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A lot of bands have released pretty good debut records, only to follow them up with less-than-spectacular careers. The rule used to be (before the FCC, the recording industry and the radio industry conspired to destroy all music) that you learned what you needed to know about a band with its third album. Given how things worked, you often saw a pattern that looked something like this:
Debut: Band (or solo artist) has been on the road for awhile, writing and building an audience and developing as a creative and performing force. The first record contained the best songs they’d managed to write over a period of a couple (or three or four or five) years. Album is a big success.
The first record contained the best songs they’d managed to write over a period of a couple (or three or four or five) years. Album is a big success. Follow-up: The success of the first record has kept the band hopping for a few months and there’s intense demand to get something new on the shelves. As a result, album #2 may wind up featuring the second-best set of songs, since the band hasn’t had a chance to develop top-notch new material. So the follow-up was sometimes a bit of a let-down.
Third Album: By now the label has had a chance to invest in artist development (a lost concept, I know) for two or three years and a more mature set of material has been written. So you get the band’s best shot – if it fizzles, well, they had one great record.
If they’re really all they were cracked up to be, though, you might get something like this:
War, U2
Sheer Heart Attack, Queen
Making Movies, Dire Straits
Zenyatta Mondatta, The Police
Damn the Torpedoes, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers
Beatles ’65, The Beatles
Reckoning or Fables of the Reconstruction (depending on whether you count the EP), REM
You can probably think of a few of your own, and to be sure the dynamic I’m describing isn’t universal (for The Who, it was the fourth record, The Who Sell Out, for instance, and other bands simply ripped the lid off from the git-go – think Graham Parker and Van Morrison here).
We haven’t seen a lot of the old pattern in recent years because the labels have been more interested in mongering disposable titty-floggers than they have developing actual artists. Today, though…today something special may be happening: The Killers release their third studio effort (no, the B-sides disc doesn’t count), Day and Age.
The band’s debut, Hot Fuss, was nothing short of fantastic, and they immediately set themselves at the head of the whole nu wave movement alongside Interpol and Franz Ferdinand. Then they veered away from tradition a bit, as Sam’s Town was actually better than the first release. This owes in part to the speed with which Brandon Flowers and Co. realized they didn’t want to be trapped in a retro-nostalgia time warp: instead of taking another neo-’80s dip, they reached even further back, into the ’70s, where they paid a worthy homage to Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run (another of those iconic third albums, by the way, and arguably one of the two or three greatest ever).
(NOTE: I know some Killers fans hate the Springsteen comparisons, by the way, but don’t blame me. Check out what happens at the 1:48 mark of “When We Were Young,” then compare it to what happens 2:53 into “Born to Run.” Besides, it’s not like this isn’t about as huge a compliment as a band can be paid.)
This, I think, is what sets The Killers apart from so many other bands of their generation: ambition. Great big aggressive epic ambition. So many – soooooo many – of today’s indie bands are possessed by a near-pathological rage for smallness. They aspire, if one can use that word, to make the quietest, least noticeable, most trivial, insignificant semi-music possible. Meanwhile, Flowers and bandmates David Keuning, Mark Stoermer and Ronnie Vannucci have seemingly grokked the majesty of true artistic aspiration – recalling that marvelous thing Bono said a few years back: “It’s still an extraordinary thing to behold, the sound of a rock band in full flight.”
I’ve heard a track or two off the new disc and saw their performance on SNL a few weeks back, and I’m expecting great things from Day and Age. Maybe I’m setting myself up for a disappointment, but I doubt it. The Killers want greatness, and their work to date suggests that they have an idea about what goes into attaining it.
They have been, to this point, the finest band of their generation. Will they transcend their generation and take their place alongside all those other bands who began revealing the full measure of their greatness with the release of their third albums?
We’ll know more today.
Thanks to Jim Booth, who contributed to this story. |
Love or hate them, it's hard to argue that Apple's retail stores aren't highly distinctive. That's what the EU's highest court thought when it overruled a German verdict and said that Apple's store design could be registered as a trademark in Europe. Though Apple holds a store trademark granted last year by the USPTO, Germany's patent office rejected it, despite admitting that the retail layout was "an essential aspect of (its) business." The Court of Justice of the EU disagreed, saying that "an integral collection of lines, curves and shapes" (in Apple's stores) fulfill all the criteria for a trademark. It noted that any store design like Apple's which "departs significantly" from others in the same sector also merits trademark protection. Meanwhile, Apple may be planning changes to its stores anyway, having just hired ex-Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts as head of retail. For now, though, you're less likely to walk into a store like this in Europe. |
Spike Chunsoft began steaming an introduction video, three and a half minutes long, for the Shingeki no Kyojin ~Jinrui Saigo no Tsubasa (Attack on Titan: The Last Wings of Humanity) Nintendo 3DS action game on Thursday. The video notes the game includes both the first and second opening animation sequences with Linked Horizon's "Guren no Yumiya" and "Jiyuu no Tsubasa" songs. The last 35 seconds contains a spoiler for a development in the original story.
In the game's Story Mode, the player controls Eren, Mikasa, Armin, and other members of the Survey Corps as they recreate the anime and take on the invading giants. At the beginning of this mode, the player can only play as Eren, but as the game progresses, the player can choose Mikasa and Armin. The characters use the story's signature 3D manuever gear for "speedy action."
In each mission, the computer control allies who fight alongside the player. If allies are captured, the player can rescue them by cutting the Titans' arms before the humans are eaten. Naturally, if the characters are eaten by the giants, the player fails the mission and the game is over. After clearing missions, players can obtain parts that can be used in the game's other mode, World Mode.
Up to four players can cooperate in the World Mode. Players can make, customize, and train their own original characters. Once created, the characters can take on either conventional or survey missions. As a character's level rises, he or she can be equipped with newly developed weapons, better 3D manuever gear, and other items.
Spike Chunsoft will ship the game in Japan on December 5 for 6,090 yen (about US$61). The video notes that the game offers Levi's route as downloadable content in Story Mode. The Levi route will be free for a limited time starting on the game's December 5 launch. If you clear the Levi route, you can play as him in World Mode and use his special weapons and parts.
[Via Yaraon!] |
Samantha Power built her journalistic and academic career around human rights, criticizing powerful nations for their complicity in abuses and failure to stop acts of genocide.
Then she joined the Obama administration, where she currently serves as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Early next month, Power will be receiving an award named for a man she used to criticize quite harshly: former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who has been implicated in a significant number of war crimes across the globe.
And she’ll be getting it from Kissinger himself.
The American Academy of Berlin’s Henry A. Kissinger Prize is awarded annually to a European or American diplomat.
Power can’t claim ignorance of Kissinger’s bloody, anti-human rights record.
In her book A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, which documented the lack of response to global genocides, Power complained that President Gerald Ford’s administration — where Kissinger served as secretary of state — had “little credibility” to report to the public on the genocide happening in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge regime because Kissinger “had bloodied Cambodia and blackened his own reputation.” Under Kissinger’s watch, the United States dropped nearly half a million tons of explosives on Cambodia, resulting in the deaths of thousands of noncombatants.
In the same book, she wrote of how Kissinger encouraged Iraq’s Kurds to engage in an armed revolt in the mid 1970s, only to withdraw support to build rapport with the country’s government — leading Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to brutally uproot them in revenge. Power dryly notes Kissinger’s justification for these events, writing: “Henry Kissinger, U.S. secretary of state at the time, said of the American reversal of policy and the Kurds’ reversal of fortune, ‘Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.’”
Finally, in her book Sergio: One Man’s Fight to Save the World, she documented how Kissinger greenlighted the brutal Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975, which led to the death of hundreds of thousands of people. Power writes that Ford and Kissinger visited the Indonesian leader the day before the invasion: “Kissinger expressed some misgivings about the possible U.S. public reaction and cautioned: ‘We understand your problems and the need to move quickly, but I am only saying that it would be better if it were done after we returned [to the United States].’”
Power did not respond to a request for comment. However, a 2014 profile in the New Yorker may provide some insight into how Power’s worldview on human rights abusers has changed. “As time wears on, I find myself gravitating more and more to the G.S.D. [Get-Shit-Done] people,” she told the magazine. “We’re racing against the clock here to get as much done as we can. So when you run across people who know how to be bureaucratic samurais, or are especially persuasive in their diplomacy internationally, spend more time on those relationships, and on brainstorming with those individuals, to achieve a common purpose. Principles and positions only take you so far.” |
A lot of intriguing and conflicting things have been said about Bitcoin in the past few years. Some see it as the salvation of the financial system, others as a new toy, appealing only to the technologically savvy.
Say what you will, but so far, Bitcoin is a technological success. Minor glitches aside, the developer community that originally rallied to launch this project forward turned an immature, yet mind-opening computer protocol into a functioning monetary system, operated and used worldwide.
These developers’ personal investments have been enormous. It took incredible creativity and innovation to combine knowledge in software engineering and cryptography with a high political sense, game theory with international diplomacy and computer networking with coalition forming and mass persuasion.
Strong leadership does in fact help forge consensus.
All of these skills are required to lead Bitcoin’s core development. As the stakes go up and the authority of early involved developers gets stretched thin, the big question is, “Can the Bitcoin community create new tools to reduce the burden of politics?”
Bitcoin, a decentralized monetary system, aims to be the new money for the Internet arena, eliminating lack of trust and reducing risks to the monetary system that are brought on by human involvement and decision making.
But even Bitcoin is a machine that is programmed by mere humans. Under the hood, politics can still be divisive when developers disagree on important code changes.
To qualify for entering the debate, one needs to invest themselves heavily and create the proposed fix; this tends to filter out all but the most opinionated developers. The reward is, of course, proving the other side wrong, and saving the day for millions of users. Oh, and those Bitcoins in your pocket, too.
Making A Decision
So how can such integral decisions be made in this new challenging environment containing so many different players?
Until the end of 2010, Bitcoin had a single voice: “Satoshi Nakamoto,” its mysterious and unidentified creator. The Bitcoin Protocol was embodied in Nakamoto’s software. The community involved was small and Nakamoto’s vision was revered as near prophecy.
By the end of 2010, Nakamoto disappeared, leaving a large vacuum in leadership. Since then, the Bitcoin community has been left with flesh and blood developers whose legitimacy is tested with every decision they make.
The debate is exacerbated by the huge financial stakes for participants and by a trust-no-one mentality — ironically, the same mentality that brought forth the need for the Bitcoin system.
Under the hood, politics can still be divisive when developers disagree on important code changes.
Unlike other software projects, a small tweak in code will affect the entire ecosystem. For example, the current crisis deals with fixing unforeseen effects of an early change that attempted to fix “spam” transactions by introducing limits to the number of transactions.
There are billions of dollars at stake, so who has the authority and immense responsibility to take risks in such a situation?
Learning From Other Software Projects
It has been proven over time that strong leadership does in fact help forge consensus. For example, Linus Torvalds, the inventor of Linux, has served as “benevolent dictator” for 24 years of continuous development.
The technological bets he took have propelled the once-hobbyist operating system into billions of smartphones and millions of servers. With a clear vision of scaling the project, Torvalds stepped in countless times, accepting or rejecting changes. As the original inventor, never bowing to political correctness, his authority was unchallenged.
If Torvalds didn’t like your code, tough luck. For years, Torvalds was, in a practical sense, the final guardian of Linux’s code. You could always create your own type of Linux (known as a fork) — a departure from the official Linux, which you would control — and include your code.
That would be considered a dramatic move, a competition to “mainstream Linux.” The tools to move code between the two versions were cumbersome, and code tended to diverge, forcing developers and users to make hard choices.
To handle the growing number of Linux types and the difficulty of managing them, Torvalds created Git, a decentralized repository of code, allowing people to interact and share code easily.
Bitcoin core developers, like neurosurgeons, won’t poke around unless absolutely necessary.
Bitcoin and Git have a main similarity, as they both deal with getting to a consensus: Bitcoin is the agreement on which transactions are considered valid; Git is about the agreement on what code changes should be included in the latest version, on top of which developers should work.
Git has changed the politics of code development. You no longer need to beg for a central authority like Torvalds to accept your code change.
With Git, it’s trivial to post your own version, and it’s trivial for Torvalds to pull it into his code, if he or his lieutenants find it worthy. Every code change is essentially a little fork, but merges became much easier. With changes moving around freely, developers compete on the merits and usefulness of their version.
What’s a useful version? How does a piece of code get merit? Those are still subjective questions that Git can’t solve. The authority behind an official version still underlines a struggle of power, but more voices can be heard, and forks are less dramatic.
By contrast, the consensus on the state of the Bitcoin ledger is mathematical, with rules on which Bitcoin participants agree. In practice, Bitcoin rules are set in the code of the official version.
Although the Bitcoin world is not quite where the Linux world is today, perhaps there is a lesson to be learned from Linux’s success versus reinventing the wheel.
Where Things Differ
The truth is, Bitcoin can’t afford a code fork. Subtle differences between implementations can lead to several competing versions of the Bitcoin ledger, the main database of all Bitcoin transactions.
Such a schizophrenic beast wouldn’t survive, as users would receive Bitcoins spent on one ledger and unspent on another. That’s why Bitcoin core developers, like neurosurgeons, won’t poke around unless absolutely necessary. They have this unwritten contract with the Bitcoin community: keep the fundamental rules of Bitcoin, keep the system running, keep it scaling and build up the system that could contend with traditional finance.
Where To Go From Here
There’s no doubt that testing needs to be done and changes have to be put in the system, but this has to be done responsibly. Some developers choose to create new coins and test their code there, in an environment separate from Bitcoin. These are commonly known as Alt-coins and do not enjoy the same popularity as Bitcoin.
Another possible solution is being promoted by the team at Blockstream. The VC-funded company pushes for experiments to happen within the Bitcoin currency, but not as part of the main system. This introduces flexibility, allowing the core developers to innovate without compromising the currency.
Opponents see it as a backdoor to coerce the Bitcoin protocol in a more government-friendly direction, taming the beast. Much like Git, these experiments, known as side-chains, separate the human consensus debate of what should be the authorized version from the underlying code-change mechanism.
Meanwhile, they keep the one consensus that seems to unite Bitcoiners: Keep Bitcoin alive and strong!
Can we really create a human-free consensus?
As the debates heat up, we’re reminded that consensus-building remains a difficult, human task. Previous attempts by the community have been extremely problematic, at best. VC-funded companies could play a larger role, but most would rather pretend that Bitcoin will be maintained by others.
Companies that step up to the job will have their work cut out for them, proving their value to the community while being deemed agenda-free.
Can we really create a human-free consensus? Nakamoto left us with an experiment. The current value of the experiment is US$4 billion, and the Bitcoin community is following closely to see how this turns out.
Bitcoin may not need a “benevolent dictator,” but as the system reaches new scales, it will need strong leadership, along with new development tools to experiment in bold directions. |
Lock your doggy doors, pet owners. There’s a new crimewave that’s targeting runaway pups around the country. And like many horrible things on the Internet, it begins when an enterprising scumbag loads up Craigslist.
The scam, called “dog flipping,” preys on our better nature. A lot of times when people find stray dogs or runaways, they’ll snap a photo and post it to Craigslist, hoping the owner might stumble across the ad. But dog flippers are searching through those posts, too. They’ll pretend to be the owner, pick up the dog, then put it up for sale on Craigslist the next day.
It’s an easy way to score a pretty sizable payday.
The Indianapolis Star recently documented the case of Raiden, a gorgeous white wolf malamute mix that ran away in June. Thanks to the help of a local group that monitors pet flipping, Raiden’s owner found him on Craigslist–for sale. So 22-year-old Elizabeth Arroyo answered the ad and showed up at the woman’s house. Raiden recognized his owner immediately The Star detailed what happened next:
After Arroyo and her father talked down the woman’s price to $900, they told her they would go to an ATM to get the cash to finish the deal. They brought back police instead.
So be careful the next time you purchase a dog over Craigslist. Your cute and cuddly new friend might be a victim of illegal dog trafficking. Stick to the SPCA, folks.
Photo via Epsos.de/Flickr |
The average Scot now enjoys £1,623 more in state spending than their neighbours south of the Border, up from £1,600 last year.
North Sea oil and gas means that Scotland also contributes more per head in taxation than the UK average, but revenues have dropped off recently and are projected to continue falling.
The figures are likely to further infuriate the English and lead to renewed calls for an overhaul of the Barnett formula, which allocates money to Scotland based on population share rather than need.
Their publication came as the Local Government Association, which represents councils south of the Border, said the system means England’s communities are being “short-changed” by £4.1 billion a year.
SNP ministers are warning Scots that the Government will abolish the formula, which dates from 1978, if they reject independence in next year’s referendum.
But, unveiling the figures, Danny Alexander, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, said: “These figures demonstrate that the people of Scotland continue to see a real financial benefit of over £1,300 per person compared to the UK average.
“The UK remains the most successful economic, and political, union in history and Scotland is one of its greatest success stories. It makes no sense to put this at risk through separation.”
The Treasury figures show £10,152 was spent per head on public services in Scotland in the 2012/13 financial year, £1,364 more than the UK average.
However, this advantage increases to £1,623 when comparing spending in Scotland and England, where the average figure is only £8,529.
Of all the UK’s regions, spending is only higher in Northern Ireland (£10,876). Wales gets £9,709 per head, £1,180 more than the English.
In England public spending is highest per head in London (£9,435), the North East (£9,419) and North West (£9,252). The South East outside the capital (£7,638) and the East of the country (£7,865) get the least funding.
A breakdown of the figures show that the average Scot receives more than twice as much spending as their English equivalent for economic affairs.
The cross-Border spending gap is nearly 11 per cent for health, six per cent for education and 9.3 per cent for social protection.
The figures show sickness and disability spending in Scotland increased 9.5 per cent last year to nearly £4.4 billion, according to the figures.
This is the equivalent of £827 per head north of the Border, more than a fifth higher than the English figure of £681.
The statistics also demonstrated that Scottish councils spend 20 per cent more per person than their English peers.
Sir Merrick Cockell, LGA chairman, said: "The Barnett formula has passed its use-by date. It is a historic relic from a time when the government stopped people taking more than £50 on a holiday abroad.
"What was only ever intended as a stopgap solution has now become a major problem which is short-changing English communities.”
The Institute for Fiscal Studies this week warned an independent Scotland face tax increases or spending cuts of £6 billion over and above what is already planned by the Coalition.
Stuart McMillan, an SNP MSP, said: “These calls from the Local Government Association are the latest evidence that a No vote next year would see the axe taken to Scotland’s budget.” |
WASHINGTON (AP) — Democrats are out to capitalize on what they believe is growing public sentiment that President Donald Trump, the richest man to call the White House home, is turning his back on the people who got him elected in favor of his wealthy peers. The party is hoping that pitch will pack extra oomph at a time when even some Republicans are raising concerns that the GOP health-care plan could hurt the poor.
Though stung by a series of defeats in special congressional elections, Democrats believe they can make inroads with some of Trump’s most loyal supporters by driving home the combined potential impact of proposed tax cuts that would largely benefit the wealthy and pending health care legislation that would fail to cover tens of millions of Americans enrolled in “Obamacare.”
In a polling memo circulated by the Democratic group Priorities USA, Democrats say they have seen a significant shift in the last two months in the number of people that believe the president sides with the wealthy and big corporations over average Americans. Democrats plan to turn that message into a prominent sales pitch for their candidates and surrogates, and could make it the theme of ads as well.
Guy Cecil, the group’s chairman, said that for the president’s first three months in office, voters who backed President Barack Obama then switched to Trump believed that the new president represented middle-class workers more than he represented the wealthy. But he said that has changed since April.
“People are taking a second look,” says Cecil. “The reason that health care is so powerful is because it directly affects people’s lives and there’s a clear trade-off: You’re giving tax cuts to the rich; you’re taking health care away from everybody else.”
Public polling also turns up growing unease about GOP attention to needs of the middle class. A Pew Research Center poll released last week found 57 percent of respondents said the Democratic Party “cares about the middle class” while 42 percent said that Republicans did.
The White House dismissed the findings.
“Unlike the Democrats who have no agenda and no ideas, the president is working hard to lower the cost of health care, cut taxes for all families and businesses, and create good jobs and higher wages for all,” said White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Trump, of course, has never shied away from being associated with wealth.
His insurgent candidacy for president was built on his business experience, and his time on the reality TV show “The Apprentice” cast him as America’s CEO, with his riches on full display. Even though he refused to release his tax returns, he boasted time and again on the campaign trail about how much money he had, even declaring, “I’m really rich.”
That hasn’t changed since Trump took office. He spends most weekends at one of his opulent resorts, brags about his advisers’ wealth and even told the crowd at an Iowa rally last week that he didn’t “want a poor person” for any senior economic jobs.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that the House health care bill would leave 23 million people without insurance while the Senate would do the same to 22 million, with the brunt falling on older people with lower income. Trump’s proposed budget also targets many of the programs that help low-income Americans, such as help with heating their homes.
Democrats hope it provides more ammunition to revive their effective 2012 attack lines claiming Mitt Romney had turned his back on the working and middle classes.
But what worked against Romney may not necessarily be effective with Trump loyalists.
“The draconian impact of the GOP Trumpcare bill is a potential asset for the Democrats,” said Wendy Schiller, political science professor at Brown University, “but the big obstacle for them is that the bill’s provisions do not take effect until well after 2018, and not entirely until 2025. So it is unclear they will be able to persuade the majority of voters in congressional districts that the sky is falling on health care if nothing much changes.”
Moreover, many of the president’s backers don’t care about Trump’s wealth or his policies, their loyalty instead guided by partisan impulses and Trump’s larger-than-life personality and promises.
“His supporters pay attention to what he’s saying, and less so to either the Democrats or the press,” Republican pollster Neil Newhouse said in an email. “Simply put, Democrats can criticize his health care plan and tax plan as much as they want, but it falls on deaf ears with Trump voters, as they simply tune it out.”
The president’s allies point to all the failed attacks launched at Trump during the campaign and to GOP wins in the recent special elections as evidence that the Democrats won’t be successful if they are simply the anti-Trump party. Former Trump campaign adviser Barry Bennett says the party’s latest strategy is further evidence that the president is “living in their heads.”
“Attacks like these are to define someone and Donald Trump is already completely defined,” Bennett said. “The people of Warren, Ohio, don’t care if he is rich. They care if he is creating jobs.”
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Follow Lemire on Twitter at http://twitter.com/@JonLemire and Thomas at http://twitter.com/@KThomasDC |
Norwegian Air Shuttle said that it will be the first to take delivery of Boeing's new 737 Max airliner, jumping ahead of Southwest Airlines, the carrier confirmed Thursday.
Being the first to take possession of the new jetliner is a sign of the fast-growing carrier's increasing stature among the world's airlines.
"Norwegian will now be the first airline to take delivery of the Boeing (BA) 737 Max and we will be the first airline in the world to operate this brand-new aircraft type," an airline spokesman said in an email.
Norwegian said it will take delivery of the first of its Max jets in May and "then it will take a little time before it enters operation," the spokesman added. The airline has ordered 100 of the jets.
But being the first comes with added challenges, as the first operator typically works out the early kinks of a new design. When Norwegian first took its 787 Dreamliner in 2013, its early operations were repeatedly disrupted by reliability issues with the advanced long-range airliner.
Related: Boeing chases airlines for stretch 737
Norwegian plans to use the single-aisle 737 Max, with its increased range, to fly between Europe and smaller cities in the U.S. The low-cost airline's long-haul operations from Europe are flown today with larger 787 Dreamliners.
The airline has been at the center of a fierce controversy with U.S. airlines and their labor unions over the Department of Transportation's approval of the carrier's ability to fly from Ireland to the U.S.. The unions claim Norwegian will undercut wages for U.S.-based pilots and cabin crews or hire less expensive non-U.S. crews while flying to America.
Related: Richard Quest flies around the world on low-cost airlines
Southwest Airlines (LUV) was the first carrier to place a firm order for Boeing's updated single-aisle jet back in December 2011 and has long been expected to take the first jet from the plane maker. Southwest said Thursday that it won't take its first Max until July and it will start flying passengers on October 1.
Boeing's chief executive Dennis Muilenburg said Wednesday that the Max, which has been in testing since January 2016, will deliver during the second quarter, but did not say which airline would take the first jet.
Related: American Airlines eliminating in-seat screens on new 737 jets
Southwest has faced obstacles getting the Max into its fleet, first facing a now-settled labor dispute with its pilots over pay on the aircraft and the compatibility of the fourth generation aircraft into its all-Boeing 737 fleet.
Southwest is the largest operator of 737 jets in the world, and was the first airline the last time Boeing introduced a new generation of its workhorse airliner in 1997.
Boeing holds orders for more than 3,400 737 Max jets, which feature a pair of new engines and aerodynamic updates to cut fuel consumption by 14%. |
The Union Budget for FY 16-17 is certainly the best budget of this government so far. It is replete with big ideas in social security, edu- cation and land management, but has misses on the banking sector, GST and formalisation of the economy.
The decision to give statutory status to Aadhaar is wonderful and timely! With almost a billion Aadhaar holders, this will settle any ambiguity once and for all. Aadhaar is the centre of JAM (Jan Dhan, Aadhaar and Mobile) and DBT (Direct Benefit Transfer) reforms. After the success of DBT in LPG, a pilot project for DBT in fertilisers has been announced.
The proposal to further target LPG connections to 5 crore poor households in 3 years will ensure universal coverage of cooking gas, reduce pollution, improve health, reduce deforestation and create employment. The automation of 3 lakh PDS outlets will also be based on Aadhaar. A nationwide deployment of micro-ATMs in post offices, a digital depository for degree certificates, and food procurement by FCI from farmers will all leverage Aadhaar.
The announcement of 10 public and 10 private institutions to emerge as world class teaching and research institutions is a tremendous move. It is now up to public spirited individuals to set up world class universities in the tradition of an ancient Takshila or a modern Yale. Full autonomy is the key to the success of such institutions.
The National Land Record Modern-isation Programme starts today under the Digital India Initiative. Modernised land records through dematerialisation and leveraging JAM will bring prosperity to villages, while reducing litigation and conflict. It is the first step in mobilising land for housing and inclusive development in cities.
Banking reforms are under- whelming. Public sector banks face an existential crisis. Beyond NPAs and the Basel 3 capital requirement, they confront a number of other challenges – a rapidly retiring workforce, stranded assets in the form of branches, intense competition, and inadequate credit appraisal skills for a globalised, technology intensive world. They have the burden of implementing unprofitable social goals and are encountering technological disruption which is bewildering even to the best banks. Getting them out of government owner-ship is the only viable option and this was the last chance to say so.
Rather than spinning wheels on the GST Bill, can we not focus on getting many of the benefits of GST that are possible through executive decision? For example, the excise and service tax arms of the CBEC in the finance ministry can be merged immediately to align the two taxes. The GSTN company is in place and it can offer a state of the art VAT system with automated invoice matching to all states. At least 15-20 states will come on board.
The design can be made future proof for the switch to GST. A common gateway for payment of both central and state taxes can be provided by GSTN immediately. The combination of invoice matching and data sharing will give a huge boost to tax collection at both states and the Centre, and show the power of cooperation. After all the real battle is not between the Centre and states for tax rates, which products to tax, and autonomy; it is to fight tax evasion.
This budget also missed the oppor- tunity to bring a majority of Indians into the formal sector as legitimate participants. This requires adherence to two principles – ensuring that the benefit of entry into the formal sector outweighs the cost, and that compliance is simple while evasion is difficult. Building on JAM is the opportunity to use what iSPIRT calls the ‘India Stack’, a set of electronic services that enable paperless, presence-less and cashless transactions.
The pieces are already in place, and leveraging them can lead to dramatic reduction in costs while achieving expansion of the market. If buying a mutual fund was as easy as buying a gold ornament, suddenly 100 million households will participate in the capital markets as opposed to a few million. For the first time, the government’s goal of inclusion and the market’s goal of expanding the customer base are coming together through technology.
As India goes from being data poor to data rich due to smartphones, digital identity, digital payments and social media, data becomes the new currency. Thus for both consumers and small businesses, the currency of their digital footprint can be exchanged for credit scoring in new and innovative ways. The kirana store owner may not have a bank account, but clearly is credit-worthy on account of her inventory and business. Bringing this information online will enable her to access credit.
Perhaps the most important miss is that the budget completely does not get this coming ‘great disruption’. It is going to come at speed and scale and threaten many industries and institutions. It can also be used as state policy.
The Chinese get this. At the January 2015 launch of Webank, China’s first online bank set up by the internet giant Tencent, Prime Minister Li Keqiang said, “We will lower costs for and deliver practical benefits to small clients, while forcing traditional financial institutions to accelerate reforms.”
The brilliant Economic Survey talks about the chakravyuha challenge. Even as the government grapples with it, leveraging disruptive technology is a great option! |
The U.S. amphibious warship USS Carter Hall (LSD-50) and Marines have arrived over the weekend in Romania for joint drills.
The bilateral Spring Strom 2017 exercise pairs elements of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) with the Romanian military to test how well U.S. Marines and Romanians work together.
The exercise, which runs until Wednesday, includes 450 Marines and 750 Romanian troops, U.S. Landing Craft Air Cushion (LCAC) hovercraft and Amphibious Assault Vehicles.
Carter Hall entered the Black Sea on March 17.
The U.S. and Romania have increased military cooperation since the 2014 forced annexation of Crimea from Ukraine by Russia.
Carter Hall and the 24th MEU are part of the Bataan Amphibious Ready Group which also includes bigdeck amphibious warship USS Bataan (LHD-5), USS Mesa Verde (LPD-19).
“The 24 MEU consists of more than 2,200 Marines, which also includes a Ground Combat Element, Battalion Landing Team 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment, Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 365 (Reinforced), and Combat Logistics Battalion 24 and the MEU command element. The 24 MEU spent 26 weeks training in mission areas such as security operations, humanitarian relief, and amphibious raids,” read a March Navy release. |
Overproduction is built right into the business model of most bakeries. While we devour much of what is made, huge quantities of perfectly good grain are tossed.
But Tristram Stuart, an Englishman who began battling food waste 15 years ago, long before it became a popular cause, discovered a way to turn bread, an inexpensive product with a short shelf life, into one that’s long-lived and lucrative: craft ale.
After coming across a recipe, he refined it with Hackney Brewery in London and then contracted with Hambleton Ales in North Yorkshire to produce it in quantities. In 2016, Mr. Stuart began selling Toast, an English ale with malt and citrus notes, at London restaurants, online and through a growing number of distributors. Using roughly one slice per bottle, his team of three has recycled 3.6 tons of bread in its first 15 months.
Now, in his first satellite operation, Mr. Stuart, 40, has begun making beer in New York. Working with Chelsea Craft Brewing Company, in the Claremont section of the Bronx, Toast produced the pilot batch of its American Pale Ale in March. |
Within the last nine months, Donald Trump has mocked a disabled reporter for his disability, suggested that Megyn Kelly was on her period during the course of a debate, made fun of Carly Fiorina’s looks, and called the entirety of the Republican leadership “stupid” more times than I can count. Now he is bashing Ted Cruz for – I kid you not – having bad manners with an esteemed member of the Republican Establishment:
“Ted has got a rough temperament, you can’t call people liars on the Senate floor when they are your leaders. Not a good thing to do if you want to curry favor and get the positive votes later on own,” Trump said. “Ted is worried about his temperament, people are talking about his temperament. I haven’t talked about his temperament but he’s got to be careful because his temperament has been questioned a lot.”
This follows Trump’s decision earlier today to quote the “highly respected” crony capitalist repeat tax hiker Terry Branstad in making an attack on Cruz.
If you’re keeping score at home, that’s four times in the last three days he’s invoked the most notorious genuine establishment figures in the Republican party to attack Cruz.
Anyway, don’t worry Trump fans, I’m sure he will really stick it to the Establishment and tell it like it is once he’s elected, and will not at all just increase government spending willy nilly as long as the spending lines the pockets of his companies. |
Part Two of the Special Two-Night Series Premiere Airs Next Sunday, Sept. 17, @ 8/7c (LIVE to all Time Zones) Immediately following the NFL DoubleheaderFrom Emmy Award-winning executive producer and creator Seth MacFarlane (FAMILY GUY, "Ted") THE ORVILLE is a live-action, one-hour space adventure series set 400 years in the future that follows the exploits of The U.S.S. Orville, a mid-level exploratory spaceship. Its crew, both human and alien, face the wonders and dangers of outer space, while also dealing with the problems of everyday life. In the series' opener, it's 2417, and the Planetary Union promotes ED MERCER (MacFarlane) to Captain of the exploratory vessel The U.S.S. Orville. Ed's enthusiasm for his new position is dampened when his ex-wife, KELLY GRAYSON (Adrianne Palicki), is assigned to be his First Officer. While on their first routine mission, the Orville crew is ambushed by the Krill, a vicious alien race, who are bent on stealing a device that can cause time to accelerate in the all-new "Old Wounds" episode of THE ORVILLE, the first part of the two-night special series premiere airing Sunday, Sept. 10 (8:00-9:00 PM ET LIVE to all Time Zones), immediately following the NFL Doubleheader on FOX. (ORV-101) (TV-14 D, L, S, V)Cast: Seth MacFarlane as Captain Ed Mercer; Adrianne Palicki as Commander Kelly Grayson; Penny Johnson Jerald as Dr. Claire Finn; Scott Grimes as Lieutenant Gordon Malloy; Peter Macon as Lieutenant Commander Bortus; Halston Sage as Chief Security Officer Alara Kitan; J Lee as Lieutenant John Lamarr; Mark Jackson as Isaac; and Chad L. Coleman as KlydenGuest Cast: Victor Garber as Admiral Halsey, Norm Macdonald as Yaphit, Patrick Cox as the Ogre, Brian George as Dr. Aronov, Christine Corpuz as Janice Lee, Sean Cook as Derek, Joel Swetow as Krill Captain |
Lancaster, Pa., keeps a close eye on itself
A vast and growing web of security cameras monitors the city of 55,000, operated by a private group of self-appointed gatekeepers. There's been surprisingly little outcry.
Perhaps most surprising, the near-saturation surveillance of a community that saw four murders last year has sparked little public debate about whether the benefits for law enforcement outweigh the loss of privacy.
Unlike anywhere else, cash-strapped Lancaster outsourced its surveillance to a private nonprofit group that hires civilians to tilt, pan and zoom the cameras -- and to call police if they spot suspicious activity. No government agency is directly involved.
