by the arc of change – he who had the chance to lead on the issue of our time but chose to give in to vested interests and the fringe of his party. As your electricity grid fails and industry holds on to the myth of an ever-growing coal export industry, Australians must draw a line in the sand and decide whether they continue to support coal, or whether the future is renewable. Backed against the wall, the coal lobby and Turnbull’s fossil fuel-obsessed colleagues have gambled everything on the construction of the Adani coalmine. This mine would be the largest coalmine in history and, if constructed, it would do much to push the planet beyond 2C of warming. The politics of coal are changing and this mine is that line in the sand. Last week a historic alliance of environmental groups representing more than 1.5 million people launched the largest climate movement in Australia’s history. Anti-Adani activists vow 'direct action' against mine contractor Downer Read more Led by Bob Brown, who I had the honour of meeting last year, the battle to stop Adani is shaping up as the most important environmental fight ever down under, the likes of the Tar Sands battle we’ve seen in North America. People are engaged and will take action to preserve the climate, the Great Barrier Reef and the rights of the traditional owners whose land will be destroyed by this mine in ways that hasn’t before been seen. In my many visits there, I have found Australians to be obliging and deeply passionate about protecting their unique environment. Never has the contrast between the fossil fuel present and the clean energy future been in such stark relief. I now implore all Australians to take a stand – for the sake of the world’s climate – to ensure this mine never goes ahead.

Créer un réseau social, faire fortune, influer sur l’opinion et s’entourer de politiciens… pour se faire élire à la tête de la plus grande puissance mondiale ? Mark Zuckerberg, fondateur de Facebook et milliardaire philanthrope, accumule les indices laissant présager une politisation de son action. Selon le site Politico, le PDG du réseau social âgé de 33 ans et sa femme Priscilla Chan viennent de recruter Joel Benenson, le grand manitou des sondages des Clinton. Officiellement pour un job de consultant au sein de la fondation philanthropique du couple : la Chan Zuckerberg Initiative dont le but est de «Faire évoluer le potentiel humain et promouvoir l’égalité des chances». N’empêche. Depuis que Zuckerberg a publié des photos de ses voyages notamment à travers l’Iowa, le premier état à organiser des primaires, beaucoup lui prêtent des intentions moins charitables. Au point qu’il a dû démentir le 21 mai sur sa page Facebook son intention de briguer en 2020 l’investiture démocrate : «Mon objectif cette année est de visiter chaque Etat (fédéré) dans lequel je n’ai pas passé du temps pour m’informer des espoirs et des problèmes des gens, et savoir comment ils pensent leur travail et leurs communautés […]. Certains d’entre vous se demandent si ce challenge signifie que je me porte candidat à la présidentielle. Ce n’est pas le cas». Qui est Joel Benenson, la nouvelle recrue de Zuckerberg ? Joel Benenson avait joué un rôle en tant que sondeur dans la réélection de Bill Clinton en 1996, avant de devenir un des principaux conseillers de Barack Obama durant ses deux mandats. Et, de se charger par la suite de la stratégie et des sondages de la candidate Hillary Clinton en 2016. Certes la société Benenson Strategy Group n’est chargée que d’une mission de recherche pour la fondation du couple Zuckerberg. Et ce n’est pas la première fois qu’elle collabore avec une fondation à but non lucratif puisqu’elle a travaillé à la «Born this way foundation» de la pop star Lady Gaga. Mais la personnalité et le CV de Benenson, qui s’est gardé de tout commentaire à Politico, alimentent les spéculations sur l’agenda caché de Zuckerberg. D’autres signaux de politisation ont été émis Surtout que le sondeur n’est pas la première personnalité politique d’envergure à rejoindre les rangs de Zuckerberg. En janvier dernier, c’était David Plouffe, le directeur de la campagne d’Obama de 2008, et Ken Mehlal, celui de George W Bush en 2004… sans oublier Amy Dudley, ex-conseillère en communication du sénateur démocrate de Virginie, Tim Kaine. Zuckerberg a même recruté le photographe de la Maison Blanche : Charles Ommanney, connu pour ses portraits des présidents George W. Bush et Barack Obama. Par ailleurs, le nom de Mark Zuckerberg figure sur plusieurs listes de candidats potentiels pour l’élection présidentielle de 2020 dont celle de CNN qui le compte parmi «au moins 22 démocrates songeant à se lancer dans la course» pour la prochaine présidentielle.

We won't be silenced. And Hillary Clinton will not be bullied by Trump, who is in lockstep with the NRA and its dangerous "guns everywhere" agenda. While this is a new spin on trying to intimidate a female gun violence prevention champion, it will fail, just as it has failed with Moms Demand Action volunteers across the country. It comes down to this: Our opponents are afraid someone will take away their guns. We are afraid our children will be shot and killed. You tell me who has more fight in them. The fact is that women are at the forefront of the gun safety movement and that’s no coincidence — women are disproportionately affected by weak gun laws. We represent 50% of victims of mass shootings and are put at risk by lax laws that make it far too easy for abusive partners to access a gun. Every month, more than 50 American women are shot to death by a current or former boyfriend or husband. We have to do better. I know that, and Hillary Clinton knows that too. That’s why we’ll continue to press for common sense solutions — like demanding a background check on every gun sale — that prove that we can respect the Second Amendment while making everyone safer.

2019-07-24T13:56:35+00:00 2019-07-24T13:56:35+00:00 2019-07-24T14:07:10+00:00. By John Askounis/ info@eurohoops.net At 34 years of age, Sofoklis Schortsanitis is determined to give it a go once more. Ionikos Nikaias AFFIDEA announced his addition to its Greek Basket League squad on Wednesday. Schortsanitis was crowned EuroLeague champion back in 2014 with Maccabi Tel Aviv. However, a downfall followed. He was the 34th pick of the 2003 NBA draft, but never made it to the NBA. He instead showcased his impressive strength in the paint all around Europe and in FIBA competitions with the Greek National Team. His second stint with Maccabi brought him the EuroLeague title. He also captured three Super League championships and four Cups in Israel gaining the love of the fans up to this day. Injuries and fitness issues have held him back recently, cutting his previous attempts for a comeback short during the 2017-18 season with Trikala. He hopes for a different outcome with Ionikos, a side that will return to Greece’s premium competition this season. alm_page: 1alm_current: 1almitem: 1alm_found_posts: 1

Все купоны (8819) 3366299 Есть жалобы или комментарии по этому месту? Оставьте свой (0). Рекомендуем организации Квест Сундук Мертвеца Nirvana. Летуаль кэшбэк польза! Чтобы получить кэшбэк внимательно читайте правила. Например, перед покупкой стоит отключить блокировщик рекламы, если он у Вас установлен, а также.

The US Commodities and Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) revealed a new fintech initiative today that will find the regulator seeking to increase its participation in the ongoing global R&D effort related to blockchain and distributed ledger tech. As part of a sweeping CFTC 2.0 proposal, the US options and futures regulator is launching LabCFTC, a fintech initiative that will seek to bolster the pace at which the regulator assesses new technologies. The aim, according to the CFTC, is to become “more accessible” to innovators working on new financial technologies through the program. The CFTC also made public a LabCFTC component called GuidePoint, both an online tool that will provide a point of contact for entrepreneurs, and a physical location in New York where they can find an open door for such guidance, and “CFTC 2.0”, described as an initiative to foster and help initiate the adoption of new technology within the agency. In statements today at the New York FinTech Innovation Lab, Chairman Christopher Giancarlo characterized the mission as one that would seek to explore new technologies including AI, machine learning and DLT. In particular, he cited advances such as “smart contracts that value themselves and calculate payments in real-time” and “distributed ledger technology, more commonly known as blockchain” as innovations that will challenge the financial infrastructure today. Giancarlo said of the program: “We will look to explore ways to use fintech to enhance CFTC functions and duties. For example, we might collaborate with other authorities on leading development of best practices to support the development of ‘regulator nodes’ on distributed ledgers, or experiment with collecting or distributing existing CFTC reports through blockchain technology.” As evidence of the need for action, Giancarlo cited the speed at which other enabling technologies – including automated trading – have reshaped modern financial markets and put new stress on regulators. “The world is changing. Our parents’ financial markets are gone. The 21st century digital transformation is well underway,” he remarked. Such a move finds the CFTC emerging as one of the more active global regulators when it comes to conceiving how it will respond to the advent of distributed ledger solutions. Among the more active jurisdictions globally include Japan, where the legislature has passed national regulations aimed at cryptocurrencies, and Mauritius and Malta, which have recently announced initiatives aimed at providing clarity to regional innovators. Washington, DC image via Shutterstock

I januari 2019 hade masterprogrammet i ABM (arkiv, bibliotek och museer) vid Uppsala universitet ett panelsamtal där lärare svarade på studenternas frågor. En grupp hade läst i litteraturen att det kan vara svårt att hitta information om ras i gamla kataloger i arkiv samt på museer och bibliotek. De undrade vad de skulle göra i sådana situationer. Inga-Lill Aronsson, lektor i musei- och kulturarvsvetenskap, svarade. Hon pratade först om pedagogiska aspekter i mötet med besökare inom ABM-sektorn, och sa att studenterna skulle söka på det aktuella ordet. – Sedan sa jag: ”Låt oss ta det kontroversiella ordet”, och gjorde misstaget att uttala hela n-ordet. Jag tänkte i termer av klassifikation och gamla katalog­system. Hon menar att det enda sättet att handskas med ett mörkt kulturarv är att titta på vad som finns i gamla arkiv. – Vi måste lägga fram ord, handlingar och forskning på bordet och diskutera det. Då måste man uttala vissa ord. ”Ingen rätt att använda ordet” Efteråt mejlade fyra studenter till institutionen. De ansåg att ordet saknade relevans i sammanhanget och att Inga-Lill Aronsson inte hade rätt att använda det eftersom hon varken är svart eller rasifierad. – Vi hajade till. Det är ett extremt laddat ord, som det, enligt min uppfattning, finns en konsensus kring att det inte är okej att använda. Det satt också tydligt rasifierade människor i salen. Vi reagerade mest på att ingen av lärarna reagerade, säger en av studenterna till Universitetsläraren. Kallades till möte Institutionen inledde en utredning om trakasserier, där Inga-Lill Aronsson kallades till möte med institutionsledningen och universitetets likavillkorsspecialist. – Det fanns ingen förståelse för kontexten, mötet handlade om att jag skulle förklaras klandervärd. Jag bad sedan att få stå över kommande undervisning med gruppen, av respekt för studenternas känslor, säger hon. Reine Rydén, ställföreträdande prefekt, uppfattade mötet som konstruktivt. De gick igenom universitetets regelverk, berättade att institutionen ansåg att ordvalet var olämpligt och Inga-Lill Aronsson gav sin syn på saken. – Kontexten var relevant. Men det går att diskutera problematiken kring känsliga ord i gamla kataloger utan att uttala orden, säger han. Läs också ”Otydlig gräns mellan hänsyn och självcensur”. FAKTA / Yttrandefrihet och diskriminering Enligt regeringsformen är var och en fri att uttrycka tankar, åsikter och känslor i tal, skrift, bild eller på andra sätt. Yttrandefriheten begränsas dock av ett antal punkter. Yttrandefrihetsbrott kan till exempel handla om förolämpning, att uttala sig nedsättande eller bete sig förödmjukande mot någon annan i syfte att kränka hens självkänsla eller värdighet. Man får inte heller ägna sig åt förtal, att någon ”utpekar någon annan som brottslig eller klandervärd i sitt levnadssätt eller annars lämnar en uppgift som är ägnad att utsätta denne för andras missaktning.” Hets mot folkgrupp innebär att någon ”hotar eller uttrycker missaktning för en folkgrupp eller en annan sådan grupp av personer med anspelning på ras, hudfärg, nationellt eller etniskt ursprung, trosbekännelse, sexuell läggning eller könsöverskridande identitet eller uttryck.” Diskrimineringslagen förbjuder diskriminering utifrån kön, könsöverskridande identitet eller uttryck, etnisk tillhörighet, religion eller annan trosuppfattning, funktionsnedsättning, sexuell läggning och ålder. Det kan vara direkt diskriminering, att någon missgynnas genom att hen behandlas sämre än andra i en jämförbar situation, eller indirekt diskriminering, att någon missgynnas genom tillämpningen av en bestämmelse, ett kriterium eller ett förfaringssätt. Diskriminering kan också ske genom trakasserier, alltså ett uppträdande som kränker någons värdighet och som har samband med diskrimineringsgrunderna. Sexuella trakasserier är ett uppträdande av sexuell natur som kränker någons värdighet. Arbetsgivare och utbildningsanordnare är skyldiga att arbeta med förebyggande och främjande för att motverka diskriminering och på annat sätt verka för lika rättigheter och möjligheter. Källor: diskrimineringslagen, regeringsformen och tryckfrihetsförordningen

Can automakers walk and chew gum at the same time? That’s the challenge facing the world’s giants, from General Motors and Ford to Volkswagen, Toyota and Hyundai. How do they invest billions of dollars and countless hours of engineering and design talent in electric and self-driving vehicles they won’t sell in meaningful numbers for years and simultaneously develop world-class cars and trucks customers will want until the mobility revolution comes, if it ever does? GM may be showing the way, as it moves toward the goal of having electric-powered autonomous vehicles in commercial service somewhere in the United States this year and selling a wide range of EVs around the world in the near future. GM’s approach: Pay less attention to vehicles people don’t care about — the automaking equivalent of Elmore Leonard’s famous instruction to writers: “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” Ceasing to build slow-selling, low-profit vehicles like the Chevy Cruze and Impala frees resources for other things. Split product development into two channels: one focused on vehicles that will be built in high numbers for the next few years, the other on vehicles and technologies that will hit their stride later Eliminate the longstanding engine and transmission development group and make its responsibilities part of vehicle engineering, a change that looks minor from the outside, but constituted a seismic shift within GM. “Things happen when you focus on them,” said Pam Fletcher, who led the program that created the Chevy Bolt electric car and Cadillac Super Cruise semi-autonomous driving system before assuming the new title of vice president for global innovation a few months ago. “Our absolute intention is to commercialize these things. It’s not invention for invention’s sake. We’ve only been public about a fraction of what we’re doing.” At the same time, human-driven cars powered by internal combustion engines accounted for 95% of the 8.4 million vehicles GM sold around the world last year. They pay the bills. GM can’t take its eye off them as it looks to the future. “If you don’t shoot for the best, you fall behind very quickly” in hyper-competitive segments like SUVs and pickups, said Ken Morris, vice president of GM’s global product group. “We need to make money on conventional vehicles and that means we need to be a leader. That’s not going to change.” More:Ford invests $500 million in Rivian, an electric truck startup in Michigan More:Detroit leads, Tesla lags in trillion-dollar race for robot-car business Combining time and talent Moving engine and transmission development — Global Powertrain Operations in GM Speak — 20 miles from an engineering campus in Pontiac to GM’s main tech center in Warren, may look like rearranging the deck chairs, but it eliminated bureaucracy and duplication of efforts that cost time and talent, Morris said. Combine that with the work saved by dropping slow-selling vehicles and GM can tackle new challenges like batteries, electric motors and self-driving cars. Linking software development more closely to vehicle engineering removed more bottlenecks. While electric and autonomous vehicles are profoundly different from today’s vehicles, they share many parts and systems, Fletcher points out. They'll “still be putting four wheels and tires on every car. Areas like chassis engineering have teams that work across the organization and portfolio. We share systems across platforms,” Fletcher said. Ford recently made similar changes. Joe Hinrichs leads Ford’s global product development and manufacturing. Jim Farley oversees advanced technology, including autonomous vehicles. Ford’s ambitious project to create an EV and AV center in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood is also part of the company’s approach “The reorganizations recognize how the market has the potential to change,” IHS Markit senior analyst Stephanie Brinley said. “It’s a difficult path to walk, but one automakers must follow.” A wait and see approach until customers demand EVs and AVs won’t do, she said. No automaker can afford to be last into the new vehicle types, but nor can any afford to ignore what buyers want today. That dovetails with GM’s plan. “We have a large portfolio and a large customer base,” Fletcher said. “We’re going to build a lot of kinds of vehicles for a long time.” Contact Mark Phelan at 313-222-6731 or mmphelan@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @mark_phelan. Read more on autos and sign up for our autos newsletter.

One of the most stressful things about being a liberal blogger is having to watch as congressional Democrats stand openmouthed at the plate, watching the fastballs fly by. Steve Benen really nails it. Go read the rest: At face value, congressional Republicans went into budget talks playing a strikingly weak hand. They're an unpopular party, pushing unpopular spending cuts, going up against a more popular president. Of the three main players -- the House, the Senate, and the White House -- the GOP controls about one-half of one-third of the relevant institutions. And yet, who seems to be calling the shots here? The New York Times had an interesting summary of the lay of the land, emphasizing the fact that Democrats seem to realize they let this debate slip away from them. Both parties remain uncertain about which of them would bear the brunt of public anger if Congress cannot agree on financing federal operations for the final half of this fiscal year and government agencies shut down or drastically scale back the services they can provide. Even many Democrats believe that House Republicans have gotten the better of the antispending, antigovernment argument. But Democrats insist that is because much of the public does not appreciate the impact the Republicans' $61 billion in proposed reductions would have on spending for popular social programs if those cuts were to become law with just half of the current fiscal year remaining. Democrats are right; most of the country has no idea the extent to which the GOP's proposed cuts would be devastating to key domestic priorities. These are cuts that, if put to a poll, the vast majority of the American mainstream would reject out of hand. But here's another thought: maybe most of the country has no idea how brutal these cuts are because Dems haven't told them.

Open University chiefs are planning significant reductions in the number of courses the institution offers and the number of lecturers it employs, the Guardian has learned. Last June the OU, established in 1969 and the largest university in the UK, announced it needed to cut £100m from its £420m -a-year annual budget, but specific detail of where the cuts would fall was not made public. The Guardian has seen confidential documents that spell out proposals for the cuts. Staff have been invited to apply for voluntary redundancy in a programme that launches on 9 April. Lecturers have said the proposals are so significant they will “destroy the OU as we know it” and reduce it to “a digital content provider”. They have expressed concern about how the changes might affect the quality of degrees offered by the OU. A document states that the number of courses, qualifications and modules available to students will be reduced by more than a third. It says there will be a smaller workforce, cutting the budget by £15-20m. “We are sharing this information in strict confidence to give the senior team early sight of the direction of travel,” the document says. It states that 41 undergraduate and postgraduate degree courses will be axed, leaving 71 degrees available. A range of courses including science, business, music and classics are under threat. The document includes terms such as “focusing”, “rationalisation” and “consolidation” to describe the fundamental changes being proposed. Of particular concern to lecturers are the plans of how an OU working group hopes to push through the changes. The Teaching, Excellence and Innovation (TEI) group is driving forward the changes. In January the university senate – the institution’s supreme academic body – declined to give the new vision for the OU the green light before seeing the full implementation plan. The TEI group is exploring alternative ways to get the plans approved if the senate does not approve them at its April meeting. Lecturers have questioned how the university has been able to spend more than £2.5m on consultancy fees to KPMG at a time when OU chiefs say they are facing severe financial challenges. The information about consultancy fees was disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act. A spokeswoman for the University and College Union said: “UCU members are hugely concerned at the cuts that are being mooted at the Open University. The proposals under discussion would destroy the OU as we know it, turning it from a world-leading distance education university into a digital content provider. In the process we risk losing the research base that underpins our work with the BBC, and the personal tutorial element that supports our students. “The branch understands that a very large sum has been set aside which, going by average payments, means voluntary severance is expected for at least 250-300 individuals in the coming year. Staff expect that large-scale compulsory redundancies may follow given the scale of the announced cuts.” An OU spokesman said: “The Open University must change to deliver its core mission of supporting students from all backgrounds to fulfil their potential through education and to equip them for a fast-evolving world. Our plans will ensure the OU is agile and innovative to meet the needs of students, business and the country for decades to come.” He added: “We are today announcing a voluntary severance programme. This covers everyone – support staff, professional services teams and much of our academic community (but, to avoid any impact on students, not the tutors who oversee our students’ study).” The spokesman confirmed there would be a significant reduction in research carried out at the university. “We are sharpening the focus of our research to make sure that it has the maximum value for our students. No decisions on the size of the reduction have been taken. Every aspect of the university’s work – curriculum, teaching, research, back office – is in scope.” He said no final decision had been taken on the precise reduction in the number of degrees available to students. Commenting on the consultancy fees paid to KPMG, the spokesman said: “This is a major transformation exercise spanning all the university’s activities. Its breadth and depth required us to draw on the best external expertise as well as skills within the university. We had an existing relationship with KPMG which led to them carrying out the initial phase of work.” In relation to the senate issue, the spokesman said: “We are not commenting on our internal processes.”

Reminiscing on Hood Bush 2013Sitting in my house bored out of my mind on this cold winter day, I figured I would rummage through some of my favorite times last year. Looking through my Hood Bush shots I realized I haven't posted most of these on this blog. I found a few that I have never posted before on any website, social media, or mag. I've been really slacking on this blog and I'm gonna try my hardest to get some stuff on here more. So much stuff is just tied up with exclusive rights to Mags and such. Working on a few shoots for Street Choppers, The Horse BC, and Chop cult in the next few months as well and also I just released a new feature in March's issue of The Horse BC of my friend Mike from Chop Machine's Root beer Sporty build, go check that issue out when you get a chance. The Bike is Called "The Horse With no Name". Thanks again Lisa Ballard for helping me with this one!In other news I am hopefully getting my new camera in the mail tomorrow! So stoked to finally be able to go shoot some stuff again. Went with a Canon 70d for now, because the burst and video stuff integrated in it, along that it was similar to my old camera yet 100% better quality. Late this year the new 7d mark ii comes out and I am definitely grabbing that one. Also I got a ton of new lenses to try out and I can't hardly wait, Spring can not come soon enough to try out some of these super wide angle ones while riding, stoked!!! Other good news, I will be out in Toronto at the end of the month for a Vice Magazine art show that I am going to be featured in with some prints of my work. Pretty amazing feeling to be asked to do that. Last but not least my friend Jarrett asked me to shoot him with his bike for a tattoo/motorcycle book called "In The Wind Book" Look out for that soon! Honored to be apart of that as well!If you have never seen the Chop Cult feature on Hood bush check it out here by clicking the image below.Here is a few images I found today that made me smile, and wish summer was back again.

Sydney councils are continuing to shut beaches and urging those wanting to exercise to stay away from busy coastal walking tracks during the Easter long weekend. Amid warnings for residents to stay home in a bid to slow the spread of coronavirus, councils and police have intensified patrols at beaches, parks, and common exercise routes from Dee Why to Cronulla. Beaches at Cronulla in Sydney's south are closed until midnight on Monday, in a bid to deter crowds during the weekend. Credit:Rhett Wyman Sydney's busiest beaches were thrust into the spotlight after thousands of people flocked to Bondi as the state government tried to enforce social distancing measures. This weekend's closures affect the majority of beaches from Dee Why and Manly in the north, to Bondi and Coogee in the east, and south to Sans Souci and South Cronulla. Many are set to reopen at midnight on Monday.

Sooner or later, every programmer ends up searching for code snippets and algorithms. Most search engines, though, don’t exactly specialize in code search and so you end up with a couple of links (one of them most likely to StackOverflow). Now, Microsoft has partnered with HackerRank to bring code snippets right into its Bing search results pages — and as an added twist, you can also edit and execute this code right on those pages, too. To trigger this, all you have to do is search for something like “string concat C#” or a similar question and Bing will pop up the editor for you. Using the widget, you can also switch to other languages as well. Depending on the algorithm you’re looking for, the options here include C, C++, C#, Python, PHP, and Java. HackerRank co-founder Vivek Ravisankar tells me the project currently features over 80 code snippets that focus on the most commonly searched terms. Microsoft is positioning this as both a productivity and learning tool. “In addition to learning how a certain algorithm/code is written in a given language, users will also be able to check how the same solution is constructed in a range of other programming languages too — providing a Rosetta-stone model for programming languages,” says Marcelo De Barros, Group Engineering Manager for the UX Features and Shared Tools at Bing. If you’re a Visual Studio user, it’s also worth checking out Microsoft’s Developer Assistant plugin (previously known as the Bing Code Search add-on), which allows you to find and reuse over 21 million code snippets and samples right from within the IDE.

Tweet When “Captain America: Steve Rogers” #1 was released, the reaction was intense. Just after Marvel secured the superhero movie win against its rivals with Captain America: Civil War, news broke that a new series by Nick Spencer would revise the iconic hero as a secret HYDRA agent from the very start. There are two ways to look at this situation that undermines this revision as being “true”: 1. This is just an elaborate marketing tool; 2. This is merely one of many versions of a character, and it does not override the others. Although these are not mutually exclusive, we will treat them as separate matters. A Marketing Plot According to reports, the comic book publishing industry is in dire straits. Every year, press releases by distributors claim that sales are down, and doomsayers are constantly predicting the fall of a major publisher. The industry is not in a risky place, nor will it collapse. Success should not be measured in sales figures but in stories, and readers will always turn to iconic storylines. However, the business side of the profession will always make high demands and seek to bring in an ever increasing profit. Thus, we get the false iconic story that seek to make money off of controversy rather than an honest movement in the field. The Death of Superman story arc was extremely controversial, and it brought in a lot of interest to Superman during the 90s because it was controversial. Although it was interesting in concept, with its use of brutality and actual loss, it became just another marketing gimmick. Superman was restored in a very strained manner, and the plot line has been glossed over ever since. It does not matter if popular demand or corporate executives were the catalyst for Superman’s return. In the end, he returned because there was a lot of profit to be made. There are many similar examples of fake storyline changes for the sake of profit, but this is the quintessential example. It is very possible that Spencer and those at Marvel wanted to use controversy to gain sales. It is not surprising that so many websites, media groups, and high profile fans have weighed into the controversy. Free publicity is great for marketing. Spencer also has a history of bait and switch plot lines. It is quite possible that the “Rogers is a HYDRA agent” will be reversed. A fan who dislikes what is happening can either see it as a cynical marketing ploy based on controversy, or a cynical marketing ploy based on fake controversy that will soon be reversed. But what if this story line sticks and Rogers as HYDRA agent is deemed canonical? There is No “Canon” We can call it the George Lucas effect: the author’s attempt to dramatically revise a plot or story because their personal views on the matter have changed. However, once an author has published a work, they no longer have control over it; it has become part of the reader. No matter how many revised editions or later stories are published, the reader can chose to accept or dismiss at will. Some call this “head canon,” but, more appropriately, there is no “canon.” Author’s have control over what is produced, but they can never control how a work is interpreted. Famously, William Wordsworth tried to revise many of his poems later in life to ground them more firmly in Christianity, yet most critics and readers seemed to ignore the changes. They preferred the earlier works, and the later revisions are practically unknown. The audience is firmly in control, but they seem unable to realize it. The major problem with fan reaction in general is that everyone has their own version of a comic book hero, either based on a particular run or incarnation of the character or an amalgamation of aspects that form an idealized version. There is a whole field based on studying this reaction called Phenomenology. In general, we react poorly when the realized form of a character does not match our preconceived form. Likewise, we experience a sense of gratitude and security when the character does match. Art has two purposes: to sooth the soul and to challenge the mind. In many instances, the two functions are in conflict with each other, which is what we are experiencing now. When a reader begins to see the “Captain America: Steve Rogers” as Spencer’s interpretation and not the interpretation, then this conflict is eased. They can approach the work in a more objective sense and try to see the ramifications of this change. DC has a history of doing this very thing with Superman, especially in “Red Son” and “Kingdom Come.” Marvel, to a lesser extent, has their “What Ifs” and parallel universes, and Marvel NOW! has revised many storylines. Readers should not expect continuity within a greater whole. Instead, they should focus on smaller segments, and return to those cherished storylines every now and then. Oddly, the Marvel Cinematic Universe diverged in many ways from the comics, especially with “Civil War” (as we explain here), yet there has been little outrage. The ethnicity and gender changes of a few characters have been questioned, but most fans do not care. “Batman v Superman” did not fair so well. We’ve had many, many television and movie versions of Superman and Batman, yet fans and critics were unwilling to accept a darker version of the characters that has been very prominent in the comics since the 80’s (we touch on it here). Either we are fine with different iconic characters being used in new and interesting ways, or we are not. It is a strange inconsistency, and it seems that Marvel is finally falling prey to it. However, it could be that Marvel is courting this inconsistency, as explained in the first point. In the end, this is just another storyline by an author who has never been a great writer and who relies on controversy over substance. Eventually, another writer will take up the mantel of writing on Steve Rogers, and the character may go in yet another direction. That is how the industry works. There is no reason to panic. In the end, Captain America or Steve Roger’s Captain America is not a HYDRA agent, unless you really want him to be one.

Over a series of months key experts prepared more than 20 papers for presentation to the president. Academics as well as CIA analysts were drafted for the effort. At one point, recalled one of the administration’s top Soviet affairs specialists, Jack Matlock, “we could get two or three two-hour sessions with [Reagan] a week! Try to get 15 minutes with any other president.” This is not Donald Trump’s way. The talks between Trump and Kim came about after Trump accepted the latter’s invitation on a whim during a phone call without the input of his advisors. "Meeting being planned!" tweeted Trump early one March morning. US President Donald Trump tweeted the news that a meeting with North Korea was being planned. Credit:Bloomberg The current US State Department has been hollowed-out and stripped of key staff and funding by the administration. Its new leader, the former CIA chief Mike Pompeo, has been in place for little more than a month. His replacement at the CIA, Gina Haspel, was confirmed on May 18. An ambassador to South Korea was announced in April, when Harry Harris, who had been bound for Australia, was redirected in haste. Trump’s new national security advisor, John Bolton, has long advocated for war with North Korea and Politico has noted that in his first two months on the job did not even call a cabinet-level planning meeting to discuss the talks. Nor is the President known for his enthusiasm for painstaking preparation. Breaking with tradition Trump does not read the daily intelligence briefings prepared for him by his agencies as it does not suit his preferred “style of learning”, The Washington Post has reported. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video Speaking to reporters before a White House meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Trump said: “I don't think I have to prepare very much. It's about attitude. It's about willingness to get things done.” North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is due to travel to Singapore for the meeting. Credit:AP Trump’s approach has prompted concern in some quarters. John McLaughlin, former acting director of the CIA, told the Post’s conservative commentator - and frequent Trump critic - Jennifer Rubin, that he doubted Trump’s team. “These people have never been in a real negotiation … and have no idea how complicated this will be.” “Even in the hands of the most astute diplomats and serious presidents,” wrote Rubin, “this meeting would be a daunting proposition; in the hands of the Trump crew, the prospect of face-to-face meetings is, candidly, petrifying.” One man who does know exactly how complicated it is to negotiate with North Korea is Robert Carlin, a former CIA analyst and US State Department official who is currently a scholar with Stanford University’s Centre for International Security and Cooperation. Carlin has perhaps spent more time in face-to-face negotiations with North Korean officials than any other American. Carlin disputes the view of some US observers that negotiation with North Koreans is pointless. In a paper for the Centre for International Security and Cooperation published in 2008, Carlin wrote that US officials spent thousands of hours of often fruitful negotiation with North Korea between 1993 and 2000, before the relationship again frayed. He lamented that the lessons of those negotiations had been forgotten by American officials, to the detriment of US national security. I don't think I have to prepare very much. It's about attitude. US President Donald Trump Recalling those talks in a recent interview with the American journal National Review, Carlin said he believes there is a possibility of a breakthrough in the coming talks. He argued that despite the lack of painstaking preparation, there were reasons for optimism, especially since talks had taken place between Pompeo and Kim. “We’re much better off than we were at the beginning of the year, when no one we knew or trusted had direct experience with Kim Jong-un,” he wrote. “We were trapped in our own bubble of ignorance. Now several people have met with Kim, and the President will have the benefit of first-hand observations on the North Korean leader.” Carlin described North Korean negotiators as tough but careful, reports The New Republic. “They are good at their game … When they get precise in their presentation, it’s important to pay attention — they mean what they say. But it’s often only possible to understand what they mean by having a good grasp of their previous positions ... My experience is that Americans sometimes don’t recognise progress when they see it from the North Koreans, and thus may miss openings.” He said the North Korean negotiators would also be alert to signs of disrespect. “When what we are asking for flows from our sense of moral superiority rather than any pragmatic or rational basis, the North Koreans can sense it. They have good emotional radars and know when we are being condescending, speaking down to them.” And he warned that they would prosecute their case rigorously. “If we leave gaps, we can be sure they will explore them. If there are seams, they will play them. If they are uncertain about our own commitment, they will pursue hedging.” Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un are set to meet at the Capella Hotel on Sentosa Island in Singapore. Credit:AP In a separate piece written for 38North, a website for analysis of North Korea, Carlin wrote that North Koreans are pragmatic negotiators who followed diplomatic norms. “A productive set of negotiations with them follows a pattern found anywhere in the world: Define the problem in terms that both sides can claim benefit from a solution; divide the problem into parts; move from easiest to hardest to solve; fix details and define terms; review again so that both sides understand what is and what isn’t in the agreement; agree on implementation details and timetable." He wrote that in talks with North Koreans, negotiators needed not only to be able to stand firm when they felt they had been slighted, but to be able to sit patiently and listen while North Korean officials voiced their own concerns. “Rarely do the North Koreans pound the table. More often, when we raise a point they find objectionable, they may quietly take off their glasses, close their notebooks gently, and lay their pens to the side.” The benefits of preparation, Carlin told National Review, are often to be felt in the wake of talks rather than at the table.