Some 165 closed-circuit TV cameras soon will provide live, round-the-clock scrutiny of nearly every street, park and other public space used by the 55,000 residents and the town's many tourists. That's more outdoor cameras than are used by many major cities, including San Francisco and Boston.
LANCASTER, PA. — This historic town, where America's founding fathers plotted during the Revolution and Milton Hershey later crafted his first chocolates, now boasts another distinction.
"Years ago, there's no way we could do this," said Keith Sadler, Lancaster's police chief. "It brings to mind Big Brother, George Orwell and '1984.' It's just funny how Americans have softened on these issues."
"No one talks about it," agreed Scott Martin, a Lancaster County commissioner who wants to expand the program. "Because people feel safer. Those who are law-abiding citizens, they don't have anything to worry about."
A few dozen people attended four community meetings held last spring to discuss what sponsors called "this exciting public safety initiative." But opposition has grown since big red bulbs, which shield the video cameras, began appearing on corner after corner.
Mary Pat Donnellon, head of Mission Research, a local software company, vowed to move if she finds one on her block. "I don't want to live like that," she said. "I'm not afraid. And I don't need to be under surveillance."
"No one has the right to know who goes in and out my front door," agreed David Mowrer, a laborer for a company that supplies quarry pits. "That's my business. That's not what America is about."
Hundreds of municipalities -- including Los Angeles and at least 36 other California cities -- have built or expanded camera networks since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In most cases, Department of Homeland Security grants helped cover the cost.
In the most ambitious project, New York City police announced plans several years ago to link 3,000 public and private security cameras across Lower Manhattan designed to help deter, track and detect terrorists. The network is not yet complete.
How they affect crime is open to debate. In the largest U.S. study, researchers at UC Berkeley evaluated 71 cameras that San Francisco put in high-crime areas starting in 2005. Their final report, released in December, found "no evidence" of a drop in violent crime but "substantial declines" in property crime near the cameras.
Only a few communities have said no. In February, the city council in Cambridge, Mass., voted not to use eight cameras already purchased with federal funds for fear police would improperly spy on residents. Officials in nearby Brookline are considering switching off a dozen cameras for the same reason.
Lancaster is different, and not just because it sits amid the rolling hills and rich farms of Pennsylvania Dutch country.
Laid out in 1730, the whole town is 4 square miles around a central square. Amish families still sell quilts in the nation's oldest public market, and the Wal-Mart provides a hitching post to park a horse and buggy. Tourists flock to art galleries and Colonial-era churches near a glitzy new convention center. |
LeBron James compared his decision not to stay at the Trump SoHo while the Cleveland Cavaliers are in New York to choosing to eat chicken instead of steak. Before Wednesday's shootaround at Madison Square Garden, James told reporters that he was "not trying to make a statement," via ESPN's Dave McMenamin.
"It's just my personal preference," James said as he talked to reporters from a baseline seat at Madison Square Garden with Cleveland preparing to play the New York Knicks later Wednesday night. "At the end of the day, I hope he's one of the best presidents ever for all of our sake -- my family, for all of us. But it's just my personal preference. It would be the same if I went to a restaurant and decided to eat chicken and not steak." ... James said it was the first time in his career that he chose to stay somewhere other than the primary team hotel on a road trip. A team source told ESPN.com that the alternative hotel -- which about half of the Cavs' roster was excused to stay at should they choose to -- was located close enough to the Trump SoHo that both factions of Cleveland's traveling party were able to meet and take the same bus over to the shootaround. "I rode the bus like I do every [shootaround], like what I've done for 14 straight years," James said. "With my teammates, coaching staff and everybody else that travels with us."
LeBron James says he's not trying to make a statement. USATSI
It seems like James is trying not to directly oppose Donald Trump now that he's the president-elect. But while he might not want to make any public proclamations now, his mere decision not to stay at the hotel is a statement in itself, especially after James joined Hillary Clinton at her rally in Cleveland days before the election. Here's an excerpt about that and the days that followed from Lee Jenkins' recent Sports Illustrated feature that coincided with James being named SI's Sportsperson of the Year:
The time has come. James walks across the tiled floor into the auditorium, up five metal steps, to a blue carpeted stage. Applause engulfs him. "I want people to understand how I grew up in the inner city," James tells the crowd. "I was one of those kids and was around a community that was like, 'Our vote doesn't matter.' But it really does. It really, really does." He speaks for less than two minutes, but the campaign is thrilled. Not only did the most famous man in Ohio appear with the candidate, he had also posed backstage with the staff, as they stood on chairs around him. Only one person was missing from the shot. "Should we get HRC in here?" an aide wondered. "No, that's okay," another chirped, and Clinton shrugged good-naturedly. She hung off to the side, out of the picture for the first time in about six months. "I think this may have happened once before," an aide mentioned, "with Brad Pitt." Two days later, James and his wife stayed up until 4 a.m., watching the state and the country choose Donald Trump. "When I was growing up, I didn't have my father, so you looked up to people in positions of power," James says. "It could be athletes or actors or leaders, like presidents. I think parents could use some of those people as role models. But when we elect a president who speaks in a disrespectful way a lot, I don't know that we can use him in our household." The next morning, James and Savannah ate breakfast, before the Cavaliers flew to D.C. for their championship ceremony with President Barack Obama. "I think we're going to have to do more," he told his wife. "I think we're going to have to step it up more."
James has only started discussing politics in public fairly recently, and he's made it clear where he stands. For this reason, his hotel preference should not be seen as much of a surprise. After all that he said leading up to the election, including what he wrote in his op-ed about why he was supporting Clinton, he should not have to explain this decision in great detail. |
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This article is all about Abrasive, here you will learn Abrasive Definition, Types of Abrasive its Forms, Application and some Important Abrasives.
SO, Lets Start from the Definition…
Abrasive Definition.
It may be defined as a hard material that can be used for Polishing, Smoothening, and Grinding the surface of other materials.
Some Abrasives are hard enough to cut many hard materials.
The essential characters of an Abrasive are its hardness and brittleness.
Diamond is a Natural Abrasive.
It is known as the hardest material in the world.
I think now Abrasive Definition will be cleared.
Types of Abrasive.
There are two types of abrasive.
Natural. Artificial or Synthetic.
The Natural abrasives occur as minerals or rocks in the crust of the earth.
Diamond, Garnet, Corundum, and Quartz are some examples of natural abrasives.
The Artificial or Synthetic abrasive group includes a number of materials possessing very high hardness.
Carborundum, Aluminum Oxide, and Glass Fall are some example of this group.
Forms of Abrasives.
They are used in both block form and powdered form. The blocks form are pieces cut in suitable shapes from the abrasives material.
They are used as grindstones, whetstones, millstone, and cutting edges.
For using in powdered form, the material is crushed and ground to different grades and sizes.
This powder is used as such and also after bonding it on cloth or paper.
Application of Abrasives.
They are used in numerous engineering fields. These are necessary for polishing, grinding and finishing surfaces of metals, leather, wood, and stones.
Some of them form an integral part of cutting, boring and drilling tools, e.g., diamond and carborundum.
Important Abrasives.
Most of the abrasives used in industries are belong to a synthetic group, except diamond.
(a.) Diamond.
It is a natural abrasive and purest form of carbon (c). It has a great hardness ( H=10 ).
In the Gem variety, Diamond is perfectly colorless.
Being the hardest substance, it has a very long life compared to other materials. It gets destroyed only by impacts.
They are used as core drilling stones, in rock and metal cutters, wire-drawing dies and gear grindstones.
Belgian Congo, South Africa, Congo, Angola, Sierra Lone, Brazil and Venezuela are few diamond producing states.
(b.) Carborundum.
It belongs to a synthetic or artificial group. It is the hardest abrasive after diamond.
In composition, it is silicon carbide and is manufactured by fusing a mixture of high purity sand, coke, and sawdust.
It was first manufactured in 1890 in an attempt to produce artificial diamonds.
At present, it is manufactured by using a very high current through of an electric arc at 2482 Centigrade.
Silicon carbide is formed at the center of the mixture.
Common applications of carborundum include in the making of grinding wheels, abrasive papers, abrasives cloth and tool sharpening blocks.
(c.) Boron Carbide.
It is manufactured by heating boric oxide and coke together at 2600 centigrade temperature.
It is almost of same hardness as carborundum and is used chiefly as a powdered abrasive.
(d.) Corundum (H=9).
This mineral belongs to a natural group. They are Gems of high value and are perfect flaw-less crystals.
They can also be artificially manufactured.
Examples are sapphire, ruby. The imperfect varieties are used as abrasives.
(e.) Quartz (H=7).
It is the most common natural minerals. When pure, it is silicon dioxide.
Quartz is also the most commonly applied abrasive in may fields.
It may be used as pure quartz in blocks and also as quartz sand, sandstone, quartzite, flent, chert, and purmice all of which are various forms of silica in nature.
(f.) Garnet (H=7/1/2).
Garnet is a group name for minerals which are silicates of magnesium, calcium, aluminum, and chromium.
Some varieties of this group name as Almandine and Grossularite are commonly used as abrasives.
Powdered garnet is used for making coated papers, cloth, and discs.
Garnet coated paper and cloth are used extensively in wood, plastic, leather, rubber, and metal industries.
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Kelvin Anderson Sr. | Brian Addison
On May 24, 1972, Kelvin Anderson Sr.’s life went from a lone, dirt road along the backwoods of Mississippi to the booming, sunny life of Los Angeles, just two days after graduating from high school. From there, he would not only become one of the most well-respected legends that helped form West Coast rap’s firm grip on American culture, but also he would come to create a Long Beach icon that served as a source of inspiration — a record shop, a recording studio and a neutral ground between the Bloods and the Crips.
In the age of digital sales that run laps around tangible record stores, Kelvin has finally found a second life of sorts for VIP. After dealing with multiple closures, moves and reinventions, Kelvin is making plans for a VIP museum and educational center that will hopefully provide as much inspiration and creativity as the record store itself did throughout the eighties, nineties and the millennium.
“This idea came to me when this guy came into the store when we was still in the original building,” Kelvin said. “His kids walked down this row and saw vinyl. They looked at their dad and said, ‘What is this?’ and the whole store laughed… It was funny but it really made me think about how this story—the story of this place and our neighborhood — needs to be told and preserved. That’s when I decided what I wanted to do for Long Beach: a museum. After I’m gone, I want people to be able to experience the influence of our city, my shop and the people in Long Beach.”
Stacks of Vinyl. | Brian Addison
As Kelvin said this, a young black man, searching for a copy of the “Welcome to Atlanta (Coast 2 Coast Remix)” by Jermaine Dupri featuring Snoop, listened intently. Hesitant at first, the man expressed his gratitude to Kelvin after noticing the gathering of signatures to support Kelvin’s museum.
“My pops brought me into the original store back in the day, man,” he said. “Every time I got me my little allowance, I straight up headed to VIP. I one-hundred-percent support you and I just wanna thank you. Thank you for the experience and the history.”
That word “experience” is key. People didn’t go into VIP just to buy a record; they came to experience the rising of a black-centric art coming to life and seizing the popular culture of an entire nation. Sometimes literally, just by watching music come to life out of the DJ booth inside the store that mimics the front end of a boat, a dedication to the Queen Mary. It would have someone spinning records that influenced the sounds of the times. That tastemaker would introduce you to Snoop, DJ Quik, Nate Dogg, Warren G — all before they became hip hop legends in their own right and all inherently connected to VIP.
Getting to this point wasn’t easy for a man who has worked the past 38 years at an average of six days a week. In fact, it would be outright damning to not include VIP’s history to this pivotal point.
Kelvin’s path was outright challenging if not sublime in a sense: he came to Los Angeles just after the Watts Riots of 1965 only to find his store — approaching its peak in popularity and influence —come head-to-head with the Los Angeles Riots of 1992 that had seeped past the borders of L.A. and into Long Beach. South L.A. saw white flight which was led by racist home buying and selling practices promoted by the California Real Estate Association; the passage of Proposition 14, which created the segregation we currently see to this day. Perhaps most impressive is that he and his store withstood the effects of both riots to bridge deep divisions — the incredibly complex dividers that are race, class and community violence.
Kelvin, humble and charming with his not-so-subtle accent forged by the histories of the South, believes in the worth of hard work and the power of kindness as a deterrent to violence.
“There was this thing between my brothers and me,” Kelvin said. “We were always told that the best manager of a McDonald’s franchise started off with a mop bucket and it was a huge promotion to start doing fries. My brother [Cletus, who opened the first VIP Records] believed the same thing. I was a cleaner, a stocker… VIP wasn’t just handed to me.”
In June of 1978, VIP Records opened up shop in Long Beach at MLK and PCH, after “getting his degree from the record industry,” as Kelvin puts it. Come January 15, 1979, Kelvin purchases the shop from his brother Cletus, becoming a store owner for the first time in his life.
Kelvin with Warren G shortly after the release of his debut album, "Regulate…G Funk Era" in 1994. | Photo courtesy of Kelvin Anderson Sr.
Walking in with massive connections from working at his brother’s other stores, the music industry was thriving but Kelvin wasn’t handed success on a platter. He opened up shop in a proud, if not defiant community that wasn’t there with open arms for anyone and everyone.
“This is not a community that embraces new people—so I had struggles becoming a part of the community while dealing with the rise of the gangs,” Kelvin said. “But if I’m anything, I’m respectful and a good sales person. So I took my time getting to know the community, earning their respect through service and kindness.”
Kelvin’s philanthropy soon became engraved into the spirit of Central Long Beach, his influence and humble demeanor created a space that defied the violence and frustrations that often overshadowed the community’s working class aura. The ability to achieve neutral grounds in a place where concerns were often addressed with violence over dialogue was, and is, definitively awe-inspiring.
“I stood my ground that no matter how bad things got on the outside, that inside these walls everyone, no matter where you came from, that this place was a peaceful place,” Kelvin. “I grew up under the influence of Martin Luther King, Jr. and I live by his words on violence… I made sure VIP was a no bang zone. And I got the respect of even the roughest of the rough in this community for that.”
For Kelvin, this achievement at creating a zone of neutrality was marked with dark spots of reality as he watched young men tragically murdered at a rate that was staggeringly high.
“In the early ‘90s, for six weeks straight, every Monday morning I would come to work and there would be another dead kid in the mortuary nearby [now a church],” Kelvin said. “A kid I knew. Between the ages of 14 and 25. Revenge killing by these local gang members gone wrong because the craziest part of it all was that most of the time, the person killed was an innocent bystander or the one tryin’ to break things up.”
By this point, Kelvin was full vested in Central Long Beach and remained admittedly baffled at how kids who were raised and grew up together would resort to killing one another. But Kelvin is also no fool: without a place to hang besides King Park (and even that place, as Kelvin notes, “had a lotta stuff go down there”), black kids had few options at not just socializing healthily but maintaining a healthy identity.
Understanding the evolution of gang culture is essential to understanding the context of Kelvin’s and many black folks’ ideology about why gangs gain power within black communities. From the institutional racism that disproportionately incarcerates black men to the systemic division of black families through governmental assistance laws, it is not that these communities are “prone” to more violence; our society creates it as an answer to their concerns.
Take the example provided by Duke Givens, Long Beach photographer and the man whose photo is the cover of Snoop’s “Murder Was the Case” album, who was able to view ganghood through his lens since many of his friends were part of them. For Duke, who had never joined a gang himself, “Many gang members don’t have fathers or father figures—this is such an important part to understanding the inner city struggle… When you chilled with these cats, there was a fierce loyalty with all of ‘em. It looked more like brotherhood than ganghood when the guns weren’t drawn.”
The respect for Kelvin very much lies in that he was and still remains a father figure for many; from the very start of VIP, he has maintained relationships with the youth that evolved and has been passed down through each generation.
“I reached out to ‘em and I got to know all the kids,” Kelvin said. “And when it finally hit me that this gang problem is real, it motivated me create a studio space… I took everything I learned from my brother Cletus about the recording industry and gave it back to the kids in the hopes that they express themselves through music and not a gun.”
Photo courtesy of Kelvin Anderson Sr.
The respect for Kelvin and the VIP space, in fact, was so strong that Kelvin never had to shutter his doors during the tumultuous, week-long Los Angeles Riots.
On April 29, 1992, the verdict on the Rodney King trial was read, acquitting four LAPD officers after they were videotaped violently beating King for over a minute. The verdict publicly dismissed by then Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley as egregious, prompted outrage and led into day one of the Los Angeles Riots.
Come April 30, the “language of the unheard” had made its way onto the streets of Long Beach, where Kelvin heard the chants and roars of a people who were frustrated, angry and felt hopeless marching down MLK.
But he stayed open and his store endured not a single violation or incident of damage.
“Someone asked me why I stayed open,” Kelvin recollected. “‘I’m here for the community,’ I said, ‘Ain’t nobody gonna mess with the VIP.’”
That very year, one of the two most important musical epochs according to Kelvin was being created: Dr. Dre’s seminal, massively influential debut album, “The Chronic.” (For Kelvin, the other musical epoch was Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” in 1982.) Kelvin was thrilled for this album because it would be the launching pad for a Long Beach artist he had been trying to get signed for years: Snoop Dogg.
“I knew Dre long before VIP was established in Long Beach,” Kelvin said. “He was one of the hottest DJs back in the day—we would sell his mixtapes. So to watch the success of Dre and Easy-E who were coming out of here and then the big movement out of Oakland with E-40 and Too $hort… Well, that’s where the idea of a studio initially came from.”
The aforementioned studio, built to provide black kids a space for expression and creativity, is hallowed ground in terms of its history. After throwing down $2,500 bucks on a SP1200 drum machine, Kelvin let Keith Thompson, back in the day known as DJ Slice, use the machine to create demos for both Snoop and 213, a never-fully-realized trio that would now be considered a hip hop wet dream featuring Snoop, Warren G, and Nate Dogg.
“Snoop’s first demo was recorded in VIP,” Kelvin said. “And that kid… He had flow like no other. So did Warren. I’m telling you, a lot of talent has passed through here… And I’m glad Dre signed Snoop because, to this day, I’ll never understand why no one in the industry was interested in 213.”
Always the ”Pops of Central Long Beach,” Kelvin was met with a somewhat saddened Warren G after Snoop was signed by Dre. Fear not, Warren, Kelvin got the hookup. Fresh off the success of becoming the first black person to earn an Academy Award nomination in directing, for his film “Boyz n the Hood,” John Singleton was planning his next film, “Poetic Justice,” and wanted Dre to do the soundtrack.
But Kelvin didn’t have Dre’s number so he deferred to Warren.
“Warren was always ridin’ around on his 10-speed and when he came in that one day, he was still pretty angry about not having a deal,” Kelvin said. “So we called John and Warren played him ‘Indo Smoke.’”
Headed by Mista Grimm (and being the only song he charted in his brief career), with appearances by Nate Dogg and Warren G (who also produced the track), the song was the biggest hit off the soundtrack and launched Warren G into the annals of hip hop history with his debut album “Regulate… G Funk Era” in 1994, just one year after Snoop released his debut, “Doggystyle.”
On the set of Snoop Dogg’s “Who Am I (What’s My Name)?” in 1993, which used VIP Records as a backdrop. | Photo courtesy of Kelvin Anderson Sr.
Supporting his adopted MC children and their success, wasn’t always easy following the tension between gangs and the LBPD before, during, and after the riots.
“We was having a midnight sale for ‘Doggystyle’ and I did my usual routine with City officials to request it and what not,” Kelvin said. “The day before, the City told me I couldn’t do it because of ‘possible hostile situations.’ I went back to the folks at Interscope Records… They had already put down quite a bit of money on the album and its promotion, so I had to tell the City too bad. We was gonna be doing it. And all they told me was that if something happened, it was on me.”
Even recently, the LBPD wasn’t too fond of gatherings. When Nate Dogg passed in 2011, Kelvin was told he wasn’t allowed to hold a candle vigil honoring the passing of one of Long Beach’s most respected artists. Despite being told not to, the community refused, with hundreds showing up to honor Nate. Another memorial, the Saturday after his death, drew thousands.
“Y’know, it’s moments like those that take me back to the fact that I never thought I would lose the original VIP space—it was so important to so many people,” Kelvin said.
When 2003 came and brought along with it iTunes, the record industry panicked—and for good reason. Virgin Megastores and Tower Records were closing locations by the minute and VIP was not immune to the new trend. It downsized and downsized and downsized until it was unable to remain in its original location and instead sits just one building east of the original spot.
Kelvin Anderson Sr. | Brian Addison
After multiple attempts at reinventing VIP, the realization that the brand and identity of VIP still stand strong, forced Kelvin to be more creative about how to keep it alive — and it wasn’t going to happen through selling music.
“I ain’t gonna try to restart the music industry and bring it back to the way I knew it. I can’t compete with free,” Kelvin said. “But I know what the brand means to people and this community… Not just here in the local community but regionally, I was an advocate for indie record companies and shops. Independent retail? We changed the way independent retail was viewed by the majors. I remember back in the day, the big record companies wouldn’t give us posters or in-store record copies to play for customers.”
That connection brought Kelvin into the fold of The Majors, where he advocated for record companies and producers to be more aware of what their artists said.
“I wasn’t asking them to censor themselves but I was trying to tell artists that they can talk about their crew, their friends, and their families—but don’t be talkin’ about your enemy because this gangbanging thing is real and it has consequences,” Kelvin said. “I still feel like I could have done more to prevent the deaths of Biggie and Tupac. Because what you say on your songs can kill you.”
This intimate history isn’t filled with name-dropping; Kelvin was attached to these people on a deeply personal level. Following Tupac’s death, Kelvin talked with reps at the Soul Train Music Awards after a party at the House of Blues on Sunset: “Someone has to tell Biggie and Puff Daddy that they can’t be walkin’ around here like it’s Brooklyn. Tupac’s dead. Suge Knight is in prison. And Puff Daddy has a song playing every 15 minutes on the radio that’s spoutin’ off how ‘nobody can’t stop be, nobody can’t hold me back.’ That’s a bad combination.”
That perfect storm eventually led to the murder of Notorious B.I.G.
It’s about these many stories that Kelvin sees attached to the future identity of VIP — and not just the histories. Kelvin also hopes his museum is an “all-in-one” facility that is not just home to historical artifacts but will have a recording studio, printing space, and radio station that will teach the youth the art of recording, creating music and marketing it.
“It’s about finding talent, promoting them, recording them and giving everyone the history of music in Long Beach,” Kelvin said. “It’s what I want to give back because it’s what I believe in. Sometimes I think I might have more support if I was more notorious, y’know… But for me, I just love Long Beach and my community.”
In these times, when violence is ubiquitous almost to the point of being common, there is something more punk, more subversive and more challenging to be found in Kelvin’s nonviolence — and that right there is worthy not just of “being in the news.”
It’s worthy of a museum.
To support the preservation of VIP records, sign the petition here. |
Hyundai Motorsport have handed over their first customer New Generation i20 R5 ahead of it’s competitive debut on the 2016 Tour de Corse – Rallye de France later this month.
WRC3 frontrunner Fabio Andolfi will be behind the wheel of the car that will be run by a small private Italian team.
Key Hyundai Motorsport staff were on hand at the headquarters in Alzenau, Germany for the handover including Team Principal Michel Nandan and Andrea Adamo who oversees the Customer Racing department, along with Luca Murdolo, team manager of the Italian squad.
“In order to meet the tough targets we have set ourselves with the New Generation i20 R5 program we have passed a huge number of milestones in a short period of time.” said Customer Racing Team Manager Andrea Adamo.
“However, the delivery of the first completed chassis to our customers is undeniably the most important point yet for us. It is when the Customer Racing department begins to live up its name and starts to fulfil its aim of building cars for private owners, and expanding the Hyundai name’s presence in rallying outside of the the WRC class.
“We are now only a week away from the New Generation i20 R5’s first competitive outing in an international event, at the Tour de Corse – Rallye de France. That weekend will, of course, be another landmark for the project and as we continue to deliver to new customers we are sure that are more to come.”
Andolfi is due to test the car ahead of his debut in a four-wheel-drive machine and will be supported with a dedicated race engineer from Hyundai Motorsport.
Despite the order books full until early 2017, the Customer Racing Department will resume testing this week with Kevin Abbring and Seb Marshall getting behind the wheel once again as they prepare for their own entry to the Tour de Corse – Rallye de France.
The upcoming WRC round will see three New Generation i20 R5’s take to The Rally of 10,000 corners with Abbring and Marshall heading up Hyundai Motorsport N’s WRC2 entry, Andolfi’s entry and 2014 Tour de Corse winner Stéphane Sarrazin. |
Buy Photo Construction workers on site of the new Detroit Red Wings arena near downtown Detroit, Thursday, January 28, 2016. (Photo: Salwan Georges, Detroit Free Press)Buy Photo
As baby boomers retire in ever increasing numbers, employers throughout Michigan are facing a growing problem finding workers with the education, training and skills needed to fill their jobs.
Industries in Michigan from construction to health care are facing shortages of competent workers. Those shortages are growing more acute as Michigan's unemployment rate continues to decline toward the 5% mark and the pool of available talent shrinks.
Shortages of qualified workers — known as the "skills gap" — presents a drag on Michigan's future economic growth. One area where it is felt most acutely is in the state's construction industry, which is facing shortages of carpenters, electricians and other skilled trades. For an industry still recovering from a catastrophic decline during the Great Recession, this skills gap isn't some distant possibility. It's a here-and-now problem.
“We’re already in trouble. It’s just going to keep magnifying itself. We’re going to be in real trouble,” said Kevin Koehler, president of the trade group Construction Association of Michigan.
And if pipe fitters and welders are in short supply, employers in other fields are also on the lookout for more registered nurses, health care social workers, truck drivers and engineers of all types.
Stephanie Comai, director of the state's Talent Investment Agency, which directs the initiatives of the state’s workforce development programs, warns that the skills gap presents "a significant challenge for the state." She said that Michigan's educational system is partly to blame.
"One of the things that we find is that in high school there’s not a lot of career counseling," she said. As a result, young people entering the workforce find that "it’s just hard to figure out what the opportunities are out there. ... Helping parents really understand the opportunities they can introduce to their kids is really important."
The State of Michigan's Labor Market Information office keeps track of the occupations that will be most in demand through 2022. And of the top 50 occupational openings in Michigan in coming years, 64% will require candidates to have a bachelor's degree or higher. But only about 26% of Michigan residents have attained that much education.
When the jobs that need an associate's degree are added in, the percentage requiring at least some college rises to at least 76% of all the openings.
In the fourth quarter of 2015, there were 23,010 online job advertisements for openings in the City of Detroit. About 44% of those openings required a bachelor's degree. But only 21.6% of Wayne County residents 25 years or older, and only 13.1% of Detroit residents, have at least a bachelor's degree.
The state's Mitalent.org website lists more than 95,000 current job openings in the state.
Because of the education gap, many of the open jobs remain unfilled.
One issue often cited is the lack of public transportation in metro Detroit, which prevents many low-income city residents from getting to service jobs in the suburbs. Most famously, there was "Walking Man" James Robertson, who gained international fame last year when the Free Press showed how he trekked 21 miles a day from his home in Detroit to and from his job in Oakland County because public transit was too inconvenient.
Meanwhile, a tightening housing market in places like Detroit's greater downtown may eliminate some candidates who would like to live near where they work from applying for those downtown jobs.
More training needed
Economists caution that unless Michigan acts, the skills gap is likely to get worse instead of better, since the level of education and training required by employers gradually rises over time.
Brad Hershbein, an economist with the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research in Kalamazoo, said that employers typically hire more-educated or better-trained workers during a recession because they have a broader pool of unemployed candidates to choose from. And having hired those better-qualified candidates, companies then tweak the jobs so that those higher skill levels are required in the future, too.
That means a worker who was qualified for a job but is laid off may no longer be qualified for the same position in a year, since the job requirements have been upgraded.
"There’s not going to be a simple silver-bullet type solution," Hershbein said. "Training is going to have to be not just a periodic thing where people do this if they lose their job. It’s going to be something that’s more systematic. Even while you're employed, you’re going to have to have refresher training to keep up to date."
“Training is going to have to be not just a periodic thing where people do this if they lose their job. It’s going to be something that’s more systematic.” Brad Hershbein, Economist
Charles Ballard, a professor of economics at Michigan State University, agrees that skill levels of yesterday or even today may be inadequate for jobs tomorrow.
"The skill requirements keep changing," he said. "The big question is, if the labor market were to continue to tighten, what would happen to the discouraged workers and those who are only marginally attached to the labor force? Would they get jobs, or have their skills deteriorated so much that they just can’t fit into today’s labor force, regardless of macroeconomic conditions?"
In the construction industry, experts say the lack of old-fashioned vocational training programs in high school, or what is now known as career and technical training, is one often-cited reason for the skills gap in the industry.
"Mostly the problem is because we really aren’t educating the parents today on the benefits of skilled trades," where carpenters electricians and others can earn $75,000 to $100,000 a year, Koehler said.
Another problem facing the construction industry is the risk and uncertainty involved in a construction career, where seasonal layoffs remain a part of life. Even skilled trades during a busy season may face a gap between jobs.
"You have to be prepared to be laid off because that’s what happens," said John Rakolta Jr., CEO of the Detroit-based Walbridge construction firm. "You get laid off for a week or two or three or four. It’s a different kind of career and the industry has to get much better with how we deal with that."
That traditional uncertainty in construction has become acute in the past decade. The Great Recession proved devastating to Michigan construction trades, with about half of the jobs in the state's construction industry vaporizing during the recession years.
"A lot of people left the field for good," Koehler said. "Those people aren’t coming back into it now that the business is starting to pick up again. We’re very concerned about today’s skilled trades shortage and tomorrow’s. Three out of four skilled tradesmen will be retiring in the next five to 10 years, and without people coming into the trades we're going to have a major shortage for many years."
Recruiting efforts
A shortage of carpenters, pipe fitters, electricians and other skilled trades means building everything from houses to highways will get built more slowly and at a higher cost. That would create a drag on Michigan's economy.
“As more work flows into Michigan, like the stadium work, potentially the new bridge, a lot of the infrastructure, with the shortage of labor, obviously it affects project time lines, it affects project costs, it affects budgeting for those projects,” Koehler said.
Rakolta echoed those concerns. Like many firms, Walbridge tries to home grow future employees by offering internships, recruiting likely candidates from colleges among students in engineering and related fields.
"Our hope is that we introduce them to the Walbridge culture and when they graduate from college, they come to work for us," he said.
Detroit-based Quicken Loans follows a similar strategy to find new workers. Each year, Quicken recruits more than 1,000 interns to work in its various units, mostly in its downtown locations, and, like Walbridge, it hopes that exposure to Quicken's culture will entice them to accept permanent jobs. Quicken also offers cash rewards to current staffers for referring candidates who get hired.
"We have all different recruiting programs to try to attract all the brainpower from all over the place to Detroit to join us," said Linglong He, Quicken Loans chief information officer.
"As we've continue to grow, we identify what roles are needed," added Teresa Wynn, senior vice president of Enterprise Services for Quicken Loans. "We focus on the folks that we have and if they don't have the skills coming in the door, how we can gain that skill while they're here during that internship so we can fill some of those roles."
Meanwhile, Comai, of the state's Talent Investment Agency, said the state continues to refine its support for training programs in the state and the usefulness of its Mitalent.org website.
Contact John Gallagher: 313-222-5173 or gallagher@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @jgallagherfreep.
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A new emergency alert system that transmits messages directly to cellphones, whether people want the alerts or not, is in the works for Canada.
The alerts would be transmitted to cellphone users regardless of their wireless providers. A similar system has been in place in the United States for years.
Once a message is sent out, it would be received by every cellphone in a geographic area, said Marc Choma, spokesman for the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association.
The association represents wireless service providers and businesses that develop products for the wireless industry.
The emergency messages would be used to alert Canadians to serious concerns like dangerous storms and possible terror threats.
System tested in Ontario
The system could use an emergency radio channel that is picked up by cellphones, and enables the system to reach people even if the servers that handle cellphone calls and text messages are overwhelmed.
"If there is going to be an emergency, the best way to reach people is with something that almost everybody has in their pocket right now, and that would be their cellphone," said Choma.
The alert system for cellphones would warn people of impending severe weather like these twin lightning strikes near the Calgary airport in August. (Submitted by Mike Maclean)
He said the alerts can also contain pictures and text.
This "cell broadcast system" has already been tested in the Durham Region of Ontario, according to Choma.
Public Safety Canada is working with the wireless industry to test the system. It's the federal department's mandate to keep Canadians safe from a long list of potential dangers, like crime, natural disasters and terrorism.
System could cost $25M
The Department of Public Safety said the wireless alert system pilot project will be completed in 2017. Choma said setting up the system could cost wireless providers about $25 million. Despite the cost, he said, wireless carriers support adopting the system.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) launched a full public consultation on the emergency alerts in March.
A test of the 'cell broadcast' system already took place in the Durham Region of Ontario. (Philippe Huguen/AFP/Getty Images)
The CRTC refused to comment on the system. However, the comments Canadians made about the proposed system have been made public. Those comments are mixed, but some people don't like the idea of being automatically included in the program.
"Only implement such a system if it can be disabled by the end user so that it is not forced upon them," wrote David Cole from Toronto. "That way, if it is poorly implemented, it can be turned off. Enough intrusion already."
"No, unless the CRTC prevents the wireless service providers from charging a fee to provide the service," wrote Ernest Price from St. Catharines, Ont.
'Take it to a higher level'
In Nova Scotia, the emergency management office supports the system. Paul Mason, director of emergency services, said the province currently uses TV and radio alerts to let the public know about emergencies.
"People spend a lot of time on their cellphones, and the alerts that would go out would have a loud noise that would get their attention ... I think bringing cellphones in would take it to a higher level."
The cellphone alerts reach every phone in a specific area and could give people who missed alerts on TV, radio and online an extra chance to prepare. This car was caught in the recent flooding in Windsor and Tecumseh, both in southwestern Ontario. (Submitted by Donnie Johnston)
Mason expects the CRTC will make a ruling on the system by December. If the alerts get the go ahead, he expects it to take at least a year or two before the system is brought online.
Public Safety Canada said it will work with all levels of government to make sure the alerting system is successfully implemented across the country.
Cell emergency alerts already in U.S.
A similar federal cellphone alert system already exists in the United States. It can only send a 90-character text message that can't contain any pictures or videos.
Seawater floods the entrance to New York City's Brooklyn Battery in the wake of Sandy in 2012. The emergency cellphone alert system in the United States was used during the superstorm to help move people to safe areas. (John Minchillo/The Associated Press)
Ben Krakauer, director of watch command with New York City's Office of Emergency Management, said people cannot opt out of the program.
"A national program that works regardless of whether you live in the city, whether you have a New York City phone number or if you're visiting us from across the country or around the world, is fantastic," he said.
In total, Krakauer said, they've only used the federal emergency alert system eight times. He believes it has saved lives.
Most recently, his office sent out a text message informing people of the search for Ahmad Khan Rahami, the Afghan-born U.S. citizen charged in last month's explosives incidents in New York City and New Jersey. |
Steampunk, in all its forms and expressions, and the people of the community, are truly amazing.
Steampunk is not dead as some people proclaim and wish it to be. True, some individuals never liked it, some lost interest, and some found it didn’t meet their personal needs or expectations. For the rest of us, however, steampunk is vibrant with creativity and potential.
To show that, my latest project, Steampunk Hands Around the World, a month-long event of blogs, videos, chats, and get-togethers, will present examples from around the world of that vitality and personal connection. With today’s technology, there is no barrier of distance nor language, and every steampunk everywhere can participate.
Every individual, group, region, and culture brings something unique to the expression and evolution of steampunk in our community. Every thought and action adds to the inspiration and excitement of what we create as a whole. Books, music, artwork, fashions, and philosophies all come together as a multi-faceted treasure. In those, we create something tangible from just our merest thoughts and dreams.
On Sunday, February 2nd, please join me and several dozen other creators in a trip around the world to learn about and enjoy the nuances of our community, and to take the opportunity to reach out to others to make new connections and new friends.
Facebook Event page
Google + Event page
Twitter Hashtag – #SteampunkHands
Here is the official press release making the rounds.
Just as current day expressions of steampunk are not limited to the literature where it began, the people in the steampunk community are not bound to any one geographical region. Steampunk appears in many forms, and with its popularity, the community has grown to encompass the world.
The celebration and sharing of that global association is at the heart of a new project, Steampunk Hands Around the World, by Kevin Steil, the creator and editor of steampunk news and information resource website, Airship Ambassador. With more than six dozen steampunk creators – bloggers, authors, event organizers, and others – also participating, the month long project is a multi format media presentation about the international connections and communications in the community, for steampunks and non-steampunks alike.
Beginning Sunday, February 2nd, and continuing until Friday, February 28th, the group will show and share that steampunks everywhere are linked together and that new friends are waiting in every conversation.
Steampunk, in its many forms, brings people together in an inclusive and helpful network of similar mind. From sharing book and music review opinions, to playing the newest games and sharing DIY information on fashion and props, the steampunk community easily and comfortably brings together people ages eight to eighty in ways not often seen in other communities.
The full and updated-daily list of participating websites, blogs and events will be posted in the kick-off blog on the Airship Ambassador blog site:
For more information, please contact Kevin Steil at Kevin@AirshipAmbassador.com |
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COLUMBIA, South Carolina — Jeb Bush replaced the exclamation mark of his campaign logo with a period Saturday night as he officially suspended his presidential campaign following a disappointing finish in South Carolina.
“I’m proud of the campaign we have run,” Bush said a few minutes into his speech. “But the people of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina have spoken and I respect their decision, so tonight I am suspending my campaign.”
The campaign suffered a major blow earlier in the week as South Carolina’s popular governor endorsed rival Marco Rubio over the former Florida governor — a move Bush called “disappointing” — resulting in what seemed the final downward trajectory of his run.
“When I began this journey in Miami I committed that I would campaign as I would serve, going everywhere, speaking to everyone, keeping my word, facing the issues without flinching and staying true to what I believe,” he said in summing up his campaign.
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The former governor headed back to his home in Miami, Florida, on Saturday night, the campaign confirmed.
Bush’s early momentum in the race stalled late in the summer in the face of a rising Donald Trump, who successfully branded Bush as “low-energy” — a moniker the former governor struggled to overcome.
“I fully believe the American people must entrust this office to someone who believes whoever holds it is a servant, not the master,” Bush said, seeming to allude to frontrunner Trump.
Saturday’s disappointing finish in South Carolina follows similar performances in the other early states where Bush finished sixth in Iowa and fourth in New Hampshire where he had devoted heavy campaign resources.
“In this campaign I have stood my ground, refusing to bend to the political winds,” he said.
Our story from this week polled Bush supporters' second choice preferences https://t.co/qDnPdl2VXx @davidtaint pic.twitter.com/xKwdOqKC8k — Sam Petulla (@spetulla) February 21, 2016
Bush’s final Palmetto State push included a much anticipated campaign appearance by his brother, former President George W. Bush, but ultimately the elder Bush’s popularity didn’t transfer.
Aside from thanking supporters during his speech, Bush — a self-described “policy wonk” — touted the importance of ideas and policy, something his campaign routinely laid out during the campaign.
“With strong conservative leadership, Republicans can win the White House,” Bush said. “That’s what I honestly believe and I know you do as well." |
Rust is an online multiplayer survival game. The game was released on 11 Dec, 2013 and it’s still in Early Access. The game is not optimized as i might stutter sometimes and the FPS drops below 15 after a short interval, Even in my GeForce GTX 1060 6GB i don’t get over 60FPS @1080p Beautiful settings, But developers are improving the game.
Many people including my friends who play Rust complains about the background & workshop contents downloads/updates. The bad this about the background updates is that you can’t stop them.
Whenever a new skin is made it directly added into the game and starts to download while you are playing, The game starts to lag,stutter and the ping goes sky high and it hurt the people who have a slow internet connection. I’m using 4G internet it does’nt hurt me while i’m playing the game.
How To Turn off The Backgrounds Updates?
1. Open your Steam App.
2. Go to the upper left corner and click on Steam.
3. Click on Settings and than click on Downloads.
4. Click on the Only auto-update games between box and set up the time in which your is turned off/you don’t use it.
And you are done.
Stay tuned with us for more. |
With a date for tea with the Queen in the bag for the Chinese premier, Li Keqiang, this week, Beijing decided to place Britain ever so gently in its place.
Britain now ranks behind Germany and France among the pre-eminent powers in Europe, the Chinese ambassador Liu Xiaoming declared on the eve of the premier's three-day visit to Britain, which starts on Monday.
The remarks by the ambassador, who highlighted a series of missed opportunities by Britain, ranging from the failure to build a third runway at Heathrow to an overly restrictive visa regime, show the delicate challenge in managing diplomatic relations with China.
David Cameron, in common with all his immediate predecessors, believes that Britain must forge a strong political and economic relationship with a country that is on course to move ahead of the US as the world's largest economy.
But the remarks by the ambassador show that China has little time for the usual diplomatic niceties and likes to remind European countries in general – and one with such a sensitive colonial past, in particular – just who is top dog in the 21st century.
The prime minister has faced the same challenge as each of his predecessors since Margaret Thatcher laid the basis for the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997, as a special administrative region, in the 1984 Sino-British joint declaration. Thatcher had initially wanted to hang on to Hong Kong island, which had been ceded to Britain in perpetuity under the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing. But officials advised Thatcher that Britain had no ability to challenge China.
More than a quarter of a century later, Cameron has faced a dilemma of his own, though this has been on a more modest scale. This was discussed over a Soho dinner among some of his closest political allies a year ago as he prepared for his second visit to China which was to be preceded by a visit by George Osborne. The gist of the dinner was to work out how Britain could tap into the vast economic opportunities of China while holding firm to its values on human rights.
An internal Whitehall debate had been under way after China put diplomatic relations with Britain in the fridge, not the freezer, after Cameron and Nick Clegg met the Dalai Lama in 2012. Hugo Swire, the Foreign Office minister, urged caution over the dinner. But Osborne called for a hard-headed approach, saying Britain needed to throw itself into building the strongest possible relationship with China.
Needless to say, the chancellor prevailed. Within months, the prime minister embarked on his long-delayed visit to China, declaring in the Chinese weekly news magazine Caixin: "There is no country in the western world more open to Chinese investment."
Human rights were on the agenda during Cameron's visit in December as they will be during Li's visit this week. But all EU countries have devised a formula to avoid causing too much offence to the Chinese, known as a "human rights dialogue". Cameron will refer to this dialogue in his meeting with Li, allowing him to say human rights have been raised without necessarily discussing the issue in great detail.
Ann Clwyd, a Labour member of the Commons foreign affairs select committee, says Cameron should not be afraid to challenge the Chinese. Clwyd says: "I suspect we don't get the balance right when trade is an issue. And this government is very hot on trade. But MPs must put pressure on the prime minister to raise the controversial issues with the Chinese."
All sides seem resigned to acknowledging the overwhelming economic might of China. Perhaps change might come from the very top: the Prince of Wales once appeared to boycott a state banquet for the former president Jiang Zemin, allegedly in protest at the treatment of the Dalai Lama. |
Handscroll depicting scenes from the Great Fire of Meireki (kept at the Edo-Tokyo Museum
The Great fire of Meireki (明暦の大火, Meireki no taika), also known as the Furisode Fire, destroyed 60–70% of the Japanese capital city of Edo (now Tokyo) on March 2, 1657,[1] the third year of the Meireki Imperial era. The fire lasted for three days, and is estimated to have claimed over 100,000 lives.
Great Fire of Edo [ edit ]
Legend [ edit ]
The fire was said to have been started accidentally by a priest who was cremating an allegedly cursed kimono. The kimono had been owned in succession by three teenage girls who all died before ever being able to wear it. When the garment was being burned, a large gust of wind fanned the flames causing the wooden temple to ignite.[2]
Historical Account [ edit ]
The fire began on the eighteenth day of the year, in Edo's Hongō district, and spread quickly through the city, due to hurricane-force winds which were blowing from the northwest. Edo, like most Japanese cities and towns at the time, and like most of those in mainland East Asia, was built primarily from wood and paper. The buildings were especially dry due to a drought the previous year, and the roads and other open spaces between buildings were small and narrow, allowing the fire to spread and grow particularly quickly. (Many cities in Europe had similar problems, being built of flammable material and tightly packed; indeed, London was to burn only nine years later.) Though Edo had a designated fire brigade, the Hikeshi (火消し, "fire extinguisher"), it had been established only 21 years earlier, and was simply not large enough, experienced enough, or well-equipped enough to face such a conflagration.
On the second evening, the winds changed, and the fire was pushed from the southern edges of the city back towards its center. The homes of the shōgun's closest retainers, in Kōjimachi, were destroyed as the fire made its way towards Edo castle, at the very center of the city. Ultimately, the main keep was saved, but most of the outer buildings, and all of the retainers' and servants' homes were destroyed. Finally, on the third day, the winds died down, as did the flames, but thick smoke prevented movement about the city, removal of bodies, and reconstruction, for several days further.
Aftermath [ edit ]
Historical marker for memorial to victims of Great Fire of Meireki
On the 24th day of the new year, six days after the fire began, monks and others began to transport the bodies of those killed down the Sumida River to Honjo, Sumida, Tokyo, a community on the eastern side of the river. There, pits were dug and the bodies buried; the Ekō-in (Hall of Prayer for the Dead) was then built on the site.
Reconstruction efforts took two years, as the shogunate took the opportunity to reorganize the city according to various practical considerations. Under the guidance of Rōjū Matsudaira Nobutsuna, streets were widened and some districts replanned and reorganized; special care was taken to restore Edo's mercantile center, thus protecting and boosting to some extent the overall national economy. Commoners and samurai retainers alike were granted funds from the government for the rebuilding of their homes, and the restoration of the shōgun's castle was left to be completed last. The area around the castle, as it was restored, was reorganized to leave greater spaces to act as firebreaks; retainers' homes were moved further from the castle, and a number of temples and shrines were relocated to the banks of the river.
One of the greatest disasters in Japanese history, the death and destruction incurred by the Meireki fire was nearly comparable to that suffered in the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake and the 1945 bombing of Tokyo in World War II. Each of these 20th-century events, like the Meireki fire less than three centuries earlier, saw roughly 100,000 deaths, and the destruction of the majority of the city.
In popular culture [ edit ]
The Fire Kimono, a 2008 mystery novel by Laura Joh Rowland, was inspired by the event.
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Sansom, George (1963). A History of Japan: 1615–1867. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Notes [ edit ]
^ Blusse, Leonard & Cynthia Vaillé (2005). The Deshima Dagregisters, Volume XII 1650–1660. Leiden ^ Noêl Noue (1961). Histoire de Tokyo (Page 98)
Media related to Great Fire of Meireki at Wikimedia Commons |
New pirate subplot - After completing any one of the story branches a player can either end the game, or continue playing to complete another branch. the player’s actions influence the entire Galaxy, while the balance in either of wars may be tipped not only by the player, but by AI actions as well. No two playthroughs will be the same.
Major technical overhaul - Display resolutions up to 1920×1200, multi-core processors, Windows® 7, and anti-aliasing in 3D planetary battles are now fully supported.
Other improvements include more than 10 new text adventures, 15+ planetary battle maps, 20+ government missions, unique non-story events, new equipment and micromodules, access to all hyperspace engagements from the main menu and more!
Space Rangers HD: A War Apart remasters and expands the world of the cult classic Space Rangers 2. The game is developed by the SNK-Games team in close cooperation with fans of the series.The biggest of the improved features is a new scenario dedicated to the pirates threatening the galaxy. While the Coalition spends all of its resources to fight the Dominators (sentient machines who seek to eradicate all life), the pirates have united under the banner of a mysterious leader. Under this new master they have begun their own guerrilla war to seize power in the weakened Galaxy. Players can now choose with whom to deal, the Dominators or the pirates, or both at the same time. If you choose the latter path, you will receive new story and side quests, new goals and promotions. After winning one of the wars, you can either finish the game or continue playing to win another.Players begin their pirate career as the lowest of the low, and will make their way to the top of the pirate hierarchy, completing story missions and learning new information about the organization and its unknown leader whose actions threaten the very existence of the Coalition of sentient species. All player actions affect what kind of place the Galaxy will be at the end, with the victorious Coalition that managed to overcome its enemies or with a collapsed alliance from both external Dominator and internal pirate pressures. The game has received a major technical overhaul in addition to the addition of new content. All of the main menu, loading screens, planet and space station vistas were reworked. Now you can choose a display resolution of up to 1920×1200 and planetary battles employ modern render technologies.
© 2013 1C Company. Developed by Elemental Games and SNK-Games. All right reserved |
ForexMinute the greater market" -in currencies they understand- while not limiting them to smaller currency markets.”
ForexMinute.com, the world’s best financial news online portal, is now providing its visitors and traders with minute-to-minute Bitcoin news. The news portal is one among the first websites to offer its visitors with even the comparatively little known facts about Bitcoin and the trades surrounding it.
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Art Briles, who was fired amidst the Baylor sex scandal, talks on a regular basis to both Florida Atlantic coach Lane Kiffin and his son, Kendal Briles, about FAU's offense.
According to the Sun Sentinel, Kendal Briles, FAU's offensive coordinator, speaks with his father about personnel and putting players in the right position to succeed.
“Obviously, he has ideas,” Kendal said. “He wants to know personnel and different guys and making sure we’re getting those guys in the right spots and getting them touches and all that stuff. He’s a football coach, that’s all he’s ever been. He’s definitely involved and we talk daily.”
Briles spent 13 years as a head coach in college at the University of Houston as well as at Baylor. Prior to that he was the head coach at Texas high school powerhouse Stephenville, where he won four state titles.
Kiffin took over the FAU program in the offseason after spending the last two years as the offensive coordinator for Alabama. The Crimson Tide won the national championship in 2015 and finished as the runner-up in 2016 with Kiffin running the team's offense.
His wide-open offense at places like USC, Tennessee and with the Oakland Raiders in the NFL has some similarities to Briles' system at Baylor that led college football in yards from 2013-15, so to take advice from Briles isn't a bad football decision.
“Obviously, he’s done unbelievable things on offense,” Kiffin said. “It’s his system that he started years and years ago. Every once in a while, I’ll text or call him and bounce something off of him.” |
What happens when a judge gets demob-happy? The answer can be seen in the intervention by the imminently departing president of the supreme court, Lord Neuberger, in the debate over the role of the European court of justice – better known as the ECJ – once Britain leaves the EU. The government will doubtless be less than delighted at another dissenting voice in the Brexit process.
Judge calls for clarity on status of ECJ rulings in UK after Brexit Read more
The ECJ has long been a bugbear for Brexiteers, and some might say with good reason. The court has expanded its jurisdiction dramatically over time, meaning that an ever-increasing number of issues fall within its remit. It’s never been a good look for judges in Luxembourg to be able to strike down laws passed in Westminster, and the judgments coming from the ECJ are an odd mix, encompassing elements both of our own common law system and the civil law seen across the continent.
Theresa May set out a negotiating red line in her party conference speech last year that Britain would not up sticks from the EU only to remain under the ECJ’s jurisdiction. “That’s not going to happen,” she pronounced confidently.
The trouble is that, as with much of Brexit, the headline is far simpler than the specifics. As Neuberger’s intervention shows, it may be impossible to shake off the reach of the ECJ, however much the government tries.
This is not so much about a lack of political will, but a matter of legal reality. The government can hardly be said to have backtracked: the draft bill on withdrawing from the EU says that the ECJ’s rulings will no longer be supreme for any law passed after “exit day”. So far, so clear.
As for previous decisions made by the European court, this too is spelled out. Where the ECJ has decided something – and the British courts have therefore been required to apply that decision – the end result will remain binding here.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘No wonder Neuberger feels that the position is invidious.’ Photograph: John Stillwell/PA
After that, things become about as simple as an Ikea flat pack. The bill, if passed in its present form, will leave lawyers scratching their heads – and billing their hours, of course – as they try to work out what it all means.
There are a number of big issues. One is what we do about decisions made by the ECJ after we leave the EU. It’s naive to suggest that these could be ignored altogether. Take a British regulation implementing EU law that was enacted prior to Brexit: what happens if the ECJ rules on what that EU law means, after we quit? Will British judges have to take the ECJ’s ruling into account, or implement the law as they see fit?
What we do know is that British courts won’t be forced to do what the ECJ says – the bill says a British court “need not have regard” to the ECJ’s judgments. Confusingly, though, it then states that the British court “may do so if it considers it appropriate to do so”.
Unless the government is clearer, it will be up to judges to decide just how much regard they must have for the ECJ. The possibilities are endless. It could be that British courts will be required to follow the ECJ unless there’s a good reason not to – or at the very least that the ECJ will be “highly persuasive” authority, meaning that the judges in Luxembourg continue to have huge sway over what happens here. At the other end of the scale, ECJ decisions might be seen as barely relevant background, largely ignored and no more important than an academic article or a decision from somewhere like Singapore.
No wonder Neuberger feels that the position is invidious. Jump one way and judges will be “enemies of the people”. Go the other and they could be seen as casting aside helpful authorities for political reasons.
Why are judges worried about the ECJ's post-Brexit role? Read more
The other big oddity is that the law will ossify from “exit day”. British judgments given in the past on the basis of ECJ jurisprudence will be confirmed as good law, even if the ECJ later changes its mind on the issue. Confused? You should be. British courts could still, in effect, be bound by decisions made by the ECJ that the ECJ has itself overturned. In that scenario, do British judges change the law to remain in line with the new European decision, or stick with what we had at the strict cut-off point?
The Brexit bill gives flexibility, but that will only lead to ambiguity. With ECJ jurisprudence no longer binding, the British courts will be free to change their mind, and it’s inevitable that over time, people will try to chip away at decisions that have been made ever since Britain first joined the EU. We may see a whole line of cases relitigated, leading to uncertainty all round.
The government will likely succeed in asserting the primacy of British courts – and that is no small change – but it needs to decide precisely what that means.
• Bobby Friedman is a journalist and barrister |
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OLYMPIA, Wash. - A robbery suspect had a canvas bag with a dollar sign tied to his pants when caught by officers on Wednesday, the Olympia Police Department said.
Police say the suspect robbed a west side Subway, stealing money from the store's register, and an employee's cell phone. The suspect was also seen fleeing the store with a blue shopping cart, police said.
After a call to 911, officers located the suspect hiding behind a dumpster near Grocery Outlet. It took multiple commands to get the suspect to the ground.
Officers located a knife, $100 cash, and a smartphone that matched the employee's in the suspect's pocket. He also had a white canvas bag tied to the front of his pants that had a dollar sign on it, police said, and the shopping cart was filled with "consumer goods."
Despite refusing to identify himself, officers found the suspect's booking picture in the Thurston County Jail log. He was identified as 22-year-old David Lingafelter, and was booked for robbery and obstructing. |
A mother-of-two is showing off her stunning physique in a series of enviable Instagram photos just a year after giving birth to twins.
Sonya Davison Sanchez, a television host based in Singapore, recently posted a throwback photo of herself in a bikini the day before she gave birth alongside another snapshot of herself holding her sons Tristan and Raiden in the same swimsuit nearly a year later.
'The day before I gave birth vs today!' she wrote on Instagram. 'So amazed by what the human body is capable of.'
Scroll down for video
Transformation: Sonya Davison Sanchez recently posted a throwback photo of herself in a bikini the day before she gave birth alongside another snapshot of herself a year later
Turn around: The mother-of-two said she lost the weight in three weeks because she stayed active and only gained what she needed to during her pregnancy. She is pictured in September
The image on the left sees Sonya wearing aqua bikini bottms and a floral triangle top while she was 35-weeks pregnant, and she is modeling the same bikini in the new photo.
But instead of flaunting her large baby bump, she is balancing her two boys, who are turning one on April 29.
Sonya has more than 202,000 Instagram followers, and her feed is filled with stunning photos of herself showing off her trim figure in everything from workout gear to crop tops.
Superhero family! Sonya and her husband are pictured with their boys Tristan and Raiden, who are turning one this week
On the go: Sonya often shares photos of herself breastfeeding her boys, including this scenic snapshot
Unsurprisingly, plenty of people questioned how Sonya was able to get her body back to the way it was after giving birth to twins, and even she admits she was surprised by her transformation.
Sharing a bikini photo of herself last September, Sonya explained how she was able to bounce back so quickly after giving birth.
'A year ago, I made my husband promise to (pretend to) still love my body after I gave birth,' she wrote. 'During my pregnancy, I mentally prepared myself for a post-twins baby body. I had fully accepted it...
No need to pretend: Sonya said that she made her husband promise to still love her body after she gave birth because she thought it would drastically different
Nursing: The mom credits breastfeeding two boys to helping her lose weight postpartum
'I, (like many) thought that it wouldn't be possible to get my body back after pregnancy (especially after seeing my ginormous twin belly). I was wrong.
'I would come to realize that a combination of factors would lead to me losing my pregnancy weight within just three weeks of giving birth.'
Sonya went on to share her secret, noting that before she got pregnant she had 'strong core muscles' from doing high intensity interval training (HIIT) workouts out home.
'I only gained what I needed to,' she said of her pregnancy. 'You don't literally have to "eat for two" when you're pregnant.
Owning it: Sonya showed off her 'tiger stripes' in a gray crop top back in March
Secret trick: Although she lost the weight in just three weeks, Sonya said she lost all muscle in her stomach and relied on Spanx to suck everything in
Feeding time: 'When you breastfeed your stomach contracts which helps your uterus shrink quicker,' she said
'I gained mostly on my tummy, so I only had to lose that extra weight, which is a whole lot easier than the whole body.'
Sonya added that she walk for two to three hours ever other day to keep her metabolism up while she was pregnant and credits exclusively breastfeeds her boys to helping her reach her pre-pregnancy weight.
'When you breastfeed your stomach contracts which helps your uterus shrink quicker - times that by two (preemie babies that fed hourly) and you have the perfect storm,' she said.
The mom often shares photos of herself nursing her boys, including one scenic shot that sees her nursing one of her sons at an outdoor restaurant in front of a pier.
Keeping fit: Sonya said she does high intensity interval training (HIIT) workouts out home
About to pop: Sonya is pictured right before she gave birth to her baby boys
New mom: Sonya welcomed her sons Tristan and Raiden into the world on April 29, 2016. She is pictured a few days after giving birth
Sonya pointed out that 'every person's body is different but this is what worked for me.'
The mother-of-two ended her candid post by saying that even though she lost weight that is only the first step because she also lost all the muscle tone in her stomach, noting that after one meal, 'it would all hang out again till the next morning'.
Three months after she gave birth she said she started doing simple 20-minute HIIT workout routines at home, and a year after welcoming her twins into the world, it looks like the mom is back in fighting shape.
Sonya has fulled embraced her postpartum body, and she proudly paid homage to the stretch marks on her stomach last month.
'Tiger stripes n all #mamabod,' she captioned the photo of herself in a crop top. |
These letters, addressed to Frederic Bastiat, an economist, originally appeared in a debate published in The Voice of the People, in 1849. Interest and Principal The Origin of Ground Rent I said before that in ancient times the landed proprietor, when neither he nor his family farmed his land, as was the case among the Romans in the early days of the Republic, cultivated it through his slaves: such was the general practice of patrician families. Then slavery and the soil were chained together; the farmer was called adscrpitus gleboe, joined to the land; property in men and things was undivided. The price of a farm depended (1) upon its area and quality of its soil, (2) upon the quantity of stock, and (3) upon the number of slaves. When the emancipation of the slave was proclaimed, the proprietor lost the man and kept the land; just as today, in freeing the blacks, we leave the master his property in land and stock. Nevertheless, from the standpoint of ancient law as well as of natural and Christian right, man, born to labor, cannot dispense with the implements of labor; the principles of emancipation involved an agrarian law which guarantees them to him and protects him in their use: otherwise, this pretended emancipation was only an act of hateful cruelty, an infamous deception, and if, as Moses said, interest, or the yearly income from capital, reimburses capital, might it not be said that servitude reimburses property? The theologians and the law-givers of the time did not understand this, and by an irreconcilable contradiction, which still exists, they continued to rail at usury, but gave absolution to rent. The result was that the emancipated slave, and, a few centuries later, the enfranchised serf, without means of existence, was obliged to become a tenant and pay tribute. The master grew still richer. I will furnish you, he says, with land; you shall furnish the labor; and we will divide the products. It was a reproduction on the farm of the ways and customs of business. I will lend you ten talents, said the moneyed man to the workingman; you shall use them; and then either we wiII divide the profits, or else, as long as you keep my money, you shall pay me a twentieth; or, if you prefer, at the expiration of the loan, you shall return double the amount originally received. From this sprang ground-rent, unknown to the Russians and the Arabs. The exploitation of man by man, thanks to this transformation, passed into the form of law: Usury, condemned in the form of lending at interest, tolerated in the contrat a la grosse, was extolled in the form of farm-rent. From that moment commercial and industrial progress served to make it only more and more customary. This was necessary in order to exhibit all the varieties of slavery and robbery, and to establish the true law of human liberty. Once engaged in this practice of interesse, so strangely understood, so improperly applied, society began to revolve in the circle of its miseries. Then it was that inequality of conditions seemed a law of civilization, and evil a necessity of our nature. Two ways, however, seemed open to laborers to free themselves from exploitation by the capitalist: one was, as we said above, the gradual balancing of values and consequently a decrease in the price of capital; the other was the reciprocity of interest. But it is evident that the income from capital, represented mainly by money, cannot be totally destroyed by decreasing it; for, as you well say, sir, if my capital brought me nothing, instead of lending it I should keep it, and the laborer, in consequence of having refused to pay the tithe, would be out of work. As for the reciprocity of usury, it is certainly possible between contractor and contractor, capitalist and capitalist, proprietor and proprietor; but between proprietor, capitalist, or contractor, and the common laborer, it is utterly impossible. It is impossible, I say, as long as in commerce interest on capital is added to the workingman's wages as a part of the price of merchandise, for the workingman to repurchase what he has himself produced. To live by working is a principle which, as long as interest exists, involves a contradiction. Society once driven into this corner, the absurdity of the capitalistic theory is shown by the absurdity of its consequences; the inherent iniquity of interest results from its homicidal effects, and while property begins and ends in rent and usury, its affinity with robbery will be established. Can it exist under other conditions? For my own part, I say no: but this is an inquiry entirely foreign to the question now under discussion, and I will not enter upon it. Look now at the situation of both capitalist and laborer, resulting from the invention of money, the power of specie, and the established similarity between the lending of money and the renting of land and houses. The first,--for it is necessary to justify him, even in your eyes,--controlled by the prejudice in favor of money, cannot gratuitously dispossess himself of his capital in favor of the laborer. Not that such dispossession is a sacrifice, for, in his hands, capital is unproductive; not that he incurs any risk of loss, for, by taking a mortgage as security, he is sure of repayment; not that this loaning costs him the slightest trouble, unless you consider as such counting the money and verifying the security; but because, by dispossessing himself for ever so short a time of his money,--of this money which, by its prerogative, is, as has been so justly said, power,--the capitalist lessens his strength and his safety. This would be otherwise, if, gold and silver were only ordinary merchandise; if the possession of coin was regarded as no more desirable than the possession of wheat, wine, oil, or Ieather; if the simple ability to labor gave a man the same security as the possession of money. While this monopoly of circulation and exchange exists, usury is necessary to the capitalist. His motives, in the light of justice, are not reprehensible: when his money leaves his own vault, his safety goes with it. Now, this necessity, which is laid upon the capitalist by an involuntary and widespread prejudice, is, as respects the laborer, the most shameful of robberies, as well as the most hateful of tyrannies, the tyranny of force. What are, indeed, the theoretical and practical consequences to the working-class, to this vital, productive, and moral portion of society, of lending at interest and its counterpart, farm-rent? I today confine myself to the enumeration of some of them, to which I call your attention, and which hereafter, if agreeable to you, shall be the subject of our discussion. And first, it is the principle of interest, or of net product, that enables an individual really and legitimately to live without working: that is the conclusion of your last letter but one, and such, in fact, is the condition to which every one today aspires. Again: If the principle of net product is true of the individual, it must be true also of the nation; for example, the capital of France, both real and personal, being valued at one hundred and thirty-two billions, which yields, at five per cent, an annual income of sixty-six hundred millions, at least half of the French nation might, if it pleased, live without working; in England, where the amount of accumulated capital is much larger than in France, and the population much smaller, the entire nation, from Queen Victoria down to the lowest hanger-on of the son of Liverpool, might live on the product of its capital, promenading with cane in hand, or groaning in public meetings. Which leads to this conclusion, evidently an absurd one, that, thanks to its capital, such a nation has more income than its labor can produce. Again: The total amount of wages paid annually in France being in the neighborhood of six thousand millions, and the total amount of revenue yielded by capital being also six thousand millions, making the market value of the annual product of the nation twelve thousand millions, the producers, who are also consumers, can and must pay, with the six thousand millions of wages allowed them, the twelve thousand millions which commerce demands of them as the price of its merchandise, and without which the capitalists would find themselves minus an income. Again: Interest being perpetual in its nature, and never being regarded, as Moses wished, as a repayment of the original capital, and further, it being possible to place each year's income at interest in its turn, thus forming a new loan, and consequently giving rise to a new income, the smallest amount of capital may, in time, yield sums so enormous as to exceed in value a mass of gold as large as the globe on which we live. Price demonstrated this in his theory of liquidation. Again: The productivity of capital being the immediate and sole cause of the inequality of wealth, and the continual accumulation of capital in a few hands, it must be admitted, in spite of the progress of knowledge, in spite of Christian revelation and the extension of public liberty, that society is naturally and necessarily divided into two classes--a class of exploiting capitalists and a class of exploited laborers. |
Question. How do you go about deleting the high resolution image files from you Nokia Lumia 1020 Windows Phone without deleting the 5MP, lower resolution copies? That's a question Windows Phone Central reader Binson#WP has tossed out over in the WPCentral Forums. There's no way to sync just the low resolution images and you can't see the high res image file from your phone. So what's the solution?
When you connect your Lumia 1020 to a computer, you can view your Lumia 1020 image folders through your computer's File Explorer. Just look under your computer's drives and you'll see your Windows Phone listed. Go to the Phone folder then Pictures then Camera Roll. Both your low and high resolution images will be listed here. The high resolution file names will end in "_highres.jpg" and will not have an image thumbnail. For example, image file WP_20130813_13_11_28_Pro_highres.jpg is the high resolution file for the low resolution file WP_20130813_13_11_28_Pro.jpg. You can always sift through these image files and delete only those with "_highres.jpg" in the file name but that can be awfully tedious. |
The Philadelphia Phillies are 27-0 when leading entering the ninth inning.
They are, however, just 1-6 when tied entering the ninth inning.
The latest of those defeats came Monday night when Jonathan Papelbon gave up a leadoff triple to Dee Gordon and an RBI single to Elian Herrera as the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Phillies 4-3.
The good news for Phillies is that at least Papelbon was in the game to take the loss as opposed to one of his lesser relief comrades. That's his second loss in a tie game he entered in the ninth inning, the first one coming in a memorable loss to the New York Mets when Jordany Valdespin hit a pinch-hit three-run homer.
Papelbon is perfect in save situations, leading to the obvious question: Do closers not pitch as well in tie games because it's not a "save" situation? You hear that suggested all the time, but it's a ridiculous notion that closers get more amped up with a lead than a tie game. Certainly, the outcome of a tie game is much more in doubt than a game in which your team is ahead. They should be more locked in during a tie game -- where there is no margin for error -- than with a lead.
What it really shows is how overrated the closer position is. Yes, the Phillies are 27-0 when leading while heading into the ninth inning. But entering Monday's games, all major league teams were 700-37 when leading while entering the ninth inning, a .950 winning percentage. So the average team has lost about one game leading into the ninth. Even though he's regarded as one of baseball's best closers, Papelbon's value is pretty minimal.
Here's a better way to look at Papelbon's value:
The Phillies 28-6 when tied or leading heading into the ninth, an .824 winning percentage.
The other 29 teams (entering Monday) are 741-100 when tied or leading heading into the ninth, an .881 winning percentage.
So despite having one of the best closers in baseball, the Phillies have a worse winning percentage than the average team when leading or tied entering the ninth inning. What good is having a so-called great closer if he's not making you better?
This points to two issues which the Phillies and manager Charlie Manuel fail to understand:
1. Using your best reliever in high-leverage situations is more important than using him in save situations. Papelbon has 15 saves; he hasn't allowed a run in any of those saves. But you know how many protected a one-run lead? Three. THREE. You know how many protected a three-run lead? Four. He has nearly as many losses as one-run saves. It's a joke.