Altcoins Goldman Sachs Hires Crypto Trader ‘In Response to Client Interest’ Goldman Sachs has had its feelers in the cryptocurrency waters for a while. Now, the Wall Street giant looks set to take the plunge, having just hired a cryptocurrency trader to help the company expand into digital asset markets. High Profile Hire With Bitcoin looking rather bullish once more, Goldman Sachs is getting serious about cryptocurrency. Goldman Sachs has hired former trader Justin Schmidt to head the multinational investment bank’s and financial services company’s digital asset markets in Goldman’s securities division, as reported by Tearsheet. Schmidt, who assumed the position on April 16, previously served as both a senior VP at Seven Eight Capital and portfolio manager at LMR Partners. Institutional Investment Inbound The new addition to Goldman Sach’s team represents the dramatic increase in institutional interest towards Bitcoin over recent months. Reports first surfaced regarding the Wall Street giant’s plans to launch a cryptocurrency trading desk in December, though the financial institution has repeatedly denied the claims. Goldman Sach’s did, however, help fund peer-to-peer payments technology company Circle in 2015. As reported by Bitcoinist yesterday, the Goldman-funded company recently doubled the size of its minimum cryptocurrency trade requirements from $250,000 to $500,000 — citing the fact that “the market is robust.” Indeed, the cryptocurrency market’s purported robustness has increased interest from high-net-worth clients at high-profile investment banks. Said Goldman Sach’s spokeswoman Tiffany Galvin-Cohen: In response to client interest in various digital products, we are exploring how best to serve them in the space. At this point, we have not reached a conclusion on the scope of our digital asset offering. Singing a different song Of course, Goldman hasn’t always been particularly bullish on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general. The financial behemoth’s head of global investment research Steve Strongin pronounced the eventual death of all but “a handful” of cryptocurrencies in February — stating that “most, if not all, will never see their recent peaks again.” Later, in March, Goldman Sachs analysts panicked forecasted a bearish return to recent lows below $6000 for Bitcoin. That prediction did not pan out, and such a return is looking less and less likely with each day — as evidenced by the company’s increased interest. What do you think about Goldman Sach’s latest hire? How high do you think institutional investment will push the value of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in the future? Let us know in the comments below! Images courtesy of AP, Bitcoinist archives, Shutterstock

Orban, apel la românii din Italia: Să nu mai vină în România decât în situații absolut necesare sau urgente pentru a preveni răspândirea coronavirusului în țară Premierul desemnat Ludovic Orban a făcut un apel, luni seară, la românii aflați în Italia, cărora le-a transmis să nu mai vină în România în perioada următoare decât în situații urgente sau absolut necesare, pentru a împiedica răspândirea coronavirusului în rândul familiilor și prietenilor din țară: Cea mai mare problemă este a cetățenilor care intră în țară cu mașina proprie. Toți cei care intră sunt obligați să completeze un formular, li se cer actele de identitate, nu pot fi forțați să arate actele din Italia, dar recomandarea asta ar fi, să li se solicite și să arate actele din Italia. Dacă vin din zonele afectate, intră automat în carantină. Dacă vin din regiunile unde există risc crescut, măsura este de izolare la domiciliu. Carantină înseamnă și carantină instituționalizată. Am inventariat și posibilitățile de tratare, de diagnosticare. Există un sistem de diagnosticare care presupune un anumit timp (…). Nu putem forța un cetățean român din Italia să ne prezinte pașaportul sau actul de identitate românesc, dar am insistat către Poliția de Frontieră și DSP să afle cu precizie unde stă în Italia, unde lucrează, astfel încât să stabilim cu precizie dacă este cazul să luăm o măsură sau alta. Fac un apel la cetățenii români din zonele afectate să evite pe cât posibil deplasările care nu sunt necesare. Dacă pot să nu se deplaseze spre România, e un act de responsabilitate. Dacă au fost în zone cu risc minim, își pot contamina familia și prietenii. Avem foarte multe intrări din Italia. Este un trafic mare. Românii să evite deplasările în zone cu risc mare de contaminare. Din fericire până astăzi nu este niciun cetățean român care să fie bolnav. În România nu există niciun caz confirmat. Am solicitat cetățenilor români să respecte toate deciziile și informările privind coronavirusul.

Abstract If free-will beliefs support attributions of moral responsibility, then reducing these beliefs should make people less retributive in their attitudes about punishment. Four studies tested this prediction using both measured and manipulated free-will beliefs. Study 1 found that people with weaker free-will beliefs endorsed less retributive, but not consequentialist, attitudes regarding punishment of criminals. Subsequent studies showed that learning about the neural bases of human behavior, through either lab-based manipulations or attendance at an undergraduate neuroscience course, reduced people’s support for retributive punishment (Studies 2–4). These results illustrate that exposure to debates about free will and to scientific research on the neural basis of behavior may have consequences for attributions of moral responsibility.

Abortion providers in Ohio say they are still open for business, still performing abortions, and still providing care for patients in their communities after an order to stop 'non-essential' surgeries last week. "Abortion is an essential and time sensitive procedure," said Iris Harvey, CEO of Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio, "we are in compliance." Iris Harvey, CEO of Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio No more elective surgeries On Wednesday March 18, the Ohio Department of Health ordered that "all non-essential or elective surgeries" be stopped in an effort to preserve personal protective equipment like masks, gloves and gowns during the COVID-19 pandemic. The health department said "a non-essential surgery is a procedure that can be delayed with undue risk to the current or future health of a patient." Examples of criteria to consider include: Threat to patient's life if surgery or procedure is not performed Threat of permanent dysfunction of an extremity or organ system Risk of metastasis or progression of staging; or Risk of rapidly worsening to severe symptoms (time sensitive) AG sends letters to abortion providers Just two days later, the Attorney General Dave Yost's office said it was forwarded complaints that abortion clinics weren't complying with the non-essential surgery order. Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost On Friday March 20, the Attorney General sent letters to the Planned Parenthood of Southwest Ohio and the Women's Medical Center in Dayton ordering they "stop performing non-essential and elective surgical abortions." The letters went on to say, "Non-essential surgical abortions are those that can be delayed without undue risk to the current or future health of a patient." The letter then threatened unspecified action, "If you or your facility do not immediately stop performing non-essential or elective surgical abortions in compliance with the attached order, the Department of Health will take all appropriate measures." Essential or Non-Essential? "I don't think there is a 'non-essential' abortion," said Harvey. At their daily briefings, Governor DeWine and Dr. Amy Acton have been pressed by reporters to clarify which abortion procedures would be determined "essential" and which would be considered 'non-essential'. Neither the Governor nor Dr. Acton would answer those questions but referred them to the Attorney General, who declined our request for an interview. In an email, the AG's communications director Bethany McCorkle wrote News 5: "As our client, if Dr. Acton’s office determines that her order was violated by any surgical facility in Ohio, they can refer it to our office to pursue legal action on behalf of the Ohio Department of Health. We cannot provide legal interpretations of her order." On Saturday March 21, the Attorney General also sent a letter to stop elective surgeries to the Urology Group in Cincinnati. McCorkle also wrote, "This is not an abortion issue. A letter was also sent to a urology group that was allegedly performing elective surgeries." Lawmaker Appalled State Senator Nickie Antonio, a Democrat who represents the west side of Cleveland and its suburbs, disagrees. “I was so appalled at the vehemence of the order,” said Antonio. OhioSenate.gov Ohio State Senator Nickie Antonio (right) “I put the total focus of this whole interpretation of the original order on Attorney General Yost,” she said. “To selectively, just to focus on clinics that provide abortion care, put it into a political nature.” Now is not the time “to politicize anything,” she said. Antonio said she has spoken with abortion care providers about the order to halt elective surgeries. “These clinics are in full compliance with the governor’s orders,” she said. “The misnomer was that somehow they weren’t.” She also said it is critical women continue to have access to health care, including abortion services, during the coronavirus pandemic. “Not only is it essential, it’s also time-sensitive,’ she said, due to Ohio’s restrictions on abortions services. “The AG (attorney general) should not practice medicine without a license,” said Antonio. “It is not his job to identify what is essential for women’s reproductive health care. ”He should just stay in his lane,” she said.

Police say a man has been charged with sexually assaulting a woman he met inside a night club in Oak Lawn.[[365597711,R]] Investigators said 31-year-old Prince Karim met the woman inside the Station 4 nightclub at 3811 Cedar Springs at about 2 a.m. Sunday. According to police, Karim sexually assaulted the woman and was arrested later that morning. Karim was held in the Dallas County Jail and charged with sexual assault, which is a second degree felony, police said. His bond was set at $25,000.

Getty Images Being a hard-core NFL fan is getting more expensive. DirecTV is raising prices on its NFL Sunday Ticket package, which is the only way to watch every NFL game. The retail price will reach an all-time high of $293.94 in 2018, with the package that includes Red Zone Channel increasing to $395.95. Many subscribers don’t pay full price, as DirecTV often offers discounts to entice new subscribers, or to convince current subscribers to renew. But the base price of the package is higher than ever. And that may point to the future of the NFL on television: For many years, the NFL has thrived by reaching as broad an audience as possible. But with audiences shrinking the last two years and advertising revenue down last year, the league may seek to make more money off fans who are paying more money to see games. That includes fans who buy the Sunday Ticket package and fans who pay for the cable Red Zone Channel. Although there were scattered reports of people canceling Sunday Ticket last year to protest players protesting during the national anthem, DirecTV can likely continue to raise Sunday Ticket prices for some time and lose few subscribers. It remains a popular package, one that millions of fans think is well worth a few hundred dollars a year.

Oklahoma sheriff hit with more serious charge in inmate's death ENID — Garfield County Sheriff Jerry Niles was charged again Wednesday in a jail inmate's death, this time with first-degree manslaughter. Anthony Huff died in 2016 after he was unlawfully confined to a restraint chair "without food, water, oversight and monitoring" in excess of 55 hours, a prosecutor alleged. Huff, 58, of Enid, had been jailed for public intoxication and was restrained after he began hallucinating. Niles, 60, was first elected sheriff in 2012.

15 SHARES Facebook Twitter If you’re going to make your feature film directorial debut, you can do a hell of a lot worse than finding a script written by Paul Schrader as your foundation. That’s exactly what director Bradley Bredeweg is doing with the upcoming film “Life From the Other Side.” READ MORE: Paul Schrader has nothing nice to say about Brian De Palma According to Deadline, Bredeweg has optioned the script written by Schrader for “Life from the Other Side” as his feature directorial debut. Previously, the director had worked as the co-creator/writer/director on the YA Freeform series “The Fosters” and its spin-off “Good Trouble.” And while maybe this body of work does not quite line up with the kind of mature self-destructive screenplays Schrader is known to write, hey, a good script is a good script and Schrader knows how to write a really great script. So, perhaps Bredeweg will knock it out of the park? “Life from the Other Side” tells the story of Emily, a 23-year-old Instagram influencer, and her friend Moussa “Mouse” Lafitte, a 35-year-old boxer and Algerian immigrant, as they attempt to survive in New York City. As mentioned, Emily, being a young Millennial influencer, is a hustler and does whatever it takes to make money. “Mouse” is her older bodyguard and driver. READ MORE: Paul Schrader on why he ‘never really respected’ the Academy Awards Obviously, if you’re a fan of The Playlist, you’re well aware of Schrader and his accolades. If not, well, suffice it to say that the screenwriter is one of the best in U.S. cinema history, with films like “Taxi Driver,” “American Gigolo,” “Raging Bull,” and “The Last Temptation of Christ” to his name. Just last year, Schrader also made a huge impact on the awards season with his film “First Reformed,” which landed him an Oscar nomination for Original Screenplay. No word on when we might see “Life from the Other Side” in theaters, but Bredeweg is reportedly eyeing an early 2020 production start date.

The FBI has arrested Ars Technica writer and male feminist ally Peter Bright. He is charged with soliciting sex with children online. Bright allegedly sought to molest a 7- and 9-year old and disclosed his intentions to an undercover FBI special agent who made contact with him on KinkD, a social media fetish platform. According to the federal complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Bright met with the special agent and was arrested. He is currently being held without bail. The complaint also states that Bright also claimed to be in a sexual relationship with an 11-year-old. “From on or about April 18, 2019 up to and including on or about May 22, 2019, in the Southern District of New York and elsewhere, PETER BRIGHT, the defendant, willfully and knowingly, did use a facility and means of interstate and foreign commerce to persuade, induce, entice, and coerce an individual who had not attained the age of 18 years to engage in sexual activity for which a person can be charged with a criminal offense, and attempted to do the same, to wit, BRIGHT used computers and/or telephones to communicate with an undercover FBI agent about arranging to engage in sexual activity with a purported nine-year old boy and a seven-year old girl, and attempted to meet with the boy and the girl to engage in sexual activity, in violation of New York Penal Law Sections 130.25(2), 130.30(1), 130.35(3), 130.55, 130.60(2), and 130.65(3) and (4). The complaint states that on April 17, 2019, the undercover agent posed as a mother of a nine-year old boy and seven-year old girl and posted a message on KinkD “seeking to chat with people who are, in sum and substance, interested in teaching her children lessons about the ‘birds and the bees.’” The next day, a KinkD user going by the handle “randomanon” allegedly took the bait. It turned out to be Peter Bright, who allegedly urged them to continue their conversation on WhatsApp. Between May 14 and May 22, the male feminist allegedly engaged the undercover agent in discussions about his ongoing sexual experience with an 11-year-old, as well as his previous sexual experience. The complaint further alleges that Bright sought to meet the agent and the two minors to engage in sex, “including BRIGHT penetrating the Girl with a finger, a toy, or his penis.” Bright allegedly inquired about whether he could teach the children “lessons” involving his private parts. “I’m thinking maybe something involving foreskin is the way to start,” he allegedly said. The FBI provided a transcript of the dialogue, which we will not reprint on Human Events. Bright’s bio on his Twitter profile, @drpizza, identifies him as an Ars Technica writer. He sexually identifies as “poly/pan/pervy” and lists his pronouns “he/him.” Bright allegedly provided the agent with test results for several sexually transmitted diseases and sent the agent two photographs of himself, which identify him as the man who showed up in person. He also allegedly sent the agent a photograph of his privates. The agent’s review of records from T-Mobile associate Bright’s identity with the phone number used by the same individual on WhatsApp. On May 22, Bright met with the undercover agent and was arrested shortly thereafter. His appearance was a visual match with the individual the agent spoke to online. Peter Bright’s bio on his Twitter profile, @drpizza, identifies him as an Ars Technica writer. He sexually identifies as “poly/pan/pervy” and lists his pronouns “he/him.” The tech journalist has made the rounds on Twitter as an avowed “male feminist” who once bragged about “dating 3 feminists right now” and spoken extensively about feminist issues and repeatedly condemned the #GamerGate movement for ethics in games journalism. Despite being a journalist in games and technology, Bright often spoke out against “male gamers,” referring to them as “irredeemable.” He also defended the concept of cuckoldry. In several posts, Bright claimed to understand the psychology of child molesters, expressed his disagreement with age-based rape laws, and once remarked that one should “please ignore the [child’s] howling coming from the basement.” Conde Nast, the publisher of Ars Technica, confirmed to the Daily Dot that Bright was indeed arrested and that he is no longer employed. Ian Miles Cheong is the managing editor of Human Events

EPA may roll back chemical plant safety rules The rules set new standards for how companies communicate with the public. — -- Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has delayed regulations that were made in response to a 2013 explosion at a fertilizer storage plant in West, Texas, that killed 15 people and injured more than 250 others. The effective date of the rules, focusing on preparing for chemical accidents, has been pushed back to June 19, according to the EPA. The public comment period for the rule has been extended to May 13, which will allow time for the agency to decide if it wants to further delay the rule. Last December, the Obama administration put the regulations in place in response to the explosion, at the West Fertilizer Co. plant in April 2013, according to Hillary Cohen, a spokesperson for the Chemical Safety Board, an independent federal agency charged with investigating industrial chemical accidents. The regulations, which were based on the CSB's recommendations, were devised to set standards for how companies that own chemical plants, like West Fertilizer, make information available to their surrounding communities so that residents and first responders can prepare for accidents like the explosion. Cohen told ABC News that her organization recommended the regulations primarily to keep people better informed about what is happening at nearby facilities. "The CSB's investigation of the West Fertilizer accident found significant gaps in information critical to first responders. The EPA's proposed rule was in part a response to our findings and recommendations," Cohen said. "In the final analysis, facility employees, communities and first responders should have adequate information to understand the risks inherent in such facilities, to ensure everyone's safety." The American Chemistry Association, a lobbying arm for the industry, expressed concerns about the regulations and promised to undertake an effort to review them. Scott Jensen, a spokesperson for the group, said in a statement that the EPA made the "right call in delaying the implementation of problematic changes to the Risk Management Plan program." Pruitt, 48, a former Oklahoma attorney general, was narrowly confirmed by the Senate for his post in February. President Trump has said he wants to roll back many Obama-era EPA regulations. Industry groups submitted a petition to Pruitt in February, asking him for a delay, saying that "an administrative stay is appropriate and necessary while the agency considers and addresses the numerous flaws" in the regulations. He issued a statement on the EPA's website on Monday, saying the agency needs time to reconsider the Obama-era regulations. "As an agency, we need to be responsive to concerns raised by stakeholders regarding regulations so facility owners and operators know what is expected of them," Pruitt wrote. Twelve of the 15 people who died at the West Fertilizer plant explosion were first responders, according to Frank Patterson, who led the Federal Emergency Management Agency's response to the incident. Firefighters responded to a fire at the plant and began evacuating people in the vicinity. Shortly thereafter, an explosion tore through a four-to-five-block radius, leveling roughly 80 homes and a middle school and trapping 133 residents of a nursing home in rubble. The blast was so powerful, residents said, that it shook the ground. There were reports that people heard it several miles away, according to an ABC News article published at the time. Patterson declined to comment on Pruitt's decision to delay the regulations until he could appraise the agency's final decision but told ABC News that the man-made disaster was the the worst such incident he had encountered in his career in emergency management. "I was headed to what I was told was a fire, and when I got there, I realized how bad it was," Patterson said. "For me, it was a pressure situation, and I think everybody who responded to the incident felt that pressure," he added.

Nutella is love for Chocolate lovers. When you are tired at night and feel some late-night cravings, don’t worry no matter how tired you are these easy peasy Nutella cake recipes will help you quench your thirst. So let’s start baking. CINNAMON NUTELLA CAKE INGREDIENTS 175g golden caster sugar 175g softened butter 3 eggs 200g self-raising flour 2 tsp ground cinnamon 1 tsp baking powder 4 tbsp milk 4 rounded tbsp Nutella 50g hazelnut, roughly chopped. METHOD Preheat the oven at 160C Greece the base of the cake tin with the help of butter Now add sugar, butter, eggs, baking powder, flour, cinnamon and milk into a bowl Beat it with a mixer until it turns into a fluffy material Make the first layer with 1/4 of the mixture into the tin and spread it evenly Then make another layer of Nutella on top of the first one Repeat the same method for 3 to 4 layers Sprinkle the hazelnut on top of it Now, bake it for 1 hour. After 1 hour take it out and let it cool inside the tin Your delicious cake is ready for you. NUTELLA MUG CAKE INGREDIENTS 3 tbsp Nutella 3 tbsp milk 4 tbsp self-rising flour 4 tbsp white caster sugar 1 egg 3 tbsp cocoa powder 3 tbsp oil METHOD First of all, put all the ingredients in a large mug Now beat it well until it is turned into a fluffy mixture Microwave the mug for 2 – 3 minutes until it looks soft Finally, if you like to you can add topping with the help of whipped cream, and enjoy your mug cake. NUTELLA CRUNCH ICE CREAM CAKE INGREDIENTS 2 cups Nutella 6 cups of cereal 1 Gallon vanilla ice cream METHOD Place a large bowl of vanilla ice cream inside the freezer to chill On a medium flame in a saucepan combine Nutella and cereal together and mix well until the cereal is completely covered with Nutella Now remove it from the stove On a wax paper, pour Nutella coated cereal and place it inside the freezer for 30 minutes After that, place the ice cream all on top of the Nutella coated cereal Now place it back into the freezer for 4 – 5 hours until it completely freezes Now cut it into slices and serve. NUTELLA CHEESECAKE INGREDIENTS 250g biscuits 80g unsalted butter 3/4 cup roasted hazelnut 400g Nutella 500g cream cheese 1/2 cup icing sugar METHOD Blend the biscuits in the mixer, Add butter, hazelnuts, and Nutella in the biscuit mixture and mix it Put a wax paper inside the cake pan and place the mixture in it and let it chill inside the freezer Now, for the topping. Mix and beat the cream cheese with Nutella and icing sugar After that, take out the biscuit mixture from the freezer and put the topping we made in the previous step on it. Now place it in the freezer again and let it chill for 3 – 4 hours again. Your yummiest cake is ready for you now. NUTELLA BROWNIES INGREDIENTS 1/2 cup Nutella 1 egg 5 tbsp flour 1/2 cup chopped hazelnut METHOD Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line a 12 mini muffin pan with foil paper Put Nutella, egg, and flour in a bowl and whisk until smooth and fluffy Place the material in the mini muffin pan and sprinkle it with chopped hazelnut Finally, bake until the material turns into a muffin shaped Now set it on a rack to cool down and serve it with Love. So these are the easy-peasy Nutella cake recipes for you. What are you waiting for getting in the kitchen and make some delicious cake with Nutella and don’t forget to share.

The blips of a heart monitor, the hum of an MRI, the intense lights of a surgical room: all can bring both comfort and fear — and all require a lot of power. But new hospitals are being filled with natural, calming light and are leveraging energy from the sun and earth to power the machines, instruments, and tools medical professionals use to help patients recover. Hospitals use a lot of energy to save lives. In fact, they use more than 836 trillion BTUs of energy every year and produce more than 2.5 times the carbon dioxide emissions of commercial office buildings. The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Commercial Buildings Program and DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) are working with the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) and the buildings industry to find ways to reduce the energy intensity of large hospitals, schools, and retail buildings by 50%. “The Advanced Energy Design Guidelines [AEDG] series represents the best practices in industry for energy efficiency in buildings,” NREL Senior Research Engineer and AEDG Project Chair Shanti Pless said. “Our job is to develop those best practices, along with the professionals in the industry, and put them together in an easy-to-implement guide. NREL created the modeling and optimization software used to determine that what is going into the guides achieves a 50% savings goal.” The NREL commercial buildings team of Pless, Eric Bonnema, and Matt Leach led the development of the Large Hospital, Retail, and School 50% Savings AEDGs. Pless was chair of the project committees of industry experts, and Bonnema and Leach provided efficiency expertise and energy modeling optimization support. U.S. hospitals spend more than $5 billion annually on energy, often equaling 1% to 3% of a typical hospital’s operating budget. “Healthcare is a big opportunity for energy savings,” Pless said. “We felt this industry needed resources, and there weren’t many out there helping them to achieve 50% savings in energy.” The 50% AEDG series is a new group of publications that builds on previous successes. Collaborators including DOE and NREL published a series of six 30% AEDGs covering structures ranging from small office buildings to highway lodging to self-storage buildings. Between the 30% and 50% AEDGs, there are roughly 450,000 copies currently in circulation. The full series of AEDGs is available as a free download atwww.ashrae.org/aedg. “ASHRAE, a professional organization consisting of 60,000 mechanical engineers who work on energy efficiency in buildings, is an excellent organization through which we disseminate the guides,” NREL Principal Lab Program Manager for Building Energy Technologies Ron Judkoff said. “ASHRAE also maintains commercial building standards for industry.” But Don’t Just Follow Code Geothermal coils are visible in a partially filled heat rejection lake at the Great River Medical Center in Burlington, Iowa. For buildings that are predominantly in cooling mode, lake source geothermal can provide substantial energy savings. The building code is the baseline for the least energy-efficient building an owner can construct. Fortunately, there is nothing in building codes to stop building owners and construction companies who want to go for the most energy savings they can find — and that’s where the AEDGs can bridge the gap. “There is a lot of interest out there for 50% energy savings in buildings because just about anyone can do it, if they are paying attention,” Pless said. “And it doesn’t have to cost more if you are using streamlined design and construction processes.” The AEDGs are written for owners, design teams, and contractors — the professionals who will be constructing these buildings. If they don’t have experience in energy efficiency, they can look to these guides for examples and details on how to do it themselves. The guides have recommendation tables for all climate zones in the United States. AEDG recommendations are also built on technical support documents written by the national labs that accompany the design guidelines. These support documents cover the details of the energy modeling used. For instance, while daylighting works well in almost all climate zones, heating and cooling can require different solutions from zone to zone, especially in hospitals because of the high demand for fresh air. “Hospitals have strict ventilation requirements, and they bring in a certain amount of fresh air along with a certain amount of re-circulated air,” Bonnema said. “There is a huge potential for savings if you set up your system differently, since most hospitals are using energy to cool the air and then heat it back up.” Jeff Boldt is the director of engineering for KJWW Engineering Consultants, and he was also a project team member for the Large Hospital AEDG. “It’s really interesting when you look at a large hospital energy model; the biggest use of energy is the reheat. It’s because you have to dehumidify all the air. For instance, you cool it down to 52 degrees in order to dehumidify it. Then, your boiler comes on to reheat the air. That process is usually the single largest use of energy in a hospital. This guide figures out how to get that reheat for free or cause the reheat not to happen at all.” According to Boldt, the AEDG will help the healthcare industry understand that there are practical ways to design a building that uses 50% less energy. “I like that they are prescriptive because a lot of people aren’t comfortable with energy modeling. With the AEDGs, we’ve done all the energy modeling, and you can hand this to your design team and say ‘I want you to follow the items in this AEDG,’ and your team can go from a checklist and know what they are getting.” Running those energy models and finding climate-by-climate solutions wouldn’t be possible without the computer modeling muscle at NREL. “From our optimization tools to mass modeling capabilities using 16 climate zones and five building types, all running different ‘what if’ scenarios, we are able to do all the modeling on a pretty condensed timeline,” Pless said. Schools are Ahead of the Class The Evie Garrett Dennis K-12 campus in Denver, Colorado, includes four academic buildings. The high school built as part of this project is the first for Denver Public Schools in the past 30 years; the common area is pictured above. The campus sees an average 38.1% energy savings each year from renewable sources. “Research has demonstrated that the quality of the physical environment affects student performance,” Pless said. “An environment that includes appropriate lighting, sound, temperature, humidity, and air quality can help students learn better. In many cases, improving these can also reduce energy use.” Schools can have similar heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) issues as hospitals — specifically, decoupling of ventilation air from space heating and cooling. If engineers are able to provide the heating and cooling separately from ventilation, this basically eliminates the issue of reheat in schools. NREL and the AEDG team have also produced a guide for K-12 Schools that includes: Three different HVAC system types that achieve significant energy savings Different ways to daylight 100% of the floor area of classrooms, resource rooms, cafeterias, gymnasiums, and multipurpose rooms for two-thirds of school hours Recommendations for computers, vending machines, kitchen cooking equipment, walk-in refrigeration equipment, kitchen exhaust hoods, and service water heating. The K-12 Schools AEDG was one that NREL chose to do early on because a number of schools are at the 50% energy-savings level, and there were many case studies to draw from. Pete Jefferson, a principal with Denver-based M.E. GROUP, was on the project committee for the K-12 Schools AEDG. He said the guides give professionals a solid starting base for energy design. “These guides are a great shortcut for anybody who is working on a school. You can jump to the AEDG recommendations and start from there and see how much further you can go as a design professional,” Jefferson said. “When we do our energy models, we use the AEDG recommendations as our new baseline to see how we can improve from there.” Some schools are even pushing the envelope to net-zero energy levels — which is something the team hopes to tackle in the next round of design guides. A net-zero energy building is one in which annual on-site renewable energy production is equal to or greater than energy use. “Net-zero makes a lot of sense for schools. They are built to last for 50 years, and a lot of effort goes into making them robust,” Pless said. “There are also teaching opportunities with energy-efficiency features and on-site renewables. So there are net-zero schools popping up, but having a design guide with best practices is key to helping them become widespread.” The NREL team sees a need for a complete net-zero design guide series. “Industry is starting to understand that it can be done,” Pless said. “Having a net-zero office design guide is needed. There are examples across the country of offices that are attempting to do this.” The United States adds 2% every year in new buildings and only tears down 1%, which means the nation continues to add to its energy use when it comes to buildings. The AEDG team sees the opportunity to make the new buildings more energy efficient and sees even greater opportunities when it comes to deep retrofits, because the recommendations in the guides can apply to both. “At these building rates, over the course of 20 years, you’ve touched over half of the buildings in America through retrofits or bringing new construction to 50% savings,” Pless said. “That’s measureable impact on the 40% of the nation’s energy that gets used in buildings.” Another area where the AEDGs have had an impact is the town of Greensburg, Kansas. After a 2007 tornado leveled nearly the entire town, DOE and NREL helped the town leaders create a newer, more efficient Greensburg. In this case, a whole town was constructed that was able to achieve 50% energy savings. “Greensburg was kind of a demonstration for us that if 50% energy savings can be done here, it can be done anywhere,” Pless said. “It exemplifies all the AEDG work that has been done.” This article was originally published on NREL and was republished with permission.

Jurgen Klinsmann is pleased with his back line but remains disappointed with the United States' crop of young goalkeepers, and plans to continue with the veteran duo of Tim Howard and Brad Guzan, perhaps even platooning them in the starting role as he sees fit. That was one of several interesting notes from the US national team coach – on a range of topics – as he held his latest question-and-answer session with fans via live Facebook video on Sunday afternoon ahead of Tuesday's World Cup qualifier vs. Trinidad & Tobago in Jacksonville, Florida (8 pm ET; FS1, UniMás, UDN). “I think we are looking good in our defensive side over the last couple of months, also throughout the Copa America, except maybe the Argentina [semifinal] game, as you guys remember,” said Klinsmann when asked about his defensive corps. “They played a tremendous tournament. “We have a lot of very good center backs at the moment in the senior national team. That is a good thing for us. Where we always have to find solutions is obviously on the wings. Here and there we rotate Fabian Johnson from the left to the right, back to the left. I think Kellyn Acosta, in our opinion, coaches' opinion, he played a very good game [at left back] in St. Vincent. He's a player that is just growing, getting more mature. He's versatile, he can play in midfield as well, as he does usually with FC Dallas. So it's good to see that our back line gives us options.” The USMNT boss will have to make significant changes to the back four that shut out St. Vincent & the Grenadines on Friday. Right back DeAndre Yedlin returned to his new club Newcastle United on Sunday morning after earning a yellow card that leaves him suspended for Tuesday's clash, while center back Matt Besler flew home to spend time with his wife and first child, who was born on Friday. Fans may not see any significant changes in goal any time soon, however. On Sunday Klinsmann laid down his latest pointed criticism of the young crop of US 'keepers like Bill Hamid, Sean Johnson and David Bingham. “We are obviously blessed with Brad Guzan and Tim Howard,” he said. “As long as the younger ones are not stepping it up even more and pushing them – kind of pushing them out, basically – these two will defend their spots. And in order to have both always available and in good spirit, here and there we can rotate. “It's not a big problem. They get along. So if one game is Brad Guzan playing and the next one is Tim Howard, it's not a big problem. They handle that very, very professionally. And then we keep waiting. We keep waiting for the next generation of goalkeepers to step it up and to challenge these two very experienced ones.” Though Guzan started throughout most of the Copa America, Klinsmann announced last week that the two would alternate in these qualifiers. Howard is set to guard the pipes on Tuesday after Guzan got the nod Friday. Klinsmann also addressed matters like US youth development, the fortunes of Yanks plying their trade abroad and the recent displays of Sacha Kljestan and Christian Pulisic. Here are a few of his notable statements: On player development: “Youth development in the United States is a very, very different topic than in every other country in the world. Because of the school system, because of the situation that you get, through a sport, to a prestigious or a good university and maybe to a scholarship, sports is driven very, very differently to Latin America and especially Europe … it's a huge country so we're trying as hard as we can to speed up through certain developments. You saw over the last years the growth of the academy system in the United States. Also the fact that Major League Soccer is now investing heavily into youth development, building their own academies, obviously eventually being the lead academies in the country, because that's how it works in every other country in the world. There's a lot of work to get done, still, but I think we're making big, big progress.” On the return of captain Michael Bradley, who was suspended for Friday's match: “It means a lot to us because obviously Michael is the captain. His experience and his drive is really important. The job is still not done. So we need Michael here on Tuesday night in Jacksonville to make sure that everybody's on board, everybody is tuned in and 100 percent focused to go with the right aggressiveness and determination into this game against Trinidad & Tobago.” On the prospects of young US internationals abroad like Gedion Zelalem and Cameron Carter-Vickers: “We are in contact with our players, we try to help them as much as we can. At the end of the day, they need to be hungry, determined, nasty, and they need to be ready to fight their fights in their club teams and sooner or later break through, like the example maybe right now of Lynden Gooch at Sunderland. He found a way to fight through and now he has to find a way to keep his spot.”