2. Having a deep bullpen is more important than having a great closer. Yes, ninth-inning blown leads are heartbreaking. But so are eighth-inning leads or ninth-inning losses in tie games. But as we just showed: Teams win 95 percent of the time when they lead entering the ninth. That is why you don't spend $50 million on a closer and let Chad Qualls pitch in key situations or Michael Schwimer throw 58 pitches and lose a game in the 11th inning and not use Papelbon.
Look, Manuel used Papelbon the right way on Monday night, but that was only because there was no save situation in play since the Phillies were the home team. But it's obviously a fine line for the Phillies this year; this club isn't going to coast to 102 wins again, not with Roy Halladay out, the offense no longer a powerhouse and the rest of Papelbon's bullpen mates not exactly a stellar group (the Phillies have the second-worst bullpen ERA in the majors).
Papelbon has pitched six crucial innings all year. The Phillies need to get him into more important situations.
And they hope he actually pitches well. Because his ratio of good outings in clutch situations is 67 percent, not 100 percent. |
Noam Chomsky Is Leaving MIT for the University of Arizona
The linguistics professor has emeritus status at MIT.
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Big news in the world of highbrow academia: Noam Chomsky is leaving MIT. The linguistics professor has announced plans to depart Cambridge in favor of, well, not greener pastures, exactly, but certainly warmer ones. He’s joining the linguistics department at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
Chomsky has been at MIT since 1955, and retired in 2002. According to the Boston Globe, he’s given some big talks at UA in recent years, including one about privacy with Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald. In an announcement from UA, Chomsky sounded excited about the department, which he called “excellent” and said was “full of former students of mine.”
Working with former students seems to have been a strong pull for Chomsky, who says he and his wife Valeria Wasserman Chomsky were “in love” with Tucson, and that “We felt that the UA would be a good place to work and think and interact with people we like and can work with.”
According to David Petesky, head of the linguistics department at MIT, this change won’t be that different, since Chomsky hasn’t taught much in recent years. “He remains our emeritus colleague,” Petesky told the Globe. “That’s never going to change.”
Chomsky is 88 years old, which seems like a fine time in life to still be considering new adventures. He will, however, maintain an office in Cambridge, so you may still spot the professor around town. |
Who is on UK 'least wanted' list?
Sixteen people banned from entering the UK since October last year for fostering extremism or hatred have been named by the Home Office for the first time. A total of 22 people have been excluded in that time, although the identities of six of them have been withheld by the government in the "public interest". The named individuals are: ABDULLAH QADRI AL AHDAL Preacher. Considered to be engaging in unacceptable behaviour by seeking to foment, justify or glorify terrorist violence in furtherance of particular beliefs and fostering hatred that might lead to inter-community violence. YUNIS AL ASTAL Preacher and Hamas MP. Considered to be engaging in unacceptable behaviour by seeking to foment, justify or glorify terrorist violence in furtherance of particular beliefs and to provoke others to terrorist acts. STEPHEN DONALD BLACK Former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard who set up racist website Stormfront. Considered to be engaging in unacceptable behaviour by promoting serious criminal activity and fostering hatred that might lead to inter-community violence in the UK. WADGY ABD EL HAMIED MOHAMED GHONEIM A prolific speaker and writer. Considered to be engaging in unacceptable behaviour by seeking to foment, justify or glory terrorist violence in furtherance of particular beliefs and to provoke others to commit terrorist acts. ERIC GLIEBE Neo-Nazi. Has made web-radio broadcasts in which he vilifies certain ethnic groups and encourages the download and distribution of provocative racist leaflets and posters. Considered to be engaging in unacceptable behaviour by justifying terrorist violence, provoking others to commit serious crime and fostering racial hatred. MIKE GUZOVSKY Jewish militant. Leader of a violent group and actively involved with military training camps. Considered to be engaging in unacceptable behaviour by seeking to foment, justify or glorify terrorist violence in furtherance of particular beliefs and to provoke others to terrorist acts. SAFWAT HIJAZI Television preacher. Considered to be engaging in unacceptable behaviour by glorifying terrorist violence. NASR JAVED Kashmiri militant group leader. Considered to be engaging in unacceptable behaviour by seeking to foment, justify or glorify terrorist violence in furtherance of particular beliefs. ABDUL ALI MUSA Muslim activist, previously known as Clarence Reams. Considered to be engaging in unacceptable behaviour by fomenting and glorifying terrorist violence in furtherance of his particular beliefs and seeking to provoke others to terrorist acts. FRED WALDRON PHELPS SNR & SHIRLEY PHELPS-ROPER American pastor and leading spokesman of Westboro Baptist Church. Considered to be engaging in unacceptable behaviour by fostering hatred that might lead to inter-community violence in the UK. The 79-year-old and his daughter are barred for their anti-gay comments. Both have picketed the funerals of Aids victims and have claimed the deaths of American soldiers are a punishment for US tolerance of homosexuality. SAMIR AL QUNTAR Hezbollah militant. Spent three decades in prison for killing four soldiers and a four-year-old girl. Considered to be engaging in unacceptable behaviour by seeking to foment, justify or glorify terrorist violence in furtherance of particular beliefs and to provoke others to terrorist acts. ARTUR RYNO & PAVEL SKACHEVSKY Leaders of a violent Russian skinhead gang that beat migrants and posted films of their attacks on the internet, and committed 20 racially motivated murders. Considered to be engaging in unacceptable behaviour by fomenting serious criminal activity and seeking to provoke others to serious criminal acts. Both are currently in prison. AMIR SIDDIQUE Preacher. Considered to be engaging in unacceptable behaviour by fomenting terrorist violence in furtherance of particular beliefs. MICHAEL ALAN WEINER (ALSO KNOWN AS MICHAEL SAVAGE) Controversial daily radio talk-show host. Considered to be engaging in unacceptable behaviour by seeking to provoke others to serious criminal acts and fostering hatred which might lead to inter-community violence. His views on immigration, Islam, rape and autism have caused great offence in the US.
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Free Go Kart Plans
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We do not publish "by-the-numbers" CAD plans; we hope that you'll find your personal design from our road map. The only limiting factor to your designs is yourself — if you can dream it, you can build it.
Materials for karts are varied. See the fabrication tips section for information on materials, bending, cutting, and more.
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When you're ready to buy, we've found that Northern Tool generally has the lowest prices on most parts. Click on go karts, then go kart accessories.
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Ensuring that your welds are good is very important. If you're not an accomplished weldor have someone inspect them or have an accomplished weldor help you with the project.
Go karts are machines with lots of moving parts, and are dangerous. Please read our safety information, use common sense, and be safe. |
Germany’s conservative chancellor, Angela Merkel, declared on a German news channel on Wednesday, “I am absolutely against any form of assisted suicide, in whatever guise it comes.”
On Friday, Bavaria and four other German states will push for new laws to ban commercial ventures that help people kill themselves. Suicide itself is not a crime, nor is aiding a suicide, provided it does not cross the line into euthanasia, or mercy killing.
But many here do not want Germany to follow the example of Switzerland, where liberal laws on euthanasia have led to a bustling trade in assisted suicide. In the last decade, nearly 500 Germans have crossed the border to end their lives with the help of a Swiss group that facilitates suicides.
“We want to make it illegal for people here to offer ‘suicide by reservation,’ ” Ms. Merk said. “That is inhumane.”
By helping Ms. Schardt end her life, and then broadcasting the result, Mr. Kusch has, in effect, hung out a shingle. A former senior government official from Hamburg, Mr. Kusch, 53, said he would help other people like her who decide of their own free will to commit suicide.
“My offer, since last Saturday, is to allow people to die in their own beds,” he said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. “That is the wish of most people, and now it is possible in Germany.”
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With his penchant for brazen publicity, Mr. Kusch recalls Jack Kevorkian, the euthanasia crusader in Michigan who all but dared the authorities to stop his assisted suicides, and ended up in prison. But Mr. Kusch, who is trained as a lawyer, is careful not to cross the legal line.
In Ms. Schardt’s case, he counseled her about how to commit suicide, but did not provide or administer the drugs. He left the room after she drank the poisonous brew and returned three hours later to find her dead on her bed. He videotaped the entire process as proof that he was not an active participant.
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Prosecutors have looked into the case, but it does not appear that Mr. Kusch is in legal jeopardy.
Mr. Kusch also videotaped five hours of interviews with Ms. Schardt, in which she discussed her fears and why she wanted to die. He showed excerpts at the news conference, causing an outcry. “A 10-minute video says more than if I had talked for two hours,” he said.
While Ms. Schardt was not suffering from a life-threatening disease, or in acute pain, her life was hardly pleasant, Mr. Kusch said. She had trouble moving around her apartment, where she lived alone. Having never married, she had no family. She also had few friends, and rarely ventured out.
In such circumstances, a nursing home seemed likely to be the next stop. And for Ms. Schardt, who Mr. Kusch said feared strangers and had a low tolerance for those less clever than she was, that was an unbearable prospect.
“When she contacted me by e-mail on April 8, she had already decided to commit suicide,” Mr. Kusch said, noting that she had also been in touch with Dignitas, the Swiss group that aids suicides.
In a goodbye letter to Mr. Kusch, posted on his Web site, Ms. Schardt thanked him, saying that if her death helped his battle it would fulfill her goal to have “the freedom to die in dignity.”
To some champions of assisted suicide, Germany’s laws do not allow for enough dignity. Ludwig A. Minelli, a former journalist who runs Dignitas, noted that those assisting in a suicide had to leave the person to die alone or risk being prosecuted. In Switzerland, he said, “the helping person, as well as family members or friends, could stay with the person who has decided to leave.”
The larger lesson of Ms. Schardt’s solitary death may have to do with the way Germany treats its old.
“The fear of nursing homes among elderly Germans is far greater than the fear of terrorism or the fear of losing your job,” said Eugen Brysch, the director of the German Hospice Foundation. “Germany must confront this fear, because fear, as we have seen, is a terrible adviser.” |
As we grow older, our early life comes sharply into focus (Image: Philippe Lopparelli/Tendance Floue)
The thought of losing our memory is a terrifying part of ageing, but there are surprising upsides, says Douwe Draaisma in The Nostalgia Factory
NEXT month I turn 50. If you think of memory as a transatlantic flight, then this is when it starts to make its descent. The first signs that it is losing altitude are failures in “prospective memory” – forgetting to do things, or worse, forgetting whether you have remembered to do them. Words and names will also become increasingly elusive. Time to panic?
“You can scare a fifty-year-old rigid by saying, aghast: ‘You surely can’t have forgotten that!'” writes Douwe Draaisma in his latest book, The Nostalgia Factory. Clearly, the Heymans Professor of the History of Psychology at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands is a bit of a tease. But in fact, one of his aims is to reassure anyone with a memory past its prime that there is little to worry about.
For me, his most convincing argument comes from experiments revealing that older memories compare far more favourably with younger ones than their owners realise. Like the plane’s descent, the decline will start unfeasibly early, but it is very gradual. What’s more, this is perfectly natural. “Anyone who still has the memory of a twenty-year-old at the age of seventy is not entirely normal,” he writes.
Accept the inevitable, and you are halfway there. Stressing over an errant word or name will only make it harder to retrieve. Besides, unrealistic expectations leave us prey to the commercialisation of ageing. Draaisma derides the “forgetfulness market” and debunks the idea that memory is like a muscle whose performance can be improved with brain-training games. You don’t need off-the-shelf stimulus, he advises, just to get out a bit more. “The good news is that social activities are sufficient. They involve all the variety and challenges needed to keep the memory up to scratch.”
“Draaisma derides the ‘forgetfulness market’ and debunks the idea that memory is like a muscle”
For the rest, a few simple strategies will work wonders: pay attention to what you are doing, have a place for objects and keep them there, and write things down. Draaisma reminds us of the saying attributed to Confucius: “The palest ink is more reliable than the most powerful memory.”
There are even benefits to an older memory. A puzzling quirk of memory is that as we get older our early life comes sharply into focus. This so-called reminiscence effect is recorded in several experiments, revealing that most of the vivid and precious memories of older people date from their childhood and early adulthood, producing a peak centred on their mid-20s.
Why this happens is the subject of much debate, but Draaisma favours the idea that from our 60s onward, early memories start to be over-represented. And it gets more intriguing. “As the reminiscence effect attains its full force, memories will return to which you have long been denied access,” he writes. What revelations will my mind reveal? I can’t wait to find out.
This isn’t your average popular science book. It is more philosophical, more diffuse, more cultured than many. Particularly entertaining is the description of Swiss writer Max Frisch’s fictitious voluntary death society, whose members meet twice a year to draw attention to signs of old age in each other. Their criteria are a work of comic genius.
Other digressions are less successful, including a whole chapter-long interview with neurologist Oliver Sachs. But at other times Draaisma leaves too much unsaid. Exploring the idea that individual memories change as we age, for example, he raises the fascinating question of how and why they are transformed, then dismisses it in a mere page.
That said, The Nostalgia Factory is absorbing. So much so that, reading it in bed one night, I got diverted from my usual routine and forgot to set my alarm. A failure of prospective memory you might think, but not so fast. Drifting off, I did remember – and was in no doubt that I had forgotten. I’m not 50 yet.
The Nostalgia Factory: Memory, time and ageing Douwe Draaisma Yale University Press
This article appeared in print under the headline “Remember this” |
Fenris447 wrote: Hotrod192 wrote: JOLTLORD wrote: Hotrod192 wrote: It is a very nice hat. Also I think I will be getting use out of that bottle opener. Yeah, I'm sure it is. And if you know you'll use the hat, then awesome! But as somebody who wouldn't wear the hat or shirt, the rest seems kind of like even more filler content, you know?
If it makes you happy, then that's awesome! I don't want to rain on your parade by any means. But I feel like having a box filled with stuff that isn't really meaningful isn't really worth it to me. Then don't waste your money on it. To each his own.
Of course, it's not my place to tell others how to spend their money. I personally wouldn't do it, but like I said, if it makes you happy then go ahead and do it. Just like those people who buy dozens or hundreds of dollars on REQ packs in Halo 5. I think it's a waste of money, but it really doesn't matter to me how you spend your cash.I mean, I'm sure that people think that video games is a waste of money, and that's fine. |
Second reckless driving incident caught on camera with no penalty for driver Copyright by KHON - All rights reserved Video
Another reckless driver was caught on camera this week.
We first told you about a van driving backward on Kapiolani Boulevard Tuesday.
On Thursday, we received video of an incident along Kamehameha Highway in Waikane.
It shows a car following a tour bus and crossing the double-yellow center line to pass it. It then pulls into the shoulder lane to avoid a head-on collision with two oncoming vehicles and drives off.
Tabby Busboso tells KHON2 that same vehicle overtook her on a blind turn, so she started recording in case she needed something to show police.
"Where we were is a dangerous area, so I was hoping that he wasn't going to do anything, but I had a feeling that he was, so I turned on my camera just in case, whatever is going to happen," she said. "He actually missed the pedestrian right before that, bypassed the two cars, then just before hitting a pole, he cut back and cut off the bus."
The vehicle overtook the bus in front of Waikane Store. The owners there say drivers are not the only ones using this busy highway.
"There's tourists walking, biking on the side of road -- a lot of traffic and a lot of people around," said owner Rachel Tokuzato.
In our last story, police said they couldn't do anything about the backward driver, because no one called police about the incident.
In this case, Busboso says she called 911 right away.
"I've seen where the car was going, told the officer, told him where the car was so he met me," she said.
Busboso even showed the officer her video, but "he just said nothing could be done because they weren't there. He could document it, but nothing further."
Busboso said the officer had her statement, had seen the video and knew where the vehicle was located, yet nothing was done.
We reached out to the Honolulu Police Department to find out why and what more do officers need for enforcement. We are still waiting for those answers.
"I had the license place number and I'm sure they can trace it back to the rental car place and they can figure out who was driving it through the rental car place," Busboso said.
Meanwhile, new statistics show just how alarming being on the road has become.
According to the Governors Highway Safety Association, 2,660 pedestrians in the U.S. died in the first half of 2016. Fifteen of them were in Hawaii.
That's up 36 percent from the same time a year earlier, when 11 pedestrians were killed.
Lance Rae with Walk Wise Hawaii says a lot of it has to do with distracted driving.
"How many times do you drive home from work on automatic pilot?" Rae said. "If someone were to ask you, how many stoplights did you stop at? How many pedestrians crossed in front of you? You don't remember, because you're kind of on automatic pilot. We really need to remember that our primary task is to drive that car."
Rae says there are three types of distracted driving: visual (when you take your eyes off the road), manual (when you take your hands off the wheel), and cognitive (when you let your mind wander). |
The teaching of history and other subjects in Ireland must develop to reflect the cultures and experiences of new immigrant communities, an education expert has warned.
The teaching of history and other subjects in Ireland must develop to reflect the cultures and experiences of new immigrant communities, an education expert has warned.
Curriculum must not be just for 'white Irish' only, expert warns
Dr Victoria Showunmi of Maynooth University (MU) said the curricula in schools and third-level colleges had to keep pace with the changing face of Ireland, and include perspectives that are not white Irish.
She warned of a risk of migrants feeling alienated if they were unable to see how what is being taught has any bearing on their experience or personal background.
With immigration a relatively new phenomenon in Ireland, Dr Showunmi said education policymakers must learn lessons from the experience of the UK, over decades, to do more to help integration.
She spoke about the subtle difference between assimilation - adopting the ways of another culture - and integration, which is defined as incorporating individuals from different groups into society as equals.
"The onus is typically placed on the person coming into the country to assimilate, but many migrants feel that they lose part of their identity through this process," she said.
"Those in charge of education policy should look to meet migrant students half-way by placing an emphasis on integration. The first step we can take in this case is to look at the content of the curriculum.
"An increasing proportion of young people are unable to see how what is being taught in schools and universities had any bearing on their experience or personal background.
"Integrating different viewpoints into the classroom is an important step to prevent this alienating experience that sours many young people on education."
Dr Showunmi pointed to how challenges posed by curricula for those from migrant backgrounds prompted the student-led "Why is My Curriculum White" campaign in the UK.
The campaign advocates more diversity on reading lists and course content.
In a reflection of shifting attitudes, the UK's prestigious Oxford University announced last week that it was making it compulsory for history students to sit one paper on non-British, non-European topics.
Dr Showunmi, who is a senior lecturer in MU's Department of Education, was speaking to the Irish Independent ahead of the university's annual education conference, next week, which will discuss the experience of ethnic minorities in education.
She said many immigrants in Ireland were white European and others were people of colour, and one group could be assimilated, or become less noticeable, than the other.
"If you look at migration in terms of people of colour, what is quite different is they change the face of Ireland; Ireland is looking very different," she said.
They may not have language needs because many, such as Nigerians, already had English as their first language. But she said: "We need to be able to ensure that their history is included in our history."
Dr Showunmi said that in history classes, students needed to be allowed to see that there are various role models, and that it was "not just people who look at it in a certain way".
Dr Showunmi said the same could apply to other subjects, such as English.
She said reading lists were a very powerful tool in education "and we are asking educators to think, are they just a particular type of book".
Irish Independent |
Google
They say the best relationships are the ones in which you can finish each others sentences. Enter Google Maps' newest Android feature: Driving Mode.
Google Maps already has features that allows it to predict destinations, but this is limited to saved locations like 'Home' or 'Work'. Driving Mode takes this one step further, taking into account user history and current location before attempting to determine your destination.
Advertisement
According to Android Police, the app will then provide users with travel times, traffic conditions and more. The vaguely annoying voice directions of previous Google Map incarnations can also be muted.
The latest version of Google Maps, 9.19, is currently being pushed to the Play Store and may not be available to many users for some time. There is a way of installing the update manually, but it's not plain sailing -- users have to go through a series of steps to install Driving Mode, though this may be a bug set to be fixed with release of the full update.
The feature can be launched either from the home screen or via an in-app shortcut.
It can be downloaded now, though an updated release is expected to come later this month. |
Join us at Unallocated for an evening of fragging goodness!! A wide variety of games will be loaded up and played until nary a headshot remains!!!
Our Favorites:
Unreal Tournament 2004 : Patch 3369 Team Fortress 2 Left 4 Dead 2 Counter Strike Source Counter Strike 1.6 Serious Sam 3 League of Legends/Dota2 (if you're in the beta) Quake 3 Arena Call of Duty MW3 Borderlands 2
Given its Halloween, we will have candy, costumes and good fun. I hope to see you there! This event is potluck style for food/drinks, bring something.
It is a family oriented event. We have trick or treat, a Costume Contest, BYO Pumpkin Contest, and then LAN gaming. As this is a family-oriented event, there is no alcohol until 8pm then only beer.
This event is free, but to help pay costs of rent, power and cooling, please consider donating $10-$20. |
Buy Photo Indiana recevier Kofi Hughes hauls in a touchdown pass from Hoosier quarterback Nate Sudfeld during second-half play against Penn State at Memorial Stadium in Bloomington Saturday. Trevor Williams defends. (Photo: John Warner / For the Star)Buy Photo
The Chicago Bears announced that they signed former Indiana wide receiver Kofi Hughes to a one-year contract.
It is already the third NFL team for Hughes, a rookie who was cut a week ago by the Houston Texas. He originally signed with the Washington Redskins as an undrafted free agent.
"Grateful For Another Opportunity," Hughes posted on his Twitter account.
As a Cathedral High School quarterback, he was a Gatorade state Player of the Year. In his Hoosiers career, he caught 132 passes for 1,956 yards and 13 touchdowns. |
National Forest officials were aghast to learn Monday, March 13, that the beauty of Ortega Falls in the mountains above Lake Elsinore is attracting not only nature lovers, but also thrill seekers.
Photographs and videos posted online – recently and in years past – show people tightrope walking directly over the waterfall, a popular destination off Ortega Highway, officially known as Highway 74, which cuts through the Santa Ana Mountains and Cleveland National Forest and connects Riverside and Orange counties.
UPDATE: Here’s what the men who ‘highlined’ over Ortega Falls had to say about the extreme sport
One such photo started circulating on Facebook over the weekend. One commenter on the post feared that sharing the image online would attract the attention of law enforcement.
Websites devoted to the extreme sport known as highlining describe the mechanics: Highliners string a thin, springy band between two points at a great height, sometimes hundreds of feet up, and carefully walk across it, often using a safety harness in case they slip. It’s popular in places with magnificent vistas such as Joshua Tree and Yosemite national parks, where rules are in place to protect both highliners and nature.
Cleveland National Forest spokeswoman Olivia Walker said officials there knew nothing about the pastime, which she said was unsafe and that now has their attention.
Installing the roping system is illegal, Walker said.
“This is not something we would promote or authorize,” she said. “This isn’t something we would ever market or encourage.”
Walker said forest officials would contact the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department and figure out what action to take themselves.
“If this is an ongoing issue … we really need to go out and look at this, who’s setting this up, should we have someone out there on weekends,” she said. “Because if something went wrong, we would be dispatched out there and a helicopter from the Sheriff’s Department to do a rescue.
“For safety issues, there’s a million reasons why we need to make sure this is not a continuous thing,” she said.
The revelation of the highlining comes in the same month that a dirt biker was filmed jumping over Highway 60 in the Badlands east of Moreno Valley. Caltrans workers quickly destroyed the ramp that was built for the stunt in an attempt to prevent anyone from repeating it.
Ortega Falls is visible from Ortega Highway, Walker said, prompting many motorists to pull over and take pictures. The area has been drawing larger crowds lately because rain has swollen the waterfall, Walker said. Now that spring-like weather has sprung, the nearby trails and campgrounds were full this past weekend, she said.
One Facebook photo album posted publicly on Sunday shows several different people walking across a rope that had been strung over the waterfall. They are tethered to the rope.
“I have come to build a bridge. Peace and love flowing as the water here,” wrote the person who posted the pictures.
One person tagged in some of the photos noted that they were “Not too high, around 20ish meters” or about 65 feet up.
Another person, who could not be reached for comment Monday, posted several photos and videos of his own Sunday.
“Here’s a little bit of what today looked like. A lot of fun and peacefulness with some amazing people walking awesome lines! Thanks to everyone who took part and raised the stoke,” he wrote.
The daredevils aren’t the first to try to feat. A search on Facebook turned up another similar photo posted in December. Its caption noted the rope was 730 feet long – about the length of 2 1/2 football fields.
And a YouTube video from 2013 titled “Tightrope walking at Ortega Falls in Santa Ana Mountains” shows a person waving his arms for balance as he navigates the span. Two people, one with a camera, await him on the other side. |
Classes in Jagobiao National High School in Mandaue City were suspended after some of its students showed unusual behavior yesterday morning.
School principal Rufino Tudlasan said the incident started at past 8 a.m. when two female Grade 7 students experienced difficulty breathing and were crying.
They were brought to the principal’s office and were assisted by teachers.
After a few minutes, other students in the class and those from Grade 8 and 9 also showed similar behavior.
But Tudlasan said they cannot tell if the students were possessed by bad spirits, adding that they are still investigating the incident.
He added that maybe the students just failed to eat breakfast.
He also clarified that there were less than 10 female students affected by the unusual happening inside the school.
The students were calmed down at the principal’s office and were brought home by their parents.
To protect the other students, Tudlasan said he decided to suspend the classes of the entire school especially that worried parents went to school to fetch their children.
But Tudlasan said classes will be back to normal today because the school year is about to end.
They invited a priest to bless the school yesterday.
When some female students started to show unusual behavior, 14-year-old Grade 8 student Hope, one of the affected students, wasn’t convinced that they were possessed by evil spirits.
“Tuo man ka ana (Don’t believe it),” Hope (not her real name) told her younger sister Faith.
But when Hope entered her room, she suddenly fell down and became so strong.
Faith said Hope fell to the floor, shaking. Then, she knelt for a while and stood up.
Faith said Hope was immediately assisted by male students but she was so strong.
Faith ran towards home to inform their mother about the incident.
Hope’s mother was already calm and silent when she arrived at the school at around 11 a.m.
Hope could no longer remember what happened except that she felt she was about to pass out prior to the alleged “posssession.”
Her male classmates gave her salt and let her drink holy water brought by a church sacristan who earlier arrived when some students first showed unusual behavior.
Later, Hope told her sister Faith that she saw at least 4 spirits that possessed her.
Hope’s mother said she will let her report to school today because their final examination will be on the 17th and 18th but she will be in school to watch over her.
Her mother clarified that Hope had breakfast before going to school yesterday. |
What is going on at Arsenal? Last weekend they were humiliatingly thrashed 4-0 by Liverpool. Their best players — Alexis Sanchez and Mesut Ozil — are refusing to sign new contracts and want out.
This week Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain rejected a contract worth £9 million a year and chose instead to join Liverpool on inferior terms. One of the few English players good enough to be a first-team regular, the Ox believed his career had stagnated and, to improve, he felt he had to leave.
Many fans are in open revolt against the club’s absentee American owner Stan Kroenke, the chief executive Ivan Gazidis, who promises much and delivers little, and the long-serving manager Arsene Wenger, who was once revered as a visionary and innovator.
On match day at the Emirates Stadium the atmosphere is sour. There has been fighting between pro- and anti- Wenger factions. I was there for the first game of the season, a frenetic 4-3 win over Leicester City, and the atmosphere turned particularly nasty in the first half when Leicester took a 2-1 lead. Less than 45 minutes into the new season and the hashtag “WengerOut” was once again trending on Twitter.
On transfer deadline day, in desperation and perhaps in an attempt to appease the restive fans, Arsenal tried to sign the Monaco midfielder Thomas Lemar for what would have been a British record of £92 million. The deal did not happen but that such an ludicrous offer was tabled for a young player who cost Monaco just £3.5 million shows how panicked Arsenal have become.
The club no longer seems to have any coherent sense of purpose or strategic long-term plan, beyond hiking up season ticket prices (the most expensive in the Premier League) and enhancing the profitability of the “franchise”.
Like Gordon Brown, Arsenal used to preach prudence for a purpose. They were England’s most traditional club. It was always a thrill to visit their old stadium, Highbury, with its magnificent Art Deco East Stand. It was said things were done differently at Arsenal. The club had special values, we were told, and decision-making was informed by the accumulated wisdom of past generations. Old Etonians were board members. Three generations of the Hill-Wood family had occupied the role of chairman.
The club was never profligate and its preference was mostly for nurturing talent rather than paying outlandish fees and grotesquely inflated wages.
Wenger once excelled at discovering outstanding young players, especially in his early seasons in north London, when he seemed exotic and mysterious, a polyglot football intellectual who was inevitably nicknamed Le Professor.
Wenger disrupted the old order at Arsenal and his innovations confounded his rivals. He used sports science and data analysis before they were commonplace. He wanted to globalise Arsenal and internationalise the squad. Soon players were arriving from all over the world but especially from France and Francophone Africa. Wenger’s Arsenal began to play with exceptional fluency and style — and they won titles, though never the Champions League.
As a long-time fan, I looked on in wonder at the transformation effected by Wenger, this continental sophisticate who had arrived in London in October 1996 from his previous job in Japan. I liked his intelligence and articulacy: we had never seen anyone like him before in English football. He was a pathfinder and a cosmopolitan: where he led, others soon followed.
That now seems like a long time ago. Arsenal have not won the Premier League since 2004, the season of the so-called Invincibles when they did not lose a single match. In recent years, however, they have become predictable in their vulnerability and inflexibility. They invariably falter when they come up against the strongest opponents — the Manchester clubs, say, or Chelsea.
The vitriol and abuse directed at him saddens as much as it startles
Wenger’s struggles and woes are a symbol of all that has gone wrong at the club. This proud man is now routinely traduced. The vitriol and abuse directed at him saddens as much as it startles.
Last weekend’s thrashing by Liverpool was no ordinary defeat. It felt like the moment at which even the Wenger loyalists turned against their man. Arsenal were tactically inept, gutless, and without commitment and togetherness.
Working as a pundit on Sky, the former England defender Jamie Carragher called the players “cowards”.
It was painful to watch the game. Sanchez, who has been agitating to leave all summer (despite being offered a new contract reportedly worth £300,000 a week), signalled his exasperation and disgust at his teammates in a display of petulance that should have forced the club to offload him yesterday.
Meanwhile, Wenger sat slumped in his seat: impotent, helpless, humiliated.
How has it come to this? There seems to be something rotten in the culture of Arsenal.
Wenger is more sinned against than sinning, in my view, but he is also absurdly stubborn. And he suffers from willful blindness. He cannot see, or refuses to see, what others can: that he is out of touch and has been surpassed by a new generation of coaches, such as Tottenham’s Mauricio Pochettino.
There seems to be something rotten in the culture of Arsenal
Wenger has spoken of his fear of the void and of how much he “suffers” when Arsenal fail. It’s as if he cannot endure the thought of what life would be like without football. “The only possible moment of happiness is the present,” he told L’Équipe in a fascinating long interview last year. “The past gives you regrets. And the future uncertainties.”
In the same interview Wenger described how he wanted his teams to play beautifully. “My never-ending struggle in this business is to release what is beautiful in man.”
But Arsenal no longer play beautiful football. And the mood at the Emirates, on and off the pitch, is ugly — as ugly as it has been in Wenger’s two decades at the club. And here’s the thing: the malaise at Arsenal is so deep that we’ve not yet seen the worst of it. |
Four suicide bombers strike Bodo in far north of country, the second time the town has been attacked in a month
Four suicide bombers have killed at least 35 people in a village in Cameroon’s Far North region, the most deadly in a string of recent attacks in an area beset by violence connected to Boko Haram. A local official said on Monday: “There was a quadruple suicide bombing in the village of Bodo this morning. There are around 25 deaths and several wounded.” When issuing the revised death toll later, officials said around 65 people had been injured in the blasts.
Two bombers struck the Bodo central market while others hit the town’s main entrance and exit points. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack.
Boko Haram violence keeping a million children out of school, says Unicef Read more
Cameroonian troops form part of an 8,700-strong regional force created to defeat Boko Haram, the militant group that has waged a six-year campaign to carve out a separate state in north-eastern Nigeria. Boko Haram has stepped up attacks outside Nigeria over the past year in countries including Cameroon, Chad and Niger, threatening regional security.
The bombing on Monday was not the first time Bodo has been targeted. At the end of December, two suicide bombers blew themselves up at the entrance to the town. Officials said at the time that the bombers were trying to access the market but were stopped by local residents. No others were injured in that incident.
On 13 January, a suicide bomber killed 12 people and wounded at least one other in an attack on a mosque in Kouyape, northern Cameroon. Chad, Cameroon, Niger and Nigeria have all contributed troops to a regional offensive devoted to driving back Boko Haram, and the US has provided military supplies and troops for assistance.
In response to the attacks, said Cameroon’s minister of communications, Issa Tchiroma Bakary, on Monday night, soldiers had carried out raids into Nigeria from the Cameroonian town of Achigashia, killing at least 17 insurgents. “The suicide bombers were escorted to Cameroon by Boko Haram fighters,” Bakary said. “We must trace them wherever they are.” |
You must enter the characters with black color that stand out from the other characters
— Slippery characters who steal used restaurant grease could face felony charges under a new law that goes into effect New Years Day.
"What was once garbage and had virtually no value is now a commodity that people are stealing," said Rep. John Torbett, R-Stanley.
The grease law is among the last set of new laws a regulations going into effect from the 2012 General Assembly session. Among the other provisions contained in 16 bills that have Jan. 1 effective dates are:
more stringent background check requirements for those who work in daycare settings. (HB 737)
towns, cities and counties with between 100 and 500 workers must now use the federal E-verify program to make sure those they are hiring are in the United States legally. Local governments with more than 500 workers had to start doing this on Oct. 1. (HB 36)
doctors and groups based out of state that provide free health care services will have legal protections when they operate in North Carolina. (HB 614)
Torbett said that grease haulers and restaurants came to him with the grease theft problem addressed in HB 512. But law enforcement hasn't always taken the crime seriously, he said.
"Some judges were treating it just as a, 'What are you doing in my courtroom?' kind of thing," Torbett said.
Under the law Torbett sponsored, grease collectors will have to carry liability insurance and provide certain paperwork that establishes ownership of the grease. Those who steal grease worth less than $1,000 would be guilty of a misdemeanor. Those who steal more than $1,000 worth of grease would be guilty of a low level felony.
Grease theft has been a national problem in states like New Jersey for years. California and Virginia have also enacted special regulations dealing with grease collection. The U.S. Department of Agriculture tracks the value of "yellow grease" as a commodity, which can fetch between 30 and 40 cents per pound. Bigger rendering companies will turn leftover grease into animal feed, cosmetics, soap and other products.