The untold stories behind a cup of coffee are what directors Andrés Ibáñez Díaz and Alejandro Díaz tell in their new documentary A Six Dollar Cup of Coffee, which premiered in Mexican City last week after making the rounds in the international film festival circuit. The film focuses on a Tzeltal family that works in a coffee cooperative in Chiapas and the trend of specialty coffee in Seattle, U.S., questioning the paradigms of quality in the coffee world. “We opted for this type of documentary because we’re big-time coffee drinkers, we have up to five or six cups a day,” said co-director Ibáñez. “And although we like it a lot, we didn’t know from where it came or what it entailed.” Alejandro Díaz assured viewers that A Six Dollar Cup of Coffee isn’t a documentary meant to make them feel bad for drinking their favorite pick-me-up. “What we hope to do is to initiate a conversation. That coffee drinkers look at the product with instinctive eyes and check the label before consuming it, or that when they want a coffee, they analyze whether it’s good to go to the chain store or walk another block to buy it from their neighborhood cafe,” he said. “You shouldn’t be shocked by a six-dollar cup of coffee,” says a person interviewed for the trailer for the film. “You should be shocked by a one-dollar cup of coffee. Because if a cup of coffee costs one dollar, and you truly know and understand the process and where that coffee came from, someone is getting screwed along the way.” Ibáñez explained that coffee from Mexico to Ecuador is cultivated by indigenous people. “We have no idea who is paying the producers, but it’s a chain of intermediaries that usually pays them very little,” he said. Despite the market benefiting the farmers the least, the directors found them to be resilient, positive and self-affirming. Far from seeing themselves as victims, they saw themselves as enterprising producers of a quality product. “The first thing we encountered [at the cooperative] was a syncretic Mayan/Catholic ceremony to celebrate the beginning of the coffee planting season, and we delved into the cosmogony,” said Ibáñez. “And their stories blew our minds.” It took Ibáñez and Díaz five years to complete the documentary, which was shown at film festivals in Havana, Vancouver, Turkey, Spain, Germany and the Czech Republic, as well as in Querétaro and Guadalajara. “We learned to be patient because the documentary moved at different rhythms from our own . . . We had to wait until the coffee was ready to be harvested . . . It was a long process, but it filled us with satisfaction,” said Díaz. Source: La Jornada (sp)

Editor’s note: The Chronicle is reviewing the season of each player after the Warriors’ second straight championship run. A brash, emotional leader, Draymond Green needs high stakes to be at his best. That is why those who know him didn’t fret when he struggled with consistency during the regular season. They recognized that, when the playoffs arrived, Green would return to his do-everything ways. He didn’t disappoint. After a regular season that failed to reach his lofty standard, Green was a driving force in the Warriors’ third championship run in four years. He averaged 14.8 points, 11.8 rebounds and 10.0 assists against New Orleans in the Western Conference finals to become the first player in franchise history to average a triple-double in a playoff series. In the West finals and NBA Finals, Green played with his signature fury, lifting his team out of its doldrums at just the right moment. It was easy to forget that he was dealing with nagging injuries. Right shoulder soreness, the lingering aftermath from JaVale McGee undercutting him on a block attempt in November, bothered Green almost all season. At various points, Green dealt with a swollen elbow, knee soreness, a bruised pelvis and emergency dental surgery to correct a tooth that was knocked back on a Russell Westbrook drive. Still, Green’s issues this past season were rooted in more than injuries. More Information Draymond Green bio Age: 28 Position: Power forward Ht./Wt.: 6-7, 230 pounds Hometown: Saginaw, Mich. College: Michigan State Years pro: 6 2017-18 averages: 11.0 points, 7.6 rebounds, 7.3 assists, 1.3 blocks, 32.7 minutes per game Contract status: Entering fourth year of a five-year, $82 million deal Read More In November, while speaking to a standing-room-only crowd of more than 150 students and faculty members at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, he took responsibility for Golden State’s first three losses of the season. For reasons he did not reveal, Green was having a tough time finding the emotional bravado that had fueled him since his days playing the older kids at Civitan Recreation Center in Saginaw, Mich. After being the centerpiece of a top-five defense for four straight seasons, Green was part of the reason the Warriors slumped to ninth this past season. His focus waned as he made uncharacteristic defensive mistakes. With Green on the court in the regular season, Golden State’s defensive rating was 103.7 — a far cry from the 98.4, 96.0, 97.5 and 99.3 it posted the four previous seasons. It didn’t help matters that Green struggled to rein in his emotions. Instead of moving on to the next play, he often jawed with referees on his way back down-court. His 15 technical fouls were one shy of a league-mandated one-game suspension. Though Green unleashed on the officials multiple times in the playoffs, he did a much better job of avoiding run-ins without sacrificing his tenacity. In April, May and June, when Green played at an All-NBA level, one thing was clear: By coasting at times in the regular season, he preserved necessary energy for the sport’s biggest stage. Offseason outlook: Warriors majority owner Joe Lacob has said that he plans to offer Green, who is entering the fourth year of a five-year, $82 million deal, a new contract this summer. However, odds are that he’ll prefer to wait until free agency. Green could make far more than the three-year, $71.7 million deal he could be extended for this summer if he just holds out. Connor Letourneau is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: cletourneau@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Con_Chron

Escalating violence in South Sudan is casting a light on Israel's murky involvement in that conflict and raising questions about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's new strategy of strengthening ties with African countries. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter Netanyahu has been forging alliances across Africa in an effort he says will help blunt Palestinian diplomatic initiatives against Israel at the United Nations. But critics say these new ties — illustrated by Netanyahu's high-profile visit to several African countries in July — have come without regard for the human rights records of those allies. Netanyahu meets with the leaders of seven African states (Photo: Kobi Gideon GPO) Such concerns have been magnified by Israel's close ties to South Sudan, whose government has used Israeli arms and surveillance equipment to crack down on its opponents. Critics say Israel's global arms export policies lack transparency and proper oversight, and ignore the receiving country's intended use. "It is the role of the prime minister, the defense minister and the foreign minister to look out for Israel's interests. But this has a limit: not at any cost and not with everyone," said Tamar Zandberg, an Israeli opposition lawmaker who has filed a court appeal to halt Israeli sales of sensitive technology to South Sudan. Israel has long viewed South Sudan as an important ally and a counterweight to neighboring Sudan's support for Islamic Palestinian militants. Israel was one of the first countries to recognize South Sudan's independence in 2011, and South Sudanese leader Salva Kiir visited Israel months later. Since South Sudan descended into civil war in 2013, some 50,000 people have been killed and 2 million have been displaced. In July, hundreds died when fighting erupted in the capital, Juba. South Sudanese troops went on a nearly four-hour rampage at a hotel, killing a local journalist while forcing others to watch, raping several foreign women, and looting the compound, several witnesses told The Associated Press. Just days earlier, Netanyahu had traveled to four African countries — Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda and Ethiopia — in a visit meant to cultivate new allies. It was the first visit to sub-Saharan Africa by a sitting Israeli prime minister in nearly three decades. During the visit, he convened a summit with seven regional leaders, including Kiir — nearly all of whom have been criticized by rights watchdogs for alleged abuses. Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta has been charged by the International Criminal Court with crimes against humanity for his role in stoking ethnic violence, charges that were later withdrawn, with the prosecutor accusing Kenya of blocking her investigation. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, 71, has served for 30 years and is trying to change the constitution so he can effectively extend his rule for life. Rwandan President Paul Kagame has been dogged by allegations of human rights abuses in neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo and criticized by rights groups for being an authoritarian ruler. Prime Minister Netanyahu with Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn (Photo: Kobi Gideon GPO) Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon said Israel is "extremely satisfied with our renewed relations with many African countries and Israel does not interfere in those countries' internal affairs." He rejected criticism of the Israeli outreach, suggesting Israel was being unfairly singled out. The United States and other Western countries also consider many African countries important allies. A UN report in January said Israeli surveillance equipment was being used by South Sudanese intelligence, allowing it to intercept communications in a "significantly enhanced" crackdown on government opponents. The report also found that an Israeli automatic rifle known as the Micro Galil is "present in larger numbers than before the outbreak of the conflict." According to the report, Israel sold the rifles to Uganda in 2007, which transferred the weapons to South Sudan's National Security Service in 2014. According to the report, Israel said it didn't receive a request from Uganda for the transfer. Eitay Mack, an Israeli lawyer working with Zandberg said weapons export licenses require knowledge of end users and mid users — meaning the transfer would either have been done with Israel's knowledge or would have prompted an investigation into the offending company. He said no investigation was known to have been opened. The UN report said Israeli ACE rifles were used in a massacre that targeted Nuer citizens in Juba in 2013. Zandberg said Israel stopped sending firearms to South Sudan in 2013 but that export licenses for the surveillance equipment continue. The Israeli Defense Ministry did not respond to requests for comment. The European Union has placed an arms embargo on South Sudan, and following the outbreak of violence, the US imposed sanctions on top military officials from both sides of the conflict. In August, the UN Security Council approved an additional regional protection force to enter South Sudan, but decided against an arms embargo on the country. "Even without an international arms embargo, states should unilaterally suspend arms transfers given the likelihood that arms would be used to commit human rights violations," said Elizabeth Deng, Amnesty International's South Sudan researcher. Zandberg and Mack asked Israel's Supreme Court in May to force Israel to explain why it has continued export licenses for the surveillance system to South Sudan. Reflecting Israel's typically opaque approach to such transfers, the Defense Ministry asked for a gag order to be imposed on the proceedings. A hearing is scheduled later this month. Netanyahu meets with Uhuru Kenyatta (Photo: AFP) Zandberg is also seeking to change Israel's weapons export oversight law, which she says does not adequately ensure that Israeli arms don't end up in troubled countries. The law states that Israel shall not supply weapons to any country under a Security Council arms embargo. But the council can often be slow to act, and Zandberg wants Israel's Foreign Ministry to have clout in determining whether it should allow arms transfers. A 2013 report by Israel's state comptroller pointed to "shortcomings, some of them significant," in export oversight, including a lack of personnel to investigate possible breaches and lax enforcement of requirements for exporters. "A country that hands out these export licenses has to be accountable and to take responsibility for the (weapons') final use," Zandberg said.

Gallery: Eleven down Nashville SC for 1st win at Lucas Oil INDIANAPOLIS — Two USL newcomers squared off at Lucas Oil Stadium on Saturday afternoon, with the Indy Eleven ultimately triumphing 2-1 over Nashville SC. Soony Saad’s brace led the way for Indy, while the assists came from Ayoze and Jack McInerney. Ropapa Mensah tallied for Nashville on a pass from Lebo Moloto. Gallery: Follow Robbie on Twitter: @RobbMeh. Support Soc Takes on Patreon for access to exclusive content and supporter benefits. Click here to become a patron today.

Monadic and Queue-Based Tree Search import Control.Monad import qualified Data.Sequence as Seq import Test.SmallCheck Can we define instances of MonadPlus whose search strategy can not be easily reproduced with a queue-based strategy? Are there queue-based strategies that cannot be implemented as instances of MonadPlus ? Such instances can be used to search a tree data Tree a = Return a | Plus (Tree a) (Tree a) deriving ( Eq , Show ) by replacing the tree constructors with monadic operations: searchM :: MonadPlus m => Tree a -> m a searchM (Return x) = return x searchM (Plus s t) = searchM s `mplus` searchM t We want to use SmallCheck to compare search strategies so we define a Serial instance for trees. instance Serial a => Serial (Tree a) where series = cons1 Return \/ cons2 Plus coseries = coseries If we have an implementation of a queue, i.e., an instance of the type class Queue class Queue q where enqueue :: a -> q a -> q a dequeue :: q a -> Maybe (a, q a) then we can also search a tree by queuing its nodes: searchQ :: Queue q => q (Tree a) -> Tree a -> [a] searchQ q t = search (enqueue t q) where search q = maybe [] continue (dequeue q) continue (Return x, q) = x : search q continue (Plus s t, q) = search (enqueue s (enqueue t q)) Depth First Search Depth first search can easily be implemented with the [] -instance of MonadPlus or a [] -instance of Queue , viz., a stack: instance Queue [] where enqueue = (:) dequeue [] = Nothing dequeue (x:xs) = Just (x,xs) Indeed, searching a tree with searchM for lists and searchQ for a stack yields the same results: prop_dfs :: Tree Bool -> Bool prop_dfs t = searchM t == searchQ [] t check_dfs :: IO () check_dfs = smallCheck 4 prop_dfs Breadth First Search Breadth first search can be implemented with a FIFO queue: instance Queue Seq.Seq where enqueue = flip (Seq.|>) dequeue q | Seq.EmptyL <- Seq.viewl q = Nothing | x Seq.:< xs <- Seq.viewl q = Just (x,xs) We can implement breadth first search as an instance of MonadPlus using matrices: newtype Matrix a = Matrix { unMatrix :: [[a]] } flat :: Matrix a -> [a] flat (Matrix rows) = concat rows instance Monad Matrix where return x = Matrix [[x]] Matrix m >>= f = undefined instance MonadPlus Matrix where mzero = Matrix [] Matrix xs `mplus` Matrix ys = Matrix ([] : merge xs ys) merge :: [[a]] -> [[a]] -> [[a]] merge [] yss = yss merge xss [] = xss merge (xs:xss) (ys:yss) = (xs++ys) : merge xss yss Let's check that we have indeed implemented the same strategy with the Seq instance of Queue and the Matrix instance of MonadPlus : prop_bfs :: Tree Bool -> Bool prop_bfs t = flat (searchM t) == searchQ Seq.empty (mirror t) check_bfs :: IO () check_bfs = smallCheck 4 prop_bfs The queuing approach to breadth-first search visits the nodes of each level of a tree in reverse order, so we need to mirror the tree in order to get the same results. mirror :: Tree a -> Tree a mirror (Return a) = Return a mirror (Plus s t) = Plus (mirror t) (mirror s) Interleaving We can slightly modify the [] -instance of MonadPlus to interleave results from different subtrees. newtype Inter a = Inter { unInter :: [a] } instance Monad Inter where return x = Inter ( return x) Inter xs >>= f = Inter (xs >>= unInter . f) instance MonadPlus Inter where mzero = Inter mzero Inter xs `mplus` Inter ys = Inter (xs `inter` ys) inter :: [a] -> [a] -> [a] inter [] ys = ys inter (x:xs) ys = x : inter ys xs The only difference compared to the list monad is the implementation of mplus . Challenge Define an instance InterQ of Queue such that the property prop_inter :: Tree Bool -> Bool prop_inter t = unInter (searchM t) == searchQ emptyInterQ t holds for all values of type Tree Bool . Fair Interleaving Oleg Kiselyov defines an instance of MonadPlus that can be used to fairly enumerate values of an infinite tree with better memory requirements than breadth first search. data Stream a = Nil | Choice a (Stream a) | Incomplete (Stream a) The data type for streams is similar to lists but has an additional constructor to postpone the computation of incomplete (not yet computed) streams. instance Monad Stream where return x = Choice x Nil Nil >>= f = Nil Choice a r >>= f = f a `mplus` (Incomplete (r >>= f)) Incomplete i >>= f = Incomplete (i >>= f) instance MonadPlus Stream where mzero = Nil mplus Nil r' = Incomplete r' mplus (Choice a r) r' = Choice a (mplus r' r) mplus r@(Incomplete i) r' = case r' of Nil -> r Choice b r' -> Choice b (mplus i r') Incomplete j -> Incomplete (mplus i j) The twist of this instance is the implementation of bind that is responsible for the good memory requirements. When starting with a Tree , bind is never called (that is why we didn't need to define it for breadth first search). Hence, good performance is only achieved when using the monadic operations directly in the computation rather than constructing a search tree first that has no occurrences of bind. I speculate that it is difficult to define a queue-based search algorithm (that searches Tree s) with the same performance characteristics as search that is expressed directly in the Stream monad. Mastering the Challenge Trying to master the challenge lead to the following attemts: First Try: Alternating Queue What if we add left children to the front and right children to the back of the queue, always dequeing at the front ? We can achieve this effect by enqueing alternately at the front and the back of the queue. data AlterQ a = AlterQ Bool ( Seq.Seq a) emptyAlterQ :: AlterQ a emptyAlterQ = AlterQ False Seq.empty instance Queue AlterQ where enqueue x (AlterQ b q) = AlterQ ( not b) (ins x q) where ins = if b then flip (Seq.|>) else (Seq.<|) dequeue (AlterQ b q) | Seq.EmptyL <- Seq.viewl q = Nothing | x Seq.:< xs <- Seq.viewl q = Just (x,AlterQ b xs) Does it pass the tests? prop_alter :: Tree Bool -> Bool prop_alter t = unInter (searchM t) == searchQ emptyAlterQ t check_alter :: IO () check_alter = smallCheck 4 prop_alter It doesn't. SmallCheck produces the following counter example: Plus (Plus (Return True ) (Plus (Return True ) (Return True ))) (Plus (Plus (Return True ) (Return False )) (Return True )) Let's examine it. We can see that all labels but one are True , so the single occurrence of False must be placed at different prositions in the compared enumerations. If we replace all labels with distinct numbers, the tree looks as follows: ((1 (2 3)) ((4 5) 6)) With the interleaving monad, the children of the root are enumerated as [1,2,3] and [4,6,5] , which are then interleaved to produce the list [1,4,2,6,3,5] . The alternating queue evolves as follows: (1 (2 3)) ((4 5) 6) 1 ((4 5) 6) (2 3) --> 1 (4 5) (2 3) 6 4 (2 3) 6 5 --> 4 2 6 5 3 Unlike the interleaving monad, it produces the list [1,4,2,6,5,3] . Second Try: Toms Queue Tom Schrijvers send me another solution that seems to work introcuding it as follows: The code below is a bit messy still. The main idea is that the queue sort of tracks the shape of the model tree. It crucially depends on the fact that two dequeues in a row mean that a solution has been produced. data TreeFocus a = Init0 | Init1 a | Root | Branch0 [NNode a] | Branch a [NNode a] | Branch1 [NNode a] data NNode a = VValue a | BBranch (NNode a) (NNode a) data TomsQ a = TomsQ (TreeFocus a) emptyTomsQ = TomsQ Init0 instance Queue TomsQ where enqueue x (TomsQ tf) = TomsQ (enq x tf) where enq x Init0 = Init1 x enq x Root = Branch0 [VValue x] enq x (Branch0 p) = Branch x p enq x (Branch1 p) = Branch0 (VValue x : p) dequeue (TomsQ tf) = do (x,tf') <- deq tf return (x,TomsQ tf') where deq Root = mzero deq (Init1 x) = return (x,Root) deq (Branch x p) = return (x,Branch1 p) deq (Branch1 p) = deq (ascend p) ascend [] = Root ascend (x:xs) = ascend' xs x ascend' [] x = descend x ascend' (y:ys) x = ascend' ys (BBranch y x) descend (VValue x) = Init1 x descend (BBranch l r) = descend' l [r] descend' (VValue x) p = Branch x p descend' (BBranch l r) p = descend' l (r:p)

Autographed well-wishes from Liverpool FC dedicated to die-hard supporter Firdaus Osman, who suffered a cardiac arrest and remains in intensive care. (Photo courtesy of Faiz Osman) *UPDATE (25 April 2016): The Changi General Hospital has said that its medical team had not advocated to the family to “pull the plug” and that its doctor’s recommendation to the family was to remove Firdaus’ breathing tube as the patient was assessed to be able to breathe on his own. The hospital said that this is a standard of care for any patient on the ventilator and that this information was also conveyed to the family. This contradicts what a member of the family said. Faiz, the younger brother of Firdaus, told Yahoo Singapore, “The doctors at CGH said he had no hope and advice (sic) my family to pull the plug”.* A classy gesture from Liverpool FC has brought tears of joy from a Singaporean fan after he had a near-death experience. The English football giants sent a get-well-soon card to Firdaus Osman, who is currently warded at Singapore General Hospital (SGH). Addressed directly to him, the Reds thanked the 28-year-old for his support and the card was signed by all the first-team members, as well as head coach Jürgen Klopp. Firdaus was admitted in critical condition earlier this month on 5 April, after suffering a sudden cardiac arrest while getting food with his colleagues after working a night shift. His younger brother, Faiz, related to Yahoo Singapore how Firdaus was brought to Changi General Hospital (CGH) after he collapsed. His heart was determined to have stopped for around 40 minutes, but was successfully resuscitated. “He was on life support for quite some time,” said Faiz. “It took him at least five days to open his eyes, but he still remained motionless.” View photos Firdaus Osman. His heart stopped for 40 minutes before he was resuscitated. (Photo courtesy of Faiz Osman) Faiz decided to play You Will Never Walk Alone, the club’s anthem, when that happened - and was astonished when his brother responded. “I know he is a die-hard supporter of Liverpool,” he explained. “The happiest thing to see was that he actually smiled for the first time during his coma and that brought tears of joy to us as a family. It gave us hope and belief.” After being advised to pull the plug, the family sought a second opinion at SGH and eventually decided to transfer Firdaus there. It was after the transfer that the idea of getting in contact with Liverpool FC occurred to Faiz. Writing in his email that he hoped they could “help him and make him happy”, he simply wanted to share his brother’s plight and did not know what kind of response to expect. Just two days after he wrote, Liverpool responded through Chanelle Weightman, a member of their Customer Experience Team. “I was surprised they actually sent me a personalised certificate with the autographs of all the players and the head coach,” Faiz said. “I was really happy and delighted, and I went to print and laminate it straight away.” View photos Story continues

Ever wondered just what the ModelState was that keeps popping up in your ASP.NET MVC controllers? So did I. Let's break down what the ModelState is and why we use it. What is ModelState? ModelState is a property of a Controller, and can be accessed from those classes that inherit from System.Web.Mvc.Controller. The ModelState represents a collection of name and value pairs that were submitted to the server during a POST. It also contains a collection of error messages for each value submitted. Despite its name, it doesn't actually know anything about any model classes, it only has names, values, and errors. ModelState has two purposes: to store the value submitted to the server, and to store the validation errors associated with those values. But that's the boring explanation. Show me the code! The Sample Project Check out my (very simple) sample project hosted over on GitHub! The Setup Now, let's get started writing the code for this demo. First, we have the AddUserVM view model: ViewModels/Home/AddUserVM.cs public class AddUserVM { public string FirstName { get; set; } public string LastName { get; set; } public string EmailAddress { get; set; } } Next, we have a simple view: Views/Home/Add.cshtml @model ModelStateDemo.ViewModels.Home.AddUserVM <h2>Add</h2> @using(Html.BeginForm()) { <div> <div> @Html.TextBoxFor(x => x.FirstName) </div> <div> @Html.TextBoxFor(x => x.LastName) </div> <div> @Html.TextBoxFor(x => x.EmailAddress) </div> <div> <input type="submit" value="Save" /> </div> </div> } Finally, we have the controller actions: ... [HttpGet] public ActionResult Add() { AddUserVM model = new AddUserVM(); return View(model); } [HttpPost] public ActionResult Add(AddUserVM model) { if(!ModelState.IsValid) { return View(model); } return RedirectToAction("Index"); } When we submit the form to the POST action, all of the values we entered will show up in the AddUserVM instance. But how did they get there? The ModelStateDictionary Class Let's look at the rendered HTML form for the Add page: <form action="/Home/Add" method="post"> <div> <div> <label for="FirstName">First Name:</label> <input id="FirstName" name="FirstName" type="text" value=""> </div> <div> <label for="LastName">Last Name:</label> <input id="LastName" name="LastName" type="text" value=""> </div> <div> <label for="EmailAddress">Email Address:</label> <input id="EmailAddress" name="EmailAddress" type="text" value=""> </div> <div> <input type="submit" value="Save"> </div> </div> </form> In a POST, all values in <input> tags are submitted to the server as key-value pairs. When MVC receives a POST, it takes all of the post parameters and adds them to a ModelStateDictionary instance. When debugging the controller POST action in Visual Studio, we can use the Locals window to investigate this dictionary: The Values property of the ModelStateDictionary contains instances that are of type System.Web.Mvc.ModelState. What does a ModelState actually contain? What's in a ModelState? Here's what those values look like, from the same debugger session: Each of the properties has an instance of ValueProviderResult that contains the actual values submitted to the server. MVC creates all of these instances automatically for us when we submit a POST with data, and the POST action has inputs that map to the submitted values. Essentially, MVC is wrapping the user inputs into more server-friendly classes (ModelState and ValueProviderResult) for easier use. There's still two important properties that we haven't discussed, though: the ModelState.Errors property and the ModelStateDictionary.IsValid property. They're used for the second function of ModelState: to store the errors found in the submitted values. Validation Errors in ModelState Let's change our AddUserVM class: public class AddUserVM { [Required(ErrorMessage = "Please enter the user's first name.")] [StringLength(50, ErrorMessage = "The First Name must be less than {1} characters.")] [Display(Name = "First Name:")] public string FirstName { get; set; } [Required(ErrorMessage = "Please enter the user's last name.")] [StringLength(50, ErrorMessage = "The Last Name must be less than {1} characters.")] [Display(Name = "Last Name:")] public string LastName { get; set; } [EmailAddress(ErrorMessage = "The Email Address is not valid")] [Required(ErrorMessage = "Please enter an email address.")] [Display(Name = "Email Address:")] public string EmailAddress { get; set; } } We've added validation attributes, specifically Required, StringLength, and EmailAddress. We've also set the error messages that are to be displayed if the corresponding validation errors occur. With the above changes in place, let's modify the Add view to display the error messages if they occur: @model ModelStateDemo.ViewModels.Home.AddUserVM <h2>Add</h2> @using(Html.BeginForm()) { @Html.ValidationSummary() <div> <div> @Html.LabelFor(x => x.FirstName) @Html.TextBoxFor(x => x.FirstName) @Html.ValidationMessageFor(x => x.FirstName) </div> <div> @Html.LabelFor(x => x.LastName) @Html.TextBoxFor(x => x.LastName) @Html.ValidationMessageFor(x => x.LastName) </div> <div> @Html.LabelFor(x => x.EmailAddress) @Html.TextBoxFor(x => x.EmailAddress) @Html.ValidationMessageFor(x => x.EmailAddress) </div> <div> <input type="submit" value="Save" /> </div> </div> } Notice the two helpers we are using now, ValidationSummary and ValidationMessageFor. ValidationSummary reads all errors from the model state and displays them in a bulleted list. ValidationMessageFor displays only errors for to the property specified. Let's see what happens when we attempt to submit an invalid POST that is missing the email address. When we get to the POST action while debugging, we have the following values in our ModelStateDictionary: Note that the ModelState instance for the email address now has an error in the Errors collection. When MVC creates the model state for the submitted properties, it also goes through each property in the ViewModel and validates the property using attributes associated to it. If any errors are found, they are added to the Errors collection in the property's ModelState. Also note that IsValid is false now. That's because an error exists; IsValid is false if any of the properties submitted have any error messages attached to them. What all of this means is that by setting up the validation in this manner, we allow MVC to just work the way it was designed. ModelState stores the submitted values, allows them to be mapped to class properties (or just as parameters to the action) and keeps a collection of error messages for each property. In simple scenarios, this is all we need, and all of it is happening behind the scenes! Custom Validation But what if we needed to perform more complex validation than what is provided by attributes? Say we needed to validate that the first and last names are not identical, and display a particular error message when this happens. We can actually add errors to the model state via the AddModelError method on ModelStateDictionary: [HttpPost] public ActionResult Add(AddUserVM model) { if(model.FirstName == model.LastName) { ModelState.AddModelError("LastName", "The last name cannot be the same as the first name."); } if(!ModelState.IsValid) { return View(model); } return RedirectToAction("Index"); } The first parameter to the AddModelError method is the name of the property that the error applies to. In this case, we set it to LastName. You could also set it to nothing (or a fake name) if you just want it to appear in the ValidationSummary and not in a ValidationMessage. Now the error will be displayed on the page: Summary The ModelState represents the submitted values and errors in said values during a POST. The validation process respects the attributes like Required and EmailAddress, and we can add custom errors to the validation if we so desire. ValidationSummary and ValidationMessageFor read directly from ModelState to display errors to the user. I've got a very simple sample project on Github that demonstrates how the ModelState works and provides all the code and markup in this post. Take a look! Also, if this post helped you, please consider buying me a coffee. Your support funds all of my projects and helps me keep traditional ads off this site. Thanks! Happy Coding!

Københavns Vestegns Politi søger vidner i forbindelse med den voldsomme brand, der hærgede den nye politibygning i Glostrup tidligere på måneden. I begyndelsen af februar tog det adskillige brandfolk en hel nat at slukke en omfattende brand, der hærgede Rigspolitiets nye bygning i Glostrup. Nu oplyser politiinspektør Svend Foldager til TV 2, at branden sandsynligvis var påsat. - Jeg kan sige det sådan, at der er en altovervejende sandsynlighed for, at det ikke var en teknisk installation, der var skyld i branden. Så er der to andre muligheder: At den var påsat, eller at det var en ulykke. Sidstnævnte vurderer vi heller ikke som særlig sandsynligt, siger Svend Foldager til TV 2. Blot nogle få måneder før, Rigspolitiets Nationalt Kriminalteknisk Center skulle rykke ind i nye og moderne lokaler i Glostrup, brød den næsten færdige bygning i brand. Branden raserede tre etager samt taget, og ifølge Hovedstadens Beredskab skete der omfattende skader på bygningen. Dengang afviste politiet, at der skulle være tale om en påsat brand, men det virker ifølge politiinspektør Svend Foldager nu som en af de mere sandsynlige årsager. Københavns Vestegns Politi er derfor meget interesseret i at høre fra vidner, der har bemærket noget usædvanligt i området torsdag 9. februar i tidsrummet mellem klokken 17 og 17.25. Politiet søger ung mand, der blev set på stedet Især vil politiet gerne i kontakt med en ung mand, som er blevet set løbe fra området omkring Ingo-benzintanken ved Ejby Industrivej og direkte ind i den nye politibygning fra håndværkerindgangen i bygningens sydvestlige hjørne. - Vi vil meget gerne i kontakt med manden, da han kan have vigtige oplysninger i sagen, siger Svend Foldager, der på nuværende tidspunkt ikke kan komme ind på, om manden er mistænkt i sagen. Manden beskrives i en pressemeddelelse som cirka 175 centimeter høj og bred af bygning. Han var iført sort strikhue, som gik helt ned til øjenbrynene samt et sort tørklæde, der dækkede den nederste del af ansigtet. Han bar sorte, forvaskede joggingbukser og en sort, kort jakke. En gennemgang af overvågningen viser, at personen løb fra området omkring klokken 17.18. Manden forsvandt ind i villakvarteret nordvest for Nordre Ringvej. Den nye bygning ligger på Ejby Industrivej, hvor en række af Rigspolitiets afdelinger - blandt andet Nationalt Efterforskningscenter - også har til huse. Nationalt Kriminalteknisk Center holder i dag til på Slotsherrensvej i Vanløse. Derfor vil branden ikke betyde noget for kriminalteknikernes arbejde. Vidner kan henvende sig til politiet på telefon 43 86 14 48.

In roughly 3 1⁄ 2 months, UFC heavyweight champion Stipe Miocic will take on light heavyweight champion Daniel Cormier in the UFC 226 main event. It’s a champ vs. champ showdown that will either see Cormier become a two-division titlist, or Miocic extend his own heavyweight title defense record to four. There are admittedly not many viable title challengers for Miocic in his own division, which is part of the reason the Cormier matchup has high intrigue and was booked in the first place. One man who has risen up the ranks quickly is Curtis Blaydes, who is coming off a big win over Mark Hunt at UFC 221. In an interview with Submission Radio, Blaydes gave his take on Stipe-DC, and why he believes Miocic will get the job done on July 7th. “It is a tough one,” Blaydes said. “This is another great match-up. Daniel Cormier, who is I think undefeated as a heavyweight, to put him against, as you said, possibly the greatest heavyweight champion we’ve had, I think it’s a great match-up. I’m going with Stipe. I think it’s going to be a banger. I think it’s going to be five rounds, just like Jon Jones’ last (fight), not his last one against DC but their first fight against each other. I think it’s gonna go like that. They’re both gonna get rocked, they’re both gonna get taken down, they’re both gonna get cut and have bruises and what not, but I think Stipe’s length and his boxing (will be too much). “ The 27-year-old Blaydes revealed his experiences training with Miocic, and had some interesting insights on both the wrestling and striking battles they had when sparring with each other. “I actually trained with him a couple of years ago, I wrestled with him,” Bl And I’m not gonna toot my own horn, but I think I’m one of the better wrestlers overall regardless of the weight class in the UFC right now, and his wrestling is legit. He is very good. “On the feet he destroyed me. I was an amateur, this is back in 2013. I’m one of those guys, I’m not gonna lie to you when someone is better. Like, he was leaps and bounds better than me. He was supposed to be, like, at the time he was going up against Gabriel Gonzaga. So yeah, it would have been weird if they brought me in there and I just started picking him apart. That probably would have been a problem for Stipe. No, he handled me like he was supposed to. But when we wrestled, like I said, pretty back and forth. He would go, (in) I guess an hour practice, he would get two takedowns, I would get two takedowns, or maybe he would get one more, maybe I would get one more.” As for Blaydes, he has his own big fight coming up on June 9th in his hometown of Chicago, Illinois, as he’ll be facing Alistair Overeem at UFC 225. That fight represents the last on his UFC contract, although if he re-signs, you would figure that a win over Overeem puts him in prime position for a title shot.

Why the British Are Hiding Information About Rudolf Hess. The Russian scholar, Andrei Fursov, explains in this video the reason why the British authorities insisted to keep Rudolf Hess’s files classified until 2050. His theory is that Hess was indeed negotiating with the United Kingdom. On June 14th 1941, Hitler suspended the transfer of forces from the western front to the Soviet border. Meanwhile, the negotiations were progressing and the royal air force had even planned a raid on Soviet targets. However, the deployment of the German forces at the Soviet border resumed four days later, on June 18th 1941. Mr. Fursov claims that the negotiations failed after the US threatened UK to confiscate all of its gold if they agree to stop the war.

Tennessee state legislators on Wednesday advanced a bill to make the Bible the official state book, a measure the state attorney general said would be unconstitutional and Republican Governor Bill Haslam has called disrespectful. The Republican-controlled state House of Representatives voted 55-38 to approve the Bible as state book. A companion bill could be considered as soon as Thursday in the state Senate, where Republicans hold 28 seats to five for Democrats. ADVERTISEMENT Representative Bud Hulsey, a Republican, told colleagues in support of the bill it is worth the fight “now more than ever.” Other Republican representatives opposed the bill, citing concerns about how Tennessee might be perceived and the cost of defending it against legal challenges. “The controversy will not end in this chamber,” Representative Martin Daniel said. “If we pass this, we’re going to be ridiculed.” Representative Marc Gravitt said the attorney general’s legal opinion made it clear Tennessee could spend millions of dollars in a losing effort to defend the measure if it becomes law. Other representatives said recognizing the Bible as the state book and putting it alongside the official state tree, song or dance would trivialize it. ADVERTISEMENT Representative Patsy Hazlewood, a Republican, said “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Pilgrim’s Progress” are books and calling the Bible a book is in itself wrong. The bill also has drawn criticism from religious leaders and others – including Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery III – who say it violates the separation of church and state under the U.S. Constitution and Tennessee’s constitution. A spokesman has said the governor sees the bill as disrespectful of what the Bible is. ADVERTISEMENT (Reporting by Tim Ghianni; Editing by David Bailey and Bill Trott)

Атомная электростанция «Пакш». Фото: REUTERS / Laszlo Balogh Нежданно-негаданно и почти бесшумно Россия вдруг решила одарить энергетику Восточной Европы чуть ли не крупнейшей инвестицией со времен соцлагеря. Выдать венграм каких-то 10 млрд евро, чтобы они купили у «Росатома» пару энергоблоков для своей АЭС «Пакш». Для сравнения: на «Северный поток» ушло 9 млрд евро, на «Южный поток», если он вообще случится, планируется потратить около 15 млрд евро. И тот и другой затрагивают десяток стран, годами гремят в СМИ по всей Европе и обсуждаются на куче международных встреч. А тут вдруг из ниоткуда сразу 10 млрд евро и одной Венгрии – как-то вечером премьер Орбан заскочил в Кремль подписать бумажки. Мастер-класс для Лукашенко Чтобы лучше представить, что такое 10 млрд евро для Венгрии – это по тысяче с лишним евро на каждого венгра, включая стариков и младенцев. Население там не дотягивает до 10 млн. Ну или более практичное сравнение – без малого четверть годовых расходов венгерского госбюджета. Или 13,5% совокупного госдолга. Или в два с половиной раза больше, чем суммарный размер субсидий, которые Венгрия получает из бюджета ЕС за год. Вот такую сумму должна получить Венгрия из российского бюджета в виде долгосрочного кредита, чтобы потратить ее на покупку у «Росатома» двух новых энергоблоков по 1,2 ГВт каждый для своей единственной АЭС «Пакш». Сейчас эта АЭС, которую в рамках интернационального долга строили советские специалисты в 80-х, выдает около 2 ГВт и обеспечивает 40% всего энергопотребления в стране. А так как особого экономического роста в Венгрии в ближайшее время не предвидится, то нетрудно подсчитать, что к 2023 году, когда проект должен быть завершен, АЭС «Пакш» сможет практически полностью покрыть потребности венгров в электроэнергии. Раздобыть в кризис долгосрочный кредит размером 11% ВВП страны – это, конечно, удивительная победа новой внешней политики венгерского премьера Виктора Орбана. После того как он разругался на Западе со всеми, с кем только можно, из-за чрезвычайных налогов на иностранные корпорации и национализации пенсионных накоплений, ему пророчили судьбу второго Лукашенко. Обещали превращение в диктатора-популиста из страны-изгоя, которому никто не захочет подавать руки. Однако на деле оказалось, что быть вторым Лукашенко не так уж и плохо. Из Евросоюза Венгрию все равно не выгонят – там такая процедура не предусмотрена в принципе. А статусом государства – члена ЕС можно очень успешно торговать на мировом рынке, не заморачиваясь излишней принципиальностью и чистоплюйством, потому что на Западе терять уже нечего. Так, в 2012 году Орбан продал Азербайджану азербайджанского офицера, осужденного за убийство своего армянского коллеги во время учений НАТО в Будапеште. На родине убийцу тут же освободили как героя, а в качестве благодарности купили у Венгрии облигаций на 2 млрд евро. Венгры стали любимым партнером Китая в Восточной Европе. За время правления Орбана, то есть с 2010 года, размер китайских инвестиций в Венгрии утроился, достигнув $2,5 млрд. Но все это меркнет на фоне роскошного подарка от России. Даже прожженный попрошайка Лукашенко смог добиться от Москвы всего 7,5 млрд евро на строительство АЭС в Белоруссии. Украине – архистратегическому братскому партнеру – обещают всего 4,5 млрд евро кредитов на ее атомную энергетику. А тут какой-то Орбан, который в Москве был всего пару раз в жизни, – и сразу 10 млрд евро. Последний в ЕС С таким кредитом и с расширяющейся АЭС Орбан легко сможет выполнить свое главное предвыборное обещание – понизить цены на электроэнергию. Это позволит ему переизбраться на следующий срок, выиграв парламентские выборы весной этого года. А если повезет, то положительного эффекта может вполне хватить и до следующих выборов, в 2018 году. Так что то, о чем думал венгерский премьер, когда соглашался на эту сделку, понять не трудно. Труднее понять, о чем думала российская сторона. Бюджет без дефицита свести не можем, собственные инфраструктурные проекты сворачиваем, а вот найти 10 млрд евро для Венгрии – это легко. Как обычно, стратегические интересы оказались для Кремля дороже денег. За последние десять лет «Росатом» успел почти полностью растерять ту огромную атомную империю в Восточной Европе, которую он унаследовал от СССР. Когда-то почти в каждой стране бывшего соцлагеря было по АЭС, и все обслуживались советскими специалистами. Сейчас не осталось почти ничего. Правда, дело здесь не только в кондовых и неповоротливых методах «Росатома» – некоторые страны Восточной Европы настолько уверовали в националистические и экологические утопии, что сами охотно бросились выкалывать себе глаза назло теще и добровольно позакрывали еще вполне жизнеспособные АЭС, лишив свои экономики дешевой и обильной электроэнергии. В любом случае список потерянных рынков у «Росатома» получился огромный. Накануне вступления в ЕС свои атомные станции полностью закрыли Литва и Словакия. Болгария остановила часть энергоблоков, много лет вела переговоры с Москвой о строительстве новой АЭС в Белене, но в 2012 году соскочила с проекта окончательно, несмотря на гигантские убытки. Польша уже много лет планирует построить свою первую АЭС, но работы пока не начались, и Россию туда вряд ли возьмут. Чехия не стала отказываться от ядерной энергетики, несмотря на давление ЕС, но контракт «Росатома» на поставку топлива чешской АЭС «Темелин» истекает в 2020 году, а тендер на строительство там двух новых энергоблоков, в котором участвует и Россия, постоянно откладывается все дальше и дальше в будущее. В итоге Венгрия осталась для «Росатома» последней возможностью хоть как-то закрепиться на рынке Восточной Европы. Ведь людям хочется работать не только в Иране или Индии. Для хорошего международного имиджа нужны проекты в более респектабельных странах, в таких, которые не станут бросаться на что угодно ради одной только низкой цены. И Восточная Европа, которая теперь оказалась частью такой уважаемой организации, как Евросоюз, подходит для этих целей лучше всего. Вот в Москве и решили выбрать в регионе самое слабое звено и удержать его всеми силами. Заемщик мечты То, что «Росатому» удалось сохранить свое присутствие хотя бы в Венгрии, само по себе замечательно. Вопрос только в том, во сколько это обойдется российским налогоплательщикам. Насколько надежны и перспективны такие гигантские инвестиции в венгерскую энергетику? И вот здесь возникают большие сомнения. Россия собирается одолжить 10 млрд евро одному из самых неблагонадежных заемщиков в Европе. Это только так говорится, что Венгрия – член Евросоюза. А на самом деле Орбан настолько испортил отношения и с европейскими, и с международными институтами, что, случись чего, там никто пальцем не пошевелит, чтобы помочь тонущей в долгах Венгрии. Наоборот, будут только злорадствовать. А случиться может запросто. Венгрия и без российского кредита бесспорный чемпион Восточной Европы по соотношению госдолга с ВВП – около 80%. Про экономический рост венгры забыли задолго до кризиса, еще в 2006 году. За последние 10 лет ВВП соседней Словакии или Польши вырос примерно в полтора раза, ВВП Венгрии – всего на 8%. Страна давно впала в затяжную экономическую стагнацию, и оживить ее не могут даже самые причудливые реформы Виктора Орбана. Кроме того, из-за постоянных экономических проблем политическая жизнь в Венгрии поляризировалась гораздо сильнее, чем у соседей. Никакой преемственности, каждый следующий лидер обещает избирателям не меньше чем новую эпоху. Сам Орбан, придя к власти, радикально пересмотрел чуть ли не все решения своих социал-демократических предшественников. И нет никаких гарантий, что если оппозиция вдруг выиграет, то она не поступит точно так же. Венгерские левые уже сейчас называют атомную сделку с Россией энергетическим рабством, новой советской оккупацией и угрозой всему живому в стране. Они считают, что это соглашение недействительно, потому что Орбан не провел тендер, а это противоречит венгерскому законодательству. И вообще такие важные решения можно принимать только на референдуме. Поэтому гораздо надежнее было бы заключить атомные соглашения с Польшей или Чехией, где правительства не в пример адекватнее, а экономические перспективы намного радужнее, чем у Венгрии. Но странам с адекватными правительствами и радужными перспективами делают предложения получше российских. А России приходится брать, что осталось, утешая свой неконкурентоспособный бизнес особым распределением: гарантированный доход – госкорпорациям, риски и убытки – налогоплательщикам.

Online Tutoring During this period of transition to online learning, the university continues to expand resources and support to help make sure everyone can make the most of available tools. STEM tutoring information: Tutoring Summer 2020 Free online Mathematics tutoring: MAC Online Tutoring Summer 2020 Monday through Thursday: 9:00 a.m. – 7:00 p.m. & Friday: 9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. *Weekend tutoring will be available as well. To get help, visit the website GSU.TUTOROCEAN.COM Create an account using your Georgia State University email address Search for the course you need help with today Check “Downtown Stem Center” for Atlanta campus tutors Schedule View makes it easier to see which time slots are available *Disregard “Perimeter College” on the homepage, TutorOcean is open to all Georgia State University students. We can help with the following Courses: MATH Course Name 0999 Support for College Algebra* 1101 Mathematical Modeling 1111 College Algebra 1113 Precalculus 1220 Survey of Calculus 2201 Calculus for Life Sciences I 2202 Calculus for Life Sciences II 2215 Multivariate Calculus 2420 Discrete Mathematics 3050/7050 Geometry and Spatial Sense 3070/7070 Introduction to Probability and Statistics 3090/7090 Algebraic Concepts*** 4547/6547 Introduction to Statistical Methods 4751/6751 Mathematical Statistics I * Online Section only. *** Task from the book are often assigned to be handed in for a grade and hence are excluded in MAC. Helpful TutorOcean Tutorials Contacts Mrs. Sutandra Sarkar (ssarkar@gsu.edu) Mr. Martin Crowe (mcrowe2@gsu.edu) Helpful Links Math Tutorials PatrickJMT — This is a YouTube channel which many students turn to for help in math. Many concepts are covered in this collection of short videos. Khan Academy — This website is extremely helpful for all levels of math and numerous other subjects. Hippo Campus — Contains comprehensive lessons on Calculus, Statistics, Algebra and Geometry Paul’s Online Math Notes — Provides topic-oriented help with calculus Study Tips, Math Anxiety, etc… Practical Study Strategies — From the University of Illinois-Chicago’s Center for Academic Excellence. Sheila Tobias’ Math Anxiety Page — Although it’s mostly an advertisement for her books, it does include detailed summaries of each chapter of her books Overcoming Math Anxiety, Breaking the Science Barrier, and Succeed with Math, as well as some frequently asked questions about math anxiety. General Math Help

Cut some prices, Mr. Cook! Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Third quarter global smartphone sales came out earlier this week. The message was clear: Apple is getting its clock cleaned by Samsung, which is now by far the dominant smartphone maker in the world. (Samsung had 32% of the global market in Q3, the same share as a year ago. Apple, meanwhile, had only 12% of the market, down from 14% a year ago.) Yes, both companies sold more smartphones this year than last year. But Apple's sales badly lagged both Samsung and, importantly, the broader smartphone market. Apple's sales increased 23%. Samsung's increased 46%. The smartphone market as a whole, meanwhile, grew 46%. In other words, Apple's smartphone sales grew at only half the rate of the market. Apple fans have developed excuses for Apple's lagging sales. The most popular is that Apple is a "premium" gadget maker, not a hoi polloi gadget maker, and it only wants to sell its phones (and tablets) to people who can afford to pony up for them. Apple, in other words, is like BMW, not Ford. There are two big problems with this analogy. First, unlike cars, smartphones are a "platform market" — third parties build products and services that run on top of smartphones — and in platform markets, market share is a huge competitive advantage. Second, in emerging markets, which is where most of the growth in smartphones and tablets now is, there just aren't that many people who want to buy BMWs when many very high-quality gadgets are available for much lower prices. The actual reason that Apple's gadget sales are now so badly underperforming the market is that Apple no longer sells products at price points that appeal to the growth segment of the market. Apple fans can keep telling themselves that this is just fine, that Apple doesn't want or need to sell gadgets to earthlings of more average wealth, but what these fans need to recognize is that this is effectively a major change in Apple's pricing strategy. In the first few years after the iPhone and iPad launched, Apple led the market not just in product quality but in product price. The iPhone and iPad were not just way better than the competition, they also cost the same or less. Now, Apple may still have an edge in product quality (this is debatable and a matter of personal preference), but in most countries, its gadgets are considerably more expensive than the alternatives. And those alternatives — from Samsung, Google, Amazon, and many other vendors — are getting better and better. If gadgets were not a platform market, this wouldn't matter. But they are. And the more market share Apple surrenders in China, Brazil, India, et al, the less chance it will have to become the leading platform in these countries. (In fact, in many of them, it's probably already too late.) The simple answer is NOT for Apple to make low-end gadgets that it considers crappy. It is for Apple to use its phenomenal profitability as a competitive weapon. Specifically, the answer is for Apple to sell some of its gadgets -— not the latest, greatest ones, but some — at prices that are highly competitive with local alternatives. Now that Apple has "forked" its iPhone product line into the 5S and 5C, for example, it could sell the 5C at a sharply lower price point. Instead, Apple is still charging almost as much for the 5C as the 5S. (Yes, Apple is selling the iPhone 4 at a significantly lower price than the 5s, but this phone is now old, weak, and small.) Similarly, in iPads, Apple is selling its "Mini" at prices that are radically higher than high-quality alternatives. Instead, it could sell the latest, greatest version of the Mini at a high price and other recent models at a very competitive price. Importantly, this would cost Apple nothing more than some near-term profits. And Apple has plenty of profit to spare. (In fact, it has so much profit to spare that it has no idea what to do with the cash piling up on its balance sheet.) Significantly increasing its market share in key markets around the world would make Apple's long-term competitive position much stronger. It would help Apple increase the value of its content and app "ecosystem" in these countries and, thereby, strengthen the "lock-in" of its products and services. But, instead, Apple is being shortsighted and choosing to maintain its already fantastically high profit margins at the expense of market share. Let's go to the charts: (These charts are all from BI Intelligence, our premium industry research service. You can sign up for a free trial here >) First, as you can see, the global smartphone and tablet markets are still growing like mad. Here's smartphones: Business Insider And here's tablets: Business Insider And now look at Apple's growth in these markets. First, as the line in the chart below shows, Apple's iPhone sales have slowed sharply: Business Insider Apple's tablet sales, meanwhile, have hit a wall. (Yes, the new iPads will help. But it is going to be very hard for Apple to make up this lost ground.) Business Insider When confronted with these statistics, Apple fans generally point out that Apple still has a very strong position in the U.S. market and that Americans keep scarfing up Apple's top-of-the-line iPhones. That's true. Apple's market share in the United States is indeed strong, as the following chart shows: Business Insider But the U.S. is an anomaly. In most other countries, Apple is losing share fast. And that means that, at best, Apple is missing a massive opportunity. The bottom line is that, by trying to maintain its price points and super-high profit margin, Apple has radically underperformed the market for the past couple of years, especially in tablets. Because of the importance of the platform and ecosystem for long-term value, this is a shortsighted decision. Meanwhile, Google's Android has become the world's dominant smartphone and tablet platform: Business Insider Business Insider Business Insider If Apple continues to pursue its current pricing and maximize-short-term profit strategy, it may continue to increase its profits for the next couple of years. (BlackBerry and Nokia grew earnings for a couple of years after some analysts began seeing the writing on the wall.) But Apple will also continue to lose platform and ecosystem share in most of the world. Apple fans can talk all they want about how Apple is "like BMW," but in a couple of key competitive respects, it isn't. And if the gadget platform market behaves the way other platform markets have (think Windows), Apple and its fans may come to regret this short-term thinking in the end. SEE ALSO: The Future Of Digital [SLIDES] Disclosure: I'm an Apple shareholder.

If Bernie runs, it looks like the progressive left flank is ready to mobilize on his behalf. Recent signals by Vermont's Independent Senator Bernie Sanders that he would consider a run for president in 2016 in order to "take on Wall Street, address the collapse of the middle class, tackle the spread of poverty... and address global warming," perked the ears of progressives who look out at the Democratic Party and see no other candidate—especially the presumed frontrunner Hillary Clinton—likely to speak for them on a core set of issues. And now, a survey prompted by Sanders' comments shows that among those who closely identify as "progressive" support for his candidacy is at more than 80 percent. Conducted by RootsAction.org—a progressive online activism, advocacy and lobbying organization—the survey asked the group's members to offer their opinion on a Sanders run for the nation's highest office. Asked if he should run, 81 percent said 'Yes.' Only 9 percent said 'No,' and the remaining 10 percent were unsure. “Nearly 20,000 people responded to our survey, from every state in the nation,” said RootsAction.org co-founder Jeff Cohen. “Though not a scientific sampling, it reflects Bernie Sanders’ huge popularity among progressives. And that there’s a ready-made base for him – or perhaps another progressive candidate – in a campaign that challenges the Democratic establishment and ostensible frontrunner Hillary Clinton.” SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT Never Miss a Beat. Get our best delivered to your inbox. In the letter sent to members that accompanied the survey, RootsAction told its members: [We] rarely focuses on elections because, quite frankly, few politicians make us enthusiastic. But Bernie Sanders is different. He has long been a strong advocate of enhanced Medicare for all, taxing Wall Street, cutting the military, opposing corporate trade pacts, etc. In 2010, he touched a national nerve when he filibustered against the Obama-GOP deal extending Bush-era tax cuts for the rich. Bernie told Politico: “Obviously if I did not think I had a reasonable chance to win I wouldn’t run . . . It is not my intention to be some kind of spoiler and play the role of just draining votes away to allow my voice to be heard.” In addition to whether or not he should run, respondents were also asked to offer input on strategy. As a follow-up question, they were asked: “Would you be more likely to support a Bernie presidential campaign if he were to run inside Democratic caucuses and primaries -- or, if he ran outside as an independent ‘3rd-party’ candidate?” On that question there was a clear majority which thought he should challenge Democrats from within (45 percent) and much a smaller number who thought running as an outside candidate would be good (24 percent). Those who remain unsure of the best strategy actually came in second place with 31 percent. As Cohen commented: “While a spectrum of our country’s progressive base represented in our online membership is overwhelmingly supportive of a Sanders campaign, there’s less of a consensus on strategy – with those favoring an inside the Democratic caucuses and primaries approach about 2 to 1 over those wanting an outside approach.” ____________________________________________

Five years ago, the UK funding body Research England, then known as the Higher Education Funding Council for England, announced an ambitious policy designed to speed up the transition to open-access publishing. To become eligible for a slice of billions of pounds of government money distributed to UK universities, academics would have to post their research on free-to-access websites such as preprint servers and institutional repositories within three months of acceptance by a journal. Though the policy took effect in 2016, it has been difficult to judge its efficacy. Now an analysis shows that researchers in the UK are indeed posting their papers online earlier, as are their colleagues all over the world. The time researchers are taking to post papers online shrunk by an average of 472 days per country between 2013 and 2017, finds a study published on 17 April and to be presented at the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in June. Though the authors can’t definitively say what’s behind the trend, they suggest that the Research England policy and other funding eligibility requirements recently announced worldwide are pushing academics to rapidly make their work freely available. Drahomira Herrmannova, Nancy Pontika, and Petr Knoth at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, evaluated the time it took for academics to deposit some 800 000 papers—including more than 90 000 from the fields of physics and astronomy—in repositories beginning in 2013. They compared the date on which each study was posted to a repository with the journal publication date. The bibliometric data came from CORE, a website that aggregates data about scholarly publications from online repositories, including preprint servers such as arXiv and institutional servers like White Rose Research Online, a collection of work from the UK’s Universities of Leeds, Sheffield, and York. The authors found that in 2017, researchers took an average of 135 days following publication to deposit their papers in an online repository. Since 2016, UK-based scientists have been posting their papers online more quickly than those in the other four nations with the highest number of papers in the dataset: the US, the Netherlands, Italy, and Switzerland. All five countries have rapidly decreasing deposition times, the study suggests, with Italy making the largest improvement, from an average of 706 days in 2013 to 48 days in 2018. In 2014 “there was a big change in behavior, and suddenly the deposit time lag starts going down,” says Herrmannova. The shift is less pronounced for physicists and astronomers, but that’s because many of them were already religiously posting to arXiv. Academics from five countries with high research output have been taking less and less time to post their journal papers in open-access repositories. Source: D. Herrmannova, N. Pontika, P. Knoth, Open University (2019); created with Flourish The authors speculate that researchers have been motivated to more quickly post their work by new funding policies. By following the 2016 Research England policy, UK researchers make themselves eligible for Research Excellence Framework 2021, a system designed to evaluate the quality of research to guide government funding. In Italy, legislation passed in 2013 requires that all research receiving at least 50% of its funding from public sources be made freely available. Other policy shifts toward open access are reflected in the US Public Access Plan, which was introduced in 2013, and Europe’s Plan S, due to take effect in 2020. It’s surprising that open access didn’t take over sooner, considering the financial burdens placed on universities by the cost of journal subscriptions, says Tom McLeish, a polymer physicist at the University of York, who was not involved in the work. In February the University of California system announced that it had canceled its subscription contract with Elsevier. Daniel Himmelstein, a data scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, says it’s possible the new study has a large selection bias, since it doesn’t consider papers that weren’t deposited at all. The authors found many repositories where more than 90% of the material had been posted within three months of publication in a journal, but they also found many sites with less than 50% compliance with the Research England policy. (Because of data limitations, the authors defined compliance as posting within three months of the publication date rather than the acceptance date.) It’s up to institutions to remind their staff to make sure their studies are compliant, Knoth says. “This is not a game of medicine versus physics or mathematics,” he notes. “This is a game of institutional policies and practices.” The study’s finding that institutional culture seems to affect how quickly researchers deposit papers is a novel one, says Vincent Larivière, an information scientist at the University of Montreal. Last year, Larivière and Cassidy Sugimoto of Indiana University Bloomington reported that up to one-third of the 1.3 million papers subject to open-access mandates from 12 major funders were not free to read. Funder policies that allowed depositing to be delayed had lower compliance rates than those that required immediate deposit. Editor’s note, 7 May: The article and graph were corrected to state that Switzerland, not China, was among the five countries analyzed in the study.

LLVM Weekly - #135, Aug 1st 2016 Welcome to the one hundred and thirty-fifth issue of LLVM Weekly, a weekly newsletter (published every Monday) covering developments in LLVM, Clang, and related projects. LLVM Weekly is brought to you by Alex Bradbury. Subscribe to future issues at http://llvmweekly.org and pass it on to anyone else you think may be interested. Please send any tips or feedback to asb@asbradbury.org, or @llvmweekly or @asbradbury on Twitter. News and articles from around the web LLVM/Clang 3.9.0-rc1 has been tagged. It's time to get testing. Swift 3 is nearing completion and Chris Lattner has shared some thoughts looking ahead to Swift 4. The first LLVM Cauldron will be held on September 8th in Hebden Bridge, UK. Registration to attend is open, and you have a week to submit your talks. Also consider the 2016 US LLVM Developers' Meeting, to be held November 3rd-4th in San Jose, California. On the mailing lists Renato Golin has shared a proposed LLVM target acceptance policy. The discussion about a potential move from SVN to Git continues with most of it focused on the pros and cons of a single monolothic repo for all LLVM subprojects. Mehdi Amini has really helpfully collected links to various workflows people have shared and other concrete reasoning for or against monorepos that people have shared. Chris Bieneman has shared his concerns about a monorepo and is keen to point out that lack of dissent in this particular thread doesn't mean consensus - as others have pointed out, the discussion has become rather too unwieldy for many people to follow. Christopher Bergström is interested in organising an LLVM social in Asia and want to gauge interest. Michael Lewis wonders if there's interest in generating PDB from LLVM-backed languages. The reason to ask is actually as he's done rather a lot of work on it for his own language and wonders if others may benefit. A number of responders suggest looking at the PDB writing support that is being done in-tree. LLVM commits A massive, target-independent MachinePipeliner pass has landed which implements Swing Modulo Scheduling. r277169. bugpoint has been modified to use a simpler control-flow graph simplification routine that results in faster runtime and more minimal test cases. r277063. llvm-cov learned to export coverage data to JSON. r276813. GlobalISel now has an instruction selector. r276875. Clang commits A simple analyzer was added to detect copy and pasted code. r276782. The web manual for Clang checker developers has been updated with a much expanded section on debugging. r277029. Other project commits

A viable alternative to Basel III prudential rules Stefano Micossi Global banking regulation is undergoing a massive reform, known as Basel III. This column argues that the proposed reforms will fail to correct flaws in the old system. The new rules are even more complicated, opaque and open to manipulation. What is needed is a radical shift to prudential rule based on a straight capital ratio. There is something surreal in the process for the implementation of the new Basel capital framework for banks in the EU and US. The new rules, known as Basel III, have the full support of financial officialdom (see BCBS 2013b for the latest official update by Basel Supervisors). Implementation is a different story. Implementation appears fraught with frictions and resistances, while the system is by now utterly discredited in the eyes of financial markets and academia (e.g. Dewatripont et al. 2010, Goodhart 2013, Admati and Hellwig 2013). Radical criticism has been voiced also by top regulators (e.g. Hoenig 2013, Haldane and Madouros 2012, and Tarullo 2008 on Basel II). In recent research, I propose shifting to a prudential rule based on a straight capital ratio (Micossi 2013 ). My work also argues that the often-rehearsed arguments against this solution are plain wrong. What’s wrong with Basel rules? My main criticism concerns the continuing reliance – for the determination of capital requirements – on banks’ risk-weighted assets calculated with unwieldy probabilistic econometric models of dubious analytical foundation that leave ample room for gaming the system and, more importantly, that are by construction unable to deal with systemic shocks hitting the banking and financial system (IMF 2009, FSA 2010, Haldane 2011, Carmassi and Micossi 2012). After ignoring the issue almost entirely during the negotiations leading to the Basel III Accord, Basel supervisors have awoken to the reality of wide divergences in risk-weighted asset ratios to total assets for individual banks and are studying the issue as part of their new Regulatory Consistency Assessment. Their January 2013 report finds that ample risk-weighted asset variations can only in part be explained by differences in business models and risk management techniques, and reflect to a considerable extent “elements of the flexibility provided to banks and supervisors within the Basel framework” (BCBS 2013). Similar exercises undertaken by the European Banking Authority have come to similar conclusions (EBA 2013). In this context, the new Liquidity Coverage and Net Stable Funding ratios are but another manifestation of Basel rules’ inability to protect financial stability. However, far from responding to a clear rationale, they have added new patches on a crumbling construction. Their costs and impact on banks’ operations have not been evaluated but may be substantial; and fierce industry lobbying, already under way, is likely to lead over time to their emasculation. As if this were not enough, important jurisdictions are also intervening directly to prohibit trading on one’s own account (the Volcker rule in the US) or impose structural separation between commercial (‘utility’) and investment banking (the Vickers ringfencing in the UK). In the EU, the Liikanen Report has brought up for consideration the possibility of segregating banks’ trading activities into a separate legal entity – with tortuous decision procedures to ensure that it doesn’t happen in practice. The Basel system has also failed to create a level playing field for ‘internationally active’ banks as divergent implementation by national supervisors has increasingly ‘balkanised’ it across the main jurisdictions – a process that Basel III special treatments will worsen. Finally, Basel rules made it possible for the banking system as a whole to operate with a very thin capital cushion and a very high aggregate leverage, laying the basis for the subsequent implosion of credit when the financial crisis struck. The problem has not been resolved by Basel III, which will permit individual banks to keep a capital buffer as low as 3% of total assets – corresponding to a total leverage ratio above 33. In sum, Basel III has to provide banking supervisors and markets with a readable metric of banks’ strength. Piecemeal fixtures won’t suffice; a complete overhaul of the system is in order. A fresh start In our Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) paper, Jacopo Carmassi and myself (2012) have outlined a logical and complete prudential system for banking that is much simpler and less distortive, entailing five components: First, capital requirements set as a straight ratio between common equity and total assets. Its level should be (gradually) raised to between 7% and 10% of total assets, based on systemic stability considerations. The new capital ratio, with equity valued at market rates, would be used as a reference in both Pillar 2 (supervisory review) and Pillar 3 (market discipline). Second, under Pillar 2, prudential capital ratios would be used to trigger enhanced supervisory review and bind supervisors to a set of predetermined corrective actions of increasing severity, when the bank’s capital ratio falls below certain pre-specified thresholds, as under the current US FDIC system of PCA. Third, in order to eradicate moral hazard, the system must be ‘closed’ by a procedure for bank resolution, to be triggered when a bank’s capital falls beyond repair. Resolution costs would fall primarily on shareholders and unsecured creditors but even secured creditors and uninsured depositors would not be sure to escape. Fourth, the correction for risk-taking by individual banks would be entrusted to deposit insurance, that would cover retail depositors and only up to a maximum amount. Fees would be determined on the basis of banks’ overall risk profile and systemic relevance, as will be described below. Fifth, under Pillar 3 (market discipline), solvency rules would be completed by the obligation for banks to issue a substantial amount of contingent capital (Co.Co.), i.e. debentures convertible into equity; It is important that conversion be triggered automatically upon crossing certain market-based capital indicators and not be left to supervisory discretion (as in a misguided proposal by the Commission, 2012). Under this system, there would be no need for special rules on liquidity or funding structures, whose adequacy would be concretely verified within the supervisory review of the banks covering the overall business model, its riskiness and its sustainability. There would also be no need for special restrictions on particular activities and operations, since supervisors would be able to penalise risk-taking as needed with deposit insurance fees. Mimicking the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation deposit insurance system The system just outlined places a special burden on deposit insurance, that which becomes the sole instrument for charging individual banks for the risk they pose for the deposit insurance fund and financial stability in general. Therefore, it seems useful to recall that this approach already has an important precedent in the system of deposit insurance developed by in the US by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, under the Federal Deposit Insurance Act, based on the so-called ‘CAMELS’ ratings system (that is, a ratings system based on capital, assets, management, earnings, liquidity and sensitivity to market risks). Deposit insurance fees are determined based on the probability that an institution may cause a loss to the deposit insurance fund due to the ‘compositions and concentration’ of the institution’s assets and liabilities, and seeks to price all aspects of risk-taking by an individual institution and their systemic relevance. The system is open to periodic adaptations to the evolving banking business; apart from this, it seems to require no complements in the form of ad hoc capital surcharges or special constraints on banking activities and legal structure. The ‘arbitrage’ objection to a straight prudential capital ratio A main objection to this approach is that the elimination of all risk adjustment in the determination of prudential capital ratios would create fresh opportunities for regulatory arbitrage by banks seeking to maximise their returns on equity. This is an old argument that played a paramount role in the demise of Basel I and the adoption of risk-based capital ratios in Basel II (Tarullo 2008). It also happens to be groundless. Indeed, the arbitrage objection assumes that the bankers’ only goal is to maximise returns on equity regardless of risk. Unless we believe that bankers’ utility function is characterised by zero risk-aversion – a rather worrisome presumption, which, to my knowledge, has no empirical confirmation – the only explanation for that kind of behaviour can be perverse incentives created by regulation and systematically encouraging bankers to take reckless risks. And indeed there is plenty of evidence that legal rules and financial-market regulations have created moral hazard by shielding bankers form the consequences of their mistakes (or reckless gambles). This is, for instance, a straight consequence of the legal provision of limited liability; of the promise that, in case of difficulty, the bank will enjoy special access to the central-bank liquidity facilities; of the implicit promise that the bank will not be allowed to fail. Far from creating new opportunities for regulatory arbitrage, the shift to a straight, risk-unadjusted capital ratio would reduce them, relative to the present system, as current incentives to manipulate internal risk management models, in order to reduce capital absorption, would disappear. Conclusions The Basel framework for bank prudential requirements is deeply flawed; the Basel III revision has failed to correct these flaws and in the main has made the system even more complicated, opaque and open to manipulation. In practice, the present system does not offer regulators and financial markets a reliable capital standard for banks; its divergent implementation in the main jurisdictions of the EU and the US has broken the market into special fiefdoms governed by national regulators in response to industry interests. The time is ripe to stop tinkering with minor adjustments and radically change the system. References Admati A and M Hellwig (2013), The Bankers’ New Clothes, Princeton University Press. Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) (2013), “Regulatory consistency assessment programme (RCAP) – Analysis of risk-weighted assets for market risk”, Basel, January (revised in February). Carmassi, J and S Micossi (2012), “Time to Set Banking Regulation Right”, CEPS Paperback, Brussels, March. Dewatripont, M, JC Rochet and J Tirole (2010), Balancing the banks: global lessons from the financial crisis, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press. European Banking Authority (EBA) (2013), “Interim results of the EBA review of the consistency of risk-weighted assets. Top-down assessment of the banking book”, London, 26 February. European Commission (2012), “Proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council establishing a framework for the recovery and resolution of credit institutions and investment, COM(2012) 280 final, Brussels, 6 June. Financial Services Authority (FSA) (2010), “Results of 2009 hypothetical portfolio exercise for sovereigns, banks and large corporations”, March. Goodhart, CAE (2013), “Ratio Controls need Reconsideration”, Journal of Financial Stability, 20 February. Haldane, AG (2011), “Capital discipline”, speech to the American Economic Association, Denver, CO, 9 January. Haldane, AG and V Madouros (2012),”The dog and the frisbee”, paper presented at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s 36th economic policy symposium, “The Changing Policy Landscape”, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, 31 August. Hoenig, T (2013), “Basel III Capital: A Well-Intended Illusion”, remarks to the International Association of Deposit Insurers 2013 Research Conference, Basel, 9 April. IMF (2009), Detecting Systemic Risk, Global Financial Stability Report, Washington, DC, April. Micossi S (2013), “A Viable Alternative to Basel III Prudential Capital Rules”, Ceps Policy Brief No. 291, Brussels, 30 May, available at http://www.ceps.eu/book/viable-alternative-basel-iii-prudential-capital-.... Tarullo, D K (2008), “Banking on Basel. The future of international financial regulation”, Peterson Institute for International Economics, Washington DC.