In North Carolina, small bio fuels producers used leftover grease to create biodiesel that can be used to run specially equipped automobiles or home heating systems.
"We feel like we've lost $10,000 worth of product in the past six months," said Woodrow Eaton, a co-founder of Blue Ridge BioFuels, a company based in Asheville that picks up grease from restaurants throughout Western North Carolina and part of South Carolina. "We're paying the restaurants based on the volume of grease we collect," Eaton said. Theft, he said, costs both his company money by wasting time and depriving it of raw materials, but costs restaurants money they're not getting from the sale of the grease.
"We haven't had any luck ourselves catching anyone. We're hoping law enforcement might take in more seriously" as a result of the new law," he said.
Biodiesel producers, he said, are worth the projection because they're the only domestic producers of liquid fuel in the state. "It's biodegradable, it's non-toxic...The industry has a huge amount of benefit to the state."
But not all biofuel producers are convinced the new law will be helpful.
"We call it the grease police bill," said Lyle Estill, president of Piedmont Biofuels based in Chatham County. His company collects grease from restaurants throughout the Triangle. "This bill doesn't do anything about the people who are stealing grease," he said. He said the bill will help big rendering companies at the expense of hobbyist and others who collect and use or sell small batches of grease.
"Imagine the teacher who would collect the used grease from the school cafeteria once a week and sell it to my company. He'll no longer be able to do that...It will have no impact but it will shift the playing field in favor of big (companies)," Estill said. |
Here Comes A New Contender for the Mobile eSports Scene – Pirates War
eSports Inquirer
‘Pirates War’ is a strategy game that brings the best aspects of Monopoly and Hearthstone together. The gameplay is fairly simple. To earn money, you must invest in something. In Pirates War, acquiring territory would be that equivalent. The game presents normal tiles that can be purchased and upgraded. The taxes coming from those tiles are going to be your main source of income. There are also special tiles that can help or hinder your journey to victory.
However, in this game you don’t have to buy everything by the book. You are a pirate, after all. You can also challenge other pirates to battle. That’s when your deck building skills will come into play. The game presents you with a selection of over 80 different pirates, each bringing different skills to the battle ground. Depending on how you mix and match them, your chances of winning this war may differ. This creates a very competitive environment for the players that is perfect for the arenas of eSports.
The game will come with three main game modes: A Single Player campaign, a Multiplayer Mode with random matchmaking, and a Friends Mode where you can play against your Facebook friends. A Ranked Multiplayer Mode is still undergoing development and will be available to everyone soon after release.
Pirates War – The Dice King is an innovative cross-platform strategy game with elements of card collecting and deck building out now for Android and iOS devices. More information about the game is also available through the Pirates War Website, Facebook and Twitter. Check more of it’s features from Pirates War gameplay video on Youtube.
Download ‘Pirates War – The Dice King’ from the App Store or Google Play. |
Top US admiral says strike on Iran means turmoil
WASHINGTON, July 20 (Reuters) - White House military adviser Adm. Mike Mullen said on Sunday he was concerned that any U.S. or Israeli strike on Iran carried a notable risk of more turmoil in the Middle East.
"I think it would be significant. I worry about it a lot," Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the "Fox News Sunday" television program.
U.S. officials have played down fears of a military strike against Iran over its nuclear program, which Tehran says is for peaceful purposes. But Israel fears Iran is seeking to build atomic weapons, and speculation it would bomb Iranian nuclear installations has grown since a big Israeli air drill last month.
"I worry about the instability in that part of the world and ... the possible unintended consequences of a strike like that," Mullen said.
He said it would be difficult to predict the impact throughout the region or what actions the United States would have to take to contain it.
"Right now I'm fighting two wars, and I don't need a third one," Mullen said, speaking of U.S. military engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan. But he quickly added the U.S. military would be capable of handling another front.
Alternately, he added, the risk of doing nothing is also big.
"It's a very, very tough problem," Mullen said. "But that's where I think this international community -- and the pressure has got to continue to be brought specifically on Iran to not proceed in this regard."
Iran faces tougher sanctions after talks on reining in its nuclear program ended in a stalemate on Saturday despite unprecedented U.S. participation.
Mullen said he believed the Iranians are intent on building nuclear weapons. "We need to figure out a way to ensure that that doesn't happen," he said. |
ROSEDALE, Md. (WJZ)—An elaborate extortion scheme generated thousands of dollars. Investigators say it was Baltimore City police officers and the owners of a local business who were behind it all.
Kelly McPherson explains how investigators say the operation worked.
In a two-year investigation, federal authorities claim 17 officers took kickbacks for illegally steering car accident victims to a Rosedale auto body shop.
Majestic Auto Repair Shop in Rosedale is at the center of the massive kickback scheme, involving 17 city police officers.
A 41-page federal criminal complaint outlines the allegations, claiming the officers would respond to car accidents and convince car owners to have their cars towed and repaired by Majestic rather than a city authorized towing company.
In exchange, Majestic paid the officers kickbacks of $300 per vehicle with one officer allegedly making more than $14,000 over two years.
According to that complaint, one officer said to the shop owner: “My pay made me cry with that two percent cut, which is less $100 from my check.” The shop owner responds, “Keep an eye out for cars. That’s where you’ll make it.”
The following defendants, all from Maryland, are charged in the conspiracy:
Hernan Alexis Moreno Mejia (Moreno), age 30, of Rosedale; Moreno’s brother, Edwin Javier Mejia, age 27, of Middle River; Eddy Arias, age 39, of Catonsville; Eric Ivan Ayala Olivera, age 35, of Edgewood; Rodney Cintron, age 31, of Middle River; Jhonn S. Corona, age 32, of Rosedale; Michael Lee Cross, age 28, of Reisterstown; Jerry Edward Diggs, Jr., age 24, of Baltimore; Rafael Concepcion Feliciano Jr., age 30, of Baltimore; Jaime Luis Lugo Rivera, age 35, of Aberdeen; Kelvin Quade Manrich, age 41, of Gwynn Oak; Luis Nunez, age 33, of Baltimore; Samuel Ocasio, age 35, of Edgewood; David Reeping, age 41, of Baltimore; Jermaine Rice, age 28, of Owings Mills; Leonel Rodriguez Torres, age 31, of Edgewood; Marcos Fernando Urena, age 33, of Baltimore; Osvaldo Valentine, age 38, of Edgewood; and Henry Yambo, age 28, of Reisterstown.
The Baltimore Police Department requires that when police request vehicle towing services, they only use towing companies that are under contract with the city of Baltimore to provide towing services for the Baltimore Police Department.
Defendants Moreno and Mejia are brothers who own Majestic Auto Repair Shop LLC (Majestic), located in Rosedale. Majestic provides towing and automobile repair services. Majestic is not an authorized tow company with the city of Baltimore. The remaining defendants are Baltimore police officers.
The commissioner set up the sting arrest by bringing the accused officers to the police academy Wednesday.
Police commissioner Fred Bealefeld says he purposefully chose to have the officers arrested at the police academy to serve as a reminder to the city and his officers of their commitment to fight corruption. He says the officers were told to report there Wednesday morning for an equipment inspection.
“I personally took the badges from every one of those men who were arrested today,” said Commissioner Fred Bealefeld. “There will be important lessons for us to learn from start to finish in this whole thing and I didn’t and don’t want to miss a single opportunity to capitalize on that and that’s why I chose that location. We just can’t give order to corruption. We can’t and won’t and will exhaust every means to eliminating it from our ranks.”
The FBI says the investigation began with the city police department and involved wiretaps and electronic surveillance all started by the city police department.
“There is absolutely nobody in this police department that should be hanging their heads right now. The police department did a very good job rooting out alleged corruption within their own ranks and they should be very proud of that effort,” said Richard McFeely, FBI.
Fifteen of the officers had their first court appearance Wednesday. Police are trying to track down two of the officers who have not yet been arrested because they were on previously scheduled vacation.
All of them have been stripped of their police powers and are suspended without pay pending the outcome of the criminal investigation.
“When we have a few bad apples, they make it bad for all of them. And the officers that we have in our city make too many sacrifices for that to be the case,” said Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.
She also released a statement.
“I expect all City employees to serve the public with the highest level of integrity, and I will not tolerate criminal or unethical activity by any city employee. I appreciate the efforts of Commissioner Bealefeld and our federal partners for working closely together to investigate, arrest, and prosecute these individuals. Any criminal activity by a Baltimore police officer dishonors our city and the 3,000 men and women of the Baltimore Police Department who serve with great professionalism and integrity.”
Police say the owners of the Majestic Body Shop spent thousands of dollars in exchange for bringing cars to their shop for repair work.
Federal agents and officers were at the shop Wednesday for several hours, according to witnesses. They were pulling out boxes, presumably full of evidence from inside the shop.
The shop is currently closed.
WJZ spoke to a nearby business owner who said sometimes the business at Majestic would get so busy that cars would have to park in the lot across the street.
That business owner says he did not suspect anything.
“I know them because they are my neighbors,” said Hanrek Singh, Club 7400 owner. “But I don’t know what they’re doing in there.”
While Singh says Majestic owners were “good guys,” another neighbor did say that he was not surprised to see police activity, but he was not aware of what was going on.
Click here to read the full affidavit.
Stay with WJZ.COM for the latest on this developing story. |
In the summer of 1967, Martin left New York and went off-grid before reappearing in New Mexico. The art she made there – with its buoyant bands of colour – offer no clues to the turbulent life of an artist who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Ahead of a major retrospective, Olivia Laing celebrates her visions of pure joy
Art must derive from inspiration, Agnes Martin said, and yet for decades she painted what seems at first glance to be the same thing over and over again, the same core structure subject to infinitely subtle variations. A grid: a set of horizontal and vertical lines drawn meticulously with a ruler and pencil on canvases six feet high and six feet wide. They came, these restrained, reserved, exquisite paintings, as visions, for which she would wait sometimes for weeks on end, rocking in her chair, steadying herself for a glimpse of the minute image that she would paint next. “I paint with my back to the world,” she declared, and what she wanted to catch in her rigorous nets was not material existence, the Earth and its myriad forms, but rather the abstract glories of being: joy, beauty, innocence; happiness itself.
A late starter, Martin kept on going, working at the height of her powers right through her 80s; a stocky figure with apple cheeks and cropped silver hair, dressed in overalls and Indian shirts. She produced the last of her masterpieces a few months before her death in 2004, at the grand old age of 92. But she was also so deeply ambivalent about pride and success and the ego-driven business of making a name for yourself that in the 1960s she abandoned the art world altogether, packing up her New York studio, giving away her materials and disappearing in a pickup truck, surfacing 18 months later on a remote mesa in New Mexico.
When she returned to painting in 1971, the grids had gone, replaced by horizontal or vertical lines, the old palette of grey and white and brown giving way to glowing stripes and bands of very pale pink and blue and yellow. “Sippy cup colours”, the critic Terry Castle once called them, and their titles likewise address states of pre-verbal, infantile bliss. Little Children Loving Love, I Love the Whole World, Lovely Life, even Infant Response to Love. And yet these images of absolute calm did not arise from a life replete with love or ease, but rather out of turbulence, solitude and hardship. Though inspired, they represent an act of dogged will and extreme effort, and their perfection is hard-won.
Martin’s work is in museums and collections across the world, and changes hands for millions of dollars at a time. All the same, she hasn’t achieved quite the renown of her mostly male contemporaries in abstraction, partly because the subtleties of her paintings are almost impossible to reproduce in print, though a substantial retrospective opening at Tate Modern in June makes a powerful case for her position in the first rank. This month also sees the publication of a biography, Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art by Nancy Princenthal (Thames & Hudson), a painstaking attempt to disentangle the many contradictions of a long and singular life.
Her story begins on an isolated farm in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. She was born to Scottish Presbyterian pioneers on 22 March 1912, the same year as Jackson Pollock, another child of wide-open prairies and enormous skies. In a documentary made in 2002, Mary Lance’s With My Back to the World, Martin claimed she could remember the exact moment of her birth. She had entered the world, she tells Lance, as a small figure with a little sword. “I was very happy. I thought I would cut my way through life ... victory after victory,” she declares, laughing. “Well, I adjusted as soon as they carried me into my mother. Half of my victories fell to the ground.” She pauses. “My mother had victories,” she says, and her candid, weather-beaten face darkens abruptly.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Untitled 5 1998, by Agnes Martin
She believed that she was hated as a child. Silence was her mother’s weapon and she used it ruthlessly. Martin told her friend, the journalist Jill Johnston, that she had been emotionally abused, and yet she could also wring a value from some of the harsh lessons of her childhood. Her mother liked seeing people hurt, but her sternness did inculcate self-discipline, while the enforced solitude fostered Martin’s self-reliance. The lessons stuck. Whether or not they always served her well, discipline and renunciation continued to be the watchwords of Martin’s existence, right through to old age.
It was a long time before she thought of becoming an artist. A fine swimmer, as a teenager she tried out for the Olympic team. Later, she trained to be a teacher, spending her itinerant 20s in remote schools out in the woods of the Pacific Northwest. In 1941, she went to New York City, where she studied fine arts at Teachers College, Columbia University. For the next 15 years, she shuttled back and forth between schools in New York and New Mexico, slowly developing herself as a painter. Little of her work from this time has survived, owing to her habit of destroying anything that failed to match up to the exacting vision of her maturity. This is why it sometimes seems as if Martin sprang into existence fully formed, absolute in her commitment to geometric abstraction.
False starts, circling, a gaining of territory. Then, at 45, she settled at the suggestion of her then dealer, Betty Parsons, in a studio community established in abandoned shipping lofts on the ramshackle waterfront of lower Manhattan. Coenties Slip was home to a group of young and predominantly gay artists – among them Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Indiana and Ellsworth Kelly – bent on differentiating themselves from the more established abstract expressionists uptown, with their grating machismo.
Though a good decade older than the other residents, Martin felt immediately at home in this place of experimentation and monastic discipline, of “humour, endless possibilities, and rampant freedom”. A famous photograph shows her up on the roof with a group that includes Indiana and Kelly as well as a small boy and a dog, camped with coffee and cigarettes among the skyscrapers of the financial district. She sits smiling on the very edge of the roof, her hands jammed in her coat pocket, something of the overseer still about her stance.
Her first residence on the Slip was a 100ft-long former sailmaker’s loft with no water and walls that didn’t quite meet its soaring ceiling. In this chilly space, increasingly austere geometric abstractions – regimented spots, squares and triangles in nocturnal palettes – slowly resolved themselves into the repeating pattern of the grid. These new works began to be shown as part of the emerging movement of minimalism, though she regarded herself as an abstract expressionist – her subject was feeling, yet feeling anonymous and unadorned.
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Martin often described a painting from 1964, The Tree, as her first grid. In fact, she had been making them since at least the beginning of the decade, first by scratching lattices into paint and then by pencilling ruled vertical and horizontal lines on to canvases, sometimes embellishing the hatchings with dabs or lines of colour, even sheets of gold leaf. “Well,” she told an interviewer, “when I first made a grid I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees and then this grid came into my mind and I thought it represented innocence, and I still do, and so I painted it and then I was satisfied.”
Tiffany Bell, the co-curator with Frances Morris of the Tate retrospective, observes of the early grids that “it is as though the energy of a Pollock drip painting has been stretched out and carefully sustained over time”. Emphatically ambiguous, they refuse artistry, reducing painting to the simplest of mark-making procedures at the same time as exceeding themselves with their grandeur of scale and grave beauty. The longer you look, the more impressive their insistent neutrality becomes. Forget confessional art. This is withholding art, evading disclosure, declining to give itself away.
Take The Islands (1961). Against a buff-coloured ground, its neat pencilled lines form a successions of tiny boxes. With the exception of its border, which resembles the fringe of a rug, these elegant rows have been seeded with hundreds of tiny paired dots of pale yellow paint, which from a distance translate into a shimmering veil. Everything is relentlessly the same, and yet out of this sameness arises an image unlike anything that had gone before.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Friendship, 1963 by Agnes Martin
It isn’t easy to catch the workings of these paintings in words, since they were explicitly designed to dodge the burden of representation, to stymie the viewers in their incorrigible habit of searching for recognisable forms in the abstract field. They aren’t made to be read, but are there to be responded to, providing enigmatic triggers for a spontaneous upwelling of pure emotion. Martin was deeply influenced by Taoism and Zen Buddhism, and there is a driving interest in her work in cutting through materiality. In an interview with the artist Ann Wilson, she explained: “Nature is like parting a curtain, you go into it. I want to draw a certain response like this ... that quality of response from people when they leave themselves behind, often experienced in nature, an experience of simple joy ... My paintings are about merging, about formlessness ... A world without objects, without interruption.”
Merging and formlessness can be blissful, but losing a solid sense of the self is also terrifying, as Martin knew. She was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in early adulthood, and her symptoms included auditory hallucinations, spells of depression and catatonic trances. Her voices, as she called them, directed almost every aspect of her life, sometimes punitive and sometimes protective. According to Princenthal’s biography: “Although the voices didn’t tell her what to paint – they seemed to steer clear of her work – the images that came to her through inspirations were fixed and articulate enough to suggest a relationship between visions and voices: she heard and saw things that others didn’t.”
During the Coenties Slip years, she was hospitalised repeatedly. One winter, she fell into a trance in a church on Second Avenue, triggered when she heard the first few notes of Handel’s Messiah (although she loved music, it was often too emotionally stimulating). Another time, she was admitted to the notoriously chaotic Bellevue psychiatric hospital after being found wandering Park Avenue, uncertain of who or where she was. Before friends located her and had her moved to more salubrious environs, she was given shock therapy.
Though a decidedly solitary figure, Martin was not entirely alone during these years. She had relationships with women, among them the ground-breaking fibre artist Lenore Tawney and the Greek sculptor Chryssa (later famous for her work in neon). Like many gay people in the pre-Stonewall era, she was deep in the closet, at least once denying she was a lesbian. That statement should be taken with a pinch of salt, considering that, when asked about feminism in an interview with Johnston, she snapped, “I’m not a woman.”
It’s tempting to read these formidable tensions and turbulences into the paintings: to convert the grid into a closet or cell, a system of traps or an endless maze. But Martin was adamant that personal experience had nothing to do with her works. In her copious writing she was formidably insistent about what meanings they did and didn’t contain: they did not embrace ideas, and certainly not personal emotions or biographical elements. She was passionately opposed to critical readings, going so far as to cancel a prestigious retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 1980 because they insisted on a catalogue. The paintings were the thing: the paintings and the sublime responses they engendered in the viewer.
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In the sweltering summer of 1967, Martin renounced art altogether. Over the years, she gave an assortment of reasons for her departure. She had been living in a beautiful studio on South Street, with cathedral ceilings, so close to the river that she could clearly see the expressions on the sailors’ faces. One day, she heard that it was going to be torn down. In the same post she received notification that she had won a grant, enough to purchase a pickup truck and an Airstream camper. Her friend Ad Reinhardt, whose black paintings she loved, had just died; her relationship with Chryssa had ended, and anyway she’d had enough of living in the city. The voices, too, were in agreement. “I could no longer stay, so I had to leave, you see,” she explained decades later. “I left New York because every day I suddenly felt I wanted to die and it was connected with painting. It took me several years to find out that the cause was an overdeveloped sense of responsibility.”
No one is exactly sure where she went. Like Huckleberry Finn, she lit out for the territories, travelling off-grid, into open space. She re-emerged at a cafe and filling station in Cuba, New Mexico in 1968, pulling in and asking the manager if he knew of any land for rent. By chance, his wife had a property available, and so, at the age of 56, Martin moved up to a remote mesa, 20 miles across dirt roads from the nearest highway. No electricity, no phone, no neighbours, there was not even a shelter to move into. For the first few months, she focused her energy on building, working from scratch and mostly alone. She made a one-room dwelling out of adobe bricks she shaped herself, and then a log-cabin studio from trees she cut down with a chainsaw. It was in this latter space that she began to inch towards art again, first prints, then drawings, then the luminous work of her maturity.
The best guide to Martin’s life from here on is the wonderfully evocative Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances (Phaidon) by her friend and dealer Arne Glimcher, the founder of Pace Gallery. In June 1974, she appeared out of the blue at Pace and asked if they’d like to show her new work. She invited Glimcher to come and view it, posting him a hand-drawn map, at the bottom of which she had scrawled “bring ice thanks Agnes”. When he arrived, after an arduous journey from New York, she fed him mutton chops and apple pie before allowing him into the studio. There, she showed him five new paintings, made of either horizontal or vertical stripes in ice blue and red so watered it was barely pink. At 62, Martin had found a new language, a mode of expression in which she continued to communicate for 30 more years.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Untitled 1959 by Agnes Martin
Sometimes the bands she made were sombre, in troubled driving strokes of slaty grey, but more often they are buoyant, elegant stacks of dilute acrylic paint. Layers the colour of sand and apricots, layers the colour of morning sky; flags for a borderless state, a new republic of ease and freedom. Her process was always the same. She waited until she saw her vision: a tiny full-colour version of the painting to come. Then came the painstaking labour of scaling up, filling pages with scribbled fractions and long division. Next, she would mark two lengths of tape, using a short ruler to pencil the lines on to a gessoed canvas. Only then did she begin to apply colour, working very fast. If there were displeasing drips or blots or other errors, she would destroy the canvas with a knife or box cutter, sometimes even hurling it off the mesa, before beginning again once or twice or seven times: every mark in a Martin painting is intentional, wholly meant.
Their meticulous geometries have intense effects on the viewer. At the London outpost of Pace, I saw Untitled #2, 1992: five blue bands separated by four repeating runners of white, watery orange and salmon pink. Up close, the pencil lines wobbled over the weave like an ECG. There were two hairs stuck to the canvas; five peach splatters the size of fingernails. The eye seized on these small details, on the infinitesimally darker patches where two brush strokes had collided, because there was nothing else to grasp: no view, no closure, just a radiant openness, as if the ocean had come into the windowless room.
This feeling of free fall is not to everyone’s taste. Over the years, a surprising number of Martin’s paintings have been vandalised. One viewer used as their weapon an ice cream cone. Another attacked with green crayon, while at a show in Germany, nationalists hurled rubbish. The grids in particular seem to attract embellishment. Martin herself thought it was narcissistic, a kind of horror vacui. “You know,” she said ruefully, “people just can’t stand that those are all empty squares.”
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Learning to withstand emptiness was her own speciality, her given task. Her years in New Mexico were marked by a profound withdrawal from worldly things, a life of renunciation and restriction that often sounds punishingly masochistic, though Martin insisted the intention was spiritual, an ongoing war against the sin of pride. The voices were strict in their limitations. She wasn’t allowed to buy records, own a television, or have a dog or cat for company. Over the winter of 1973 she lived off nothing but preserved home-grown tomatoes, walnuts and hard cheese. Another winter it was Knox gelatin mixed with orange juice and bananas. When she was evicted from the mesa after an argument with the owners, she rang Glimcher, telling him she had lost everything, even her clothes. “It’s a sign I’ve been living too grandly,” she announced cheerfully. “It’s another test for me.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Agnes Martin at her house near Cuba, New Mexico, in 1974. Photograph by Gianfranco Gorgon
Ironically, Martin’s reclusiveness, her spartan existence, contributed to her growing status as the desert mystic of minimalism, something she simultaneously resisted and fed. During this period, she began to give public lectures that managed to be both bossy and self-effacing, mixing the language of Zen sermons with the babyish burblings and deliberate repetitions of Gertrude Stein, whose poems she was fond of declaiming. Martin was adept at using language opaquely, creating a screen of words that could veil her from the gaze of the world. Like her enigmatic, resistant paintings, her statements are designed to express something beyond the reach of ordinary understanding, weapons in a campaign to devalue the material and elevate the abstract. “When you give up on the idea of right and wrong, you don’t get anything,” she told Johnston. “What you get is rid of everything, freedom from ideas and responsibilities.”
Towards the end of her life, even the strictures began to dissolve. As she aged, Martin became happier and more social, as well as considerably more wealthy. In 1992, she moved into a retirement community in Taos, New Mexico, driving each day to her studio in a spotless white BMW, one of the few extravagances in a life still dedicated to extreme material simplicity. Other things that gave her pleasure were the novels of Agatha Christie (themselves, as Princenthal observes, infinitely ingenious repetitions on the same core structure), occasional martinis and the music of Beethoven. To Lillian Ross in 2003, she announced cheerfully: “Beethoven is really about something. I go to sleep when it gets dark, get up when it’s light. Like a chicken. Let’s go to lunch.”
It was in this period that objects began to return to her canvases; a final swerve in a life dedicated to absolute obedience to vision. Triangles, trapezoids, squares: black geometric shapes, arising out of drained and sober fields. In one of the most striking of these paintings, Homage to Life, 2003, a severe black trapezoid looms out of a wash of exquisitely agitated putty grey (reviewing it in the New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl observed: “It looks thoroughly deathly to me”). And her very last work was, of all things, a tiny drawing of a plant, barely more than three inches high: a tottering ink line that attests at long last to the material things in which beauty temporarily makes its home.
After that, she set down her pencil. Her final days, in December 2004, were spent in the infirmary of the retirement home, surrounded by a few of her closest friends and family members. In his memoir, Glimcher describes sitting and holding her hand, singing her favourite “Blue Skies”, a song they’d often sung together while she drove him through the mountains, her foot on the gas, exhibiting a queenly disregard for speed limits and stop signs. Sometimes she’d chime in from her bed with a couple of wavering lines: “Nothing but blue skies / From now on.”
She wanted to be buried in the garden of the Harwood Museum in Taos, near a room of paintings she had donated, but New Mexico law forbade it, and so in the spring after her death, a group assembled at midnight and scaled the adobe walls with a ladder. It was a full moon, and they dug a hole under the roots of an apricot tree, placing her ashes in a Japanese bowl lined with gold leaf before scattering them in the earth. A beautiful scene, but as Martin knew, “beauty is unattached, it’s inspiration – it’s inspiration”.
• Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone is forthcoming from Canongate. Agnes Martin is at Tate Modern, London SE1, from 3 June to 11 October. tate.org.uk. |
This story has been updated with new information. For the most recent developments, go here: San Bernardino shooters “sprayed the room with bullets”
SAN BERNARDINO >> At least 14 people were killed and 21 others injured by assailants who opened fire Wednesday morning on a training session of county employees at a facility that serves developmentally disabled people.
The shooting at the Inland Regional Center, on Waterman Avenue, just south of Orange Show Road, marks one of the largest mass shootings in the country in recent years and triggered lockdowns at schools, hospitals and entire neighborhoods across the city as federal and local law enforcement officials searched for the suspects.
• Related: 2 suspects killed in shootout with police
Finally, four hours after the 11 a.m. shooting, two suspects — a man and a woman — were killed in a gunbattle with police about two miles from the regional center, San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan said.
A third suspect seen fleeing that shootout was later detained. While it is not clear whether he or she was involved, Burguan said late Wednesday that police now believe that the two slain suspects were the only two shooters.
• Related: Michel Nolan: The darkest of days for a resilient but battered city
Law enforcement identified them as Syed Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 27. Farook has worked as an environmental health specialist for San Bernardino County for five years, according to police officials.
Authorities are still investigating a possible motive and have not ruled out terrorism or the possibility that it involved a workplace dispute. Police continued to search a house in Redlands on Wednesday night that may be connected to the suspects.
• Related: Officials identify suspects as Syed Farook, Tashfeen Malik
“The information we have is that (the shooters) came prepared … as if they were on a mission,” Burguan said.
They were dressed in assault-style clothing and armed with long rifles, Burguan said. They were later found with assault-style rifles and handguns, he said.
• Related: What is the Inland Regional Center, the building at the center of the San Bernardino shooting?
Though the shooting took place at the regional center, which serves thousands of people with developmental disabilities, the suspects targeted a gathering of county employees who were using a conference center at the facility often rented out to outside agencies. The San Bernardino County Department of Public Health was conducting a daylong training event at the facility, according to top county officials who requested anonymity. Environmental health specialists work under the Department of Public Health.
A dispute took place at the event, which police described as a holiday party, and Farook left angry, Burguan said.
“There had to be some degree of planning that went into this,” he added.
FBI assistant director David Bowdich said earlier in the day terrorism also remained a possibility.
“Is this terrorism? I’m still not willing to say we know for sure … that is a possibility,” he said, adding that FBI agents are involved in the investigation. “We will go where the evidence takes us. It’s possible it will go down that road.”
“At minimum we have a domestic terrorism situation occurring,” Burguan said.
A city in terror
The shooting occurred shortly before 11 a.m. Officers from several agencies responded and began evacuating people, including children and IRC clients.
At the same time, families of employees began receiving phone calls and texts from terrified loved ones inside the regional center.
“Dad, I’m scared,” read one text Tom Carrillo received from his daughter, who works at the facility. He later received word she was evacuated.
“This is heartbreaking,” Carrillo said.
Inside, hundreds of employees barricaded themselves in offices. Melinda Rivas, a social worker, said she and about 40 others locked themselves inside a conference room and stacked furniture up against the door.
“I had no idea if I was going to get out alive,” she said.
Law enforcement officers who entered the facility said there were so many wounded victims and they wanted to act fast, so they loaded them into a truck to quickly drive them to safety.
IRC employee Brandon Hunt, who was out running an errand at the time of the shooting, said he received calls from inside. Co-workers told him they had to step over what appeared to be bodies as they tried to get out.
“This is a great agency. I don’t know why anyone would target it,” Hunt said.
Once evacuated, victims and other building occupants were taken to the San Bernardino Public Golf Course, across the street from the regional center, where triage was set up.
Desperate family members waited at the perimeter of the crime scene for news of their loved ones.
Evacuees were interviewed by police and eventually loaded onto buses and taken to two local churches where they were to be reunited with family. But as the search for suspects continued, little information was released.
Schools, county buildings and hospital buildings were put on lockdown. At Arrowhead Regional Medical Center in Colton, where some victims were taken, throngs of police and SWAT officers clad in full gear stood guard, many clutching their department-issued assault rifles, outside the emergency room and other hospital entrances.
Staff at Loma Linda University Medical Center received a bomb threat about 2:40 p.m. Classes were canceled and students were encouraged to leave public areas of campus. Officials later declared that no credible threat was discovered, but the hospital remained on a heightened state of alert.
Redlands home focus
Authorities spent hours searching the three IRC buildings for the suspects, though they also had word they fled in a dark-colored SUV. While they didn’t find any suspects at the facility, they did find an explosive device that was later detonated.
The search eventually took law enforcement to a house in Redlands. While watching the house, they saw a dark-colored SUV leave. A chase ensued that eventually ended at San Bernardino Avenue near Richardson Street, in San Bernardino, only miles from the regional center. The suspects and police exchanged a barrage of gunfire.
Jesus Gonzales, 36, said his house was hit. His wife was inside.
My wife “called me frantically saying she’s hearing gunshots going off. Everywhere. And that’s she’s scared. And that she heard noises in the house, like it’s hitting the house,” he said. “She ducked down and said she heard more than 100 rounds.”
Two suspects were killed in the exchange, a man and woman. A third suspect who fled the scene was later detained, but police are not certain if he was involved, Burguan said.
A police officer was also injured in the gunfire and suffered a non-life-threatening injury, Burguan said.
Thoughts and prayers
People from across the nation and close to home were praying for San Bernardino on Wednesday night.
“My prayers are with the victims, families and survivors of this horrific attack. … My heart aches that the out-of-control gun violence epidemic has come to our community,” said Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-San Bernardino, echoing sentiments from many public officials.
A prayer vigil was held at the Kingdom Culture Worship Centre, at 480 W. Court St., where attendees sang and prayed for the city and the people and families impacted by the shooting.
Lead Pastor Sherman Dumas said he was in a staff meeting when he heard about the shooting. He said he dropped everything so that he could head to the scene.
“The main reason why I was driven to be there is because I love San Bernardino,” Dumas said.
The Los Angeles Council on American-Islamic Relations also held a news conference Wednesday night to express their condolences for the victims. CAIR’s executive director for Los Angeles, Hussam Ayloush, said his organization condemns “this horrific and revolting attack and offer our heartfelt condolences.”
The brother-in-law of San Bernardino shooting suspect Syed Farook said he has “no idea” what Farook’s motive could have been.
“Why would he do something like this? I have no idea. I’m in shock myself,” said Farhan Khan, who said he was at CAIR to express his family’s sadness for the victims. “I cannot express how sad I am for what happened today.”
Staff Writers Doug Saunders, Beatriz Valenzuela, Brian Day, Joe Nelson, Michel Nolan, Nereida Moreno, Kristina Hernandez, Neil Nisperos, Ryan Hagen, Liset Marquez, Susan Abram, Sandra Emerson, Josh Dulaney, David Montero and Rebecca Kimitch contributed to this report. |
The owner of Reptile Ocean pet store has been arrested in Quebec in connection with the python strangling of two brothers in Campbellton, N.B., in 2013.
The arrest, made Thursday by New Brunswick RCMP, was confirmed by Cpl. Chantal Farrah. No charges have been laid, she said, adding the investigation is continuing.
Typically, the longest someone can be held in custody before being charged or released is 24 hours.
RCMP have not released the name of the individual arrested.
Lawyer Leslie Matchim confirmed the man arrested in the Montreal area is his client, Jean-Claude Savoie, the owner of the pet store.
"I've been authorized to confirm that it was in fact Jean-Claude Savoie who was arrested today," said Matchim, after his client called him.
"Quite honestly, I can't say [the arrest] came as a surprise. Certainly for me, the surprise came when the RCMP, quite some time ago, seemed to be recoiling from their official position with me that no charges would be forthcoming.
"After they sort of recanted that position and announced that in fact the investigation was ongoing, then … I can't say that I’m surprised that we're at the point we're at today."
Savoie is being held in police custody, said Matchim. "All things considered, he seems to be doing all right," he said.
Lawyer Leslie Matchim says if Jean-Claude Savoie is charged, he would have to come back to New Brunswick to face those charges. (CBC) Barthe , 6, and his brother Noah, 4, were killed on Aug. 5, 2013 , by an African rock python that escaped from its enclosure in the apartment where the boys were attending a sleepover. ConnorBarthe
Reptile Ocean was an unlicensed zoo and pet store, New Brunswick Department of Natural Resources officials have said.
Savoie was the subject of a criminal investigation, and the RCMP turned the file over to Crown prosecutors in July.
At that time, Savoie's lawyer said he had been told by police "quite formally and officially" that his client would not be charged criminally.
But New Brunswick RCMP said the investigation has been ongoing since the Barthe boys died.