A second person in Pima County has been "presumptively diagnosed" with COVID-19 and is being treated at a local hospital, officials said. How the patient contracted coronavirus is under investigation and that person's "household contacts are under observation in home isolation," officials said. From Pima County: A presumptive diagnosis was made March 13th at the Arizona State Public Health Laboratory in Phoenix. A sample will be sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, GA., for confirmation. The Health Department was notified Friday afternoon and is working hard to learn more about this individual’s potential exposure to the virus. At this time there is no clear link between this case and the presumptive case identified in Pima County on March 9. PCHD is working to identify additional close contacts that may have been exposed while the person was infectious. Any individuals who have been identified as having been exposed will be contacted directly. These individuals will be monitored for fever and respiratory symptoms in collaboration with PCHD and medical providers. This individual had recently traveled to another U.S. state, however, investigators are still working to identify whether or not this person contracted the virus during this travel. "This new case highlights the importance of hospitals, doctors, public health, and the general public working closely together," said Dr. Bob England, director of the Pima County Health Department. "Our disease investigators have been working day and night to protect public health, and are in the process of identifying and reaching out to any people who may have been in contact with the case while infectious." Cases tested in Arizona and other states are being deemed "presumptively positive," with test samples being sent to the CDC for further confirmation. England said Friday evening that "there doesn't appear to be any link between" the two Pima cases. "Again, if you've got a disease where you're only able to test the sickest folks and you've got a lot of mild cases for each really sick person then you could have transmission from person to person to person, that you don't see, that links the two cases. But, we have no way of knowing that at this point." Monday, officials announced that one other Pima County resident had been presumptively diagnosed with COVID-19. The patient, who had recently traveled to an area with "community spread," is "not severely ill" and is recovering at home. "The patient is a resident of unincorporated Pima County. This individual is not severely ill, is currently recovering at home in isolation, and has been fully cooperative with public health monitoring," officials said. Pima officials declined again Friday to release any details about the two COVID-19 patients here. As of Friday morning, 143 people in Arizona have been tested for COVID-19 — the novel coronavirus that was first diagnosed in people late last year — with three confirmed positive cases and six "presumptive positive" cases the only ones in the state. Friday afternoon's announcement adds to that total. Another 40 tests were pending results, and 94 people have been ruled out, officials said. The virus has caused the deaths of at least 47 people in the United States, with more than 2,000 people diagnosed as having the virus. There have been more than 4,000 deaths worldwide, with the World Health Organization declaring a pandemic Wednesday. County officials refused to give any other details about the first person here who tested "presumptively" positive, only saying that they lived in unincorporated Pima County and had returned from traveling from an area known to be infected with COVID-19. "We're keeping the details close because we don't want people to suspect their neighbor," England said. 'Common sense' urged Earlier Monday, local officials urged residents to use "common sense" solutions against the COVID-19 virus, reminding people to wash their hands regularly, and stay home when they're sick. At that point, no positive tests had been announced in Pima County, but cases in Pinal County were evidence of "community transmission" there. Tests still limited Dr. Cara Christ, director of the Arizona Department of Health Services, said that state health authorities have a limited number of testing kits available. "I understand and my numbers may be a little but outdated, we had enough to run 225 samples, we have not reached that capacity and we are expecting if we haven't already gotten another test kit in for another 150," she said Wednesday. Tests are being limited because of the small supply, Gov. Doug Ducey and Christ said, despite President Trump's statement earlier this week that anyone who wants a test can get it. "If you're symptomatic and you're in a position where you're part of the vulnerable population, that's where you would qualify for the test," the governor said. Christ said that some patients require multiple test kits. "It's hard to determine how many patients that is because there's so many different factors that play a role in how many samples are getting utilized for each patient," she said. Monday, Dr. England told TucsonSentinel.com that up to eight control tests are required for some individuals who are tested. Arizona health emergency declared Wednesday afternoon, Gov. Ducey declared a "public health emergency" prompted by the COVID-19 outbreak, allowing the state to request federal funds and deal with medical price-gouging. "While our state is not currently facing the number of cases we've seen in some other states, we are anticipating additional positive cases — and we're not taking any chances," Ducey said in announcing his emergency declaration. "Arizonans should not panic — our approach will be calm and steady." Ducey also ordered insurance companies to cover out-of-network providers and cover 100 percent of the cost for coronavirus care. He also announced that nursing homes and elder care facilities will begin implementing new visitor policies and enhanced symptom checks for staff members and visitors. Ducey and Christ, speaking at a news conference Wednesday afternoon, downplayed suggestions that large gatherings be banned. "At this time we are not recommending canceling mass gatherings in Arizona," Christ said. "So we are working right now with the CDC on brand-new community mitigation guidance that they just put out and we are not at a point where we would recommend those type of things, but we are constantly evaluating to see if those measures do take sense, but at this time we're not." 'Focus on protecting the vulnerable' "I want you to think about three things that are our most important messages," county Chief Medical Officer Dr. Francisco Garcia said Monday. "Number one, this is the time to optimize your health and the health of your family. People who are healthy get over this virus, people who are unhealthy, or who are frail, who are elderly may have a harder time and it may have a more serious consequence," he said. And, he said that people need to "focus on protecting the vulnerable." "The vulnerable are the same vulnerable that are impacted every year during the flu season — these are our elders and medically frail individuals," he said, adding that they should stay our from crowds, including cruise ships and airplanes. "These folks need to be cocooned so that we can maintain their health," he said. Garcia also said that the city and county should "settle-in for a long-term response," which includes making sure that employers allow people to stay home when they're sick. England who also dealt with the county's response during the H1N1 outbreak in 2009, said that there hadn't been a positive result in Pima County, "but it really doesn't matter because it's going to be here, and it's going to transmit locally," he said. "and we need to begin treating it in that way as if we're expecting it." "This is probably going to feel to us like a bad flu season, so just as we lose tens of thousands of Americans each and every year to the flu," COVID-19 "will tragically kill many people," said England. "There's no getting around that, but that' going to be something that we've all experienced every year because we go through the flu season every year," he said. England said that while the illness might be deadly, testing in South Korea showed that COVID-19 might have a lower mortality rate than expected, running about 0.6 percent, or roughly one-fifth of the "often quoted figure that you see in the news." "I'm sure we're much of the mild illnesses," he said, noting that cases from cruise ships showed that people were often "asymptomatic" and showed no signs of the disease, dragging the mortality rate down to the range of the flu. "We've got a lot to learn," he said, but he added that there were "good indications" for county and city officials to treat this in the same way that they treat influenza. "So, I cannot foresee a circumstance under which we would close a school, or more the point all the schools," he said. "That would be terribly disruptive and the data just doesn't support it." He added that kids often have a less severe illness, and are often less likely to be infected by COVID-19. - 30 -

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COLUMBIA, S.C. -- The boyfriend of a murdered University of South Carolina student said at a vigil on Tuesday he was on the phone tracking her location when she got into the wrong car, according to WGHP. “I was on the phone tracking her to make sure she got home safely and immediately knew there was something that was wrong,” Greg Corbishley said, holding back tears. “Unfortunately, I was two and a half hours away. I would do anything to go back.” Samantha Josephson, 21, was killed early Friday morning after getting into a black Chevy Impala she thought was her Uber. Josephson’s roommates began to worry when they hadn’t heard from her later Friday morning. They called the police around 1:30 p.m. Friday. Her body was discovered a day after she disappeared. The coroner said she died from multiple sharp injuries. Josephson’s father also spoke at the vigil. “He was a monster, right?” Seymour Josephson said about Nathaniel David Rowland, 24, who has been arrested on charges of murder and kidnapping. “What he did, I don’t want anyone else to go through what I did as a parent.”

Oliwer Kaski, 23, expected to sign with the Detroit Red Wings according to a Finnish news outlet. If this proves to be true, this will be Yzerman’s first signing as newly appointed GM. On May 6th, 2019, it was reported by Ilta-Sanomat, (Finnish Newspaper) the Detroit Red Wings will be signing Finnish defenseman standout, Oliwer Kaski. After leaving Western Michigan University (NCAA) in the 15-16 season, Kaski scored 4 goals, 8 assists, for a total of 12 points in 31 games played, Kaski decided to leave to head back home to Finland to turn pro. Playing for HIFK (SM-Liiga) of the Finish Elite League, Finland’s top league, Kaski struggled to gain any sort of momentum, finishing with only 2 goals, 4 assists, for a total of 6 points, in 36 games played during the 16-17 season. Nothing too impressive there, after having minimal success Kaski showed steady progress the next season, posting better numbers. Kaski, in turn, finished with 9 goals, 7 assists, good for 16 points, in 49 games. With statistics like that, one would expect a steady increase for the 18-19 season, right? Well, that would be a massive understatement. Playing for a different team in the 18-19 season, Kaski made a name for himself, which opened the eyes of NHL teams. Kaski blew open the door finishing with 19 goals, 32 assists, for a total of 51 points, in only 59 games played, a 35-point increase from just the year before. Although not officially confirmed as of yet, the rumor appears to be that Yzerman was able to sign Kaski. Scoring 19 goals during the regular season for Lahti Pelicans in Finland’s top league, Kaski was awarded the Juha Rantasila Trophy for most goals by a defenseman. He also finished with the most points as well. Playing for the University of Western Michigan for one season could have been a leading factor for Kaski to be familiar with the area in which he reportedly has signed with the Detroit Red Wings. Due to being 23, Kaski can only sign a 1 year, 2-way contract. This gives Yzerman the flexibility of sending Kaski down if he isn’t ready to handle playing against some of the best players in the world. Nonetheless, let’s delve into the pros and cons of Oliwer Kaski, the first signing of the Steve Yzerman era. Pros: The first trait you will notice about Kaski, is his effortless skating ability. If you watch the way Jack Eichel skates around the ice at top speed, while it seems as if he is only gliding, Kaski skates the same way. Kaski has excellent vision throughout the ice, which enables him to find open ice for a one-timer, which showcases his accurate shooting ability. As a right-handed defenseman, he was the QB for the Pelican’s power-play, something the Wings’ are in dire need of. As an offensive-defenseman, Kaski regularly enjoys joining the rush when necessary. In high-intensity situations, Kaski remains calm, especially when the puck is on his stick. He makes accurate passes as he skates through the opposition’s defense, then makes backdoor passes which his teammates capitalize on. Cons: As mentioned above, Kaski is an offensive-defenseman. With these type of players’ often-times means, they prioritize offense over being defensively sound. While I don’t believe Kaski has the worst defensive game, it definitely will need work if he wants to make the jump to the NHL. Kaski enjoys going the rush to create more offensive chances for his team; this has led to him not always being able to get back in the play, exposing his defensive flaws. Another key to Kaski’s game is playing without the puck. Kaski is going to have to play better defensively in his own zone when the opposition is cycling the puck down low. I do think over time he will be able to fix this part of his game, as his speed is a tremendous asset that he surely knows how to use. Standing at 6’3, 187lbs, Kaski is going to have to use his body more to slow down the opposition and clear out the front of the net. If he can fine-tune his defensive game, I like what the future holds for Oliwer Kaski. Conclusion: Overall, I like this signing by Steve Yzerman. This is one of those low-risk, high-reward situations that can aid in bolstering the prospect pool for the Wings’. I like that this will add much-needed competition come training camp, as Cholowski, as well as newly acquired Bowey, aren’t guaranteed a spot, as well as veteran’s Daley, and Ericsson. Kaski has a legitimate chance to make the Detroit Red Wings out of training camp. Want your voice heard? Join the Detroit Jock City team! Write for us! With his skating and shooting ability, he creates offense in a flash. If Kaski wants to make the transition directly to the Detroit Red Wings, Kaski will have to prove he can be counted on be responsible in his own zone. There is no doubt about this offensive talent, but defense comes first. Since his offense is what is attracting multiple NHL teams, such as the Columbus Blue Jackets, the main question concerning Kaski is, can his offensive prowess translate to the NHL? Time will tell.

More than 210,000 workers in Britain are to receive a pay rise after the charity behind the living wage increased the national minimum hourly rate by 30p to £9.30. The Living Wage Foundation, which sets the voluntary measure, said London workers’ basic hourly rate will also rise, by 20p to £10.75, compared with the government’s “national living wage” of £8.21 for workers aged 25 years or older. The charity said the difference between its own living wage and the government minimum will be more than £2,000 a year nationally and almost £5,000 a year in London. This year, the Living Wage Foundation has accredited about 1,500 employers, taking the overall total to just under 6,000. Employers that have joined the initiative include the FTSE 100 insurer Hiscox, Crystal Palace football club, Leeds Building Society, City airport in London and Newcastle University. In September, Capita, the outsourcing company that operates the London congestion charge and collects the BBC licence fee, became the latest to gain accreditation. It said it would adopt the rate across its UK business, resulting in a pay rise for 6,000 staff. The rise comes as both main political parties compete to offer higher minimum wages. At the Tory party conference in October, Sajid Javid said he would increase the minimum rate for workers over the age of 25 to £10.50 by 2024 and reduce the age level at which workers qualify to 21 by the same date. The shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, has pledged to introduce £10 an hour as a minimum rate immediately, which he said would rise with living costs. McDonnell said it would mean “everybody over 16 years of age will be earning comfortably more than £10.50 an hour by 2024”. Katherine Chapman, the director of the Living Wage Foundation, said good businesses knew the living wage “means happier, healthier and more motivated workers”. She welcomed announcements by Cardiff and Salford councils to build “living wage cities”, with Cardiff planning to double the number of workers receiving the real living wage to nearly 50,000. Chapman said analysis by the consultancy IHS Markit consultancy for KPMG found 5.2 million workers were paid less than the charity’s living wage, which is the lowest figure for seven years. Writing in the Guardian, the archbishop of York, John Sentamu, said levels of in-work poverty had become widespread and employers should take the lead by increasing wage levels. He said: “When we read that schools in the east of England are installing community fridges to provide food for families who otherwise would not be able to pay for it, we know there’s something seriously wrong.” The West Ham United vice-chairman, Karren Brady, said: “West Ham has paid the London living wage to all staff since 2015 and has been an accredited employer for two years now and it is something we’re hugely proud of. “The London living wage helps to ensure that we can support our staff at a time when we know the cost of living is rising across the country, not just in the capital. As such, we made a decision in 2015 to extend the initiative to staff based outside of London, in our retail stores across Essex.”

1 of 1 2 of 1 The 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow were boycotted in protest of the Soviet Union’s invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. Then–U.S. president Jimmy Carter announced the boycott in February 1980, and Canada and dozens of other countries soon followed suit. In his state of the union address that year, Carter made the case against the Soviet war: “The vast majority of nations on Earth have condemned this latest Soviet attempt to extend its colonial domination of others and have demanded the immediate withdrawal of Soviet troops. The Muslim world is especially and justifiably outraged by this aggression against an Islamic people. No action of a world power has ever been so quickly and so overwhelmingly condemned. But verbal condemnation is not enough. The Soviet Union must pay a concrete price for their aggression.” Part of the price the U.S. and its allies imposed was the Olympic boycott, which was explained as a protest in support of Afghanistan’s right to self-determination and independence, which the Soviets had egregiously violated when their tanks rolled across the border in December 1979. A decade of Soviet occupation resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Afghans and the displacement of millions. Of course, the U.S. was not a neutral observer in that conflict. According to a 1998 interview with French newsmagazine the Nouvel Observateur, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was then Carter’s national security adviser, boasted that they helped lure the Soviets into invading. For years, they armed and helped finance the anti-Soviet armed resistance, tending to favour the most ruthless and extremist elements of the insurgency—the fundamentalists who still plague Afghan political life. Many of Canada’s athletes were bitterly disappointed in 1980, but our country’s authorities assured them that the rights of the people of Afghanistan were worth the sacrifice of their athletic ambitions. Thirty years later, it is the United States, Canada, and the other NATO countries that are occupying Afghanistan. Instead of a boycott, the Vancouver 2010 Olympics are being used to promote militarism in general and Canada’s role in the occupation of Afghanistan in particular. Who will make these invading countries “pay a concrete price for their aggression”? For instance, a disproportionate number of Canadian Forces members, 200, and their families were to participate in the torch relay, whose route involved 14 military bases. It is widely expected that the opening ceremonies will tout Canada’s role with NATO in Afghanistan. Long before the disastrous Soviet occupation in the 1980s, the old British Empire tried and failed three times to subdue the Afghans before finally withdrawing its armies. As Afghan dissident member of parliament Malalai Joya has pointed out on her visits to Canada, “The Afghan people want peace, and history teaches that we always reject occupation and foreign domination.” Alas, today’s war is evidence that the lessons of this history go unlearned or unheeded. Once again countless Afghan lives, as well as the lives of NATO soldiers, have been sacrificed in vain. The Canadian government claims to support the call for an “Olympic truce”, yet in Afghanistan aerial bombings, night raids, and other forms of collective punishment will continue each day of the Games. The Olympics Charter states that the Games seek to “promote peace”, with the goal of “encouraging the establishment of a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity”. And yet the Canadian government is using the Games to promote its warmaking. Stephen Harper claims to promote democracy abroad, yet he has prorogued Parliament—suspending the basic functioning of Canada’s democratic institutions—in order to avoid scrutiny over Canada’s complicity in the torture of Afghan detainees. Indeed, just like in Moscow in 1980, the host governments of the 2010 Olympics have curtailed free speech and restricted civil liberties, and the Canadian government is participating in an illegal and destructive invasion of Afghanistan—and it will do its best not to draw attention to this bit of Olympic history. Let’s hope that the media gives some airtime to this historical parallel, lest the Games become just another prime-time venue to uncritically tout Canada’s military engagements abroad. Derrick O’Keefe is the cochair of the Canadian Peace Alliance.

Telstra has shifted gears in its fight to stop Naked DSL being mandated as a wholesale service, turning to projected system costs and interference investigation data to dissuade the competition watchdog. The carrier has provided a supplementary submission to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's wholesale ADSL inquiry. (pdf) Although much of the document attempts to correct alleged errors in rival telcos' submissions, Telstra also attempts to lay out fresh evidence to have the bid for a mandated wholesale Naked DSL service quashed. The carrier has turned over raw data on "interference investigation requests" that it believes support its contention that Naked DSL would introduce too many network faults. Interference investigation requests cover a spectrum of DSL faults and require a technician to attend and rectify. The figures table the number of interference investigation requests on the unconditioned local loop service (ULLS, which is used to underpin Naked services offered by other ISPs) versus those for the line sharing service (LSS, which Telstra contends is less problematic). "Over the six month period from March to August 2012, the rate of interference investigation requests for ULLS services is around 177 percent of the rate of interference investigation requests for LSS services," the carrier noted. "This is a significant difference." Telstra said it charged a fee of "$85 + $35/15 minutes" in business hours, or "$270 + $50/15 minutes" after hours, to investigate interference reports about either ULLS or LSS. "Telstra expects that these charges will be passed on to end users by their service provider," the carrier noted. "Furthermore, prior to requesting an interference investigation, Telstra requires its Wholesale customers to carry out extensive testing of their own equipment to ensure that the fault does not lie there, which only adds to the time that the end user is experiencing an issue with their Naked DSL service. "While it is difficult to forecast the demand for a Naked WDSL service – if such a service was to be mandated – it is clear that the likely result would be a higher rate of interference investigation requests, with the attendant costs and poorer service quality for end users than is the case for WDSL services today. "Clearly, such a requirement would also impose costs upon Telstra – its technicians would be required to spend a greater proportion of their time identifying and rectifying the faults that result from the lack of an underlying PSTN service, on top of the existing levels of field work that they are already required to carry out." Telstra has previously argued that its ADSL provisioning systems require the presence of an underlying active PSTN service — and that changing that could cost the telco significantly. The incumbent lays out those costs in its supplementary submission, though they are completely redacted in the public version, and provide no further clues on how expensive Telstra believes a mandated Naked DSL service could be.

Child sex offenders are being put on notice by the Turnbull Government, as it commits nearly $70 million to the fight against paedophiles. A national centre dedicated to fighting child exploitation will be created in Brisbane, and dozens more federal police will focus on the scourge. The Commonwealth estimates the new hub will save about 200 abuse victims each year. "Anyone's child can be targeted by paedophiles and child traffickers," Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton said. "It's our responsibility to stamp them out wherever we can." The Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation (ACCCE) will be led by the Australian Federal Police (AFP). The new centre will coordinate with state police forces, and work with international counterparts, such as the United States Centre for Missing and Exploited Children. The ACCCE will also include members of the financial intelligence agency AusTrac and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission. The AFP's child protection operations will also grow from about 100 to 170 staff by mid-2020. "This will have a big impact," Mr Dutton said. "As any parent knows, we want to make sure we take care of our children, we want to make sure that we eliminate this threat from our society." The $68.6 million boost will be included in May's budget. Shadow Justice Minister Clare O'Neil said Labor welcomed any extra funding to protect children. "Labor is absolutely committed to keeping children safe," Ms O'Neil said "We were very concerned by cuts to the AFP in recent years, which the commissioner himself said were affecting the AFP's discretionary work, including their child exploitation work."

Brandi, who says she dated Wade for 10 years, said in the new documentary that her ex "has always been a bit of an opportunist," adding, "and he kind of gets it, I'm going to say, I feel comfortable saying this, he gets this from his mother, and he knows how to position himself into different situations that will benefit him in a financial way." "He's saying that he was in a relationship with my uncle, that they were in love, and that they were having a relationship, if you will," she said. "He's saying that my uncle kept him from women, which is not true. We were just talking about how my uncle put us together. It would discredit the things that he's trying to claim, and I find it fascinating that he thinks he's able to just erase 10 years of his life." She said that if she were to talk to Wade, she would "confront him about his lies," adding, "I would tell him to stop lying. I'm not curious as to why he's doing it. He needs to stop. I don't care what his reasoning is, as far as trying to be relevant, desperate for money, whatever it is, these lies needs to stop and it's not OK. This man, my uncle took care of him and did very well by him and his family, and he knows that." Wade and Safechuck have not responded to the comments made in the Neverland Firsthand documentary.

Aquarium staff, which had hoped for Qinu's pregnancy for years, is "devastated" and focusing on her recovery, a spokeswoman said Wednesday. Qinu came to Atlanta via airplane from SeaWorld San Antonio in November 2010, when she was two years old. The aquarium announced the pregnancy — her first — in June.

As a physician, Zeldis had cared for hundreds of patients infected with hepatitis C and seen how, untreated, the virus ravaged people's livers. That a high price could bar patients from easy access to a cure seemed unethical to him in the face of a rare public health opportunity to vanquish a disease that afflicts 150 million people globally. AD AD "If we make it affordable ... this epidemic can be cured," Zeldis said. "I want to be bold -- I want to treat 100 million people by 2030 -- end of story. And there is really no reason why we can’t." Zeldis had been mulling hepatitis C therapies, and he believed it was possible to develop a medicine, sell it for a fraction of the price of Sovaldi and still make money. So in 2014, Zeldis put $1 million of his own money on the table to co-found Trek Therapeutics, a startup with the mission of creating a novel, affordable hepatitis C treatment for the world. To attempt to produce an effective and safe treatment at a modest price, Zeldis and his co-founder, Ann Kwong, had to blow up the typical drug company model. The reality of the pharmaceutical industry is that executives answer to investors, not just patients. Creating new medicines is a high-risk, high-reward business in which companies invest huge amounts of money on uncertain payoffs. Shareholders demand extremely high profits in return. AD AD Trek is taking a unique approach. The company is organized as a public benefit corporation – a relatively new type of corporate structure that places public welfare on equal footing with profit. Trek's legal charter requires the board to weigh stockholder interests against the need to "provide therapies for the treatment of infectious diseases that are accessible and affordable." The company cuts costs by piggybacking on the work other companies have already done to develop and test drugs. "What they proposed and introduced at the board meeting was quite a revelation, I think, for many of us who had been used to working with major pharmaceutical companies -- the idea of a company with a different ethos," said Geoffrey Dusheiko, an emeritus professor of medicine at University College London Medical School who joined the company's clinical advisory board. "Their profit system will be different; they are trying to put access first -- and are risking a great deal." A barebones startup Trek's leaders are industry veterans with enviable track records in the failure-prone business of inventing new cures. The executive team has collectively launched seven antiviral drugs for previous employers and have deep expertise in hepatitis C. Their newest experiment is in business, not in a test tube: After years of working in established drug companies, they're running a startup on a shoestring. AD AD Instead of hiring a small army of scientists and building an expensive laboratory, Trek is a virtual, 10-person company that operates out of a small incubator space in Cambridge, Mass. The company acquires experimental drugs that typically have been vetted through some degree of human testing. Trek capitalized on the fact that, for years, drug companies had raced to develop new hepatitis C treatments, which meant there were promising drugs stuck halfway through the pipeline.The availability of these drugs de-risks Trek's job considerably, cutting down on the cost and time of developing molecules from scratch. Trek has acquired or licensed five drugs so far, of which all but one have been through some human clinical trials. The company contracts with outside labs and clinics for additional testing. AD AD Treatment of hepatitis C typically requires a combination of drugs, which meant that Trek could pluck drugs from different companies and bring them together in powerful new pairings. In fall of last year, Trek began a small clinical trial, using a drug called faldaprevir in combination with an experimental drug called TD-6450 and ribavirin. Trek hopes to get a medicine on the market in 2020. The company is still in the earliest stages and investors will have a long and risky wait for a return. So far, the startup has raised $9 million in its initial funding round and is seeking an additional $50 million to fund the large trials needed to push drugs toward approval. That might seem like a lot of money, but in drug development it's pocket change. AD One study pegs the cost of developing and launching a drug at $2.6 billion. That work has been critiqued because of questions about the data and the analysis, which was done by a university group that receives funding from the industry. At the other extreme, the non-profit Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative has estimated the cost of developing a drug for diseases that are overlooked because they affect poor people at less than $170 million -- a number that can't be interpreted too broadly because critics argue the model won't work for all diseases and it underestimates some costs. To avoid the cost and uncertainty of challenging behemoth drug companies in the American market, Trek plans to focus on middle-income countries where new hepatitis C drugs have been slow to roll out, such as nations in eastern and central Europe. If they are successful at finding a new balancing point of profit and access -- a true "if" -- they hope their example could inspire companies working on other diseases to experiment with similar pricing models. “That’s exactly why, when Trek organized, we became a benefit corporation," said Robert Hindes, Trek's chief medical officer, who helped develop Sovaldi. "So we would have the option of not charging as much money as we could charge, or make as much money as we could make, but to take other factors into consideration -- so we could set the price that was consistent with our mission of affordability." AD AD Ann Kwong, chief executive of Trek, said the team is working on health economic models to find the right price, based on need and ability to pay, for each country it could distribute to -- although they haven't named where they'll start yet. "We can go into different countries, such as Romania and say, 'This is how much this disease is going to cost you over the next X years; for a fraction of that, you could cure these people and avoid that future cost,'" Kwong said. A unique opportunity in hepatitis C Trek's leaders are also in a race -- existing drugs are already making their way into these countries, and Trek doesn't expect to have a drug on the market for at least three years. AD Large drugmakers also are taking steps toward providing treatments in developing countries at lower costs -- and the net price of existing hepatitis C treatments has fallen because insurers have been able to strike deals for deeper rebates from drugmakers. Because Sovaldi's price has received so much attention and scrutiny, drugmakers have also priced their hepatitis C drugs aggressively to compete on price -- for example, when Merck introduced a new drug early this year, it priced it well below competition in an unusual move. Gilead has agreed to make its hepatitis C drugs available as a generic in 101 countries. A spokesman said the company is working with payers -- including governments and health insurers -- and cited a recent scale up of treatment in Poland to enable 3,500 patients to be treated per year. (A recent study estimated there are 231,000 people infected with the virus in Poland, with most unaware of the disease.) AD Bristol-Myers Squibb licensed its hepatitis C drug, Daklinza, to the Medicines Patent Pool, a United Nations-backed organization that makes the drug available as a generic drug to 112 low- and middle-income countries. A spokesman said the company employs tiered pricing in low- and middle-income countries that takes into account how many people have the disease and the country's ability to pay. AD AbbVie said that its hepatitis C drug regimens are approved and accessible in more than 70 countries, including most in central and eastern Europe. A Merck spokeswoman, asked about access to its drug, Zepatier, in low and middle income countries said the company was "working on securing market approvals." The nonprofit Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative has also partnered with an Egyptian company, Pharco Pharmaceuticals, to test a new drug combination that could sell for less than $300 in low- and middle-income countries. AD Trek's business model is based on the idea that these approaches are incomplete. They will provide piecemeal access, Kwong argues, but will leave millions untreated. Danny Edwards, a research program manager at the Access to Medicine Foundation, which ranks and evaluates how well pharmaceutical companies provide their drugs in low and middle income countries, said it was a reasonable strategy. "I think middle-income country markets present a real business opportunity. You can design access-to-medicine strategies which are commercially sustainable at the same time," Edwards said. Trek will face other challenges, too, including regulations, uncertainty about how fast other companies' drug prices will drop as competition increases, and the need to show physicians and governments that their drug works as well as pricier options. AD Among the most common reservations outside experts expressed about their model was the worry that the medicine Trek is developing might be inferior to other hepatitis C treatments. "I would hope we could develop a regimen that I would be perfectly comfortable using with my patients, to cure their hepatitis C," said Camilla Graham, Trek's vice president of medical and government affairs and a physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. " I don’t like the idea we’d create an inferior regimen for poorer people." In September, the company announced that all 16 people in a small trial had reached undetectable levels of virus after 12 weeks on their drug combination. That's far from the kind of large randomized trial that precedes a drug’s approval, but it is an encouraging sign. David Rein, a director of the public health analytics program at the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center, said that the effort seemed like an intriguing way to work within the current system for developing drugs. “I’ve heard of a lot of other approaches that I think are completely unrealistic in the context of our current health care system,” Rein said. “This actually seems like it would have a chance."

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a suit filed by people who were in the vicinity of Nagasaki at the time of the 1945 U.S. atomic bombing and seeking official recognition as A-bomb survivors. While turning down recognition of the 387 people as victims, the top court found one plaintiff who died after the suit was lodged could have been exposed to radiation after entering areas affected by the attack. His case was sent back to the Nagasaki District Court. The plaintiffs, who claimed they were within 12 km of ground zero at the time of the attack on Aug. 9, 1945, are not classified as survivors, or hibakusha, because they were outside the oval-shaped, state-designated zone stretching around 7 km from east to west and around 12 km from north to south. Instead, they are defined as individuals “who experienced the bombing,” and are not therefore entitled to full compensation including medical assistance as hibakusha are. As of late November, 6,278 individuals who experienced the bombing lived in Nagasaki Prefecture, according to the prefectural government. The top court’s First Petty Bench, presided over by Justice Katsuyuki Kizawa, upheld a 2016 Fukuoka High Court ruling that said an earlier scientific finding that radiation-linked health problems basically occurred within 5 km of ground zero was appropriate. “I’m so disappointed and dumbfounded by the top court’s decision,” said Chiyoko Iwanaga, 81, who led the plaintiffs. “Although we are getting old and exhausted, I will keep challenging. The truth can’t be bent.” In the suit filed in 2007, the plaintiffs asked the central, prefectural and municipal governments to issue health cards entitling them to full compensation under the law supporting atomic bomb victims. They also insisted that they developed acute symptoms, such as hair loss, after exposure to the blast and still suffer from radiation-related diseases. But the top court upheld a 2012 Nagasaki District Court ruling that concluded the symptoms did not match those stemming from radiation exposure. Under the support law, people are legally recognized as hibakusha if they were in the state-designated zone at the time of the bombing, entered the city within two weeks of it, or were otherwise exposed to radiation from the explosion. All of the plaintiffs argued that they fell into the third category, while the man who died during the lawsuit demanded he be put into the second category. KEYWORDS courts, Nagasaki, abomb

Si entra una mosca en casa y alguien aprovecha, saca una pistola, y mata a la suegra, no cabe decir que haya matado moscas a cañonazos. Ha cometido un crimen que nada tiene que ver con la mosca. Puede decirse que esto es lo que está pasando en Podemos. El actual equipo de Pablo Iglesias (que no conserva ya ni a una sola de las personas que le hemos acompañado desde el principio) entró en Podemos con un objetivo que sólo podía conducir a la destrucción del proyecto. Entraron tarde y entraron mal, con la intención de excluir a todos los que no formaran parte de su pandilla. No son más de 4 ó 5 personas, pero suficientes para dar al traste con todo. La estrategia que han seguido es tan simple como eficaz: en primer lugar, acusar de "errejonista" a cualquiera que no fuera de su estrecho círculo de confianza (que venía ya prefabricado desde fuera); en segundo lugar, defender que todos los errejonistas deben estar fuera de Podemos. La conclusión inevitable de esto es que todo el mundo, menos ellos, debe quedar fuera de Podemos. No voy a negar que, desde mucho antes de que entraran en Podemos Rafa Mayoral, Irene Montero o Juanma del Olmo, ha habido comportamientos desleales contra Pablo. Siempre me he enfrentado a esas deslealtades (y nunca las perdonaré), sin importarme si venían con sello "anticapitalista" o "errejonista". El comportamiento de muchos "anticapitalistas" en Vistalegre I ponía de manifiesto que no lograban entender el tipo de operación que teníamos por delante. Y disparaban de un modo insensato contra el líder que necesitábamos. Un tiempo después, yo mismo he sido víctima de ataques de "errejonistas" que tampoco sentían ningún respeto ni por el secretario general de Podemos (en términos orgánicos) ni por Pablo Iglesias (en clave personal). Pero, desde que fundamos Podemos, no me he encontrado con nada tan dañino para Pablo y para el proyecto como la camarilla que, a día de hoy, está dispuesta a destruirlo todo con tal de no perder su condición de cortesanos. Aún no consigo entender cómo Pablo lo ha permitido. Soy su amigo desde hace más de 20 años y sé que Pablo no es así. Lo único que se me ocurre pensar es que sigue sin tener ni idea del tipo de cosas que se hacen en su nombre. Pablo es un hombre de honor por encima de todo. Y cuida hasta la muerte a la gente que considera sus amigos. Pero creo que ahora se confunde: llama amigos a quienes no tienen más interés que el de mantener su posición excluyente, incluso si eso implica la destrucción de Pablo (y, por lo tanto, de Podemos). De todas formas, voy a votar a Pablo a la secretaría general y lo voy a hacer con entusiasmo, porque necesitamos que siga liderando Podemos. También voy a votar a Pablo al Consejo Ciudadano porque, como cuestión simbólica, me parece importante (y de justicia) que saque más votos que Errejón. Pero no me puede pedir que vote a una lista llena de gente que, honestamente, creo que va a acabar con él y con Podemos sin miramientos. Tampoco puede exigir que le acompañemos en el último giro truculento, tras el que parece más sencillo entenderse en lo político con Anticapitalistas que con Errejón, con el que trazó la estrategia con la que nació Podemos y en gran parte contra esos mismos anticapitalistas. Entre otras cosas porque la alianza de esas dos familias es imposible y no va a tardar en saltar por los aires. Lo único que los une es su pertenencia común al siglo XX y su rechazo compartido a la hipótesis que hizo posible Podemos (hipótesis que, insisto, siempre ha sido tan de Pablo como de Íñigo). Necesitamos un Podemos dirigido por Pablo, pero también por Íñigo, Carolina y Nacho. Un Podemos en el que todxs asuman y respeten de verdad el liderazgo de Pablo (cosa que no siempre ha ocurrido) y en el que Pablo sea de verdad el secretario general de todxs (cosa que tampoco). No me he animado a escribir un artículo como este hasta que dos personas tan imprescindibles para el proyecto como Carolina Bescansa (Secretaria de Análisis Político) y Nacho Álvarez (Secretario de Economía), el día 1 de febrero, han anunciado su intención de no participar en el proceso de Vistalegre2. Pero, sobre todo, me ha movido ver cómo, con una lógica de persecución del enemigo interno que recuerda a las peores tradiciones de la izquierda, se acusaba de traidores a personas como Miguel Vila o Eduardo Fernández Rubiño. Ambos comenzaron con esto, al igual que yo, mucho antes de Vistalegre I; antes también de la maravillosa campaña de las elecciones europeas; incluso mucho antes de que saliéramos a la luz aquel enero de 2014. Siempre han estado, al igual que yo, tratando de combatir toda deslealtad, viniera de donde viniera. No sólo Eduardo y Miguel, por supuesto, sino una lista interminable: Pedro de Palacio, Clara Serrano, Carlos Fernández Liria, Dani Corral, Paz Vaello y un largo etc., y que van en equipos que no son el de Pablo o no van en ninguno. En esta situación, no podría dejar de decir, sin sentir vergüenza, a qué creo que se debe. En cualquier caso, digo todo esto ya desde fuera, sin más pretensiones que las de alguien que ya ha abandonado todas las responsabilidades orgánicas. Mi sitio está en la Universidad, con mis libros, con mis clases, con mis alumnos y alumnas. Estos 3 años han sido años excepcionales; años en los que se abría una clara posibilidad de cambio y todxs estábamos obligados a darlo todo para entrar por esa rendija; años excepcionales en los que, pasado el tiempo, uno se habría mirado a sí mismo con vergüenza si se hubiera estado dedicando a otra cosa mientras tanto. Nunca he cobrado un solo euro de Podemos ni he querido ocupar ningún cargo público, y estoy orgulloso de que haya sido así. Ahora, ya hay un partido (en guerra, pero un partido), con sus inercias internas y sus dinámicas institucionales. La excepcionalidad del momento en el que había que crearlo todo de la nada ha pasado. Y, por lo tanto, los que no nos hemos dedicado nunca a la política de modo profesional, podemos volver a nuestras tareas, las que nos dan de comer y las que nos hacen felices (en los casos afortunados, como es el mío, en el que las dos cosas coinciden) sin mayor cargo de conciencia. Ese es, pues, todo el interés que tengo: poder volver tranquilo a mi oficio. Pero no querría reprocharme nunca haber estado callado mientras veía cómo un grupo de conspiradores estaba a punto de tomar el control de Podemos. Creo que esto es algo que va a ocurrir casi con seguridad, porque van a lograr parasitar a Pablo hasta destruir al organismo. Estoy seguro de que Pablo se dará cuenta un año o dos después de que le hayan matado los suyos, pero ya será tarde. No creo que este artículo cambie nada. Pero si las tareas imposibles nos paralizaran, no habría llegado nunca el día de montar Podemos. Y eso no va en el carácter de quienes comenzamos esta historia.

In the quiet of his empty home, it can sometimes feel like Hadi Ahmadi's wife and son are still away on their trip. It's a short-lived reprieve from the crushing weight of his loss. His wife, Behnaz Ebrahimi, and nine-year-old son, Rahmtin Ahmadi, were ripped away from him when 176 people were killed on Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752, which was downed by Iranian forces earlier this month. Then reality sets in. "I don't have them anymore," he says, taking a breath. Each time he can grasp it, the pain begins all over again. Rahmtin Ahmadi's room sits empty in his family's home. (Chris Mulligan/CBC) Ahmadi arrived back to his Toronto home Saturday night after a flight to Iran he never dreamed he would have to make: to identify the remains of his loved ones and lay them to rest. On Sunday, hundreds gathered to honour his wife and son at a memorial in Richmond Hill, Ont. It was one of two memorials held Sunday for two mothers and their children killed in the disaster. Siamak Jadidi also bid his wife and daughter goodbye on Sunday. Saharnaz Haghjoo, 37, and Elsa Jadidi were also on the plane, their remains identified last weekend and returned to their family in Toronto on Saturday. Some 300 people turned out to the Imam Mahdi Islamic Centre north of Toronto to honour their memory. "They were full of love, both mother and daughter, and they always wanted to do good," said Zainab Rasool, who grew up with Haghjoo. "Sahar was just a gem, she was a flower, she walked into the room and she would light up the room." 'I wish I would have gone with them' Ahmadi flew to Tehran as soon as he heard the news. He had to see his wife and son again. But when he arrived, he learned there was almost nothing left of their remains. "She was a wonderful wife. The best mother, the best friend, kind to everyone ... she always had a smile," he said through tears. The pair met in Tehran and got married there, before moving to Toronto 16 years ago. Behnaz Ebrahimi (pictured) met Hadi Ahmadi and got married in Tehran, before moving to Toronto 16 years ago. (Submitted by Hadi Ahmadi) Rahmtin, he said, loved dinosaurs and especially hugs from friends, teachers and just about anyone around him. He had Down Syndome and was in a special class at school, his father said. "Rahmtin had a short life, but I think he had the best life. He was always happy. He had whatever he wanted," Ahmadi said. "I wish I would have gone with them to Iran instead of staying behind to work." On the morning after the news of the disaster, Ahmadi recalled Rahmtin's school bus driver arriving ready to pick him up. "I went to see the driver. I told him Rahmtin is not coming home anymore," Ahmadi said, explaining what had happened. Nine-year-old Rahmtin Ahmadi was among 176 passengers killed during the Iran plane disaster. (Submitted by Hadi Ahmadi) When he looked out 15 minutes later, the bus was still there, the driver's head resting on the wheel in grief. That afternoon, he got a phone call from the school saying all of Rahmtin's teachers had been crying recalling those special hugs. At the ceremony for Saharnaz Haghjoo and Elsa Jadidi, Haghjoo's father thanked Canadians for all the support shown to his family and the victims since the disaster. "My family is now from this city to the ocean, from East to West," he said. "The amount of compassion, sympathy, they're all with me," he said. "Everyone, I really thank you." 'Unbearable' But amid the gratitude, his pain was palpable. "I hope nothing like this happens to not even my worst enemy. This is unbearable," he said, his voice breaking. Haghjoo had been an employee of YWCA Toronto since 2015 and helped newcomer women and girls get the services they needed to settle in Canada. Elsa was a student at the Brampton-based Wali ul Asr Islamic school. Since Elsa's death, a photo of a drawing she did a few months prior has been a small comfort to students, the school said. The drawing showed a beaming Elsa holding a large, white poster with the words, in letters the colours of the rainbow, "Life in Heavin." Saharnaz Haghjoo, 37, and Elsa Jadidi were also on the plane, their remains identified last weekend and returned to their family in Toronto Saturday. Some 300 people turned out to the Imam Mahdi Islamic Centre north of Toronto to honour their memory. (Myriam Eddahia/CBC) She drew three mosques: one of the mosque of the prophet's family, another with the words "Pray Salah" and the third that recognizes the Qur'an. Butterflies flutter near a palm tree with a bounty of coconuts. A creek flows along one edge. And a sun shines brightly on the entire scene. "It does give people a little bit of comfort that she visualized something so wonderful that will be her reward to be in a good place," said the school's principal, Mina Mozaffarian. Through the grief, the ways in which Canadians have banded together has been a light, said Daryoush Kari, president of the Imam Mahdi Islamic Centre, which shares a parking lot with the neighbouring synagogue. After the tragedy, he said, the rabbi, a good friend, visited the mosque to deliver prayers. Saharnaz Haghjoo and her daughter Elsa Jadidi are seen in this handout photo. (Habib Haghjoo/The Canadian Press) "One of the first slogans I saw when I came to Canada was 'The world needs more Canada.' I didn't get it at that time, but when it comes to this kind of times, I realize it," he said. For Ahmadi, the silence in his home is almost too much to bear. He's overcome with grief when he opens the door to his son's room for the first time since the tragedy. "Everywhere I look, I have a memory of them," he said. "It's impossible to forget them, it's impossible to live without them." "I really don't know how to start my life again, if there's anything left."

この写真にはショッキングな表現、または18歳以上の年齢制限の対象となる内容が含まれます。 ご覧になる場合にはご了承の上、クリックしてください。 【10月12日 AFPBB News】アジア最大規模の眼鏡見本市「第30回国際メガネ展（iOFT2017、International Optical Fair Tokyo）」が東京都江東区の東京ビッグサイト（Tokyo Big Sight）で11日から開催され、メーカーや小売店など大勢の来場者で連日にぎわっている。 今年は、国内外21か国、370社から約7万4000点の製品が出展された。宝石をあしらった3000万円を超える高級眼鏡をはじめ、入浴中でも使える曇りにくい眼鏡や折りたたむと薄さ2ミリになる老眼鏡、映画「エイリアン（Alien）」から着想を得たサングラスなど、実用的なものから人目を引くデザインまでがそろっている。13日まで。(c)AFPBB News

Posted by kovarex on 2016-06-10 Hello! Playtesting Circuit connection graphics Most of this week was spent by switching between playtesting and fixing bugs/issues found when doing so. We get a little bit further in the technology tree every day as we play our multiplayer playtest game, it always uncovers few bugs or desyncs which we fix immediately so we can continue playing.We also tweak some inconvenient things. For example, once we are able to build rails fast with the rail builder, it was annoying to mine these when you misaligned them, so we just halved the mining time of rails. The inventory space was running out in the later game, so we made the armor give the character an inventory size bonuses (up to 30).We felt that the evolution factor growth doesn't slow down enough towards the higher value. In our specific game, it probably grew faster than usually as Scott was more than eager to test the new fire mechanics by setting every forest he found on fire. So we couldn't know what affected the evolution factor the most. We changed the formula of the evolution factor growth and added command. The game now tracks which factors contributed to the evolution, so you can get something like this:Evolution factor 0.8702 (Time 9%)(Pollution 57%)(Spawner kills 32%)It is great for balancing, but the players can use it as well, so they have a better clue of what is going on.At this stage it is still faster to fix bugs internally rather than going through the bug section on the forums, that is why we didn't release so far, but it is starting to be quite playable these days, so there is a good chance for release next week :)Once we decided that everything will be circuit connectable, Robert and Albert agreed that the wire can't just end in the middle of the entity, that it needs something more. So there is a small circuit box sprite attached when the entity is connected. I have to say that it adds a nice touch to it. As always, let us know what you think on our forums

DARK PHOENIX (2019) 9 p.m. on HBO. In an interview with The Times last year, the actress Sophie Turner discussed the moment when Simon Kinberg, the writer and director of “Dark Phoenix,” made clear how much the movie would rely on Turner’s performance. “I just [expletive] my pants right there and then,” Turner said. But she made it through. This most recent “X-Men” movie casts Turner, a star best known for “Game of Thrones,” as Jean Grey, a young mutant whose abnormally potent powers threaten to get the better of her. Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy reprise their roles as Magneto and Professor X, alongside Jessica Chastain as an alien modeled partly on Tilda Swinton. For the most part, Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The Times, Kinberg “just moves characters from point A to B, pausing for face-to-face heart to hearts before the next blowout.” But, she added, “the mayhem is generally coherent and executed with clean, crisp special effects, even if Kinberg settles for slo-mo clichés.”

Average Price of a Movie Ticket Rises to $8.97 in 2017 Individual admissions, meanwhile, declined by more than six percent. While the average price of a movie ticket in the U.S. rose to $8.97 in 2017, an increase of 3.69 percent, total domestic box office in North America dropped by 2.55 percent to $11.091 billion, according to information released Wednesday by the National Association of Theatre Owners. Despite the increase in ticket prices, the overall decline in ticket revenue was caused by a drop in overall admissions, which fell by 6.03 percent to 1.236 billion. While the average ticket price hit $8.97, it remained below the cost of an average ticket in 1977 when adjusted for inflation. Back then, a ticket cost $2.23, the equivalent of $9.40 in today's currency. For the final quarter of the year, the average ticket price hit $9.18, up from $8.79 in the fourth quarter of 2016. Fourth-quarter ticket prices reflected the more expensive tickets sold for 3D and large-format screens which were in demand as well as the roster of adult-skewing, awards-contending films hitting the multiplex. While the 6.03 percent drop in admissions was the steepest decline in the past decade, over those 10 years the number of annual admissions has actually bounced around the 1.3 billion mark — increasing four times, decreasing five times and staying even with the previous year on one occasion. In terms of admissions, 2017 had a strong first quarter, with hits like Beauty and the Beast contributing to a record-setting Q1 in terms of both admissions and box office. But then the tide turned because of a disappointing summer, in which a number of sequels failed to perform up to expectations. A particularly downbeat August accounted for half of the summer 2017 shortfall, according to NATO. Moviegoing rebounded in the fourth quarter of the year to nearly the level of 2016, as 315 million tickets were sold compared to 319 million in fourth quarter 2016. From the theater owners’ perspective, the see-sawing business during the course of 2017 only underscored the need for Hollywood to maintain a balanced, compelling release schedule throughout all 52 weeks of the year.

It wasn't until Ron Carmel became a parent that the ideas informing Subterfuge began to coalesce. The World of Goo co-creator knew that he wanted to make the mobile game equivalent of the glacially slow PC strategy title Neptune's Pride. But Carmel figured that his game had to be mobile, as being a parent made it impossible to sit at a PC for any length of time, let alone to play a game that requires as much time as Neptune’s Pride. Carmel teamed up with Noel Llopis--a fellow new parent and designer of Flower Garden--to create a strategy game that would suit their lifestyles. Carmel says they wanted to create "a short-burst experience that was also deep and engaging and meaty, something we could sink our teeth into.” Playing the long-but-not-too-long game In Subterfuge, eight online players compete against each other in real-time to capture their Queens or to create 200 kilos of the element Neptunium. They do the latter by creating mines and drilling into the seabed. A player can only form mines at outposts they own, and so battles are fought to gain more of them. Players must decide which outposts to launch submarines toward, and how many of their Specialists and Drillers they'll transport in the process. If you overpower your enemy's Drillers, then you gain ownership of that outpost. Drillers and Specialists can also be transferred between friendly outposts to boost their defense. As Carmel puts it, it's "a combination of a brawl and a race." "Carmel says that his mobile strategy game is a combination of a brawl and a race." In Neptune's Pride, a single match can take two to six weeks to play. "With the amount of involvement and investment you have in a particularly desired outcome, [the game] becomes pretty serious and pretty heavy," Carmel says. “It creates a very strong emotional attachment.” Carmel found that the "sheer length" of matches in Neptune's Pride is what drew him in, and he wanted Subterfuge to have that same cadence. However, Carmel found Neptune's Pride's month-long matches to be too demanding. He could only ever manage one per year. And as Subterfuge was to be a mobile game, he sought to have "something that was less involved and less encompassing." A game of Subterfuge lasts for seven to 10 days. Carmel describes it as a "good middle ground," creating a deep emotional investment without detracting from the player’s quality of life. Seven to 10 days isn't a strict time limit--that's just how long it usually takes due to the pace of the game. What creates this slow pace is the time it takes for submarines to travel between outposts--on average, about 12 hours. “Not now sweetie, mommy’s conspiring” Another reason that drawn-out match length was important to retain was due to it giving players time to indulge in diplomacy. If you see that a player has launched submarines at one of your outposts, you may want to reach out to a third player to request some of their Drillers to help you win the battle. "Restricting communication to text reinforces the feeling that things may not be as you think, and you have to be a suspicious of people's motives." The methods by which players can communicate with each other is one of the most interesting parts of Subterfuge's design. Carmel and Llopis considered letting players use voice, to record videos, or to send screenshots to each other. All of these considerations were eventually dropped. "The game is a lot more interesting when you can't do that," says Carmel. The only way to communicate with other players in Subterfuge is to type out text messages. "Restricting communication to this relatively limited medium of text reinforces this feeling that things may not be as you think, and you do have to be a little suspicious of people's motives," says Carmel. Since you can only see as far as your sonar allows, players will often find that they have to rely on other players for information. But they are also aware that all alliances are temporary, and information cannot necessarily be trusted. Making communication text-only makes it easier for players to lie to and betray each other for their own benefit. "We did think about adding game mechanics that actually reinforced making alliances explicit in the game," Carmel says. He adds that some players did request formalized alliances. "But for the same reason we avoided screenshots, we eliminated that. We wanted all alliances, and everything that's communicated about in the game, to be fluid." Enabling this ambiguous interaction is part of Carmel and Llopis's grander effort to avoid Subterfuge becoming a chip-taking game. This concept is outlined by Thomas Ferguson in his book Game Theory. The archetype is this: All players have chips, each player takes a turn to take a chip from someone else, and when a player loses all their chips they are out. "The chip-taking game is what a lot of political games tend to be reducible to," Carmel says. "There's not really any skill involved, other than the skill of trying to convince players to take a chip from someone else." According to Carmel, to avoid the chip-taking game, each player's strategy has to matter. And this is why Subterfuge has Specialists. Every 18 hours, you get a choice of three Specialists, but can hire only one. What determines the Specialist that you choose are their various skills. These can, as the rulebook says, "break and change the rules of the game." The full list of Specialists shows the strategic possibilities each one offers, whether it's generating Drillers quicker, increasing the sonar range, or allowing for quicker attacks against opponents. Fluid alliances, fluid chronology While Subterfuge borrows heavily from Neptune's Pride it also differs from it in one vital way. Other than the shorter match length, what turned out to be very effective in retaining the player's quality of life is Subterfuge's 'Time Machine' mechanic. As the game is deterministic, the Time Machine lets you wind forward into the future and see what the situation would look like based on the information you have at present. Not only that, you can actually launch submarines at a specific time in the future so that you don't have to set an alarm during the night to make an important move. Getting up in the middle of the night and having to rush through meals is something that Carmel found himself doing while playing Neptune's Pride, and he didn't want it to carry over to Subterfuge. The Time Machine mechanic solves that. Helping it along are the game's push notifications. It took some tweaking to get the number of push notifications right--too few would render them pointless, and too many would become annoying. "In the end we came up with a rule," Carmel explains. "Anything that happens that you could not have known about earlier, we will send you a push notification for it." The effect of this is that player's don't have to constantly check their phones to ensure they don't miss out on anything important happening. It helps that Subterfuge isn't a game that rewards micro-management. In fact, the game's pricing model is designed to discourage it. Anyone can play Subterfuge for free. What you pay $9.99 for is the game's "convenience features." The biggest of which is being able to make more than one move in the future using the Time Machine. Buying into the game allows you to spend more time away from it, while still executing precise strategic moves. "It's pay-for-convenience," says Carmel.

The mother of a six-year-old boy who was shot earlier this month has said the shooting was horrific and changed his life forever. Gillian Scully, mother of Seán, said he is in a wheelchair and will not be able to walk for some years, although they are hopeful he will be able to take some steps eventually. She said it would be a long road with intense rehab and her son would suffer for a long time. Speaking on RTÉ's Liveline, Ms Scully said Seán also has to wear nappies and does not sleep well as he has nightmares and flashbacks. On 13 June, Seán was playing on a green area metres from his home in Ballyfermot in Dublin. He was shot in the neck in what gardaí believe was an accident as the gunman was looking for someone else. Ms Scully said Seán asked what had happened and she had told him it was a boy "messing with a pellet gun". She wanted to make it clear to him that it was not his fault and it was an accident. She said he hated the wheelchair but he was coming around to it and he asked why he had to wear a nappy and was embarrassed by it. The bullet damaged nerves in his neck and he has no feeling from the chest down and his bowel and bladder were affected. However, his mother said he still has his personality and he still laughs. Seán is being treated in Crumlin Children's Hospital. He was operated on two days after the attack. The family have been told they will have to get a special car and must get their home adapted including a special mattress and a hospital bed. Ms Scully has quit her part-time job to look after Seán full time. Her husband, Karl, has only just gone back to work after the shooting. The only person arrested in connection with the shooting was a man questioned on suspicion of withholding information. Ms Scully said the attack was not on her, her husband or Seán. She said whomever was responsible should come forward. She said they should put their hands up rather than run away.

Is Closed Source a Good Idea in Real Estate? A response to a curious shift at Keller Williams Recently, Keller Williams co-founder Gary Keller took the stage at a company event to discuss the role of technology in the future of his firm. The full article is reprinted here, courtesy of WFG National Title Insurance Company. TL;DR — Keller Williams is adopting an aggressive ‘closed-network’ approach that prioritizes proprietary technology and nearly eliminates ‘bolt-on’ or third-party software integrations. How this will play out for Keller Williams in an increasingly open-sourced, sharing economy will have ramifications for not only Keller, but other high tech powered brokers, agents, and ultimately, clients. credit: pexels.com Open vs Closed What do we mean? Generally, and for the purposes of this discussion, I’ll refer to the Wikipedia definition of open and closed systems: Open systems are systems that allow interactions between their internal elements and the environment. Closed systems, on the other hand, are held to be isolated from their environment. For real estate brokerages such as Keller Williams, this means choosing between developing and supporting proprietary technology (closed) or integrating and collaborating with third-party software (open). Before we get into the details of Keller’s direction, let’s step back and take a look at the pros and cons of each: Benefits of Being Open In general, open source systems: Can more readily support industry growth through collaboration, idea sharing and ease of adoption. Are characterized and supported by strong and vocal communities that often time generate new innovation within themselves. Are not subject to a private agendas. From the initiation of the first trade routes to open source software development, the benefits of open systems are obvious. In today’s “knowledge sharing economy” (hello, Uber and AirBnB!) it is obvious customer demand supports the growth of open-source development. Drawbacks of Open Source On the flip side, open source can lead to: Fragmentation and time constraints due to reliance on others, especially among poorly coordinated efforts. Slower decisions and a lack of consistency in product development and user experience. Theft. Closed systems benefit from a singular vision, faster execution, consistent delivery, and retention of critical and sensitive data. Keller Williams Has Spoken: Closed “We are a technology company. No. 1 that means we build the technology. No. 2 that means we hire the technologists …. We are not a real estate company anymore…” — Gary Keller We’ve seen this trend emerge with companies such as @Properties, who have focused on both developing proprietary tools and integrating third party software to new players such as Compass that are building an end-to-end platform for their agents. Keller appears firmly set against off-the-shelf solutions, implying that inputting consumer or transaction data into third party software strengthens their competitive position and weakens that of Keller Williams. The takeaway is that this consumer and transaction data is not only valuable, but the property of Keller Williams. Which of course it is…and it isn’t. credit: Keller Williams per WFG National Title Insurance Company The problem with this position is that it assumes Keller is the only holder of this information. Take search parameters and search progress for a home buyer. I challenge any real estate agent who thinks once they have a conversation with a prospect, that those search parameters and online browsing habits aren’t also already captured by Zillow…or Redfin…or Realtor.com. Consumers have already spoken: they freaking love the portals. According to NAR’s 2017 report, 51% of home buyers found their home online, versus 34% through an agent. To be fair, 88% purchased a home using an agent — which means buyers are more commonly searching on their own and using an agent for negotiations and advice. That’s significant, and if Keller thinks they’re going to monopolize and maximize economic value from consumer search data I think they’re wrong. Furthermore, building a system of closed technology goes against the grain of consumer habits. Nowhere is this more painful than this video, featured on Keller Williams Marketing & Technology page: “Download this app to work with me” — no thanks. Did you catch that? How many times did the KW agent refer to the fact that the open house visitor must download his app in order to benefit from working with the agent. Would you leave the open house and download an app just to message the agent and get updates on the property? Me neither. Back to Zillow. “You have singlehandedly created the most valuable real estate company in the country called Zillow. They don’t create their own content,” Keller added. “It’s your data. [Real estate portals are] just using money and technology to enhance the experience so everyone wants to go there.” I’ve spoken to a lot of real estate agents, and the love-hate relationship with Zillow is real. In any single conversation, Premier Agent is hated because a prospect can easily go back to a link and click on a different agent’s contact information, while in the next breath the lead generation function of Zillow is praised. Keller would be better off acquiring data from these sources because the portals are doing a better job of it (and can do it cheaper because they’re paid to do it, not paying). The last part of that quote is important: “so everyone wants to go there.” Exactly. This is why you don’t mess with the 800 pound gorilla. Closing yourself off in this sense is akin to developing a product without listening to your stakeholders. Keller Williams Labs vets ideas through its own agents, (who presumably get feedback from their clients) but why not collaborate with additional technology developers to expand that knowledge base exponentially? Open systems account for changes in need that allow companies to develop products that fit those needs and can better use supply (i.e. previous knowledge) that benefit firms who can iterate through ideas. Ultimately, open systems benefit from mutual respect, collaboration, and interests. A closed system is akin to running a restaurant and creating a menu based on what the other chefs want to serve, instead of listening to the paying customers. It Sounds Familiar Unfortunately, this industry has seen this closed-system development before: the 680+ MLS’s across the country. The real estate industry has historically been characterized as one leery of adopting new technology due to the fear it may diminish their relevance. This is literally the manifestation of closed systems, and one that the industry is now rapidly trying to undo through the adoption of RESO standards and web APIs. While listings were once the most basic and prized asset to a broker, the adoption of the portals has shifted that slightly. With that in mind, it’s hard to fault Keller Williams for wanting to protect it’s, and any brokers, now most coveted asset: data. To that effect, Gary Keller, in his presentation, noted the firm’s data pledge: “We will always respect your data as your business and we will always allow you to take your database with you.” Data, however, is messy and a real challenge to manage, which is a major advantage to relying on experts in this business, such as established CRMs and young and able startups with teams of dedicated data scientists. Out-of-the-box solutions are often less risky for this reason. This can also benefit firms because real estate is cyclical, and the heavy impacts of this can be better handled if firms can be more flexible. “Big Data” is likely in the running for word-of-the-decade, and for Keller Williams to potentially shut itself out from streams of data would mean missing an incredible opportunity to leverage the latest in machine learning and build a database with troves of valuable data (which of course Keller does not want to supply, so the point being they won’t be able to acquire, either). A Better Alternative There are two camps emerging: the high tech powered brokers and niche boutiques. Many, including Compass CEO Robert Reffkin, believe the traditional brokerage model is going away. Without doubt the boutiques will need the technology to keep up, and it is likely agents will benefit the most regardless. To this point, firm-agnostic technology is likely to be most appealing not only to consumers, but to agents who will continue to grow to be more entrepreneurial and drive decisions for which business tools they use. This flexibility will allow agents to meet the demands of clients more closely. In the End The next generation of real estate technology companies are likely to establish a competitive advantage through value propositions derived through complementary services to the technology leaders of today, from high tech brokers to AirBnB. This is a challenging environment for closed system companies. The worst case scenario is positioning oneself as Borders while Amazon eats your lunch due to its massive value derived from far reaching integrations and partnerships. At the moment, it is way too early to know if this is the right move for Keller and the industry. Technology alone is solely a means, not an end in generating value. Adoption is critical, and a question Keller needs to ask itself is whether or not to define that as adoption of its tools among its own agents (likely high) or their clients (TBD). If the tools, such as the Keller Williams app, create addition frictions or a “tax” on the existing process, it’s a fail. How valuable would Twitter be if it content was only viewable by those users who are currently logged in? Personally, I’m leaning one direction:

Since the outbreak of the HIV epidemic in the early 1980s, the FDA has banned blood donations from men who have had sexual relations with other men since 1977. Now, that ban may be "relaxed" to a one-year deferral following a vote by a panel from the Department of Health and Human Services. TIME reports: The current ban in the U.S. applies to any potential male blood donor who has had sex with another man since 1977, the start of the country’s AIDS epidemic. The FDA website states that these men are at an “increased risk for HIV, hepatitis B and certain other infections that can be transmitted by transfusion.” The Department of Health and Human Service’s Advisory Committee on Blood and Tissue Safety and Availability examined data and heard testimony on Thursday from critics of the lifetime ban, who say it is discriminatory and now unnecessary, since technological advances have made the risk infinitesimal in most cases. The panel then voted 16-2 in support of allowing men who have had sex with other men to give blood after being abstinent for one year, Bloomberg Businessweek reports. The FDA is not obliged to follow the panel’s advice but Jennifer Rodriguez, a spokeswoman for the agency, said “the meeting provided valuable information and perspectives that will help inform the FDA’s deliberations.” Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom have all reduced lifetime blood donation bans on men who have had sex with men to a one-to-five year ban from their last sexual encounter. The panel voted in favor of a policy that would permit blood donation following a one-year period of abstinence of same-sex encounters. Previously, there was a six-month window where HIV was undetectable in blood. Thanks to improvements in technology, this window has been reduced to a mere 11 days. The American Red Cross also supports the one-year deferral. I think this is worth looking in to. Technology has improved leaps and bounds in the past 30 years, and policies should adapt as such. It would be interesting to see how things have played out in other countries who have changed their policies regarding blood donations from men who have had sex with men--if their supplies have remained safe, I don't see why the United States' supply would be at risk.