"Now, the investigation has furthered and has brought us to the point where an arrest was made today, so this person is now in police custody, but the investigation is ongoing," Farrah said.
"If at some point charges are laid, then more information will be available to you," she added.
Savoie's lawyer said it's too early to speculate whether his client will be charged, or what those charges might be.
But the RCMP would not be involved in any investigation pertaining to the legality of the zoo, said Matchim. That would fall under provincial jurisdiction, he said.
"The Department of Natural Resources did oversee an investigation in that respect, and they have decided not to proceed with charges," said Matchim, adding there would be a six-month limitation period on any such charges.
"So I don’t think there's any doubt as to what is being investigated today," he said.
If Savoie is charged in the deaths of the boys, he would be required to return to New Brunswick to face those charges, said Matchim.
A report from a task force, struck by the New Brunswick Department of Natural Resources to review the province’s exotic animal laws and regulations and recommend changes to prevent future tragedies, is expected in March. |
Why. Why? Why would anyone think it was cool to get butt injections—which are illegal and typically happen in motel rooms, as many illegal things do—after seeing the pictures of that transexual lady who was arrested last year for performing the procedure on women and fucking up not just their butts but their entire bodies with infections and all kinds of shit. Even if you are stupid enough to not care if needles are clean or if it's dangerous to let some random person stick one into your body, filling it with who-knows-what, wouldn't you at least be vain enough to care that the results look scary and horrible?
Apparently, not everyone is deterred by veritable PSAs of illegal cosmetic procedure horror stories. More and more African-American women are seeking the black-market enhancements, according to the Daily Beast, risking infection, gross deformities, and even death.
Image via Anna Kucherova/Shutterstock
Illegal Butt Injections Are on the Rise and Women Are at Risk [Daily Beast] |
Buy Photo A view of the inside of JQH Arena, which was used in May for Missouri State University graduation ceremonies. (Photo: News-Leader file)Buy Photo
Late developer John Q. Hammons promised to give Missouri State University more than $30 million to help build the JQH Arena.
Of that amount, $22 million is still outstanding.
"That is what is left on their side," said MSU President Clif Smart.
The Springfield-based hotel company founded by and named for Hammons filed for protection Sunday in federal bankruptcy court in Kansas.
MSU officials said the trust is scheduled to pay $1.8 million a year and the last payment is scheduled for April 2032. On Monday, Smart said it's too early to know what the impact will be on the arena payments.
"I do not know yet. We are working on that, obviously," Smart told the News-Leader. "We are tracking all that down today. We'll obviously try to make contact with their general counsel over there to visit about this. It's a lot of unknowns now."
At a news conference Monday, Hammons CEO Jacquie Dowdy said the restructuring and protection under the bankruptcy will allow the company to meet its ongoing philanthropic commitments.
Gregg Groves, senior vice president and general counsel, said he wouldn't get into specifics.
"The trustees have paid all beneficiaries in full except for one and that one is being paid currently and we anticipate that it will be continued to be current," he said, apparently referring to the arena donations to MSU. "It was set up in his trust as ongoing payments. The trust has recognized those payments and we expect to continue."
Nearly a decade ago, Hammons' gift helped fuel construction of JQH Arena. The project, roughly $67 million, provided a home for MSU's basketball teams. The venue is also frequently used for graduations, concerts, circuses, and other large-scale events.
It is located on the west side of the MSU campus, not far from the Juanita K. Hammons Center for the Performing Arts, which was named for Hammons' wife. That facility, too, was funded with donations from the Hammons trust, but was paid off shortly after his death in 2013.
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This is a review I didn’t want to write. I’ve been putting it off for the past month. Why? Because the Sonos PLAY:1 is awesome, and once this post goes live, a lucky MakeUseOf reader will win the two I was sent to play with.
The PLAY:1 is the entry level model in Sonos’s line of smart speakers. While a single Sonos is good, you’re meant to invest in a whole network of them to kit out your house. Each speaker can be controlled separately — or linked together — from your smartphone or computer.
This is what I made of the PLAY:1
How the Sonos PLAY:1 Works
The Sonos PLAY:1 is more than just a speaker. It’s a lot easier to think of it as a speaker with a small computer attached Turn An Old Amp Into A Smart Streaming Speaker With Raspberry Pi Turn An Old Amp Into A Smart Streaming Speaker With Raspberry Pi The ultimate self-contained music streaming speaker, with support for Spotify, Google Music, SoundCloud and Airplay. Let's do it. Read More than anything else.
On the device there are three buttons: Play/Pause, Volume Up and Volume Down. That’s it. The only way to control it is using the Sonos Controller app on your computer or smartphone. It’s available for iOS, Android, OS X, and Windows. If you use a different operating system, you’re out of luck.
Unless you’re streaming content from your phone or computer, the Sonos does all the hard work. It’s connected to your Wi-Fi network and, if you’re listening to content from a service like Spotify or TuneIn, it pulls in all the content itself. It’s not like an AirPlay or Bluetooth speaker where your phone is just beaming the information to a dumb speaker, the Sonos has a brain of its own. This is the biggest difference between a Sonos and most other wireless speakers.
How the Speakers Sound
Let’s get this out of the way, with the PLAY:1 you are paying a premium for the Sonos’s intelligence and brand. The speakers sound great, but they’re not cheap.
Right now a PLAY:1 – the cheapest model in the range – is $200 on Amazon. As we’ll see later in this review, you need at least two to get the full use out of the Sonos system so you’re looking at a minimum set up cost of $400. Sonos does offer the CONNECT which turns your existing audio setup into a Sonos system however, rather than being an entry point, each Connect costs $350 dollars.
With this sort of budget to play with, if sound quality is all you’re after, you can probably invest in a better setup.
This isn’t to say the PLAY:1 sounds bad. I didn’t do any frequency response testing, just listened to tens of hours of Spotify over the last two months. I was always impressed with the audio quality. There’s a surprising amount of bass for such a small package, and the midtones and highend all sound good. The default EQ didn’t do anything weird to any of the music I listened to.
The biggest compliment I can pay the PLAY:1 is that its sound is room filling. There was no room in my house for which a single speaker wasn’t enough. Sonos make larger speakers — the PLAY:3 and PLAY:5 — but I never felt that I needed their extra ooomph.
The All Important Apps
The Sonos Controller apps are a hugely important part of the whole experience. I found that I just tucked the speaker away and forgot about it. My only interaction was using the apps. It felt like a natural extension of my phone and computer. There were very few occasions when I used the hardware buttons.
It’s fortunate then, that the app experience is a good one. Both the smartphone and PC apps give you full control over your Sonos system. You can control what’s playing on each speaker, create playlists, search and add tracks from any of the supported services, and essentially do anything you want.
For all the features the app has, it never feels bloated. I spent a lot of time using the Spotify streaming feature and, while the Sonos app’s layout wasn’t quite as good as the official Spotify app, it was completely satisfactory user experience. The same is true of the other channels. The official apps will always have a slight edge — Sonos is essentially taking ten different apps and averaging their controls to have a system that works okay for everything — but five minutes with the app is all you’ll need to get to grips with things.
UI wise, the app is functional rather than anything particularly stunning. This is just another side effect of having to work for so many different services — it’s hard to do great design when you’re working with so many different APIs. The one criticism I’d have is the headache inducing splash screen when you load the app. The Sonos surrounded by lines is an optical illusion, and an unpleasant one at that. Seeing it every time I opened the app got old, fast!
The Setup Process
Setting up the Sonos is brainless. The short instruction manual talks you through it in full but you basically connect your smartphone or computer to the Sonos’s Wi-Fi network, then add your actual Wi-Fi details. It will restart, connect to your network, download any updates, and then be ready to use.
Adding a second Sonos is even easier. You just turn it on, go to the app and choose add new device. The Sonos network will do the rest.
A system like Sonos can seem intimidating, but it really is easy. I’d have no problem recommending this to people who avoid most technology. If you can use a smartphone, you can use a Sonos.
A Sound System for Your House
The biggest draw of a Sonos is that it’s a system for your whole house. Add a speaker in each room and you can control what’s playing in each place from a single app.
The idea is that if you want to listen to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers in the kitchen while your roommate plays Marvin Gaye in the bedroom, you can. Alternatively, if you’re moving from one room to another, you can just use the app to pair the two rooms so your music continues seamlessly. If you’re throwing a party it gets even better, you can link every room there. Put on a big Spotify playlist and just let the Sonos system take care of everything.
My two room Sonos setup really worked exactly like that. In the best possible way, it just worked. Any changes I made were instantaneous. When the two speakers were both playing together they kept perfectly in sync. You could even have them in the same room and use them as a set of dual speakers.
After a few weeks I began to get annoyed when I went into a room and there wasn’t a Sonos there.
Downsides
As should be abundantly clear by now, I’m a big fan of the Sonos system. It isn’t however without some drawbacks.
First, the Sonos system is expensive. As good as the app is, it’s not really worth it for a single speaker. You need to be using the multi-room features to get your money’s worth, and even then, they’re still expensive. Cost is going to be a major barrier to entry for a lot of people.
Second, while you can stream media that’s on your phone, you can’t stream directly from your phone or computer in any other app. This is all well and good if you keep a library on your phone, but if like me you listen to audiobooks using Audible then you won’t be able to play them on your Sonos.
Third, there are some notable omissions in the list of supported services. The biggest of them is the newly released Apple Music. While Sonos may be able to work out something with Apple, I’m not optimistic. There’s also things like Audible that, theoretically at least, would be far easier for Sonos to add. It’s a small complaint though: the number of services offered does more than enough to cover most use cases.
Wrapping Up
If you’re looking to invest in a speaker system for your home, Sonos is the way to go — as long as you have the budget. I’m a big fan of the app but I’m not sure I can recommend getting a single Sonos speaker: a good Bluetooth or AirPlay speaker would have pretty much the same function. You really do need to buy at least two. If I had $1000 dollars to spend on audio gear, without a shadow of a doubt every penny would be spent on a full Sonos system.
Other than budget, the only reasons not to use a Sonos are your OS or streaming service of choice isn’t supported.
If you’ve got the money and can get at least two… Buy! Buy! Buy!
Sonos PLAY:1 Set Giveaway
Send your products to be reviewed. Contact James Bruce for further details. |
A trio of astronauts from the United States, Russia and Italy are headed for the International Space Station, a step toward boosting U.S. research projects aboard the orbiting laboratory.
The Russian Soyuz rocket carrying the three spaceflight veterans blasted off at 11:41 a.m. ET from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, a NASA TV broadcast showed.
.<a href="https://twitter.com/AstroKomrade">@AstroKomrade</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/astro_paolo">@Astro_Paolo</a> & <a href="https://twitter.com/Ryazanskiy_ISS">@Ryazanskiy_ISS</a> are safely in orbit after an 11:41am ET launch, set to arrive at <a href="https://twitter.com/Space_Station">@Space_Station</a> at 6pm ET <a href="https://t.co/ii2wtEPoK8">pic.twitter.com/ii2wtEPoK8</a> —@NASA
The three astronauts are:
Randy Bresnik with the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Sergey Ryazanskiy with the Russian space agency Roscosmos.
Paolo Nespoli with the European Space Agency.
The men were slated to reach the station at 6 p.m. ET, where they will join three crew members already aboard the station, a $100-billion US lab that flies about 400 kilometres above Earth.
Doubling research
Their arrival will mean NASA, for the first time, has four crew members instead of three available for medical experiments, technology demonstrations and other research aboard the station, the U.S. space agency said.
The extra astronaut will effectively double the amount of time for research, program manager Kirk Shireman said at a station conference last week.
NASA does not oversee the Russian staff, which was reduced to two in April until a long-delayed research module joins the station next year.
Previously, Russia flew three cosmonauts, with the remaining three positions filled by a combination of European, Japanese, Canadian and U.S. astronauts.
By the end of next year, NASA intends to begin flying astronauts aboard space taxis under development by SpaceX and Boeing. Both spaceships have room for a fourth seat, bumping the station's overall crew size to seven once Russia returns to full staffing.
Prepping for Mars, lunar missions
NASA is using the station to prepare for human missions to the moon and Mars and to stimulate commercial space transportation, pharmaceutical research, manufacturing and other businesses.
The agency also conducts physics, astronomy and Earth science investigations aboard the outpost, which has been staffed by rotating crews of astronauts and cosmonauts since 2000.
The trio of astronauts wave to onlookers after donning their space suits, shortly before their launch. (Shamil Zhumatov/Reuters)
Bresnik, 49, last flew on the space shuttle in 2009 during a space station assembly mission. Ryazanskiy, 42, spent five-and-a-half months aboard the station in 2013-2014. Nespoli, 60, is making his third space flight, having previously served on both space shuttle and space station crews.
The men are slated to return to Earth in December. |
The report found that many universities have been offering emergency aid to students at risk of dropping out for financial reasons for years, but often in an ad hoc fashion. Requests for help might be handled by one department on Monday, another department on Thursday. And students usually figure out where to go by asking other students or professors. NASPA attempted to take stock of where these programs exist, how they operate, and, perhaps more importantly, how they might streamline services for students.
Amelia Parnell, one of the authors of the report, said that although emergencies are not new, the cost of education is rising, and calls for certain types of aid, such as food pantries, seem to be increasing. “I don’t think we had that type of situation 10 years ago,” she said. Only about 60 percent of students who begin college have a degree six years later, but figures are even lower for black and Latino students, who are more likely to be low-income. While some of the attrition is tied to academic issues, a good portion is financial. Where students can apply for aid and scholarships to cover tuition and housing, in the absence of similar assistance to cover unforeseen family emergencies or medical issues, students who don’t have savings can be forced to drop out.
In addition to food pantries and vouchers, schools are also turning to completion grants to help students who run out of money and other financial-aid options in their last semester or year of school. A separate study from the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU) found that most of the schools it looked at turned to the grants after they noticed rising dropout rates among students close to graduating.
Georgia State University in Atlanta launched a completion-grant program in 2011 after discovering that many seniors needed just a few hundred dollars. Dillard University, a historically black college in New Orleans, created a fund two years ago after the school discovered it was losing more students to financial gaps than academic issues, Marc Barnes, the vice president for institutional advancement, said. Dillard put out a call to alumni and raised several hundred thousand dollars in the first few months, and $1.5 million in the last two years. The school has assisted about 250 students, a sizeable figure considering the entire student body is about 1,200. “It’s made a significant difference,” Barnes said, adding that retention rates are up several points.
Like Georgia State, Dillard attaches some strings to the aid. The school requires students to be in good academic standing and to take a financial-literacy course. They also have to participate in a university event. The school doesn’t advertise the program, but, Barnes said, it’s also not a well-kept secret.
Barnes expects need at Dillard to increase because of looming cuts to a Louisiana scholarship that helps thousands of low-income students pay for college. But need could also grow nationally, too. At Dillard, where more than 40 percent of students are first-generation college-goers and some 90 percent rely on financial aid, administrators have been helping students who have financial emergencies for years, offering food and clothes, and even helping homeless students secure housing. Other schools are just learning what it takes to help such students succeed, Barnes said, noting that his school accepts transfer students from colleges they say aren’t as receptive to their non-academic needs. “It’s a learning curve for both the students and the institutions,” he said, adding that Dillard “gets a number of calls” from other colleges considering emergency-aid funds. |
The latest developments left one major question: Will prosecutors bring charges against Tanaka's boss, former Sheriff Lee Baca, who led the department for more than 15 years before stepping down last year?
Acting U.S. Atty. Stephanie Yonekura declined to comment on that possibility. The former sheriff has denied any wrongdoing and previously said federal officials assured him that he is not a target.
In sketching out the case against Tanaka and Carey, prosecutors accused them of directing a group of deputies who were convicted last year of carrying out the plot to impede the FBI investigation.
"This new case illustrates the fact that the leaders who foster and hide the corrupt culture of their organization will be held responsible, just like their subordinates," Yonekura said
An attorney for Tanaka, H. Dean Steward, called the charges "baseless" and vowed that Tanaka would "aggressively defend" himself in court.
"At all times, Mr. Tanaka dedicated himself to serving the residents of Los Angeles County honorably, ethically and legally," Steward said. "After all the facts come to light, we are confident he will be exonerated of any wrongdoing."
Tanaka — who is in his third term as mayor of Gardena and unsuccessfully ran for sheriff last year — and Carey pleaded not guilty at their arraignments Thursday and were released on bail. Carey also faces charges of giving false testimony last year during obstruction trials for some of the deputies. His attorney declined comment.
Tanaka plans to request a leave of absence from his mayoral duties, Gardena's city manager said.
The image of Tanaka standing before a judge marked a decisive new chapter in the sweeping federal investigation into the jail facilities run by the Sheriff's Department. After winning convictions against the lower-ranking deputies, investigators tried to link top officials to the misconduct. Several other deputies are awaiting federal civil rights trials on charges that they beat inmates and visitors to the jails.
The case against Tanaka and Carey centers on events in August and September 2011, when, according to the indictment, the pair instructed several deputies to keep close tabs on Brown, the FBI's inmate informant.
On Aug. 19, Tanaka and Carey met with some of the deputies to hear what information they had extracted from Brown about the scope of the FBI inquiry, the indictment alleges. The indictment does not name Brown, but refers to him by the initials AB.
The following day, prosecutors allege that the same group met again to discuss the fact that a cellphone deputies had confiscated from Brown belonged to the FBI and had been used in a sting operation against a deputy who smuggled it into the jail to Brown.
Days later, Tanaka gathered in a parking lot with deputies who had gone undercover to pose as Brown's cellmates in an attempt to glean information about the FBI's investigation.
Tanaka and Carey also went to great lengths to keep FBI agents from speaking with Brown, the indictment alleges.
In one display of gamesmanship, Tanaka directed underlings to draft a new department policy that required FBI agents to receive approval from him before interviewing any jail inmate, the indictment said. (Tanaka later had his name removed from the draft policy, according to the indictment.)
And, in late August, deputies approached clerks working in the sheriff's records center and said they were acting on orders from Tanaka. They instructed the clerks to falsify entries in the agency's database to show Brown had been released from custody when, in fact, he remained in a jail cell, according to the indictment. The episode was part of a broader scheme in which the deputies repeatedly moved Brown among various jail facilities under fake names to conceal his whereabouts from federal authorities, the indictment alleges.
Tanaka testified during one of the deputies' corruption trials last year that he did not have a clear memory of many events, but that the inmate was moved under false names for his own safety and to protect the integrity of the Sheriff's Department's investigation into the smuggled phone.
Defense attorneys for the low-ranking sheriff's officials on trial argued that their clients were "worker bees" complying with what they believed were lawful orders. All seven of the defendants brought to trial on obstruction charges last year were convicted and sentenced to prison terms.
At trial, prosecutors probably will have to rely heavily on testimony from those deputies to prove their allegations that Tanaka and Carey played central roles in the attempt to thwart the FBI, said Joseph N. Akrotirianakis, a former member of the U.S. attorney's public corruption unit in Los Angeles.
If the deputies testify in hopes of getting leniency on their prison sentences, it could cause problems for the prosecution as defense attorneys will raise questions about the reliability of the testimony, Akrotirianakis said.
How Baca, who could not be reached for comment Thursday, might factor into the case against Tanaka and Carey remains to be seen.
The former sheriff was not called as a witness in any of the previous trials.
His name is not mentioned among the attendees of the many meetings documented in the indictment. But some defendants in the prior trials testified that Baca led some of those meetings and gave orders.
Tanaka and one of the earlier defendants, Lt. Stephen Leavins, both recalled that Baca convened a meeting in his office on Saturday, Aug. 20, 2011, to discuss Brown's smuggled cellphone and where it had come from.
"The sheriff ordered us … to conduct a criminal investigation into the introduction of the cellphone, safeguard Mr. Brown and investigate the matter thoroughly," Leavins testified at his trial in June. "It was a directive from the sheriff for me to safeguard [Brown], period."
The indictment against Tanaka and Carey refers to that Saturday meeting. While the indictment does not include Baca's name, the document does refer to "LASD Official A" as being present with the others.
The indictment also alleges that Tanaka and Leavins directed others to search for listening devices in the office and conference rooms belonging to Tanaka and "LASD Official A." During Leavins' trial last year, a prosecutor asked him about checking for bugs in the offices of Tanaka and Baca.
Leavins testified that Carey, Tanaka and Baca were all involved in the decision to move Brown around. He described a meeting in Tanaka's office with Carey and Baca, at which Baca said to do whatever was needed to safeguard Brown.
"Baca gave the order. He ordered me to relocate Anthony Brown safely and approved that location to be a station jail," Leavins testified.
And at a Sept. 26 meeting in Tanaka's office, Baca told Leavins and others to approach an FBI agent, Leah Marx, at her home and question her about the cellphone, according to Leavins. Though the indictment accuses Tanaka and Carey of having had a hand in arranging the encounter with Marx, it says nothing about Baca or "LASD Official A." |
Story highlights Turkey will consider any military approach from Syria a potential threat, its PM says
Turkish-Syrian ties have deteriorated during the uprising
The countries had sharp tensions in the 1990s over Kurdish militancy
NATO condemns the shooting down of the plane, but does not act
Turkey is changing its military rules of engagement and will now treat a military approach toward its borders by Syria as a potential threat that "will be dealt with accordingly," Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Tuesday.
The announcement is a significant escalation of rhetoric after Syria shot down a Turkish plane last week.
Erdogan criticized Syria harshly on Tuesday for shooting down the Turkish fighter jet, saying: "Even if the plane was in their airspace for a few seconds, that is no excuse to attack."
"It was clear that this plane was not an aggressive plane. Still it was shot down," he said.
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He said Syrian choppers have strayed into Turkish airspace five times in 2012. But, the Turks say, the government never escalated the situation despite the border violations. That could change under the new policy.
The shooting down of the Phantom F-4 jet on Friday raised even more tension between Turkey and Syria, two heavily armed regional powers.
Relations between the two neighbors have deteriorated during the uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime. Erdogan has repeatedly called on al-Assad to step down.
Turkey has withdrawn its diplomats from Damascus. More than 30,000 Syrian refugees have spilled onto Turkish soil and Turkey is hosting Syria opposition groups.
NATO condemned the shoot-down "in the strongest terms," Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said after the alliance met Tuesday at Turkey's request. Both sides say the jet strayed into Syrian airspace, but Turkey says the incursion was accidental and quickly corrected.
Rasmussen refused to comment on what intelligence Turkey had presented to NATO about the incident at the alliance's headquarters in Brussels, Belgium. He called on Syria to "avoid such events in the future" and said he did not expect the situation to escalate.
NATO did not promise any action in response to the incident, and Turkey did not invoke the NATO article calling for collective defense of members, Rasmussen said.
The NATO consultations were held under Article 4 of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's founding charter. The article allows any member to call for consultations "whenever, in the opinion of any of them, their territorial integrity, political independence or security is threatened," the charter says.
France's Foreign Ministry called the shootdown an "attack" on Tuesday and said it "constitutes a violation of international law."
It's a reminder, the ministry said, that the regime "is threatening international peace and security. It is consistent with the regime's escalating violence against its own population."
Alexander Lukashevich, the Russian Foreign Ministry's official representative, expressed Moscow's concern on Tuesday.
"In our opinion, it is important that the incident not be seen as a provocation or a deliberate action that could lead toward destabilizing the situation," he said.
White House spokesman Jay Carney said the United States commends Turkey for its measured response and stands with the government and the other NATO allies. Washington plans to work with Turkey and others to hold the al-Assad regime accountable and to pursue a democratic transition in Syria, he said.
Carney added that the regime's continued use of airpower reflects al-Assad's desperate attempt to maintain control.
The United States and many other countries have been vocally opposed to military intervention in Syria and are unlikely to encourage Turkey to press the issue. After Syrian troops shelled refugees on the Turkish side of the border earlier this year, U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta made clear that the bar is high for Turkey to claim the need for a collective self-defense.
Syria raised the stakes Monday in the war of words over the incident.
Syrian Foreign Ministry spokesman Jihad Makdissi said the plane was shot down in Syrian airspace, disputing Turkey's claim that it was downed over international waters after briefly straying into Syrian airspace by mistake.
"What happened was a violation of Syrian airspace. Even Turkey says Syrian sovereignty was violated. Regardless of whether it was a training mission, a reconnaissance mission, it was a violation," Makdissi said.
He insisted that Syria was the wronged party, not Turkey.
Also Monday, a spokesman for the Turkish Foreign Ministry told CNN that Syria fired Friday on a second Turkish plane that was part of a search-and-rescue mission sent in after the jet was shot down. The plane, which entered Syrian airspace in search of the jet, was not hit, said Selcuk Unal.
"There was no injury, nobody was harmed. But that plane immediately returned to Turkish airspace. And through military diplomatic channels we informed them: 'What's going on?' " Unal said.
The Turkish Foreign Ministry said Sunday that it considered the shooting to be a hostile act. Turkey delivered the message in a diplomatic note to the Syrian consulate in Istanbul, Unal told CNN.
In addition to NATO, Turkey also submitted a letter about the incident to the U.N. Security Council. The country made no request for action, but outlined its version of events.
"This attack at the international airspace, causing possible loss of two Turkish pilots, is a hostile act by the Syrian authorities against Turkey's national security. Thus, we strongly condemn it," read the letter, dated Sunday.
It identified the downed plane as a Turkish RF-4 reconnaissance aircraft, a version of the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II. It was flying alone, without arms, in international airspace when it was shot down, the letter read.
Turkish search-and-rescue teams found the wreckage of the jet in the Mediterranean Sea on Sunday, about 1,300 meters (4,260 feet) underwater, Foreign Ministry spokesman Unal said.
Tension between Syria and Turkey escalated sharply in the 1990s over Kurdish militancy.
Turkey was angry that the Syrian regime harbored Kurdish militant Abdullah Ocalan.
Ocalan founded the Kurdistan Workers' Party, the PKK. The group, regarded as a terrorist organization by Turkey and the United States, has been fighting the Turkish government for Kurdish autonomy.
Syria eventually expelled Ocalan and the hostility eased. Syrian-Turkish political and economic ties grew after Erdogan became prime minister in 2003. But over the last year, Erdogan's government grew disgusted with the al-Assad regime over the government's brutal crackdown against Syrian citizens during the uprising.
Some observers believe Syria is now supporting the PKK. |
SALT LAKE CITY -- A glitch in the FAA's traffic control computer system, which caused widespread cancellations and delays, has been traced to Salt Lake City.
The Federal Aviation Administration said the problem, which lasted about four hours, was not a cyber attack.
Related:
FAA glitch causes widespread US air travel delays For the second time in 15 months, a problem with the FAA system that collects airlines' flight plans is causing widespread flight cancellations and delays nationwide.
In a statement from the FAA, Allen Kenitzer, manager of Communications and Media Relations FAA Northwest Mountain & Alaska Regions, said, "The failure was attributed to a software configuration problem within the FAA Telecommunications Infrastructure (FTI) in Salt Lake City. As a result FAA services used primarily for traffic flow and flight planning were unavailable electronically."
The National Airspace Data Interchange Network (NADIN), which processes flight planning, was affected because it relies on the FTI services. It's located right next to the airport. It's one of two centers like it in the nation; the other is in Atlanta.
The failure happened about 5 a.m. Eastern time. It meant that flight plan information for every flight in the nation was unavailable.
"The big impact we had was the possibility of delays, " said Troy Decker, vice president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. "Aircraft departing saying, ‘Hey, I want to pick up my flight plan. It's not in the system.' Air traffic controllers have to put it in the system. It's a right now thing, you need to get it in the system, get them going so you don't incur delays."
The delays mostly affected people on the East Coast. The problem lasted for five hours but affected flights all day long.
Delays at Salt Lake International were minor since this happened so early in the morning. Flights that were already in the air landed close to on time.
Rebecca Smith was at the Salt Lake airport waiting to pick up someone. She said, "I have my BlackBerry, so I've been checking on the Delta flight and so far, so good. In fact, it just landed, so he's only about 10 minutes late."
The FAA says it's investigating the situation, but for now it appears to be resolved.
This is the second widespread computer glitch the FAA has had in the last 15 months. But this time, the agency says it was because of information received from outside the system, not a glitch from within the system.
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Story compiled with contributions from Richard Piatt , Shara Park and Randall Jeppesen. |
The New York Times
Sony has declined to testify at a Congressional hearing on Wednesday, “The Threat of Data Theft to American Consumers,” that seeks to understand how consumers’ private data is protected by corporations.
Last week Sony’s PlayStation Network was infiltrated by hackers who gained access to highly sensitive information about its customers. The gaming network has 77 million registered users. Representative Mary Bono Mack, the chairwoman of the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade, asked the company to answer a set of questions and attend the hearing.
Ken Johnson, senior adviser and spokesman for Representative Mack, said Sony declined to testify at the hearing citing “an ongoing investigation” it is conducting with law enforcement.
The subcommittee sent a letter to Sony on Friday asking the company to answer a number of questions related to the attack by May 6. After Sony declined to testify to the committee, the deadline to respond to questions was pushed up to May 3.
A sony spokesperson said in an e-mail message: Sony is cooperating with the request for answers to the Committee’s questions, and in fact will be providing our responses in advance of the deadline. We informed the committee that we could not appear as early as this Wednesday because of our ongoing intensive investigation and management of this criminal cyberattack.
“We’ve taken a pretty tough line with the company, and they have agreed to provide answers to all of our questions by close of business tomorrow,” Mr. Johnson said. “While we understand the company is going through a tough time with this, there are certain questions that need answering.”
A memo that was sent to subcommittee members notes that the hearing is intended to “examine risks related to data breaches, the state of ongoing investigations, current industry data security practices, and available technology.”
Although Sony said its users’ credit card information was encrypted on its servers, hackers claimed to have access to 2.2 million credit cards and were hoping to sell them on a underground hacker networks. The committee has asked Sony to divulge what type of personal information was actually taken during the attack.
Other witnesses who will testify at the hearing include David Vladeck, director of the bureau of consumer protection at the Federal Trade Commission, and Pablo Martinez, deputy special agent in charge of criminal investigations at the United States Secret Service.
The committee hopes to discuss recent data breaches from companies like Sony and Epsilon and to determine if Congress needs to create a federal data breach notification law to help protect consumers after their personal information is taken or lost. |
These advertisements, ripped from magazines such as Head, High Times, Rush and Flash offer a glimpse of the wide range of flashy gear and accessories offered to the cocaine connoisseur of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.
While the War on Drugs was underway — Ronald Reagan popularized that infamous phrase in 1971 — and cocaine was still very much illegal, selling and marketing paraphernalia (“Not intended for illegal use!”) was a legitimate and lucrative business.
The devices and gadgets up for sale include the practical, such as a spray to ease irritated nostrils and products to keep the powder dry and free of clumps. Then there's more performative and ostentatious gear, including gold-plated razor blades and ornately carved, ivory snorting straws. For a drug as classy and luxurious as coke, a rolled-up dollar bill simply won’t do. |
Episode 60 - Tortuga 1667
Ep.60. Travis Hancock from the board game Tortuga 1667, set out to mix Pirates of the Caribbean and table top games. Since he's 1534% over his goal, I'd say he's done a fantastic job. The year is 1667, and you are a pirate sailing the waters of the Caribbean. A Spanish Galleon floats nearby, and you’ve talked your crewmates into working together to steal all of its treasure. What you haven’t told your fellow pirates is that you have no intentions on sharing the treasure once you have it. Your crewmates have told you that they share your loyalty and that they’ll help you maroon the greedy pirates on your ship to the rocky island of Tortuga. But you’ve seen your friends’ loaded pistols and heard their whisperings of a mutiny. You know that nobody can be trusted. Now, this episode is a bit, "dark", in the beginning. I've personally hit a wall and I'm pissed off. |
1. Inception (2010)
There’s a lot going on in Inception, including a running commentary on how movies work. Take the scene in which Leonardo DiCaprio walks Ellen Page through the way dream worlds get constructed, and how at the slightest hint of unbelievability, the dreamers turn on their makers. As with movies, the illusion must be thorough or run the risk of falling apart. Or look at the way the film’s dreams start to align with film genres, including a trip into the deepest part of the psyche, which resembles the compound of a Bond villain. Or take the fate of Cillian Murphy’s character, who’s slowly manipulated into making a moving breakthrough about his relationship with his father, one that leaves him sobbing and looking at his life differently than he had before. But really, it’s just a story he’s been told. He sees himself in it, but it’s just as external as the one writer-director Christopher Nolan is telling us as we watch his film.
2. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)
As a hotshot young screenwriter, Shane Black virtually invented the buddy action-comedy with Lethal Weapon, and spent a highly lucrative decade reworking—and in some instances, revitalizing—a formula that was driven into the ground with scripts for The Last Boy Scout, The Long Kiss Goodnight, and The Last Action Hero. Given a chance to direct his own movie with Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Black relentlessly, brilliantly picked over the clichés that he and other Hollywood screenwriters insert into their work. Casting Robert Downey Jr. as his narrator and surrogate, Black rolls his eyes at the conventions that he’s propagating, often stopping the action cold to reveal, say, a scene that exists wholly to plant information that will pay off later (“like that shot of the cook in The Hunt For Red October”) or a denouement at the hospital where everyone recovers from their wounds, including Abraham Lincoln. At one point, he chides himself for bad narration after forgetting an important plot detail; at another, he assures the audience, “I saw Lord Of The Rings. I’m not going to end this 17 times.” Black pulls off a remarkable act of cinematic cannibalism: By the time it’s over, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang has eaten itself alive.
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3. Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003)
Film professor and longtime Los Angeles resident Thom Andersen channeled his fascination with the quirks and character of his home city, and his frustration with how the American movie industry has often misused the very place where it lives, into the documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself. Andersen has some fun with the way Hollywood returns over and over to a few landmarks—often to destroy them—and with the way L.A.’s downtown areas easily double for post-apocalyptic wastelands. But he also chides filmmakers for ignoring the urban poor, and for turning the work of some of our most innovative, idealistic 20th-century architects into shorthand representations of moneyed decadence. Los Angeles Plays Itself rambles off-track at times, and Andersen’s take on what certain directors were up to often presumes too much. But he also performs some necessary alchemy, turning Hollywood sets back into real places with histories of their own.
4. Scream (1997)
Scream didn’t pull back the curtain on horror-movie clichés. Written by debuting screenwriter Kevin Williamson and directed by horror veteran Wes Craven, the film wouldn’t work if its intended audience didn’t know the clichés already. The chaste last girl, victims with the bad habit of running upstairs instead of out of the house: These were already familiar to viewers reared on Mystery Science Theater 3000, and used to talking back to the screen during chatty sleepovers. What made Scream remarkable was the way it acknowledged those conventions and alternately reveled in them and zigged around them to deliver scares. Though weak sequels and weaker imitators have dampened its impact, when it was released, it felt like the horror-movie equivalent of a ’90s indie-rock band: one that “rocked,” but still, you know, rocked. It worked on a deeper level, too: From its first scene on, Scream suggested that irony and self-awareness, values treasured by the generation that doubled as its target audience, could only do so much to keep evil at bay.
5. Inglourious Basterds (2009)
Arguably, every movie Quentin Tarantino ever made could fit into this Inventory; while other directors share his love for the language of movies, few are willing to directly engage that language as gleefully as he does, as each successive entry into his oeuvre since Jackie Brown embraces cinematic artifice without sacrificing sincerity. There’s never any doubt Tarantino means what he says—the trick is deciphering the meaning in the playfulness. Inglourious Basterds is many things: a goof on war films, an ultra-violent gab-fest, a World War II revenge fantasy. But it also functions as a commentary on the importance of image in modern culture. Here, the standard victims of World War II movies become violent killers, and the villainous Nazis can be buffoonish, charming, or even noble. The key comes late in the film, when a character, after nearly vanquishing an assailant, sees that same assailant on a movie screen. On the screen, the attacker seems vulnerable, and the heroine is taken in just long enough to lower her guard and seal her fate. It’s almost saying that movies can make anyone sympathetic, but that doesn’t make them safe.
6. Irma Vep (1996)
When Olivier Assayas made Irma Vep in 1996, the French film industry was the midst of an identity crisis, with its auteur-driven culture on the decline and young, Hollywood-minded directors like Luc Besson, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and Mathieu Kassovitz taking the country in a decidedly more commercial direction. At the same time, Hong Kong cinema was in full flower, pumping out diverse, creatively dynamic movies around glamorous stars like Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung. Those two worlds collide in Irma Vep, which has a wonderfully flummoxed Cheung playing herself as an actress cast in an aging New Waver’s doomed remake of the classic French silent serial Les Vampires. Part of Cheung’s confusion is garden-variety culture clash, but most of it comes from being thrown into a filmmaking system that’s totally dysfunctional and lacking in purpose. Assayas takes aim at two targets: The Old Guard (represented by actual aging New Waver Jean-Pierre Leaud) for its creative bankruptcy, and the New Guard for its shallowness and opportunism. (Assayas claims to have taken the embarrassing comments of one journalist/John Woo fanboy directly from things he heard Kassovitz say.) What a relief, then, that Irma Vep can itself be turned to as a source of revitalization.
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7. Rear Window (1954)
Alfred Hitchcock always had a knack for toying with his audience’s baser instincts, but never more trickily than in Rear Window, a movie about voyeurism that allows viewers to enjoy the cheap thrills of the peeper by experiencing them vicariously through nice guy Jimmy Stewart. Stewart plays a photographer who’s nursing a broken leg in his apartment and passing the time by watching the people in the building across the alley, piecing together the story of their lives from what he sees and hears through his window. The plot is driven by a murder that Stewart suspects one of those neighbors of committing, but that’s really just a hook to allow Hitchcock to film long scenes of Stewart playing people-watcher, ever-limited by what’s in the frame of his window, and what he imagines is going on outside his scope of vision. It’s a sly metaphor for how people watch movies—or television, given that Stewart has multiple “channels” to scan, in the form of his neighbors’ windows—and it’s simultaneously critical and sympathetic.
8. Peeping Tom (1960)
Michael Powell’s 1960 thriller about a serial killer who films his victims as they die can be seen as a dark companion piece to Hitchcock’s Rear Window; both films share a protagonist more comfortable behind a camera than in front of it, and both deal with the tricky relationship between cinema and voyeurism. The major difference being that Karlheinz Bohm’s obsessions are far more fatal than Jimmy Stewart’s. Peeping Tom uses its fractured, dangerous protagonist to examine how movies allow audiences to view without participation, and how the disconnect between the person in front of the camera and the person behind it creates a sort of heightened reality, as though the action, once filmed, becomes something more than mere screams and blood. With its uncomfortable intimacy and darkness, Peeping Tom effectively destroyed Powell’s career, although the film is a justly revered classic these days. It remains a bleak commentary on the dangers of too much detachment. While Hitchcock was willing to allow that audiences might have some good in them, the only heroes to be found in Powell’s movie are a blind woman and a librarian.
9. S.O.B. (1981)
Blake Edwards’ directorial career spanned nearly 50 years, starting with innocuously titled ’50s musicals like Bring Your Smile Along. In spite of his long, varied career since—most notably Breakfast At Tiffany’s, the Pink Panther series, and a lot of Dudley Moore comedies—Edwards always seemed to long for a return to the classical Hollywood musical. Darling Lili, his anachronistic 1969 attempt at a revival, was tampered with by Paramount and bombed in release; a little more than a decade later, Edwards took his revenge in S.O.B., which chronicles a remarkably similar musical production, also starring Julie Andrews. In a misguided attempt at sexing up the film for an indifferent, coarsened public, Andrews is convinced to go topless. In the most unexpected laugh of her career, she squeals delightedly, “I’m going to show my boobies!” But aside from dramatizing Hollywood inside baseball, S.O.B. is a eulogy for old Hollywood and a lament about changing tastes. It’s no coincidence that it ends with a Viking funeral for its old-school producer, driven insane by trying to keep up with public taste.
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10. Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957)
In 1956’s The Girl Can’t Help It, Frank Tashlin mocked his assignment to make a straightforward rock ’n’ roll movie to lure in the youth. In spite of the presence of Little Richard (whose title song was later, uh, immortalized when Fergie sampled it), the film anticipated Beatlemania’s excesses by showing teens so zombied-out by their favorite music they don’t even notice hands being waved in front of their faces. Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? ups the ante by showing how celebrity can warp putative adults: Tony Randall occasionally speaks in strangled voices seemingly possessing him, while fiancée Betsy Drake starts maniacally doing push-ups, trying to live up to what she sees onscreen. But Tashlin doesn’t stop at criticizing movies for misdirecting audiences’ minds with visions of impossible glamour: He stops everything dead so Randall can mock TV fans, presciently warning of the many ways movies could take on the most pandering mannerisms of ’50s TV.
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11. Never Give A Sucker An Even Break (1941)
The sucker in Never Give A Sucker An Even Break is W.C. Fields himself. By 1941, Fields was being shunted aside by Universal for the far more innocuous, less misanthropic, and infinitely more censor-friendly Abbott & Costello; his last salvo was to attack the entire apparatus he’d enriched. With its deliberately disconnected, stream-of-consciousness structure and constant notes about what the censor will and won’t find appropriate—Joseph Breen’s six-page response to the originally submitted screenplay noted 60 separate scenes set in saloons—Never Give A Sucker An Even Break is as much a satire on the studio process as it is an attack on the increasingly censored and rigid formats made possible for comedy. In its relentless pursuit of gags over coherence, it predicted the Adam McKay machine way ahead of schedule.
12. Funny Games (1997)
One of cinema’s most subversive moralists, Michael Haneke, like his kindred spirit Lars von Trier, teaches his lessons through aversion therapy. Just like the parent who catches kids smoking and forces them to go through an entire carton at one sitting, Haneke upends the expectations and sympathies we have toward violence in cinema by giving us what we want—until it hurts. In Funny Games, his creepy, insinuating, strangely quiet horror film, a vacationing couple’s summer home is invaded by a pair of curiously polite young psychopaths who torment them, subtly at first, then graduating to intolerable acts of cruelty. Haneke isn’t the first filmmaker to attack blood-for-thrills movies, or to damn his viewers by involving them in the awful acts taking place onscreen, but no one has done it in a more deliberate, cruel, explicit way. The cleverer of the two home invaders toys with our expectations as viciously as he toys with the lives of his victim; at a key moment in the film, when it seems like there might be some hope, he literally alters the direction of the entire movie. This is what we wanted, Funny Games is telling us, and since we asked for it, we’re going to get it right up until the bitter end.
13. Barton Fink (1991)
Even the least of the Coen brothers’ films are generally more thematically complex than they’re given credit for, but with Barton Fink, they reached a sort of cinematic apotheosis. Few movies have managed to keep so many balls in the air at once, and the sheer weight of meaning in the movie is so breathtaking that even if it doesn’t all cohere into a singular statement, it’s jaw-dropping to watch them try. Among its many other themes, Barton Fink is about every aspect of filmmaking. There’s the act of creation, with Barton’s writer’s block literally fed by blood. There’s his genuine desire to do good, which is at odds with his self-centered overestimation of his role in society and his childish need to be the center of attention. There’s the process of filmmaking itself, with Hollywood depicted as a sinister paradise, gorgeous but poisonous, where crass phonies corrupt art to feed the machine. And of course, there are movies themselves, where the struggle between art and commerce can yield things of beauty, or complete garbage. Barton Fink encapsulates any number of film genres within itself, from the murder mystery to the artsy character study. But even as it mocks them, it forces us to consider the real value of seemingly frivolous genre exercises. And if you think that isn’t intentional, you don’t know the Coen brothers.
14. Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (1992)
Filmmaker Mark Rappaport has had a career-long fascination with the coded messages transmitted by classic Hollywood films, and how people with the right sense of history and aesthetics can understand them. Rappaport found a wider audience for his theorizing with his 1992 cine-essay Rock Hudson’s Home Movies, which examines scenes from the late star’s work and shows how the actor and some in-the-know directors told the true story of his sexual orientation through subtle gestures and framing devices. Is Rappaport really onto something here, or is he just building a case with circumstantial evidence? Probably more the latter, but that doesn’t make this movie any less provocative or moving.
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15. Adaptation (2002)
Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman turns himself a character (played by Nicolas Cage) in Adaptation, a mind-bending comedy about Kaufman’s own struggles to turn Susan Orlean’s digressive, intimate non-fiction book The Orchid Thief into a movie. On the surface, Kaufman and director Spike Jonze are making sport of how navel-gazing artistes and crass Hollywood types are equally unsuited to turning real life into art. But the structure of Adaptation—which evolves into a dumbed-down blockbuster version of the story in its final third—also offers some insight into the limitations and rewards of scriptwriting formulas. With so many possible ways to approach a story, the Hollywood way can be the easiest and most effective, even if it betrays everything that makes a story profound.
16. Tropic Thunder (2008)
Ben Stiller’s action-satire turns on the clever premise of actors on a big-budget, Platoon-like war movie stumbling unwittingly into actual combat, but it’s really just a vehicle for a relentless takedown of celebrity vanity and Oscar-bait filmmaking. The fake trailer for Satan’s Alley sets the tone: This forbidden romance between gay monks—starring a five-time Oscar winner, distributed by Fox Searchlight, and touted as the “winner of the Beijing Film Festival’s coveted Crying Monkey Award”—suggests that the formula for winning awards is just as hacky as the one that results in lowest-common-denominator comedies like the fake Jack Black fart-a-thon The Fatties. From there, Stiller attacks awards-grubbing Method stunts (like that five-time Oscar winner, played by Robert Downey Jr., going black for a role), outpourings of spittle-filled emotion, and the perils of going “full retard.” Under the best of circumstances, the exalted seriousness of the movie-within-a-movie in Tropic Thunder should never be mistaken for art; it’s just ego service of another kind.
17. The Player (1992)
While Robert Altman enjoyed great critical success in the ’70s with classics like McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Nashville, the commercial victories enjoyed by some of his peers (most notably Scorsese and Coppola) eluded him, revealing a schism between his sensibility and Hollywood expectations. After more than a decade in Hollywood exile, Altman returned with 1992’s The Player, a cameo-littered satire of the Hollywood studio system disguised as a murder mystery. While fielding ludicrous pitches like “Out Of Africa meets Pretty Woman,” Tim Robbins’ Griffin Mill deals with anonymous death threats. Griffin kills a disgruntled screenwriter he believes to be the culprit, then takes up with the victim’s girlfriend; as he eludes the authorities, he also beats back the studio sharks eager to push him out of his job. Throughout The Player, Altman and screenwriter Michael Tolkin ruthlessly mock Hollywood studios for recycling hackneyed material, and demanding big stars and happy endings. And just as the noose tightens around Griffin, he receives his own Hollywood happy ending, in which the murder charges are dropped, he lands a job as a studio head, and he gets the girl, too. He has, literally and artistically, gotten away with murder, Hollywood-style.
18. Breathless (1960)
Jean Luc-Godard wasn’t the only member of the French New Wave who came to filmmaking from criticism, but his subsequent career exemplifies the idea that filmmaking can be criticism by another means. In later years, particularly with the masterful series Histoire(s) Du Cinéma, Godard bore out that notion, but even in his first film, he was using the medium to comment on itself. Dedicated to the disreputable B-movies of Monogram Studios, Breathless (whose title translates better as “out of breath”) follows a swaggering small-time crook (Jean-Paul Belmondo) obsessed with the decidedly un-B star Humphrey Bogart. He mimics Bogart’s gesture of caressing his lower lip with his thumb, but more importantly, imitates his hard-boiled outlaw allure, a path that leads to a fatal confusion between art and life. Belmondo thinks he’s the author of his own fate, but he overlooks that fact that his American girlfriend (Jean Seberg) is more precisely an author; not only does she create text, but when she’s hawking newspapers in a Herald-Tribune T-shirt, she actually is text. Belmondo, as it turns out, is a mere fan. He can only play out the same doomed finish, while Seberg writes her own storyline.
19. Sans Soleil (1983)
The objective of true criticism is not evaluation—any jackass with two thumbs and an Internet connection can render an opinion—but illumination, by which standard Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil is among the most intimate and transformative essays ever written. Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo is only one of hundreds of elements Marker weaves into his ephemeral collage, but it’s a key text, one that has obsessed Marker throughout his career. In Marker’s reading, Vertigo is, like Marker’s “La Jetée” and like Sans Soleil itself, the story of a man in search of an image, or a memory, which in Marker’s cosmos amount to the same thing. For filmmakers, he says, images not only constitute memories, but supplant them. A picture does not merely record a moment, it creates it. In the case of James Stewart, the obsessive detective of Hitchcock’s tale, mistaking one for the other is a disastrous pursuit. Ignoring the transformative power of the lens makes it impossible to see the world clearly. As the pseudonymous narrator of Marker’s movie puts it, “Have you ever heard anything more stupid than what they teach in film schools—not to look at the camera?” |
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April 1, 2016, 10:20 AM GMT / Updated April 1, 2016, 10:19 AM GMT / Source: Reuters By Reuters
The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday approved a proposal to expand a telephone subsidy for low-income Americans to include Internet access, after a deal to cap the cost of the plan collapsed.
The commission voted 3-2 to approve a proposal by FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, unveiled earlier this month, to expand the $9.25 monthly mobile phone subsidy to include broadband Internet access. The agency's three Democrats voted yea and its two Republicans nay.
A man takes a photo of the U.S. Capitol. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
Republicans have pushed for a budget cap for the $1.5 billion annual program, called Lifeline, which has helped lower-income Americans get access to telecommunications technologies since 1985. There is currently no cap.
FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai, a Republican, said Democratic Commissioner Mignon Clyburn had signed onto a deal with Republicans earlier in the day after intensive negotiations, only to change her decision.
Pai's aide, Matthew Berry, said Wheeler had "bullied" fellow Democrat Clyburn into withdrawing from a "moderate, bipartisan deal" that would also have set a minimum standard on broadband speeds.
Clyburn told reporters that Wheeler had not pressured her to withdraw from the deal, but she said she had decided "upon reflection" that the deal wasn't the best result. " I took a risk," Clyburn said.
Wheeler has said he wants to give those receiving the subsidy a choice of using it for phone services, high-speed Internet, or both. But households would only receive a single $9.25 per month subsidy that would apply to both services.
The program currently helps about 12 million U.S. households afford landline and mobile phones, according to agency estimates.
Wheeler proposed setting a budget for the program of $2.25 billion a year, indexed for inflation. The extra funds would give more than 5 million additional households access to the program, but FCC officials say the money will not be used all at once.
The FCC estimates that some 95 percent of U.S. households with incomes of at least $150,000 have access to high-speed Internet, while less than half of households with incomes lower than $25,000 have Internet access at home.
The proposal requires phone providers to offer unlimited talk time for all plans for subsidy users after December 2016, and by the end of 2019 providers would have to offer both phone and broadband services to qualify under the program.
FCC Republican Commissioner Michael O'Rielly said this month that Wheeler's proposal would "massively expand the size and scope" and "balloon a program plagued by waste, fraud and abuse."
Read More: White House Pushes Plan to Bring Internet to 20 Million More Americans |
Yeah! Thursday! Burn your calves! The weather is shitty outside! But I've got 12 stations of ass-maneuvering, tummy-crunching, algorithmically determined jams! Pandora's suite of exercise tunes almost makes me want to exercise—I'm sort of exercising in my chair!
The dozen stations cover a multitude of different sweat scenarios. 80's Cardio is great for flailing your arms in the air, touching your toes, and smiling a lot. Electronic Cardio makes me feel like I'm inside Tron, and also running inside Tron—and healthier because of it. Classic Rock Power Workout is great if you're lifting giant blocks of concrete or triumphantly jogging up a hill. There's even soothing yoga music! With all the time you'll save from having to cobble together a playlist, you can spend more time making yourself healthier and more beautiful. And listening to ads!
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Many of these stations would also make decent backdrops for sex. Particularly Electronic Cardio. Ungg tss ungg tss ungg tss ungg tss. [Pandora]
Photo: Andresr/Shutterstock |
In adapting Tim Tharp's hit novel The Spectacular Now for the screen, the biggest challenge was turning its unreliable and flawed (though sympathetic) high school narrator, Sutter Keely, into a protagonist that audiences could really get behind.
Having the ever-charming 26-year-old Miles Teller in the role was a huge help, but it was still a difficult needle to thread.
"If we did our job, then the reasons you love Sutter when the story begins are not why you love him at the end," Michael Weber, The Spectacular Now's co-screenwriter, told BuzzFeed. "He goes from being the class clown and the life of the party to a thoughtful young adult, more cognizant of the repercussions of his actions."
Between the film's critical praise — a 92% score on Rotten Tomatoes — and the fact that Weber and co-writer Scott Neustadter were nominated for an Independent Spirit Award, it seems they pulled the job off with aplomb. Even more impressive was the fact that they were able to write a scene (above) in which underage Sutter drinks hard alcohol as he's driving a child he found wandering sans parent outside the liquor store — and still have it be a heartwarming exchange.
Even though the scene made it onto the production schedule, it was eventually cut — which, as Weber noted, was probably for the best given the fact that the movie was already rated R.
"You can't tell an honest story about young people without language, sex and drinking; being a teenager has never been, and will never be, a PG-13 experience. We knew the drinking would get us an R," Weber explained. "Underage drinking and driving on the way to high school with a young kid riding shotgun? They'd probably bring the X rating out of mothballs for a movie with that scene!" |
Mexico and the United States signed a memo of understanding March 16 to create a Program of Professional Practices between both nations.
The document was signed in Washington D.C. by the Subsecretary for North America Sergio Alcocer and the Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs Evan Ryan.
The program seeks to expand academic exchange and increase the professional practices in various academic fields for university students on both sides of the border.
The initiative arises from the Bilateral Forum on Higher Education, Innovation and Research (Fobesii) signed by both nations in May of 2013.
In May 2013, the presidents of Mexico and the United States announced the formation of the Bilateral Forum. It is envisaged as a strong association between governments, higher education institutions, civil society and the private sector of Mexico and the United States.
The forum will develop a shared vision regarding educational cooperation and will propose specific short and medium term initiatives in order to promote bilateral cooperation and policy coordination. It is comprised of representatives from relevant government institutions and other key stakeholders. Bilateral technical meetings will be held on issues such as workforce development, student and academic mobility, research, technological development and innovation, partnerships and promotion. Mexico and the United States are jointly working to transform North America into a prosperous, competitive and inclusive region, based on knowledge, that promotes sustainable development by boosting bilateral cooperation in higher education, innovation and scientific research. In order to attain these goals, a broad-ranging participation by higher education institutions, research and innovation centers and the development of knowledge networks is required. Mexico and the United States agree higher education, innovation and research are a key driving force in order to strengthen competitiveness and prosperity in both nations. In the new program both governments agree to promote opportunities for higher education offered by both nations for their students so that the students may take advantage of the opportunity to study abroad. During May 2015, academics from both nations will visit corresponding institutions to discuss opening further opportunities for students. Source: http://thenews.mx/
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About This Game
From the creators of Surgeon Simulator comes its prequel - an adventure with a hero like no other! ‘I am Bread’ is the epic story of a slice of bread’s journey to become toast. Take the intrepid, crumby adventurer on a journey from his natural confines of the kitchen, through the home of an unsuspecting owner and into the outside world. This bread will be boldly going where no other bread has gone before . . .
In addition to the deepest story ever seen in a videogame, about a slice of bread, there are a wealth of baked options to sink your teeth into. Additional game modes and other types of bread will cater for all tastes! Set speed records racing across the levels as a bagel; realise your destiny as crispbread in cheese hunt mode; relieve your stress as the baguette and smash everything in sight in rampage mode. Oh, and did we mention bread goes into space too?
Added Content:
GoatBread - Goat Simulator-inspired level called ‘RAMpage mode’. You won't believe your eyes.
Team Fortress 2 level...climb Heavy’s face, use tumour-inducing teleporters, fire the minigun and traverse a floor filled with sticky mines, all in the name of becoming “‘sandvich”’…
Starch Wars - Attack of the Scones! Take out the Empire's Rye Fighters in this level inspired by a certain beloved universe!
Key features: |
Republican presidential primary front-runner Donald Trump trails Democratic candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, as well as potential candidate Joe Biden, in hypothetical 2016 general election matchups, according to a new poll.
Advertisement WMUR/CNN poll: Trump trails in matchups with Sanders, Clinton, Biden But few Granite Staters are focused on general election Share Shares Copy Link Copy
Republican presidential primary frontrunner Donald Trump trails Democratic candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, as well as potential candidate Joe Biden, in hypothetical 2016 general election matchups, according to a new poll.Click to watch News 9's coverage.The latest WMUR/CNN New Hampshire Primary Poll, conducted by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center, shows Trump faring better against former Secretary of State Clinton than he does against Sanders, a U.S. senator from Vermont, and Vice President Biden, who has yet to decide whether he will run for president.In the Sept. 17-23 poll, Sanders leads Trump, 57 percent to 37 percent; Biden leads Trump, 56 percent to 37 percent; and Clinton leads Trump, 50 percent to 42 percent. In all matchups, 1 percent of those polled said they would support another candidate and 5 percent were undecided.For the full poll results, click here.The survey center polled 820 randomly selected New Hampshire adults, including 743 self-described likely voters. The margin of error in the head-to-head matchups, which included only likely voters, is plus or minus 3.6 percent, the survey center said.A WMUR/CNN New Hampshire Primary Poll released Thursday showed Trump leading Republican runner-up Carly Fiorina, 26 percent to 16 percent, while Sanders led Clinton, 46 percent to 30 percent, with Biden at 14 percent.In the general election matchups, independents favor Sanders over Trump, 48 percent to 39 percent, and Biden over Trump, 46 percent to 37 percent. But independents are split between Trump, with 42 percent, and Clinton, with 41 percent.The poll also reveals a clear gender split between Clinton and Trump. Clinton leads among women, 62 percent to 31 percent, while Trump leads among men 54 percent to 38 percent. But Sanders and Biden lead Trump among men and women and by identical margins. The two Democrats lead Trump among women, 63 percent to 30 percent, and among men, 50 to 44 percent.Polling this week showed while Granite Staters are beginning to focus on presidential primary elections, they have yet to pay much attention to the 2016 general election.Only 18 percent of likely voters said they have definitely decided who they will vote for in November 2016, and 21 percent are leaning toward someone. But 62 percent are still trying to decide.The survey center said 44 percent of those polled are registered independent, or undeclared, voters, while 29 percent are registered Democrats and 28 percent are registered Republicans.When asked to identify themselves by party, 46 percent said Democratic, 38 percent said Republican and 17 percent said they still viewed themselves as independent.On another question, likely voters were asked to give their opinions on the best experience for a president. Experience as a governor was named by 32 percent, experience as a member of the U.S. Senate or U.S. House was named by 26 percent and no experience as an elected official was named by 20 percent. |
Democratic “power lobbyist” Tony Podesta is resigning from the Podesta Group, after coming under investigation by FBI Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Politico reported Monday.
“Podesta announced his decision during a firm-wide meeting Monday morning and is alerting clients of his impending departure,” Politico reported. Podesta’s brother, John Podesta, served as chairman of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
The news came just hours after Mueller charged lobbyist and former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and his partner Rick Gates with 12 counts related to alleged money laundering, tax evasion, violating lobbying rules, and making false statements.
The charges were related to work they did for former pro-Russia Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and his pro-Russian party “Party of Regions.” Manafort had organized a public relations campaign on behalf of a pro-Russian non-profit called European Centre for a Modern Ukraine (ECMU), and the Podesta Group was one of several firms who worked on that campaign to promote Ukraine in the United States.
The Podesta Group belatedly filed paperwork with the Justice Department in April stating it had done work for the campaign, which benefited the Party of Regions. The Podesta Group said at the time it believed its client was a European think tank untethered to a political party, according to Politico.
Last week, NBC News reported that Podesta and the Podesta Group were subjects of Mueller’s investigation, which has “morphed into a criminal inquiry into whether the firm violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act.”
The Podesta Group has also lobbied for Uranium One, the Canadian-based energy company that has come under scrutiny as well. In 2010, the Obama administration allowed Uranium One to be sold to Russian energy company Rosatom, giving the company control over one-fifth of American uranium-mining capacity to Russia, despite an ongoing FBI investigation into a Rosatom subsidiary involved in a racketeering scheme. The Podesta Group received $180,000 from Uranium One over several years between 2012 and 2015, according to records at opensecrets.org.
Politico described Podesta as a flashy, well-known figure in Washington:
Podesta has long been a larger than life figure on K Street, growing his business from a boutique firm into a massive lobbying and public relations operation. He is well known for his flashy dressing, vast art collection, generous campaign donations across all levels of Democratic politics and, of course, for his brother John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman.
The firm has struggled since being tied to the Mueller investigation, the report notes. “More than a dozen of its lobbying clients have cut ties with the firm this year, according to lobbying filings. Revenues have also declined: The firm brought in an estimated $4.8 million in the third quarter of 2017, down from $5.2 million in the second quarter of 2017 and from $6.1 million in the third quarter of 2016,” it said.
Podesta is handing over full operational and control to the firm’s CEO Kimberley Fritts, according to the report. Fritts and a senior group of the Podesta team will be launching a new firm in the next one or two days, a move reportedly in the works for the past several months.
“[Tony] was very magnanimous and said, “This is an amazing group of people,” Podesta reportedly told staff he “doesn’t intend to go quietly, or learn how to play golf,” and that he “needs to fight this as an individual, but doesn’t want the firm to fight it.”
Fritts said she was “thrilled at this opportunity,” adding “This is not about me, this is about y’all.” The meeting ended with a “resounding ovation for Podesta,” the report said. |
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Kotaku East East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond. Tune in every morning from 4am to 8am.
Japan doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving. Christmas stuff starts going up as soon as Halloween finishes, which, I guess, also happens in the U.S. While Japan isn’t the only country to recently latch on the American sales bonanza Black Friday, the day has increasingly become more noticeable.
See? People are noticing!
Though, even this year, some people think it’s a day the country could do without.
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So why does the country have Black Friday? Because money, that’s why.
Above is a commercial from major Japanese retailer Aeon.
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Last year’s ad (above) explained that Black Friday “major sales” started in the U.S. The shopping mall chain’s Black Friday sales are three days long and stretch into Cyber Monday.
Aeon Mall, Japan largest shopping center chain, kicked off Black Friday sales across the country.
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As did other stores, such as Toys “R” Us.
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The deals and crowds don’t reach the fever pitch that they do in the States. Yet.
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Many people in Japan, however, seemed unsure what exactly “Black Friday” meant.
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In English, of course, “Black Friday” refers to retail instantly making a profit—being in the black. In Japanese, there is a similar expression, “kuroji” (黒字). Not sure if that helps Black Friday’s chances in Japan, but there you go.
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Gap kicked off a huge Black Friday event last year, while Toys “R” Us Japan began Black Friday sales back in 2014.
This year’s Gap events drew lines, which people hoping to score a limited number of sweaters for 100 yen (less than a dollar).
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Japan has bigger sales drawing much longer lines during the New Year’s Holidays, which already has an established sales tradition with items like “lucky bags.” Retailers, it seems, no doubt hope that Black Friday will give a fall sales bump to their bottom line.
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As previously mentioned, there is no Thanksgiving (Halloween, however, is celebrated), so Black Friday obviously doesn’t mark the official start of holiday shopping.
Not that such matters much these days.
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This article was originally published on November 28, 2016. |
As a proud member of the LGBTQ+ community, I take issue with public funding for the Pride celebrations this year, based on the discrimination against Toronto Police Services. Black Lives Matter has issues with Toronto police and many of those issues are righteous. But BLM is not representative and not a part of the LGBTQ+ community. It has held the Pride organization ransom. Sadly I will not take part in Pride festivities this year and I know of many others who will also be absent. What the Pride organization has done is disgraceful.
Stephen Bloom, Toronto
I personally, as well as several of my friends, will be boycotting all Pride festivities this year due to the Pride committee’s decision to not include our police in the parade.
I find this to be embarrassing and shameful. Wasn’t the whole purpose of Pride to be about acceptance and inclusiveness? We have been working for years to establish a relationship with the police and all levels of government and this decision is just not right or acceptable.
It appears to me that in the name of political correctness, you have allowed yourself to be held hostage by Black Lives Matter and its agenda when the bottom line is “all lives matter” and that should be your focus. |
Citing potential damage to Israel’s foreign relations, the Supreme Court rejects a petition calling to reveal details of the government’s arms exports to the Serbian army during the Bosnian genocide.
By John Brown* (Translated by Tal Haran)
Israel’s Supreme Court last month rejected a petition to reveal details of Israeli defense exports to the former Yugoslavia during the genocide in Bosnia in the 1990s. The court ruled that exposing Israeli involvement in genocide would damage the country’s foreign relations to such an extent that it would outweigh the public interest in knowing that information, and the possible prosecution of those involved.
The petitioners, Attorney Itay Mack and Professor Yair Oron, presented the court with concrete evidence of Israeli defense exports to Serbian forces at the time, including training as well as ammunition and rifles. Among other things, they presented the personal journal of General Ratko Mladić, currently on trial at the International Court of Justice for committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Mladić’s journal explicitly mentions Serbia’s ample arms ties with Israel at the time.
The exports took place long after the UN Security Council placed an arms embargo on various parts of the former Yugoslavia, and after the publication of a series of testimonies exposing genocide and the creation of concentration camps.
The Israeli State Attorney’s reply and the court’s rejection of the petition are a de facto admission by Israel that it cooperated with the Bosnian genocide: if the government had nothing to hide, the documents under discussion would not pose any threat to foreign relations.
The most horrific acts of cruelty since the Holocaust
Between 1991 and 1995 the former Yugoslavia shattered, going from a multi-national republic to an assemblage of nations fighting each other in a bloody civil war that included massacres and ultimately genocide.
The Serbs waged war against Croatia from 1991-1992, and against Bosnia from 1992-1995. In both wars the Serbs committed genocide and ethnic cleansing of Muslims in the areas they occupied, leading to the deaths of 250,000 people. Tens of thousands of others were wounded and starved, a multitude of women were raped, and many people were incarcerated in concentration camps. Other parties to the conflict also committed war crimes, but the petition focuses on Israel’s collaboration with the Serbian forces. The horrendously cruel acts in Yugoslavia were the worst Europe had seen since the Holocaust.
One of the most notorious massacres was perpetrated by soldiers serving under Serbian General Ratko Mladić around the city of Srebrenica in July 1995. Serbian forces commanded by the general murdered about 8,000 Bosnians and buried them in mass graves in the course of a campaign of ethnic cleansing they were waging against Muslims in the area. Although the city was supposed to be under UN protection, when the massacre began UN troops did not intervene. Mladić was extradited to the International Court of Justice at The Hague in 2012, and is still on trial.
At the time, prominent Jewish organizations were calling for an immediate end to the genocide and shutting down the death camps. Not so the State of Israel. Outwardly it condemned the massacre, but behind the scenes was supplying weapons to the perpetrators and training their troops.
Attorney Mack and Professor Oron have gathered numerous testimonies about the Israeli arms supply to Serbia, which they presented in their petition. They provided evidence of such exports taking place long after the UN Security Council embargo went into effect in September 1991. The testimonies have been crossed-checked and are brought here as they were presented in the petition, with necessary abbreviations.
In 1992 a former senior official of the Serb Ministry of Defense published a book, The Serbian Army, in which she wrote about the arms deal between Israel and Serbia, signed about a month after the embargo: “One of the largest deals was made in October 1991. For obvious reasons, the deal with the Jews was not made public at the time.”
An Israeli who volunteered in a humanitarian organization in Bosnia at the time testified that in 1994 a UN officer asked him to look at the remains of 120 mm shell — with Hebrew writing on it — that exploded on the landing strip of the Sarajevo airfield. He also testified that he saw Serbs moving around in Bosnia carrying Uzi guns made in Israel.
In 1995 it was reported that Israeli arms dealers in collaboration with the French closed a deal to supply Serbia with LAW missiles. According to reports from 1992, a delegation of the Israeli Ministry of Defense came to Belgrade and signed an agreement to supply shells.
The same General Mladić who is now being prosecuted for war crimes and genocide, wrote in his journal that “from Israel — they proposed joint struggle against Islamist extremists. They offered to train our men in Greece and a free supply of sniper rifles.” A report prepared at the request of the Dutch government on the investigation of the Srebrenica events contains the following: “Belgrade considered Israel, Russia and Greece its best friends. In autumn 1991 Serbia closed a secret arms deal with Israel.”
In 1995 it was reported that Israeli arms dealers supplied weapons to VRS — the army of Republika Srpska, the Bosnian Serb Army. This supply must have been made with the knowledge of the Israeli government.
The Serbs were not the only party in this war to which the Israeli arms dealers tried to sell weapons. According to reports, there was also an attempt to make a deal with the anti-Semitic Croatian regime, which eventually fell through. The petition also presented reports by human rights activists about Israelis training the Serb army, and that the arms deal with the Serbs enabled Jews to leave Sarajevo, which was under siege.