A Palestinian embassy has been officially opened in the Vatican. The Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas also had an audience with Pope Francis, with discussions on how peace can be achieved. Abbas said he hopes the example of the Vatican is followed by others. He said: “This embassy is a place of pride for us and we hope that all of the countries of the world recognise the State of Palestine, because this recognition will bring us closer to the peace process.” Mahmoud Abbas also spoke out against reports that US President-elect Trump wants to move the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Palestinian President Abbas says U.S. Embassy move would hurt peace https://t.co/7vyv6ll2zCpic.twitter.com/LgCJDC02m0 — Reuters Top News (@Reuters) January 14, 2017 The Palestinian President warned that if the idea went ahead it will not help efforts towards finding peace. “We have heard in the media that the US administration wants to move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem,” he said. “We hope this news is not true, because it is not encouraging and will disrupt and hinder the peace process. “We call on President Trump, when he reaches the White House, to open a dialogue for peace between us and the Israelis and we are ready for this dialogue on the basis of international legitimacy.” The opening of a Palestinian embassy in the Vatican comes ahead of new peace efforts, with France hosting fresh talks on Sunday among delegates from some 70 countries and organisations in Paris. Abbas says he will attend but the Israeli Prime Minister has refused, reportedly calling the event “futile”. Pres. Abbas told #PopeFrancis that new embassy to Holy See “is a sign that the Pope loves the Palestinian people & loves peace.” pic.twitter.com/xPyGrRkLMb — Junno Arocho Esteves (@arochoju) January 14, 2017

Image 1 of 6 ▼ A lockdown has been lifted at San Leandro High School Wednesday afternoon after a school shooting threat was written on a bathroom wall in what appeared to be permanent marker. News of the threat came as thousands of students across the Bay Area were participating in a national 'March for Our Lives' walkout to urge congress for tighter gun control laws in the wake of the Parkland, Florida school shooting. A photo posted on Instagram shows the alleged graffiti threat which shows writing on a bathroom stall stating, "I'm shooting the school tomorrow (Thursday) at 1. I'm sick of this sh*t. Better not come. F**ck this place." San Leandro Unified School District Superintendent Mike McLaughlin says the school will be closed Thursday as a precaution, "unless we notify you otherwise." Lt. Isaac Benabou with the San Leandro Police Department says the graffiti was found in a boys' bathroom on campus Wednesday morning. The school was placed on lockdown and the school was searched. "We brought in police department staff and we systematically searched the school. We also brought in some K-9's to search the hallways, and do a very comprehensive search the best we can to ensure the safety of the school, students and staff. However this message was written with the intended violence to take place tomorrow. We didn't want to take the chance and have this take place tomorrow. We decided to work with the school and clear the grounds today - just as a precaution," said Lt. Benabou. There were rumors that a gun or guns were found on campus. However, authorities say those rumors were not true, and there were no guns found on campus. The district says all students and staff are safe. Students will be dismissed at their regularly scheduled time Wednesday.

The full Libertarian Party UK 2017 Manifesto content can be read below, or download the PDF version (975kb) by clicking the front cover. THE LIBERTARIAN PARTY MANIFESTO 2017 Your Life, Your Country, Your Liberty INTRODUCTION This General Election is allegedly being fought on the interests of giving a clear majority to carry through Brexit. We believe that it is in fact a panic measure with the Conservatives facing a damaging rerun of up to 21 seats following Police Investigations into alleged electoral fraud in the 2015 General Election leading to a loss of the Conservative majority in Westminster. From 1945 to 2006 there have been only been six petitions to overturn elections, in 2017 alone there could be five times that amount. This is not in the interests of the people of the United Kingdom. It shows a broken system that does not deliver ‘Representative Parliamentary Democracy’. Labour is fighting on the basis of public sector privilege in the NHS and Trade Union power over our lives. It has very little else it can credibly fight a campaign on, especially having Jeremy Corbyn as its Leader. The Liberal Democrats have cynically painted themselves as the only pro EU, Anti-Brexit Party. Thus showing they are neither Liberal nor Democratic in relation to the result of the Brexit referendum. The Libertarian Party believes that the main issue that is not being addressed is that of the Constitution, we still need to have a Constitutional Convention and accept that the United Kingdom is rapidly heading for a de facto Federal Kingdom. People are grown up, they want more of a say, and referenda Swiss style should be the norm on both national and local issues, not the exception. This included membership of the European Union, the final vote showing the political classes were completely out of touch with public sentiment. The Libertarian Party supported and campaigned for Brexit. As a Party we are confident that a new European settlement will be reached for Free Trade without the need for ever closer union. It is time we moved from a Representative Democracy to a Direct Democracy where every vote matters. First past the post (FPTP) is no longer just or sane. All schools of political thought should be heard in Parliament. Finally the ‘D’ word has to be addressed – our national debt of ‘1.4 Trillion has to be paid down, either through a specific Tax – the ‘Gordon Brown’ Tax or by a much reduced State. Switzerland and other countries have in their Constitutions a prohibition on the State borrowing above a certain limit. We need to enshrine this into our Constitution and have it codified. Adam Brown LPUK Party Leader +++++ BALANCING THE STATE The Libertarian Party is aware that for many people the State is an unfeeling, unresponsive animal. When things go wrong, its first instinct is to cover up. The NHS, HMRC and others are state institutions where state employees enjoy a virtually entrenched immunity from prosecution other than by the very rich. This has led to declining standards of civic behaviour. The Libertarian Party is committed to: – Making Misconduct in Public Office a statutory criminal offence. – Compensation for those injured by the State. – Ensuring the State makes compensation to the individual by implementing the Law Commission Report 322 on Administrative Redress: Public Bodies and the Citizen. – Restoring the impeachment process for public servants that abuse their position including Ministers of State. – A ‘recall’ system for MPs whose standard of behaviour brings Parliament into disrepute, by local referendum. The Libertarian Party will establish local tribunals or Ombudsmen made up of lay citizens elected to the position, with a legal advisor to assist to ensure that complaints about public servants and public bodies are heard quickly. Each complaint is to be heard within six weeks before referring to a Judge to decide whether the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) will be directed to prosecute on the citizen’s behalf. – The Libertarian Party is committed to a written Constitution that protects the individual against the State and to have the Magna Carta and other documents codified into a single Constitution. The rights sought from Magna Carta down to the 1951 European Declaration of Human Rights have been continually usurped. – The party takes as its model the Swiss Constitution of 1999. – A Constitutional Court would be established. – The Monarch under law would be the head of State, but subject to the Constitution. Switzerland is a stable country with a devolution of power to its diverse cantons with different languages, religions and Cantonal Tax rates as our preferred model. England, alone out of the United Kingdom is disenfranchised amongst the home Nations, not having a Parliament of its own. The Libertarian Party is committed to an English Parliament not based in London. There would be a Federal Parliament for the United Kingdom in that we would adopt either the traditional counties with multi seat constituencies with proportional voting as being the only rational way for the country to have representative government. Alternatively, the return of the 1,000 year old seven English Saxon kingdoms as the basis of public administration together with Ulster, Wales, Scotland and Kernow, emulating the German Lander or Swiss Cantons. Each would determine and have its own tax raising powers that will be devolved from Whitehall. The House of Commons would be by popular election. The Libertarian Party would terminate the House of Lords as an anachronism that allows hereditary and unelected members along with the Clergy to influence public policy. The Libertarian Party would immediately abolish the requirement for paying any deposit to the State to stand for any elected office. Democracy should be on the basis of ideas not cash. Westminster would only deal with Defence and Foreign affairs. The House of Commons would be reduced to two hundred members and shall only sit from September to December each year, on the basis that the less time Parliament is sitting, the less interference in the life of the individual citizen. Exceptions would be made in a time of national emergency. The Military and Police would swear allegiance to the Constitution. No clergyman from whatever faith shall have the right to a seat unless elected. There will be a complete separation of Church and State. All public honours and decorations other than proven military service shall be set aside. No public servant shall receive an honour as a matter of course for doing a job that they are already paid to do. The honours system has become a degraded and corrosive form of patronage. The Libertarian Party would establish Commercial Tribunals with experienced business people sitting alongside specialist Commercial Judges to hear commercial disputes in the interest of speed of resolution and competence. Disbarment from holding commercial Directorships will be removed from the Civil Service to such Tribunals. DEFENCE – THE ONLY LEGITIMATE ROLE OF THE STATE The Libertarian Party follows the Jeffersonian line of ‘Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.’ Following the Crimean War disaster in 1856, the British Army was overhauled by Edward Cardwell Secretary of State for War in 1868, determined on a programme of reform to overcome the incompetence and maladministration of our armed forces. At a time when we have more admirals than ships and aircraft carriers with no supply of aircraft to land on them, together with there being more civil servants working in the MOD than full time soldiers there is a requirement for a ‘Cardwell 2’. Our aim is to ensure a strong, independent, sovereign nation. This requires a well funded, trained and equipped professional Armed Forces (both full time and Reservist), geared for the defence of our nation and shipping, a policy to be called Armed Neutrality. National Defence is one of the few legitimate reasons for the State to exist. This is different to mounting wars in support of other nations and invading other sovereign nations on the command of the Prime Minster exercising the Royal Prerogative. – Our Armed Forces need to be able to make an enemy think twice, so must have the ability to project force rapidly, globally and flexibly in focused ways, e.g. submarines, amphibious assault, Marines and Special Forces. – To protect supply lines and commercial shipping and fisheries from piracy and other interference will require a suitably sized fleet of corvettes, frigates and associated support craft. – Reformation of Volunteer Yeomanry on a county basis for 18 to 25 year olds wishing to enlist as part time soldiers with no requirement to serve overseas and to be paid. This based on the Swiss Militia system. – Maintain membership of NATO while in the National Interest. – Maintain strong ties with non-aggressive Commonwealth countries. – Any nuclear deterrent to be made truly independent, retained, maintained and eventually replaced in the foreseeable future. – The establishment of a separate military pension over and above the State pension for those that have served in the armed forces. – The establishment of separate military hospitals for those servicemen and ex-servicemen and their families. – The establishment of a living wage for the armed forces. – A programme of demolition of old housing and building of modern accommodation using the disposal of MOD assets. This is to establish real substance to the ‘Military Covenant’ which should be on the Statute Book. Military Pensions by the State should be seen not as entitlements but as rewards for actual service, and to benefit dependants of those killed on active service. IMMIGRATION Our immigration policy will be points based whilst the State provided Welfare System exists. The core tenet is that there should be free movement of peoples. Anybody arriving in the country should have no expectation of being supported by the State, subsidised housing or any benefits of any kind. The state will not issue any National Insurance (NI) numbers to anybody not born in this country, or has made not less than five years contribution in payments to an NI approved scheme. Anybody granted a residency permit will be obliged to demonstrate that they have adequate medical insurance. In parallel, we will establish bilateral agreements with countries to enable free flows of people. Longer term, and in conjunction with the shrinking of our unsustainable current Welfare System, we are committed to pursuing an open borders policy towards those who would wish to come to the United Kingdom in order to contribute to our economy and share our values. Totally free movement of people into the UK is not practical whilst we have a large welfare state and other countries are themselves not broadly Libertarian in nature. A free flow notwithstanding, any Libertarian government will reserve the right to eject or refuse entry to foreign nationals convicted in a court of law as part of the Government’s prime role in protecting the population and maintaining Rule of Law. The UK shall have full control over its immigration policy, with any right of final appeal remaining within the UK jurisdiction. Asylum Seekers must present at a UK border or at the British Embassy of a neighbouring country to their own, otherwise their claim shall not be accepted. Those refusing to declare originating country and accept that the failure of their application will result in their return shall be denied entry, and any right to seek asylum will be refused outright without appeal. Asylum seekers to be held ‘air side’ while their case is heard as swiftly as possible, meaning weeks, not months or years. This shall not apply to children under the age of 15. End automatic access to education and resources for any child who presents itself to the authorities, i.e. vouchers will not be available. We believe any concept of a mass ‘amnesty’, actual or de facto forgiveness for illegal immigration undermines the Rule of Law and as such will not be entertained. The policies above are strict but are drawn up in regard to those who approach the process lawfully and follow the rules, not those who try and bend the rules or bootstrap their way in. Acceptance into the armed forces will be dealt with by the Ministry of Defence. The Libertarian Party fully supports the CANZUK proposal, for a free trade zone including Canada, Australia, New Zealand and United Kingdom having shared legal and cultural heritage. THE RULE OF LAW Freedoms won for us by the blood of our ancestors have been seriously eroded over the decades, and this erosion is gaining speed and must be halted and reversed. It is a core responsibility of the State to enable the citizens to go safely about their lawful business without let or hindrance. A central tenet of Libertarianism is that we are all equal before the Law from the mightiest to the poorest. This is the Rule of Law. The failure to hold former Prime Minister Tony Blair to account before a Court of Law undermines Law and accountability. We have car insurance, we have life assurance, yet so few of us carry Legal insurance. Going to Law to protect an interest or to defend yourself is frustrating and seriously injurious to your wealth. The Libertarian Party will advocate an insurance scheme to balance out the individual against the State or the wealthy abusing the legal system. County prosecutors elected at the same time as MPs will defend the individual or prosecute the powerful and the State on behalf of the individual, paid for by this insurance scheme. Unenforceable Law is bad Law, the Libertarian Party will advocate that after thirty years each Law on the statute book is reviewed and has a sunset on its provisions. Law that is clearly not understood by the Layman is bad law. It should not need a thousand pages of Civil Procedure Rules to enable any citizen to obtain both Justice and redress. The Libertarian Party wants less Law and regulation, replacing it with enforceable Laws. This is on the basis that which is not proscribed is free to do, rather than the State giving freedom or licence to carry out an activity. The Libertarian Party will reaffirm the Nine Peelian Principles: 1. The basic mission for which the police exist is to prevent crime and disorder. 2. The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon the public approval of police actions. 3. Police must secure the willing cooperation of the public in voluntary observation of the Law. 4. The degree of cooperation of the public that can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force. 5. Police seek and preserve public favour not by catering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolute impartial service to the law. 6. Police use physical force to the extent necessary to secure observance of the law or to restore order only when the exercise of persuasion, advice, and warning is found to be insufficient. 7. Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full time attention to duties which are incumbent upon every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence. 8. Police should always direct their action strictly towards their functions, and never appear to usurp the powers of the judiciary. 9. The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it. Police Chief Constables to be locally elected, and given a greater amount of autonomy. Drastically simplify and reform Police/CPS targets, now the remit of the Chief Constable, and to remove the desire to prosecute innocent parties. A reduction in paperwork to enable more beat officers to remain on patrol for as long as possible. We will undertake a review of the Police Community Support Officers (PCSO) concept, with the potential to recruit those capable in to the main police force, and to disband the remainder. Limit retention of DNA only in the event of a conviction, and to discard after that conviction is spent. Futhermore: – Disorder to be handled via the courts, not on-the-spot fines, which we believe are unconstitutional as laid out in the 1689 Bill of Rights. – Repeal inhibitions to ‘right to lawful assembly’. – Wiretap evidence to be permitted as evidence in court cases if obtained with a warrant. – Undertake a review to consider returning juries to all criminal trials. – Immediate repeal of Control Orders. – Implement a maximum period for detention without charge of 48 hours; arrests should be evidenced based, not fishing expeditions. – Decriminalisation of all sexual activity related to consenting adults. Roll back the right of government agents to enter property without a warrant issued by a judge. Prisons We will ensure that sufficient prison places are available to make capacity not a factor in detention, bail or sentencing decisions. Make prison harsher for uncooperative inmates as necessary, while rewarding cooperation. End the practice of using regular prisons for the incarceration of the mentally ill. Life to mean life. An end to early release of the violent or abusive. No consideration for age or gender should influence sentencing, especially with access orders for children. We will undertake a review to examine the options available for the provision of training and educational facilities within prisons, and also investigate the possibility of prisoners being able to perform paid work whilst incarcerated should they wish. Ensure first time remand prisoners are kept separate from other inmates. Capital Punishment The Libertarian Party is unequivocally opposed to the death penalty by the State. Torture The Libertarian Party believes that the use of torture is against the Rule of Law. Family Courts The Libertarian Party would end the ‘secret Court system’ that is open to much abuse. The party fully supports joint parenting orders. The Court System The Libertarian Party would abolish the Crown Prosecution Service. Elected Magistrates would be the basis of a decision to prosecute. The Party would hold that the Justices of the Peace system was always far more responsive to local crime. Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) The Libertarian Party would abolish this intrusive Act. THE WELFARE STATE The welfare state was promoted on the false premise that the State could look after the individual from ‘Cradle to Grave’, a phrase that is no longer heard. This undertaking was in return for oppressive levels of taxation. This so called ‘social contract’ has been breached repeatedly by the State and the Welfare State has become a by word for social conditioning and has unleashed an army of bureaucrats on the population. All these changes will be phased in over a twenty year period. All accident and emergency services will remain free at the point of delivery. THE NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE As an organisation, the NHS has obscured its failings through a political ‘sacred cow’ status. This cannot continue as it will eventually lead to financial collapse. It is our proposal as an interim measure that National Insurance becomes a true insurance entity for health provision, not a Ponzi scheme. National Insurance contributions will be paid to ‘not for profit’ organisations whose board members are elected and are disconnected from politicians much as the Bank of England is at present. The holding of a NI membership means the patient will receive appropriate treatment from whatever source including overseas treatment and this will be paid for by the National Insurance Board. Should you elect to take out your own medical insurance you will be entitled to opt out of the National Insurance Scheme. Employers can offer medical insurance as part of an employee’s contract. This will not be a taxable benefit. The National Insurance Board will not own or operate any hospital, but will purchase services from clean safe hospitals from whatever quarter on the basis of ‘patients before public privilege’. The National Health Boards shall consist of an English Board, Scottish Board, Ulster Board and Welsh Board. They shall be fully independent of regional government interference. Should each board wish to increase the rates they wish to take, this shall be put to the opted in members of the scheme to be agreed by a referendum. Elective cosmetic procedures will not be funded by National Insurance boards. Non Residents arriving at their port of entry show that they have adequate Health Insurance for the length of their stay. This will be reflected in the cost of a visa. The central premise should be that National Insurance should reflect the true cost of the service provided on an annual basis. GP services will also be paid for by the National Insurance Board, each GP practice having to demonstrate that it can provide 24 hour coverage on a local basis to alleviate A&E services. Medical incompetence should be referred to a no fault compensation scheme so those deaths and injuries can be compensated within months not decades. Emergency Services The RNLI has existed since 1824, was granted charitable status in 1860 and is a registered Charity. The Air Ambulance charities are continuing this honourable tradition of voluntarism. We propose that any individual or business that contributes to such charities should be able to set these contributions against taxation. Thus promoting localism and the reduction of bureaucracy. We also propose this concept be extended to volunteer fire services and ambulance services, together with a volunteer civil defence charity. Much of the 2014 response to the flooding in Somerset was made by local volunteers not the state or the military. 18 to 24 year olds who volunteer for these services for three years will be granted a sponsored University or further education course. Medical Training We propose that anybody undertaking any professional medical qualification or nursing qualification in United Kingdom should not be required to pay tuition fees on the basis that they contract to work within the United Kingdom for a period of five years or volunteer to work in a developing country for two years. It is iniquitous that the current NHS relies on doctors from developing countries to make up for the training gap. Any company, charity, corporation or individual who sponsors medical trainees shall be exempt from taxation to the level of the sponsorship. Drugs Policy The Libertarian Party advocates decriminalisation of drugs following the Portuguese model, and treated users as addicts and a public health issue not a criminal one. The ‘War on Drugs’ has been lost. We should accept that this is the case. THE ECONOMY The Libertarian Party is committed to: – Abolishing Personal Income Tax – Abolishing Inheritance Tax and Capital Gains Tax – Lowering Corporation Tax to 10% – Ending the budget deficit and reducing the National Debt – People and organisations trading freely, honestly and voluntarily Our short-term goal will be to reduce and simplify taxation and shift it towards consumption rather than income, to increase transparency and accountability. Begin repayment of the National Debt and to reduce the payment of unsustainable monthly interest payments. Our long term goal is to have a vibrant, transparent, open, honest, low-tax, sustainable and true market economy, in which the Pound Sterling value is preserved and little or no National Debt exists. We understand that there is a risk to everybody’s wealth should the State decide to emulate Cyprus and seize a percentage of all wealth. Therefore the choices are further reduction in spending or a tax for a period of five years to reduce the debt. If the latter course is adopted it will be applied on the same basis as the German Reunification Tax, and we would propose to call this after a former Prime Minister; ‘The Gordon Brown Tax’. This would be written into a Swiss style constitution that forbids the State on our behalf to overspend. The State has a responsibility to not destabilise the economy nor create government debt, which is both a tax on the existing population and a mortgage on our children’s future. Free Markets Libertarians believe passionately in free markets. And when we say ‘free markets’ we mean exactly that – people and organisations trading freely, honestly and voluntarily, for the benefit of all. Some lobby groups use the term ‘free markets’ to mean the economic rule over us by faceless corporations. Such corporatism (sometimes called political capitalism) is opposed by Libertarians, and many of our policy proposals are squarely aimed at tackling this abuse by monopolies, cartels and regulation. Attempts to reform our economic system would flounder if we ignore one of the major underlying structural issues; the question of how our money supply is created. Income and Corporation Taxes The Libertarian Party will introduce a simplified tax system, easy for everybody to understand. Personal Income Tax to be abolished. Initially the poorest will be taken out of income tax with a ‘21,000 personal allowance, and a flat rate above that. Corporation Tax lowered to 10% to encourage business and commerce to be based in the UK. The Party is committed to investigate the viability of a 5 year exemption from Corporation Tax for start-ups. Inheritance Tax and Capital Gains Tax abolished in first Libertarian parliamentary term. Local Taxation Areas As the Libertarian Party advocates a Swiss style devolution, the Party would not have a standard tax rate across the country. Each Region or Canton to set its own rate. Low or differential Tax in different areas would create competition for business to move, locate or set up in a low tax area. Local Banking Groups The Libertarian Party advocates removing the current support to The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and ensure that private institutions are not bailed out in future. Then the free market will ensure that too big to fail is too big to exist. ‘The Spending Plan’ The Libertarian Party endorses ‘The Spending Plan’ produced by the Tax Payers Alliance as attempting to bring some honesty back into Elections where the moon is promised and could never be delivered. EDUCATION The Libertarian Party advocates the denationalisation and secularisation of education to end this 150 year battle over indoctrination and put power back where it belongs, with the parents. As an interim measure each child would receive an educational voucher which the parents can use at a school of their choice, and top up should they so wish. This would ensure that only worthy schools with high standards would prosper. The Libertarian Party would ensure that educational trusts that gave scholarships, their donors could set that off against corporation and personal tax. The Labour project of fifty per cent of young people going to University was fanciful nonsense. We need technical educational establishments to train young people in transportable skills. Again donors to such high standard establishments would set off their donations against tax. Tertiary education has to be paid for; many universities now rely on foreign fees to pay their way. Others are just finishing schools. The key to education is in the arts to have superlative standards to gain entry. In technical and language universities proven ability is the key to access. Teachers should not be banded, but paid on talent. Poor quality teachers and lecturers will be removed from their posts, equally there will be no barrier to entry into the profession from business and the armed services. Post Military service of five years or more service personnel will receive an education voucher for any three year course at tertiary level. The Libertarian Party holds that the Education of Children is the responsibility of the parents not the State, therefore the power to fine parents for taking children on holiday will be immediately withdrawn. Both Parents and Grandparents are equally influential in the education and values of their children. VANITY PROJECTS AND PUBLIC WORKS The Libertarian Party would immediately terminate the following: High Speed Two (HS2) There is no economic case for this project. Restoration of the Palace of Westminster This project will take decades, it will overrun by millions of pounds due to so many unknown factors. The building is unfit for purpose. A new Federal Parliament should be built using the best designs submitted in competition for a much smaller Parliament. Hinckley Point This part Chinese financed, French run project will be cancelled in favour of smaller British built nuclear plants, and funding directed into proven technology such as tidal barrage schemes. As a rule, if the private sector will not fund a project without subsidy there is always a question mark over its viability. FOREIGN AID The Libertarian Party would end this abusive and corrupt system of patronage in favour of more trade with developing countries. +++++ The Libertarian Party UK, BM LPUK, London, WC1N 3XX Tel: 0208 088 8121 Registered with the Electoral Commission RP 2517848 (GB)

Last updated on .From the section Football FA Cup fourth-round draw Date: Monday, 9 January Time: 19:00 GMT Coverage: Live on BBC Two, BBC Radio 5 live & BBC Sport website Plymouth's third-round replay with Liverpool will help Argyle earn more than £1m from the FA Cup, said the League Two club's chairman James Brent. The Pilgrims put on a dogged defensive display against a much-changed Liverpool side to draw 0-0 at Anfield and set up a replay at Home Park. Argyle have already had two televised ties, with a third likely, as well as their share of Sunday's 52,692 gate. "It's approximately 20% of our turnover," Brent told the BBC. Argyle went into administration in March 2011 and narrowly avoided relegation from the Football League in 2012. Plymouth is the largest city in England never to have had a top-flight side, and with a large group of supporters Brent believes tickets for the replay will be in high demand. He added: "We took 35,000 to Wembley [for last season's League Two play-off final] and we only have about 16,000 tickets to sell. "I personally think it's a great competition. It gives you the ability to pit your team against teams at a higher level and it gives you the ability to market your brand more widely. "The Liverpool-Plymouth match was televised in the United States, China, India - it's a great opportunity for a club of our size to promote itself around the world." Adams defends defensive plan Plymouth manager Derek Adams defended his side's tactics at Anfield, against what was the youngest Liverpool side ever. Their line-up had an average of of 21 years and 296 days. Liverpool's heatmap (left) may show their dominance of the ball compared with Plymouth's (right) - but the match ended goalless The League Two side had just 23% possession in the game and did not trouble Liverpool goalkeeper Loris Karius. "They've been very defensive in their play, but that was the game plan. It was to give Liverpool the ball and stop their good players causing us damage," Adams told BBC Radio Devon. "It was important that we didn't come out and pressurise Liverpool because top players want you to do that and we've probably executed it really well." Miller injury blow Gary Miller moved to Plymouth Argyle in the summer from Partick Thistle The only downside to the day for Argyle was full-back Gary Miller being carried off on a stretcher after injuring his ankle. Adams believes the problem could be serious, potentially ruling the 29-year-old Scot out for the rest of the season. "It looks like either he's got a broken ankle or ankle ligament damage," said Adams. "It is disappointing for Gary, but we'll wait and see what happens over the next day or so."

Molten chocolate cake, chocolate fondant cake, lava cake…. Many attractive names for one succulent addictive cake that melts your heart with it. If you are planning for a romantic dessert, this is a heavenly one with its divine melting texture. You will need: (recipe yields 7-8 ramekins) 200g dark chocolate cut in small pieces 4 large eggs 10 tbsp granulated sugar 8 tbsp softened butter 6 tbsp flour 2 tbsp creme fraiche Melt the chocolate then add the butter. Whisk eggs with sugar, and add it slowly to the chocolate butter. Add the flour and finally the creme fraiche. Lightly coat the ramekins with butter, then dust with granulated sugar. Distribute the batter evenly in the coated ramekins. Place in the fridge for 4-5 hours. Take it out to bake it for 20 minutes in a 300°C oven. Take out from oven and allow it to cool for 5 minutes before serving. Use a sharp knife to scrape along the edge of the cake before inverting onto a plate. Dust with powdered sugar and garnish with strawberries. Top it with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and let the chocolate mania start! If you like this post give it many likes and shares to spread the joy. Don’t forget to like marmite et ponpon facebook page and follow on twitter. More interesting posts are yet to come.

jON3.0 wrote: I am beyond thrilled to be the voices of Shockwave AND Soundwave in the Bumblebee movie. It’s been a childhood dream of mine to voice a Transformer(s) in an animated series and/or movie since I was 5 years old. You may already know that I voice Optimus Prime for various Hasbro things if Peter Cullen is busy, doesn’t want to do it, or for budget reasons. It was a great honor being Optimus for Combiner Wars. Shockwave has always been my favorite character and Soundwave is just barely second and to voice such an iconic moment in the film is insane! My agent submitted my character demo (which features Prime from CW) to Paramount and they hired me to fill in as Optimus Prime for the Bumblebee movie which I was STOKED for! I knew up front that once everything was finalized, they would bring Cullen in. Working with Travis Knight was really cool. He told me if he could talk like Optimus the way I could, he would use that voice all the time. Before you record for a job like this, they always show the scene first. I’m watching the unfinished animation of the opening scene of the movie on this awesome mini-theater in sound stage at Paramount which is totally surreal and I’m seeing the Cybertronian seekers and Shockwave, Soundwave, Ironhide, Arcee and the other classic characters I’ve loved since 1984 . Even as unfinished animation, I was totally blown away. I literally fanboyed on Travis Knight about how amazing it was and how it’s what I’ve always wanted to see in the Transformers movies (he’s a true Transformers fan by the way). I recorded 4 sessions at Paramount, most of them to voice Prime. In the waiting room for different sessions, David Sobolov, Steve Blum, Grey Griffin and I talked shop while I’m trying to keep my cool. Here I am, sitting at the GROWNUP table. Before the fourth session, I received an audition for all the characters in Bumblebee and I had my heart set on booking it. We were asked to pick 4 or 5 but I did them all. I ended up auditioning 3 different times but never found out why. Never heard back from the auditions so I assumed I didn’t book anything, but at least I gave them my best shot. When I booked the last session, I was only booked to fill in for Optimus again, but I was told I would record scratch (temp voiceover) for other characters, so I figured I still had one more shot. That was the same day Steve Blum was there. Someone came out to ask us which characters we’d booked before and of course Steve is like “Yes. Yes. Yes. No. Yes. Yes...” so I’m thinking I don’t have a chance since I’ve only ever actually BOOKED Optimus. I was only given 2 or 3 characters to record. When I got into the session, I was determined to at least try to do the others because some of them were my favorites. After I asked Mr. Knight if he wouldn’t mind if I tried the other characters, he was kind enough to allow me to record them. After I recorded a few, he said “Dude! You’re blowing my mind here! You sound just like them!” Greatest compliment ever. They had a montage of clips from the G1 cartoon queued up before we recorded each one to make sure they were as accurate to the cartoon as possible which is so cool to see up on a big screen with great sound. We had a fan chat about how Soundwave’s vocoder effect was originally done (he had me record two versions of the voice in two different pitches to better recreate that effect). I also told him about Corey Burton’s David Warner impression was how he came up with the original Shockwave voice. By the end of the job, I had recorded Ratchet, Ironhide, Wheeljack, Soundwave and Shockwave, with no idea whether or not anything would end up in the final movie, but I was confident that I had gave it my all. A couple of months ago, my two youngest kids and I got to see an early version of the film and all the voices I had done, INCLUDING Optimus Prime, were in that version of the movie which blew my kids’ minds. It was definitely one of the most memorable moments of my entire life. We still didn’t know if that meant any of the voices I did were in the final film or not, but I took it as a good sign. My agent finally gave me the great news at the end of October. I had joked with Travis Knight that if there were any other voices they needed at all, whatever they wanted, I had to get in the movie somehow and he chuckled, “Don’t worry, you will.” At the time, I took it as “one day it will happen.” It really did and I couldn’t be happier. My goal has never been to voice Optimus Prime one day, even though it was Peter Cullen’s Optimus Prime voice that inspired me to become a voice actor. My goal was always to work with Peter Cullen on a Transformers project and I finally crossed that off my list, even though I never thought it could possibly happen. It was an incredible experience and the movie is really great. It’s got the G1 look & action I’ve always wanted to see with the charm, humor & heart of Iron Giant. My name is up there on the big screen between 2 of my favorite voice actor heroes, Steve Blum & Grey Griffin. I am eternally grateful to my agent, Paramount, the other actors & Travis Knight for their kindness and the opportunity to make a lifelong dream become reality.

Natalie Nougayrède, in her assertion that we have no alternative but to rely on “US leadership if a rules-based global order is to survive” (America must lead the free world – the alternative is chaos, 28 January), betrays an outdated cold war world mentality that excuses US barbarity in the name of some fictional “free world”. In his defence of that “free world”, Barack Obama killed and maimed people on an epic scale. A Council on Foreign Relations survey reported that in 2016, the US military dropped 26,171 bombs on some of the poorest nations on earth. Drone strikes were responsible for killing over 4,500 people, many of them women and children attending family gatherings or merely going about their business. Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq and Pakistan were all subject to American aggression. In Libya, Nato forces led by Obama and Hillary Clinton struck on 9,700 occasions, after which the Red Cross identified mass graves containing the bodies of children killed by air raids on civilian targets. Of course, there is nothing new about any of this: in its role as the world’s self-appointed policeman, the US has been invading countries and overthrowing governments for decades. The peace and security of the west and, indeed, the world at large, will be secured by dialogue, cooperation and mutual assistance, not by simplistic propaganda that should have disappeared after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Bert Schouwenburg International officer, GMB union • Natalie Nougayrède is wrong. There is always an alternative, but we need to discuss our options widely. Tina (there is no alternative) suits narrow, binary thinkers, who close down debate before it can start. The military-industrial complex has always needed an enemy to justify its existence, and Donald Trump will always be on the side of businessmen. Now he’s friends with Vladimir Putin, he won’t stand up for Ukraine or the Baltic states. Nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers won’t defeat Isis, so Iran is the main option to be the next military threat. As the article says, Europe thinks there is the possibility of a negotiated settlement. Trump sees threats and bullying as the only solution. Maybe we should redefine Tina: Thinking (or talking) is the new alternative. Michael Peel Axbridge, Somerset • Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com • Read more Guardian letters – click here to visit gu.com/letters

The leftist academics and LGBT lobby continue to insist that there are hundreds of genders and that biology, nature and sex are not real, rather they’re “social constructs.” Turns out, NONE of that is true. CNS News reports: Dr. Paul McHugh and Lawrence Mayer, psychiatric experts, argue that “there is a large gap between the certainty with which beliefs about [sexual orientation and gender identity] are held…and what a sober assessment of the science reveals.” Their report identifies major areas where scientific findings don’t support the triumphal rhetoric of activists. First, the idea that “gay” people are “born that way,” genetically pre-programmed to be attracted to their own sex, lacks evidence. “Genes,” write the authors, “constitute only one of the many key influences on behavior in addition to environmental influences, personal choices, and interpersonal experiences.” So-called “sexual orientation” is “fluid,” not “fixed” and often changes throughout a person’s life. In fact, some studies found that eighty percent of males who reported homosexual or bisexual feelings as children later identified exclusively as heterosexual. POLL: Do You Think Trump Should Appoint A New Supreme Court Justice? Yes No Just show the results... Enter your email to see the results... Vote Completing this poll entitles you to Pro Trump News updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime with a single click. Here's our Privacy Policy. Their report also tackles the transgender question, comparing actual research to the lofty claims of activists. Once again, there’s a yawning chasm. Only a tiny minority of children who experience gender dysphoria continue to identify as transgender when they’re adults. McHugh and Mayer insist that subjecting children to hormone therapy or to so-called “sex reassignment” surgery is an act of sheer ideology, not medicine or compassion. And, they add, adults who undergo sex-change operations (which the Obama Administration is pressuring health insurers to cover) are still—get this—19times more likely to commit suicide than the rest of the population. Well that sure squashes Gloria Steinem and the feminist movement’s talking points. Nice try! Image: Source Completing this poll entitles you to Pro Trump News updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime with a single click. Here's our Privacy Policy.

GOP Rep Writes Rider for Spending Bill that Would End Mueller Probe 'This is Crazy - It's Scary': TX Woman Talks Leaving Her Home as Harvey Floods Approach Two parents of children who were taught a kindergarten lesson on transgender people spoke out to Martha MacCallum after their kids told them about the curriculum. The parents asked that their identities remain anonymous in fear of retribution by folks in the community who disagree with them. The lesson was reportedly taught at a California charter school because a boy in the class was transitioning to become a girl. One parent said the lesson then scared her daughter while she was bathing. The parent said the girl saw her wet hair slicked back in her reflection and "started shaking and crying" because she thought she had turned into a boy. "This is what really troubled me," the mother said. "This lesson that was taught to my child was not taught about acceptance or love." Another parent said that their child was embarrassed in front of other schoolmates after accidentally referring to the transgender student by their former name. The school disputed that the child was formally reprimanded in any way, but the mother said her child was pulled out of class after the playground incident. The parent said her child "said hi to the name they had gone to school together - that he had one name for kindergarten then [was] reintroduced at the end of the school year [by her] girl's name," "I think any parent would want right to know what their children are learning in school," she said. Watch the interview above. Trump Blasts Arpaio Critics: Dems Pardoned Marc Rich, Susan Rosenberg, Chelsea Manning Stephen King 'Bans' Trump from Seeing His New Horror Flick

Vista aérea de una plataforma petrolera de la compañía PEMEX en el Golfo de México. (Crédito: OMAR TORRES/AFP/Getty Images/ Imagen de archivo) (CNN) — El incendio que se presentó en la mañana de este jueves en una plataforma de petróleo al sur de la costa de la ciudad de Grand Isle, en el Golfo de México, fue extinguido, según informó la Guardia Costera de Estados Unidos. El incendio que se presentó en la plataforma operada por la compañía Renaissance Offshore LLC empezó temprano esta mañana. Cuatro personas estaban a bordo de la plataforma cuando comenzó el incendio y fueron rescatados del agua según las autoridades.

The Tampa Bay Lightning are once again at the top of our NHL power rankings. The Nashville Predators move up one slot and sit at No. 2. The Washington Capitals jumped into the top three this week, moving up from No. 9. The Vegas Golden Knights move back into the top five and come in a No. 4. The St. Louis Blues fall back a slot to No. 5. The bottom three remain in the same order as last week – Arizona Coyotes in last followed by the Buffalo Sabres and Ottawa Senators. The Florida Panthers slip a spot to No. 28, and the Vancouver Canucks round out the bottom five. We’ve taken power rankings from eight media outlets this week. To get our consensus NHL Power Rankings point totals, we awarded the top team 31 points, the second team 30 points, third team 29 points, etc. ** Keep in mind the dates the rankings were posted, and in some cases, they may have been submitted to their editors the day before it was published. Different outlets use different factors in determining their rankings. **

This week marks a major milestone at ELIX! We’ve just enabled Explore, a feature allowing you to browse and filter products and campaigns on ELIX. Keep reading to learn all the details! Sign Up If you’re just finding out about ELIX, welcome! Create an account so can Explore products, campaigns and submit your own. Join ELIX here or click the Create Project button below: Explore Once you’ve signed up, it’s time to start exploring products and campaigns. Use the “Explore” item in the upper left menu to filter products and campaigns based on their Categories. Click here to start exploring projects on ELIX. Once you make a selection, you’ll see all of the campaigns or products that match the selected criteria. Here’s a demo video showing the Explore menu in action: Design Jane and Rosello have been working hard to create compelling, sleek designs for ELIX. As you may have read in our previous updates, they’ve finished designing detail views for campaigns. They’ve further refined these designs to include comments, updates, rewards, and project videos: Create your first product or campaign in just a few minutes using the online ELIX web portal here. You can also click on the image below to get started: If you participated in our recent giveaway, we’ve now finalized the list and will be sending out prizes to the winners over the next week! That’s all for this week! Join ELIX here to browse products and campaigns.

Rethinking her loss in the presidential race as a mere “setback” after her “long walks in the woods” and lots of sleep, Hillary Clinton bravely stated recently that she was ready to “get back up and keep going.” But while speaking of “girl power” in the U.S. in the 21st century last Tuesday, Clinton likely didn’t suspect she was fighting a more powerful obstacle: a curse by the lady-shaman of Siberia, with whom she had the misfortune of crossing paths about 20 years ago. A fuzzy photograph of Clinton by the mummy of the Princess of Ukok is one of the most revered exhibits at the City Museum of Novosibirsk, in the capital of Siberia. “Will her acquaintance with the Princess bestow a curse on Hillary tonight?” asked one headline on election day. (“The Princess did not like Clinton—and Clinton lost!” a victorious reader remarked the next day, in the comments section beneath the article.) The remains of the immaculately dressed 20-something ‘princess,’ preserved for several millennia in the Siberian permafrost—a natural freezer—were discovered in 1993 by Novosibirsk scientist Natalia Polosmak during an archaeological expedition, The Siberian Times reported in 2012. Six saddled and bridled horses, her spiritual escort to the next world, were buried around her—a symbol of her evident status as a healer or a holy woman. A meal of sheep and horse meat was placed by her side, as well as ornaments of felt, wood, bronze and gold—and a small container of cannabis. This discovery, in the middle of the Ukok Plateau—the holiest place of the native people of the Altai Mountains, direct relatives of Native Americans—has been called one of the most important archaeological moments of the modern era. Even today, only a chopper can deliver one to this unreachable place. Both of the ancient girl’s arms—from shoulders to wrists—were covered with exquisite, modern tattoos. “It is a phenomenal level of tattoo art. Incredible,” Dr. Polosmak, who found the mummy, said. The tattoos on the left shoulder of the ‘princess’ show a fantastical mythological animal: a deer with a griffon’s beak and a Capricorn’s antlers. Her head was completely shaven and she wore a horse hair wig. She died over 2,500 years ago. “She was called ‘Princess’ by the media. We just call her ‘Devochka,’ meaning ‘Girl,'” explained Irina Salnikova, head of the Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography. Her brain and internal organs had been removed, so it was not possible to determine the cause of death. The Princess of Ukok was not related to any of the Asian races, scientists are convinced—nor was she related to the present day inhabitants of Altai. She had a European appearance and blond hair before shaving her head. Local shamans declared that the mummy belonged to the Altai Princess Ochi-Bala or White Lady of Ak-Kadyn—the progenitor of the Altai people, the keeper of peace, who stood guard, preventing evil from penetrating our world. Leave her in peace, rebury her in the same spot, or there would be dire consequences—her ire and curse, for anybody who would cross her path—the shamans warned. From day one, many Altai locals were alarmed by the removal of the ancient girl’s remains from the sacred burial mounds—known as kurgans—regardless of the value to science of the discovery. In a land where the sway of shamans still holds, they believed that the princess’ removal would immediately lead to consequences. Locals insisted the excavation disrupted her protective mission and the revenge she would inflict would reach globally. Archaeologists confirmed that as soon as the mummy was found, there was thunder—even there wasn’t a cloud in the sky above. When the remains were removed, an earthquake began. Some say the “curse of the mummy” caused the crash of a chopper carrying her remains out of Altai. Then, in Novosibirsk, her body—preserved so well for so long—suddenly began to decompose. The mummy had been stored in a freezer used to preserve cheese and fungi began growing on the flesh, it was claimed. The princess’ remains had to be taken to Moscow and to be treated by the same scientists who took such great care of the body of Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Soviet state. After the body was brought to Novosibirsk (some 400 miles from the burial site), the constitutional crisis of 1993 began in Moscow. Ordered by Russian President Yeltsin, Russian tanks shelled Russian Parliament. Soon after, economic disaster followed. Even the war in Chechnya that began in 1995 was blamed on the Princess of Ukok. Back in Altai, many ills had been explained by the princess’s removal: forest fires, high winds, illness, suicides and an upsurge in earthquakes in the region, The Siberian Times reported. In November 1997, first lady Hillary Clinton visited Russia during her solo Human Rights Tour. One of her stops was in the city of Novosibirsk. On November 16, while on her trip, Clinton was lured into the most dangerous trap: to meet face-to-face with the scientific sensation, the Princess of Ukok. At the History and Archeology Institute of Novosibirsk Akademgorodok, in the company of archeologists Vyacheslav Molodin and Natalia Polosmak, the first lady observed the remains of the Princess—on exhibit just for Clinton herself. Was it a trap deliberately set by the Russian Secret Service? Clinton was greeted by the local governor, shared vodka and tea with him, and then paid a visit to a “traditional Siberian family”—the Vdovins. Father Vdovin was an engineer and mother Vdovin was an English teacher at the local school, NGS News reported. Clinton’s life, as well as the lives of those she met while there, dramatically changed soon after. The governor lost his post two years later and died, while the Vdovin family split and moved to Canada. In January, 1998, exactly two month after Clinton’s visit to the mummy of the Siberian Princess of Ukok, the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke and the course of U.S. history was changed forever. And, most importantly, Hillary Clinton’s goals became ever more elusive—no matter how hard she worked to reach them.

A team of UK paleontologists has unearthed three 380-million-year-old fossil forests in Svalbard, an archipelago administered by Norway and located far north of continental Europe in the Arctic Ocean. The fossil forests in Svalbard were formed mainly of lycopod trees, better known for growing millions of years later in coal swamps that eventually turned into coal deposits. The forests grew near the equator during the Late Devonian, according to the paleontologists – Dr Chris Berry of Cardiff University and Prof. John Marshall of the University of Southampton. They were extremely dense, with very small gaps around between each of the trees, which probably reached roughly 13 feet (4 m) high. “In-situ trees are represented by internal casts of arborescent lycopsids with cormose bases and small ribbon-like roots occurring in dense stands spaced 8 inches (20 cm) apart, identified as Protolepidodendropsis pulchra,” Dr Berry and Prof. Marshall wrote in a paper published recently in the journal Geology. “These fossil forests shows us what the vegetation and landscape were like on the equator 380 million years ago, as the first trees were beginning to appear on the Earth,” Dr Berry said. “The Middle to early Late Devonian transition from diminutive plants to the first forests is a key episode in terrestrialization,” the scientists explained. “The two major plant groups currently recognized in such transitional forests are pseudosporochnaleans (small to medium trees showing some morphological similarity to living tree ferns and palms) and archaeopteridaleans (trees with woody trunks and leafy branches probably related to living conifers).” “We report a new type of transitional in-situ Devonian forest based on lycopsid fossils from the Plantekløfta Formation in Munindalen, Svalbard.” The newly discovered forests could provide an insight into the cause of a 15-fold reduction in levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere around that time. “During the Devonian period, it is widely believed that there was a huge drop in the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, from 15 times the present amount to something approaching current levels,” Dr Berry said. “The evolution of tree-sized vegetation is the most likely cause of this dramatic drop in carbon dioxide because the plants were absorbing carbon dioxide through photosynthesis to build their tissues, and also through the process of forming soils.” _____ Christopher M. Berry & John E.A. Marshall. Lycopsid forests in the early Late Devonian paleoequatorial zone of Svalbard. Geology, vol. 43, no. 12, p. 1043-1046; doi: 10.1130/G37000.1

Attorney General Bill Barr assigned top special prosecutor John Durham to investigate the origins of the Russia probe. John Durham, a US Attorney in Connecticut will examine the origins of Spygate according to a new report by The New York Times, citing two sources familiar with the matter. As Cristina Laila reported, Mr. Durham, who was nominated by President Trump in 2017, has a history of investigating potential wrongdoing among National Security officials, reported the NY Times. TRENDING: OUTRAGEOUS! Ohio State University President Sends Ignorant Text Message to Students Following Breonna Taylor Decision -- And a Crazy-Ass Video! HYSTERIA IS SPREADING– Durham was the prosecutor in charge of investigating the corrupt Boston FBI office and brought officials to justice. Via Techno Fog: https://twitter.com/Techno_Fog/status/1128103200169525248 Durham uncovered evidence the FBI FRAMED innocent men for murder and brought the FBI office to justice.

About the Show The Daily Show with Trevor Noah Trevor Noah and The Daily Show correspondents tackle the biggest stories in news, politics and pop culture.

• From the NY Fed: Empire State Manufacturing Survey: "The Empire State Manufacturing Survey indicates that conditions for New York manufacturers worsened for a fourth consecutive month in September. The general business conditions index inched down one point, to -8.8." This was lower than expectations of a reading of -3.6. • CPI increased 0.4% in August (0.2% core). I'll have more later on the Fed survey and CPI. • The DOL reports: In the week ending September 10, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 428,000, an increase of 11,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 417,000. The 4-week moving average was 419,500, an increase of 4,000 from the previous week's revised average of 415,500. Click on graph for larger image in graph gallery. The following graph shows the 4-week moving average of weekly claims since January 2000 ( longer term graph in graph gallery).The dashed line on the graph is the current 4-week average. The four-week average of weekly unemployment claims increased this week to 419,500.The 4-week average has been increasing recently and this is the highest level since early July.

Says a slow, gradual reconciliation process will be fruitful Even as sections within Sri Lanka criticise the government for its apparently delayed efforts on post-war reconciliation, President Maithripala Sirisena has sought the international community’s support for a “slow and successful” journey. Addressing the 72nd session of the UN General Assembly in New York on Tuesday, Mr. Sirisena said haste would not yield good results and stated that a slow and steady path is the most suitable one to restore religious and communal harmony. “We all have heard that speedy journey is a dangerous journey. Therefore, I believe that you will understand the complex nature of issues that hinder the instant and radical solutions that some impatient groups are asking for,” he said. While critics are frustrated with the government’s pace on reconciliation and accountability, Mr. Sirisena is also facing pressure from his political rivals opposed to such efforts. Allegations of abuse Mr. Sirisena said a huge foreign debt and allegations of rights abuses during war were two main challenges that his government faced. In addition to evolving an economic plan to service the massive outstanding debt, the government is “paying serious attention” to the allegations and is working on solutions as a matter of priority, he told the UNGA. He also urged the international community to support his government’s “moderate but steady path” to find solutions. Mr. Sirisena’s appeal to international actors for more time comes weeks after the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein urged the government to act on its commitment to establish a clear timeline and benchmarks for implementation. In March, the UN Human Rights Council had given Sri Lanka a two-year extension of deadline to fulfil its assurances on post-war reconciliation. While countries, including the U.S., have commended the Sri Lankan government for its efforts so far, human rights organisations remain critical of its pace. “Setting up various reconciliation offices and talking of progress is not the same as implementing the 2015 [Geneva] resolution,” Human Rights Watch observed recently, pointing to “scant progress” on the UN resolution.

We’re on to Wednesday. In the Patriots’ world, that means a new week is kicking into gear — beyond all the work being done behind the scenes to move ahead. There’s a game plan to be installed, and a fresh opponent to study. But first, Bill Belichick will address his team, as he does every Wednesday morning at Gillette Stadium. By 8 o’clock, the players are in their seats in the squad room. It doesn’t take long before their attention is completely fixed on the head coach, who’s up at the podium. It’s at this very point in the week CBS analyst and former NFL quarterback Boomer Esiason says he’d most love to be a fly in the room and tune in. Because this is the day Belichick delivers what many who have played the game consider the most important speech for the week. It’s when Belichick warns his team just how they could lose this week and gets all 53 players working as one and focused on stopping the upcoming opponent. “Belichick has all of these lunatics buying into the unselfish nature of trying to win a football game,” Esiason said. “I’d say four-fifths of the league is dealing with crazy people who have no clue what it means to win and how to be a team.” Like Esiason says, he values that Wednesday morning atmosphere, and the message being sent, because it might be Belichick at his most impactful. “I wish somebody could bottle, not his pregame speech,” Esiason said, “but that Wednesday speech.” Setting the tone What’s the secret? What makes that one stand out above the rest? “Wednesday sets the tone for the week,” said former NFL head coach Herm Edwards. “Every coach is different how they go about it,” Edwards said of the Wednesday talk. “I wasn’t a big script guy. I always had notes on what I was going to say. But it usually came from my gut.” Belichick? He’s not a script guy, either. But he’s a prep guy. By the time he steps to the podium, he has poured over countless hours of film in preparation of this speech. Mostly, he’s trying to find every possible way the upcoming opponent can hurt his team, and how to counter that. He comes in armed with the kind of evidence that would have most lawyers going undefeated in court. Former Patriot Heath Evans said Belichick tirelessly prepares himself, almost literally from the moment one game ends, so he in turn can best prepare the team for the next one on the docket. “The prep time he puts in from wrapping up a Sunday game on Monday afternoon . . . to when he gets in there Wednesday morning, that 48 hours time, or 40 hours time, whatever it is, the amount of tape he’s digested, and amount of study he’s already put in,” said Evans, “by the time he’s up there addressing the team, he really has a great feel of what that (next) team is capable of and what they’re all about.” Case in point, today, Belichick will be pumping up the Rams, who visit the Patriots Sunday, and telling his team all the ways a 4-7 team will tear them apart. He’ll make rookie quarterback Jared Goff, starting just his third game, and his receivers sound like Kurt Warner and “The Greatest Show on Turf.” “He just finds a way to trigger a preparation mindset by showing you everything that team does well,” Evans added. “Now, by the end of the week, you know that team’s flaws, too, or their weaknesses, and how you’re going to attack them. But on Wednesday, he sets the tone for, ‘If you don’t do such and such . . . you’re going to get embarrassed.’ ” Belichick delivers facts, figures, visuals of the points he’s trying to deliver. Sometimes the presentations are as short as 15 minutes, sometimes they can go 45 minutes or longer. “Yeah, and he’s really good at it. He’s the best at making sure you’re well-prepared and know the strengths and weaknesses of your opponent,” said former Patriots safety Rodney Harrison. “He’ll say, ‘Hey guys, this is what we’re dealing with. This is what we need to take away. This is what we need to do in order to win. And all week, we’re going to practice situational football, and put ourselves in situations where we know what’s happening when they do it.’ ” Former Patriots linebacker Jerod Mayo, who was in that Wednesday meeting as recently as last season, says Belichick pulls no punches. “It’s pretty high-level. Bill goes over the last three weeks and how (the upcoming opponent) has won those games, or lost those games and how we can make them play our game,” Mayo said. “He breaks it down, and talks about situations. And then we go over those situations every day after that.” Study starts early Belichick’s message is then reinforced by his assistant coaches in positional meetings before the players head to practice. But there’s a catch. On many teams, players are just beginning to learn about their upcoming opponent on Wednesday morning. On the Patriots, Belichick expects his players to already have begun studying the prep work he and his coaches have made available. “Tuesday’s a day off for players, but it’s not a day off because you have to study and be prepared to answer questions on Wednesday,” said Mayo. “So it’s not brand new stuff.” If Belichick asks questions about the nuances or specific players on the opponent, Patriots players don’t want to be embarrassed. “Yeah, because he’ll ask you everything,” said Mayo. “I mean, you can do what you want on Tuesday, but you should have some type of high-level understanding of the next opponent.” Or catch the ire of the Hoodie for being unprepared. This isn’t quite the norm around the league. “For us, Tuesday is just as much a work day as any day. Personally, being at other places and other teams, that’s not necessarily the case,” said wide receiver Danny Amendola, who played four years with the Rams before joining the Pats. “Knowing the opponent, already knowing the roster, knowing what coverages they play in our (wide receivers) room, that’s what’s required of us. “In other places, you’re getting your body right on Tuesday, then you talk about (the next team) Wednesday,” he went on. “But here, I’m already onto the next team on Tuesday.” Harrison, who played for the Chargers before playing for Belichick, concurred. “That Wednesday speech wouldn’t have had the kind of impact that it does,” said Harrison, “if he wasn’t preparing us Monday and Tuesday, all those days before.” And yet, Belichick —whom Harrison called a “fantastic” orator — still commands the room and gets the message across whether players have done their homework or not. “He just has a great way of communicating his message,” said Harrison. “I don’t care if you’re a rookie, I don’t care if you’re a 10th-year player or been to 10 Pro Bowls . . . you buy into it because you know he knows what he’s talking about.” All about the team Not every head coach gets players to buy in and sacrifice individual goals for the team mission. With the type of money players are now earning, with so much to be gained as individuals who stand out from the pack, the team concept is not always the easiest sell. Belichick, however, is one NFL head coach who has managed, for the most part, to keep the egos checked at the door and aligned toward the common goal during his 17 seasons as head coach of the Patriots. And if a player isn’t going to buy in, he won’t last long. “Bill’s message? If you want to be a superstar, buy into the team,” said Evans, “because if the team is successful, there’s going to be a whole bunch of superstars on this team.” There have been a few uprisings of late in wake of Jamie Collins’ departure via trade to Cleveland. But that still hasn’t changed the message. “Really, just throw your personal stats out the window and focus on what you can do to help win the game,” Amendola said, “rather than be focused on how many balls you catch, how many sacks you can get, or how many tackles. That’s how it is around here.” And every Wednesday morning, the players are reminded of what they need to do as a team so they won’t be embarrassed and so they can win on Sunday. Belichick delivers the roadmap, and by the end of the week the team can be confident in the steps he’s laid out that should make it easier to win. “He’s always on point. There was always a message to be sent that this team could beat you, and you better play your best game. And if you don’t, you lose,” said Evans. “But after he’s done with all the ‘what ifs’ he devises a plan for you to go whup ’em.”

As far back as I can remember, my Uncle David has always shipped me a box of junk on my birthday. I use the word “junk” loosely – the boxes have included everything from a masturbating monkey (not really junk), to a CD of “Timeless Jewish Songs” (Jewish junk), to an expired coupon for a free game of bowling (definitely junk). Basically, anything my Uncle David has hand-picked, hoarded, or considered throwing into the trash ends up in the box. Mostly the last one. The boxes of junk contain about 20-30 items, each with twists, turns and surprises. For example, Uncle David will take a coin from 1974 he found in his desk, write “hey alex” on a post-it note and stick it to the coin, wrap the coin in an inch of tape, place the coin at the bottom of a ring box (Uncle David is a jeweler), cover it with a Preparation H portable wipe (in packaging), close the jewelry box, wrap it in more tape, toss it in the packing box, then repeat. Why do I unwrap everything? There’s always a “real” present hidden somewhere inside the box, like a $20 bill. By the time I find it, I’ve made less than Reagan Era minimum wage. (This brings to mind unpacking Uncle David’s epic box of junk from 2011, when he unloaded all of his AOL 3.0 floppy discs on me. I can only assume this was premeditated, with planning starting in the mid-90s and ending in the late-90s, only to be forgotten about and shipped to me 15 years later.) The other day, a bloated, overpacked box arrives on my doorstep. My birthday is approaching, so I know what it is. I grab the box with both hands, hold it over my head, and run it up to my apartment. Then I tear open the box with the finesse of someone who’s never opened a box before. The first item sets my expectations of what’s to come. “Now Alex, there is no particular order how to open these fine quality b-day gifts but this should be #9.” Here’s where things get weird, if they weren’t already. There are three boxes labeled #9, another labeled #10, another labeled #6, and another labeled with a squiggly “1.” The puzzling, mysterious directions bring one question to mind… Is Uncle David the Zodiac Killer? I don’t know where to start, so I go for the biggest box first. “I was saving this for a special occasion. This is it!!” I tear the wrapping paper off and unveil… …a set of cake knives engraved “Lewis & Beth, 8-27-94.” Thanks, Lewis & Beth. Next, I open the box with something illegible written on it. I tear off the wrapping paper and find… …a burner phone. I can only assume the writing on the box reads, “Alex, if you ever become a drug dealer, use this phone. When you’re done, throw it into the nearest body of water.” Next, I open what Uncle David has carefully wrapped in a plastic grocery bag and labeled “fragile.” Guess what’s inside? I tear away the wrapping paper, more plastic bags, more wrapping paper, and I’m left with… …a collectible Brach’s candy display? It’s time to collect my winnings, so I open the box labeled “$ in this one + life advice.” Here’s what’s inside… The dollar on the right is definitely less valuable than the 20 or so cards of “life advice” on the left. Here are my three favorite cards, the first of which seems like a leftover from the fannypack Uncle David wore to Woodstock. And… And the third, which I like because it’s yelling… Next, I open the box wrapped in leftover Valentine’s Day paper. Inside are business cards (one of which is Uncle David’s), a gourmet spoon, $25, and a money clip. I think it’s obvious which of these items is most valuable. It’s at this point I realize Uncle David is not the Zodiac Killer and that Tedd “cash for trash” Klein probably is. Here are other highlights from this year’s box. A genie lamp. I rubbed it and wished for… …an International Frog Jump coin. Dum-Dum lollipops that I’m guessing are anywhere from 10-40 years old. A display of colored earrings. Uncle David clearly robbed a Claire’s. A set of plastic mustaches, which would be perfect if I were a girl on Instagram. A compass, which I’ve been meaning to buy since reading Into The Wild. A frame for “Tessa” with a picture of Uncle David’s cats, neither of which are named Tessa. Something called “Bulletin Bar II.” I can’t even imagine “Bulletin Bar I.” A Palm Beach license plate frame, perfect for your grandfather’s Chrysler. An 16 inch inflatable globe made with “super tough vinyl.” A class ring from ‘88, the last year class rings were cool. A band-aid in protective casing. A “ho, ho” pin, perfect for fans of the cream-filled cakes or misogyny. And that’s it…or so I thought. The day after I received the box of items above, a second BONUS box arrived with the following: a rocket pen, a gold chess piece, a “kiss me I’m Irish” necklace, a spare Acura key, a silver chain, a CD-ROM business card, two Twizzlers, a box of M&Ms, an American flag dog tag, and… …googly eyes. Uncle David is watching me. Uncle David is watching all of us. Uncle David’s box of birthday junk is the best part of my birthday. The excitement, the randomness, the jokes – it feels the same as it did when I received my first box of junk 20 or so years ago. Birthdays typically make you feel older – Uncle David’s box of junk always makes me feel younger. Thanks, Uncle David. Now take your fucking cake knives back.

Scientists have sequenced the genome of the chimpanzee and found that humans are 96 percent similar to the great ape species. "Darwin wasn't just provocative in saying that we descend from the apes—he didn't go far enough," said Frans de Waal, a primate scientist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. "We are apes in every way, from our long arms and tailless bodies to our habits and temperament." Because chimpanzees are our closest living relatives, the chimp genome is the most useful key to understanding human biology and evolution, next to the human genome itself. The breakthrough will aid scientists in their mission to learn what sets us apart from other animals. By comparing human and chimpanzee genomes, the researchers have identified several sequences of genetic code that differ between human and chimp. These sequences may hold the most promise for determining what creates human-specific traits such as speech. "If people are asking what makes us human, they're not going to find a smoking gun [in this study]," said Evan Eichler, a genome scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle who was part of the research team. "But they're going to find suggestions for where to look." The project was conducted by an international group of scientists called the Chimp Sequencing and Analysis Consortium. Sixty-seven researchers co-authored the study, which is detailed tomorrow in the journal Nature. Genetic Blueprints To map the chimp genome, researchers used DNA from the blood of a male common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) named Clint, who lived at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta. Clint died last year from heart failure at the relatively young age of 24. A comparison of Clint's genetic blueprints with that of the human genome shows that our closest living relatives share 96 percent of our DNA. The number of genetic differences between humans and chimps is ten times smaller than that between mice and rats. Scientists also discovered that some classes of genes are changing unusually quickly in both humans and chimpanzees, as compared with other mammals. These classes include genes involved in the perception of sound, transmission of nerve signals, and the production of sperm. Despite the similarities in human and chimp genomes, the scientists identified some 40 million differences among the three billion DNA molecules, or nucleotides, in each genome. The vast majority of those differences are not biologically significant, but researchers were able to identify a couple thousand differences that are potentially important to the evolution of the human lineage. "The goal is to answer the basic question: What makes us humans?" said Eichler. Eichler and his colleagues found that the human and chimp sequences differ by only 1.2 percent in terms of single-nucleotide changes to the genetic code. But 2.7 percent of the genetic difference between humans and chimps are duplications, in which segments of genetic code are copied many times in the genome. "If genetic code is a book, what we found is that entire pages of the book duplicated in one species but not the other," said Eichler. "This gives us some insight into the genetic diversity that's going on between chimp and human and identifies regions that contain genes that have undergone very rapid genomic changes." Mutations Humans and chimps originate from a common ancestor, and scientists believe they diverged some six million years ago. Given this relatively short time since the split, it's likely that a few important mutations are responsible for the differences between the two species, according to Wen-Hsiung Li, a molecular evolutionist at the University of Chicago in Illinois. "If you look at two species of frogs over 10 million years, you probably won't see a lot of the morphological or behavioral differences that you see between humans and chimps," said Li, who wrote an accompanying commentary on the chimp genome sequencing for Nature. There are several hypotheses that account for the evolution of human traits. Li believes these traits come from changes in the parts of the genome that regulate other gene activity. Scientists agree that many questions remain unanswered but the chimp genome provides important clues to understanding what makes us human.