While all of this was taking place in relative secrecy, at the public level the government of Israel lamely expressed its misgivings about the situation, as if this were some force majeure and not a manmade slaughter. In July 1994, then-Chairman of the Israeli Knesset’s Foreign Relations and Defense Committee MK Ori Or visited Belgrade and said: “Our memory is alive. We know what it means to live with boycotts. Every UN resolution against us has been taken with a two-thirds majority.” That year, Vice President of the US at the time, Al Gore, summoned the Israeli ambassador and warned Israel to desist from this cooperation.
Incidentally, in 2013 Israel had no problem extraditing to Bosnia-Herzegovina a citizen who immigrated to Israel seven years earlier and was wanted for suspicion of involvement in a massacre in Bosnia in 1995. In other words, at some point the state itself recognized the severity of the issue.
The Supreme Court in the service of war crimes
The Supreme Court session on the state’s reply to the petition was held ex parte, i.e. the petitioners weren’t allowed to hear it. Justices Danziger, Mazouz and Fogelman rejected the petition and accepted the state’s position that revealing the details of Israeli defense exports to Serbia during the genocide would damage Israel’s foreign relations and security, and that this potential damage exceeds the public’s interest in exposing what happened.
This ruling is dangerous for several reasons. Firstly, the court’s acceptance of the state’s certainty in how much damage would be caused to Israel’s foreign relations is perplexing. Earlier this year, the same Supreme Court rejected a similar claim regarding defense exports during the Rwandan genocide, yet a month later the state itself declared that the exports were halted six days after the killing started. If even the state does not see any harm in revealing — at least partially — this information regarding Rwanda, why was a sweeping gag imposed on the subject a month prior? Why did the Supreme Court justices overlook this deception, even refusing to accept it as evidence as the petitioners requested? After all, the state has obviously exaggerated in its claim that this information would be damaging to foreign relations.
Secondly, it is very much in the public’s interest to expose the state’s involvement in genocide, including through arms dealers, particularly as a state that was founded upon the devastation of its people following the Holocaust. It was for this reason that Israel was, for example, willing to disregard Argentina’s sovereignty when it kidnapped Eichmann and brought him to trial on its own soil. It is in the interest not only of Israelis, but also of those who were victims of the Holocaust. When the court considers war crimes, it is only proper for it to consider their interest as well.
When the court rules in cases of genocide that damage to state security — which remains entirely unproven — overrides the pursuit of justice for the victims of such crimes, it is sending a clear message: that the state’s right to security, whether real or imaginary, is absolute, and takes precedence over the rights of its citizens and others.
The Supreme Court’s ruling might lead one to conclude that the greater the crime, the easier it is to conceal. The more arms sold and the more genocide perpetrators trained, the greater the damage to the state’s foreign relations and security should such crimes be exposed, and the weight of such supposed damage will necessarily override the public interest. This is unacceptable. It turns the judges — as the petitioners have put it — into accomplices. The justices thus also make an unwitting Israeli public complicit in war crimes, and deny them the democratic right to conduct the relevant discussion.
The state faces a series of similar requests regarding its collaboration with the murderers of the Argentinian Junta, Pinochet’s regime in Chile, and Sri Lanka. Attorney Mack intends to present additional cases by the end of this year. Even if it is in the state’s interest to reject these petitions, the Supreme Court must stop helping to conceal these crimes — if not for the sake of prosecuting perpetrators of past atrocities, at least in order to put a stop to them in our time.
*John Brown is the pseudonym of an Israeli academic and a blogger. This story first appeared in Hebrew on Local Call, where he is a blogger. Read it here. |
Every week a handful of games release on Xbox One and many elude owners of the console due to their timid marketing. Xbox Wire makes sure you know about them but can’t provide gamers with recommendations. A lot of these titles are absolutely phenomenal and it’s a shame that they aren’t noticed. Here are some games coming out between April 24 and April 28 which you should check out. Some of the experiences are quite obvious while others may surprise you.
Outlast 2
Outlast 2 is an eerie experience which tasks you with finding your wife after your helicopter crashes into a territory occupied by a terrifying cult. If you haven’t played the prequel and its expansion before, there will also be an Outlast Trinity bundle available for sale. The game is very similar to Resident Evil 7 but you don’t have access to any weapons. Stealth and evasion are your only options.
Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3
Go behind enemy lines with the ultimate modern military shooter. Choose your own path to accomplish your missions across an unforgiven open world. Explore large maps with dynamic weather and a day-night cycle that actually impacts your play and decisions. Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3 is the story of brotherhood, faith and betrayal in a land soaked in the blood of civil war.
Little Nightmares
Immerse yourself in Little Nightmares, a dark whimsical tale that will confront you with your childhood fears! Help Six escape The Maw–a vast, mysterious vessel inhabited by corrupted souls looking for their next meal. As you progress on your journey, explore the most disturbing dollhouse, offering a prison to escape from and a playground full of secrets to discover. Reconnect with your inner child to unleash your imagination and find the way out!
Valhalla Hills: Definitive Edition
In Valhalla Hills, you play as Leko, youngest son of Odin, exiled to Midgard by your father for failing to meet his expectations. More interested in building villages than pillaging them, you now find yourself far from home with a disgruntled band of recently-deceased muscleheads. There’s only one thing left to do—you’ll have to guide your newfound companions to heavenly glory the only way you know.
You must lead your band of outcast Viking warriors through the mountain region of Valhalla Hills, where a magical portal awaits to take to your rightful place in the realm of the gods. But the journey is a hazardous one, and the Vikings will need to do one thing first…survive! Reach the portal at the top of each mountain, and shout your battle cry loud enough for the gods to hear. If they will not give your people the reward you all deserve, then by your axe, you will take it from them.
Romance of the Three Kingdoms XIII: Fame and Strategy
Romance of the Three Kingdoms XIII: Fame and Strategy expansion pack introduces new mechanics to the series that allow for greater strategic possibilities. One of these additions is the Fame System, wherein players work towards receiving bonuses for their characters by completing achievements, which range from battlefield objectives to peacefully resolving disputes. Players can also earn a Prestige title for their character through the Fame System, which will unlock new actions based on their Prestige level and ultimately shape life as an officer.
Also arriving with the new expansion is the War Council, which is held before engaging in battle. With this feature Generals are able to choose which Officers will follow them into combat and which strategies they will apply to outsmart their opponent. Furthermore, players will now be able to create their own scenarios with the Event Editor. This tool allows unique narratives to be crafted within second century China and offers full control over when Events take place, which officers are affected and whether there will be multiple outcomes.
On top of these engaging gameplay elements, players will be able to utilize a wide range of strategic options and kinds of warfare from the base Romance of the Three Kingdoms XIII game. Players can partake in open field, narrow pass and naval battles, duels, or exchange weaponry for words and enter debates. Each battle is brought to life with stunning detail alongside environments that provide better views of the field and support quick and efficient changes to battle strategy. Outside of combat, the Civic Development system provides the option of developing Commerce, Farming and Culture, which can give a variety of boosts to an army’s loyalty and strength. Finally, securing allies and forming strong relationships through the Bond system is key to receiving aid in tight situations, allowing the tides of battle to be turned in the player’s favor.
The upcoming expansion’s release also marks the first time that the grand-strategy experience will be available on Xbox One. Gamers on Xbox One will be able to experience the renowned strategy series as a digital bundle including both Romance of the Three Kingdoms XIII and the Fame and Strategy expansion pack.
Apart from the games mentioned above, Xbox One is getting Lost Grimoires: Stolen Kingdom, Syberia 3 and The Walking Dead: A New Frontier’s latest episode. There might be other surprise releases in there too like last week’s classic ACA NeoGeo Fatal Fury 2. This week is definitely more eventful than the last few put together because heavy-hitters like Outlast 2 and Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3 are releasing together. All of these are great experiences Xbox One owners should try out. |
But the World, the ambitiously-constructed archipelago of islands shaped like the countries of the globe, is sinking back into the sea, according to evidence cited before a property tribunal.
The islands were intended to be developed with tailor-made hotel complexes and luxury villas, and sold to millionaires. They are off the coast of Dubai and accessible by yacht or motor boat.
Now their sands are eroding and the navigational channels between them are silting up, the British lawyer for a company bringing a case against the state-run developer, Nakheel, has told judges.
"The islands are gradually falling back into the sea," Richard Wilmot-Smith QC, for Penguin Marine, said. The evidence showed "erosion and deterioration of The World islands", he added.
With all but one of the islands still uninhabited – Greenland – and that one a showpiece owned by the ruler of Dubai, most of the development plans have been brought to a crashing halt by the financial crisis.
Nakheel, the developer, was part of Dubai World, the state-owned conglomerate that had to be bailed out of debts put at around $25 billion at the end of 2009. The Dubai World Tribunal was set up to hear cases arising out of the restructuring and separation of the companies involved.
The low-lying islands represent a vague shape out to sea when viewed from Dubai's beaches, but are visible by satellite or from the top of the city's Burg Khalifa, the world's tallest building, which opened to the public last year.
According to the company, 70 per cent of the World's 300 islands have been sold. Nakheel is also behind Dubai's famous Palm-shaped offshore developments. Villas in the only one near completion, Palm Jumeirah, were given to or bought by footballers including David Beckham and Michael Owen.
Though few celebrity buyers were found for The World, it was rumoured – or joked – that Brad Pitt and Angeline Jolie had considered Ethiopia.
Many investors who did buy the islands proved unwilling or unable to finance further work when Dubai's property prices halved in the space of a year.
Some were hit by troubles elsewhere – the owner of the company which bought Ireland for £24 million, John O'Dolan, committed suicide, while the man who bought Britain for £43 million, Safi Qurashi, is serving seven years in jail in Dubai after being accused of bouncing cheques.
The dispute being heard by the property tribunal involves Penguin Marine, the company which bought the rights to provide boat travel to the islands.
With little business, it is trying to exit the contract, which involves paying an annual fee of just under £1 million to Nakheel.
Nahkeel say they will cash an advanced payment guarantee worth just over £1 million if that happens.
Penguin claim that work on the islands has "effectively stopped". Mr Wilmot-Smith described the project as "dead".
Graham Lovett, for Nakheel, said the project was not dead but admitted it was "in a coma".
"This is a ten-year project which has slowed down," he said. "This is a project which will be completed."
He said Penguin would make money eventually. "That's the price Penguin makes to stay in the game," he said. "They have the potential to earn millions."
The tribunal found for Nakheel on Thursday, saying it would give full reasoning later.
A spokesman for Nakheel insisted the islands were not sinking. "Our periodical monitoring survey over the past three years didn't observe any substantial erosion that requires sand nourishment," a statement said. |
This summer, many articles have been written about the appropriation of black music culture. The most recent article that caught my attention focused on Katy Perry’s ignorance about the meaning of cultural appropriation. This article came just a week after I read an interview about Questlove and his statement dismissing Iggy Azalea’s role in cultural appropriation. After reading the Questlove and Katy Perry articles, I’m fed up with the treatment of cultural appropriation.
Cultural appropriation is not “appreciation” as Katy Perry puts it. Cultural appropriation occurs when one person from a race or culture borrows other racial or cultural tropes for personal gain. There are many examples in the present and the past of appropriation of black music culture by white people.
For instance, Iggy Azalea is appropriating when she raps, “how you love that?” in her song “ Fancy ” because she is imitating the way a Southern black female speaks. Katy Perry is appropriating in her most recent video for her song “ This Is How We Do ” because she is imitating black culture by wearing cornrows, using slang associated with black people, and eating watermelon.
In music, cultural appropriation also involves one person of a racial group covering songs or borrowing a melody from a person of another racial group without giving the originator credit. The most well-known example is Elvis Presley, who recorded Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right Mama” without giving Crudup royalties until the late 1960’s.
I am not anti-white. I’ve got just as many white musicians on my iPod as I do black musicians. I love Pink and Janet Jackson, Joan Jett and Tamar-Kali, to name some. However, as a black woman, I can’t help but become protective of black musicians when their identities are threatened.
Yet, the only thing more upsetting to me than cultural appropriation is when the people who are being appropriated give people permission to do so. Questlove is not the only black musician who doesn’t understand the seriousness of cultural appropriation. He joins people like Lil’ Kim and Pharrell Williams, both of whom complimented Miley Cyrus on her appropriation of hip-hop culture.
Cultural appropriation is a way of keeping black people in their place by telling them when they can and can’t be seen. When a Forbes article proclaimed that Iggy Azalea “runs hip-hop” , it ignored emerging black women rappers. When Variety magazine published an article proclaiming how Elvis Presley invented rock n’ roll, they ignored Chuck Berry and other black pioneers.
Some black and white people don’t care about cultural appropriation because they are profiting from it. Others don’t care about cultural appropriation because they don’t know what it is or how disrespectful it is. Either way, cultural appropriation is a miseducation of race, culture, and a person’s potential.
Thanks to cultural appropriation and the perpetuation of stereotypes, some black people have been taught that the only way to be seen is to either conform to stereotypes or help other races steal aspects of their own racial identity. Participating in this makes them new slaves. They allow themselves to be chained by stereotypes for recognition and money.
In addition, these new slaves can become faux masters of other blacks by enforcing what they think qualifies as blackness, not realizing their perceptions have been shaped by these stereotypes. Although rock music was pioneered by black musicians, the historic exclusion of blacks has made it a white male-dominated genre.
Since rock music today is a white male-dominated genre and black people today are known for hip-hop and R&B, black people today with an interest in rock are considered strange by some blacks and whites. The only way a black musician can make it in rock today is by being an independent musician.
What Are You Doing Here?: A Black Woman’s Life and Liberation in Heavy Metal. In an For black music writer Laina Dawes, it is being considered strange for liking heavy metal and finding other black metalheads that inspired her to write her book,. In an excerpt of the book, she discusses her experiences with being called “white” by white people and asked “Who do you think you are?” by black people.
Cultural appropriation is disrespectful. It treats marginalized races and cultures as things to be used and tossed aside when you are tired of them. It is part of a vicious cycle of appropriation, perpetuation, and elimination of a person’s true potential. It is not appreciation. It is degradation.
Tonya Pennington is a student at Clayton State University. She also blogs about books, music, and movies on artsandyouthlove using the pen name Serena Zola. |
UCF's Class of 2017 - the future stars of tomorrow - officially become Knights today.
Beginning at 7 a.m., players can begin sending in their National Letter of Intent. UCF, via their official site at UCFKnights.com and social media accounts, will then officially announce the signees as soon as their paperwork is confirmed by compliance.
Signings and any other news of the day will be updated here as well as the Dungeon message board.
At 4 p.m., head coach Scott Frost will hold a press conference to talk about the class.
Fans are invited to attend the Signing Day Show at the FAIRWINDS Alumni Center, which is expected to run from 6 to 8 p.m. (the formal presentation begins at 7).
On Tuesday, UCF got some big news in the way of WR Marlon Williams who announced he would be signing with the Knights. It had been a UCF-Georgia Tech battle for the former USC commitment from Mobile, Ala., who originally planned to announce on Wednesday.
UCF is still waiting on several more players. A pair of linebackers, Bartow's Lionel Cummings and Montgomery (Ala.) St. James' Sterling Jones, will make their decisions early Wednesday. Jones, who lists UCF, Purdue and Kentucky as finalists, says his announcement is scheduled for 10:45 a.m. EST. Cummings, who visited UCF, Michigan State, Toledo and Temple, plans to announce around 8 a.m.
Four-star RB Cordarrian Richardson of Memphis (Tenn.) Trezevant is expected to sign at approximately 10 a.m. EST. The former Clemson commit has visited UCF, Ole Miss and Rutgers. At one point Tuesday he said he would wait until next week to sign because he wanted to visit Michigan State, but those plans were abruptly canceled a few hours later.
UCF could be trending for Richardson. Ole Miss offered Isaiah Woullard late Tuesday night, who immediately accepted, with reports indicating the Rebels' staff told him he would be the only running back they take in this class. Rutgers also made a late offer to a backup target, Elijah Barnwell.
UCF is also in the running for two additional targets - Miami-Southridge RB Bentavious Thompson and Clearwater WR Jacquez Jones - both of whom visited in recent weeks. Thompson, who is also considering Florida and FIU, will sign at 8 p.m. Jones, a Tennessee commit, will announce shortly before 9 a.m.
Three players in UCF's 2017 class have already enrolled and will participate in spring practice: RB Otis Anderson, WR Emmanuel Greene and CB Antwan Collier.
UCF Commitment List / Breaking News in the Dungeon
Rivals.com Team Recruiting Rankings / American Athletic Conference Rankings |
Some people are fans of the Los Angeles Rams. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Los Angeles Rams. This 2016 Deadspin NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. And buy Drew’s new book here.
Your team: Saint Lou… OOP DEE!
Yes, the Rams fled St. Louis this offseason and headed west to reclaim their title as Lamest Pro Sports Team In Los Angeles. Feels great! It was the first NFL franchise relocation since the Oilers left Houston back in 1997. And it was all thanks to Stan Kroenke, a man who is deathly afraid of pooping with other people nearby…
Kroenke’s flight from St. Louis—a city that is STILL paying off its stadium debt from the Rams moving in two decades ago—represents the apex of the NFL’s virulent desire to suck the lifeblood out of everything and everyone around it. Citizens of Los Angeles, Stan Kroenke gives roughly as many fucks about you as the city he just trashed on his way out the door. He’s already tried to screw over his own players by keeping Missouri labor law language in their contracts (I guess he liked SOME things about the state). And he will use that new stadium (located in the shithole that is Inglewood) as a cudgel to snatch up other properties, demand further tax rebates, and force any second L.A. football team to live under his boot. Right now, there is no NFL owner—not even Dan Snyder—who deserves failure more than this squirrel pelt of a man. Thankfully, the team he happens to own is perpetually capable of making all his worst nightmares come true.
Your 2015 record: 7-9.
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Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh yes you are. You’re Jeff Fisher. Your whole life is 7-9, amigo. When Jeff Fisher is your coach, the only excitement you get is when the team decides to set its own goddamn field on fire.
Your coach: Still Jeff Fisher, who has been losing long enough and consistently enough to have presided over TWO relocated NFL teams. Jeff Fisher is Hell’s interim coach. Alongside defensive coordinator and Steven Seagal movie villain Gregg Williams, Fisher presides over what is arguably the most widely disliked team in football. Take it from Marty B:
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Everything about this team is dirty. They nearly decapitated Teddy Bridgewater last season. Their idiot concrete stadium ring obliterated Reggie Bush’s leg. Their punter laid a cheap shot of his own. They held a phony military reunion for some asshole from the Busch family. They don’t even treat their OWN players well. Right, Case Keenum?
You gotta work real hard to make the rest of the NFL say, “Oh wow, that’s pretty reckless.” They even let Wes Welker back onto an NFL field. The KGB had more compassion for its own.
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Your quarterback: Jared Goff, for the price of two first rounders, two second rounders, and two third rounders. All for this guy…
Somehow that’s even worse than getting picked off five times against Utah. Every quarterback in football looks like an 80s movie villain but Jared Goff looks like the MOST 80s movie villain. I can already picture him cramping out of a diving meet just to teach that little runt Jason Melon a lesson he’ll never forget. Goff represents your standard off-year No. 1 pick at QB, à la Alex Smith, Tim Couch, and such and such. He’s gonna suck very, very hard, and sell lots and lots of Pantene in the process:
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The Rams plan on sitting Goff for at least a year, but you and I know that isn’t gonna happen. Keenum, still the presumed starter, will have his head ripped off and used as a basketball, and then Goff will be forced out onto the Coliseum turf and have his chest caved in. The Rams will not notice any of this. I’m excited!
What’s new that sucks: Well, Stedman Bailey got shot. Oh, and defensive end William “Carl Everett II” Hayes doesn’t believe in dinosaurs.
“I don’t believe dinosaurs existed,” Hayes said last month. “Not even a little bit. With these bones, it’s crazy because man has never seen a dinosaur, we can agree on that, right? But we know exactly how to put these bones together? I believe there is more of a chance you will find a mermaid than you will a dinosaur because we find different species in the water all the time.”
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See now, this man belongs back in Missouri. That’s his spiritual home.
Also, Tre Mason went missing and the team gave exactly zero fucks because he wasn’t Todd Gurley. I feel like I’m sensing a pattern as to how the Rams do business.
What has always sucked: There’s still no one to throw to. Tavon Austin is good for one neat reverse every three weeks. Kenny Britt is a strip club fight waiting to happen. Lance Kendricks can go die. This is a team that massively upgraded its pass protection from a couple years ago but has little offensive firepower to show for it. This entire offense is Gurley or nothing, and it’ll be that way for the next five years.
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Frankly, L.A. deserves to have the most anonymous NFL team this side of the Titans come limping into town. For two decades now, L.A. has stuck its leg out and tried to entice the NFL at the expense of nearly a dozen other cities. St. Louis got fucked because of L.A. San Diego is in the process of being fucked by L.A. Minnesota spent a billion dollars it didn’t have because of the threat of L.A. Like the Rams, L.A. has gleefully shit on every last dinner plate during this relocation process. And now they’re stuck with the worst possible franchise as a result. The Rams were an afterthought during their time in Anaheim. I bet your average L.A. resident is more excited for the eighth installment of the Divergent series than watching this funeral procession of a team.
What might not suck: Gurley is fantastic but Fisher will give him 500 carries a season and cut his career short by at least eight years.
Let’s remember some Rams:
Cleveland Gary
Todd Lyght
Adam Timmerman
Darryl Henley
Keith Null
Hear it from Rams fans!
Keith:
That piss-dribbling, mink coat-wearing harpy stole my beloved Rams back when I was in high school and consummated her deal with Satan in Saint Louie of all places. Didn’t Kurt Warner’s SuperChristianVision allow him to see that she was aligned with the devil? I’m never ever supporting that gang of shitbags again, no way bub. Uh uh. Do I look that desperate and gullible? LA has too much going on to need football; those 12-hour Sunday Bud Lime-a-Rita benders are for the unwashed gimps in Cleveland and Buttalo. I’m better than that... Just bought tickets for the home opener. I hate myself. Fuck that Ginger Hammer and his crackbag of violence. Also, fuck Pat Hayden with a rolled-up SC diploma encrusted with scabies.
Lucas:
I don’t know why I’m still a fucking Rams fan. I’m from Michigan and have lived here all my life. I think I won a bet on them in the Super Bowl and decided to latch on. Our greatest QB, Kurt Warner, has been gone for 13 years. And since then, this team has been worse than the fucking Lions. I’ll be thinking “Oh, cool, I think they can do some damage and finish 9-7,” once again, only to see 3 horrible losses (like losing to Jim “Home Depot Construction Department Head” Tomsula on the final weekend) and limp to 6-10, with Toupee Man laughing all the way to the bank. I’ll just bandwagon another team that wins the Bowl and then sucks balls the next two decades afterwards.
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Luke:
Days after the relocation became official I got invited over to my parents’ place to talk and hangout and whatnot. The elephant in the room eventually came out. “What team are you rooting for now?”. I said I’m still a Rams fan, but I’m still bitter about the move (I still am, just not as much). My Pseudo Stepdad then gives me his Brady Quinn Chiefs jersey (one of his favorite players ever is Brady Quinn. I don’t get it either) and says “I know you’re still a Rams fan, but the Chiefs are playing the Pats this weekend and it would be cool if you would come out and root with us”. One thing started leading to another to the point where they were suggesting that rooting for another team wouldn’t be so bad “even if it isn’t the Chiefs”. My family gave me an intervention to stop being a Rams fan. Kroenke’s an asshole. If I was in a room with Hitler, Stalin, and Kroenke and I could shoot two of them I’d kick Kroenke in the balls, piss on his face, and then shoot him twice. He lied about not moving the team, he shit talked the entire city, and insulted cracker thin crust pizza (I will fucking fight anyone who shit talks cracker thin crust pizza) all while still saying he loves the place. Kroenke still hasn’t fired Snead or Jeff “The Ass Kisser” Fisher yet probably because he gets off on making the fans miserable (which is probably why he moved in the first place). There are rumors right now that Kroenke is going to help fund a stadium in St Louis to get an MLS team, but IF he actually does it, he’s only doing that to get the city in even more debt when they don’t land one. Can’t wait to root for the Las Vegas Rams in 2034 when he convinces the NFL to turn the Rams into a betting sideshow to see who can kill themselves first: the tlayers for being forced to play for this abomination of a franchise, or the small remaining fans left that still support them (me included if I don’t die of alcohol poisoning or a stroke by then). Also I live in Kansas City now so I could easily just root for the Chiefs, but I enjoy being let down and fucked over.
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Mike:
I’ve lived in L.A. for 6 years, and since there are no such thing as real “LA Rams fans” — don’t buy into the astroturfed “marches” staged last year — I’m anointing myself a Rams fan. Los Angeles is the worst sports town in America. (Let’s say that twice for SEO purposes: L.A. is the worst sports town in America.) The Los Angeles area is massive population center, yet you can’t find an intelligent sports opinion for miles. One of the dumbest principles constantly parroted by L.A. sports talk radio hosts is that the people of Los Angeles “demand winners.” “Jerry Buss set a championship standard!” That’s bullshit pandering code for “terrible bandwagon fans.” L.A.’s frontrunner reputation is totally real, and that’s why the Rams will be a disaster until they’re on the brink of a Super Bowl. Until then, after the hoopla of a new team dies down, everyone will forget the Rams exist, and transplants will settle back into their Sunday Ticket packages. You can see the Rams are already desperate. They traded the world to pick a mediocre quarterback first overall. But that rookie QB will be sitting behind Case Keenum. Todd Gurley will be totally ruined carrying the ball 50 times a game. When that doesn’t work out, expect them to sign a washed-up star — a la Wayne Gretzky — to cajole some attention for their new stadium. (I’m honestly stunned the Rams didn’t make an absurd offer to Peyton Manning.) Oh and Jeff Fisher still has a job. Did you know that he made the Super Bowl in 2000? A few more reasons why the Rams will suck: - 60% of L.A. households with cable haven’t seen a Dodger game in years. And nobody cares. - There are like 7 sports bars in L.A., and one of them is owned by Leonardo DiCaprio’s Pussy Posse. (E and Turtle really hang out there!) - It’s the first pro football team here in 20+ years, and they are already centering their marketing on opposing players. There’s a billboard near LAX featuring Cam Newton. (Note: He plays for a different team.) - And finally, asshole transplants like me who bitch and moan that more people don’t like to sit in dark bars and watch sports while everyone else enjoys things like the outdoors and a healthy diet.
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Kyle:
I genuinely feel bad for Jared Goff because being paired with Fisher as a QB is an NFL death sentence for developing talent, and being paired with Robinson as your left tackle is a death sentence proper.
Spenser:
I just took this picture this morning at my apartment complex.
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Welsley:
Whenever I get into a football discussion with people they inevitably ask me what team I support. I always say “I’d rather not say.” They prod me some more, to which I respond, head hung down, “the Rams.” The usual response is “THE FUCKING RAMS, WHY???” or “Shit man, I’m sorry. Good on you for sticking it out though.” So yeah. At least we have Gurley! He’s fun to watch. We can run him into the ground for the next 10 years a la Steven Jackson all the while probably winning 30 games. Speaking of winning, so much is made about Jeff Fisher’s ability to go 8-8 but that cocksucker hasn’t even done that yet. I’ll bet you my life savings our record will be 7-9. There’s nothing like starting at .500 and ending at .500. Makes you wonder why you even watch in the first place. Fuck Stan Kroenke.
Chad:
I was a season ticket holder to the St. Louis Rams, my son met Sam Bradford a day after he was drafted, and I spent most of my childhood growing up rooting for them. At any rate, they left us like a sack of shit and with nothing to root for after we begged them to stay and gave them everything they wanted… And you know what? I’m glad, so I can pick a new team. THAT’S HOW MUCH THEY SUCK.
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Dustin:
I love being a Rams fan. Where else can you show such optimism year after year for a team who hasn’t had a winning team since the 2003 season? Every team in the fucking NFC has been to the playoffs at least TWICE since the Rams last appearance. Marc Bulger, Chris Chandler, Jamie Martin, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Gus Frerotte, Brock Berlin, Trent Green, Kyle Boller, Keith Null, AJ Feeley, Kellen Clemens, Austin Davis, Shaun Hill, Nick Foles, and Case Keenum round up the stinkhole that’s been the Rams QB situation since 2004 (the beginning of the losing streak). Fuck them. Fuck the Rams.
Brian:
In Kroenke’s carpet bombing letter to the NFL regarding the viability of Saint Louis as an NFL market he stated that his investments in the team led to “a 52 percent improvement in winning percentage over the five years before Stan Kroenke became the controlling owner” The Rams were 20-60 in the 5 years before the hair piece took over. His football acumen led to the dramatic improvement to 36-59-1 in the 6 seasons since. Fuck him, fuck his lackey Demoff and fuck everyone who called out STL fans for poorly attended games. From 2007-2011 the Rams went 15-65, that’s the worst 5-year stretch in NFL history. Have fun paying for that shit, LA.
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Max:
Have fun, L.A. They’re all yours.
Daniel:
Seeing them in the Coliseum for a few years will be fun. Fun like seeing a Formula One race on rutted mule tracks. Every live sporting event is faced with the problem that watching on big-screen hi-def TV is a better experience. At the Coliseum, you have a situation where the seats are so far from the field it was better to watch on TV at home in the 1980s, on a 12-inch low-def screen. Seeing a football game at the Coliseum is like camping in rotting concrete ruins located in the vicinity of a football game. It is sort of charming to watch a game in the equivalent of Stonehenge, but only at night and if you go there at night you might get stabbed. Then they’re spending $2 billion dollars on a stadium that’s like 2 miles away from LAX. Driving to LAX is awful. You have to take eight different freeways. All of these except the 110 (which is only three blocks long and doesn’t go anywhere) were built in the 18th Century when nobody lived in LA. None of them have been maintained at any point since the Eisenhower administration. To people living outside of SoCal this may sound like an exaggeration but it’s not. It will be quicker for people in Orange County, the Valley, or the Inland Empire to drive to a better airport, fly to Oakland or Phoenix, rent a car, and go to a game. For many it will still be quicker to drive to San Diego. I cannot imagine any set of circumstances under which I would voluntarily pay any of my own money to go to a Rams game at fucking LAX. I can only assume from the placement of the stadium that either no natives were consulted, or more likely, only very rich people. After the first few years, the stadium will be empty if the team is bad. I predict the Rams will be begging for a new stadium or threatening to move in 8-12 years. Finally, I know the NFL thinks it’s the center of the universe, but they underestimate how far out of the public consciousness they’ve fallen. I’ve had more conversations about soccer than the NFL. In most towns the sporting hierarchy is NFL>MLB>NBA in some order. The Rams will be a distant fourth to the Lakers, Trojans, and Dodgers. I wonder if they can cope.
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Submissions for the Deadspin NFL previews are now closed. Next up: Detroit Lions. |
Nonetheless, the school board's approval will keep Saccoccia at the school — and it signals a vote of confidence in perhaps the most influential man in the fading steel town that was consumed by the social media response to a case in which two of Saccoccia's players were convicted in juvenile court of raping an unconscious 16-year-old girl at after parties for a pre-season game by the powerhouse Big Red football team. A grand jury hearing into possible additional charges relating to the parties and their aftermath is now scheduled to convene on April 30.
During the rape trial last month, text messages from Trent Mays, one of the convicted rapists and Saccoccia's star quarterback, were submitted as evidence that seemed to indicate the coach — know around town as Coach Sac — knew about the assault at the parties and had attempted to do something about it:
I got Reno. He took care of it and shit ain't gonna happen, even if they did take it to court. Like he was joking about it so I’m not worried.
To be clear, that's just a text message. Mays could easily have been exaggerating about Saccoccia's involvement, and proving otherwise might prove difficult. But Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine has indicated that the grand jury investigation will look into whether anyone else should be charged with, among other things, a failure to report a crime or tampering with evidence. "We want to bring finality so the community feels that justice has been done — that nothing has been swept under the rug and everyone has their day in court," DeWine said after the verdict. According to Ohio law, Saccoccia and school administrators in the state are required to report child abuse. Indeed, Saccoccia's re-upped contract confirms he held a second position within the school that would seem to put him in a position defined by that Ohio law — the responsible parties include a "school teacher; school employee; school authority; person engaged in social work or the practice of professional counseling."
Because of that text — and because Saccoccia apparently didn't punish his football players until eight games in to their ten-game regular season (Mays and Ma'lik Richmond were suspended, but it's unclear if that happened before their arrest) — there have been calls, mostly from beyond Steubenville, for the school to relieve him of a position he has held fore more than 30 years. One of the most popular petitions on the social justice site Change.org is still "Steubenville Schools: Fire Coach Reno Saccoccia," which has 134,000 signatures. The petition reads:
No players known to have participated in the rape in any way -- sharing the photos and videos, keeping it from authorities, being at the scene without reporting the rape -- were ever punished by Saccoccia or his staff. Even after the boys were arrested and charged with rape, Saccoccia kept his players on the team [boys who were not convicted of the rape, but boys who were at the party and one boy who said he took a picture of the rape and deleted it] for eight more games. Saccoccia even threatened a female reporter with violence, telling her, "You're gonna get yours. And if you don't get yours, somebody close to you will."
Despite other vocal calls for Saccoccia to lose his job, he remains a leader in a fragile town. Some residents blame him for bringing out the dark side of Steubenville, while the equally vocal football fan base in the town continues to support Coach Sac. So, apparently, does the school board.
Image from WTRF-TV broadcast.
This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire. |
Approximately 1,100 kilograms of cocaine and 4,420 pounds of marijuana interdicted in the Caribbean Sea worth an estimated wholesale value of $41 million was offloaded by U.S. Coast Guardsmen at Coast Guard Base Miami Beach, Fla., Tuesday.
The drugs were seized as part of Operation Martillo and Unified Resolve. On September 20, a Coast Guard HC-144 Ocean Sentry aircraft located a suspicious go-fast vessel southeast of Isla Saona, Dominican Republic . The Coast Guard Cutter Richard Dixon responded to the report and interdicted the vessel after the suspects jettisoned four packages into the water, multiple packages remained onboard. A Coast Guard boarding team recovered in total of 49 bales of marijuana weighing 2,450 pounds. Three suspects aboard the go-fast boat were taken into custody and transferred to U.S. authorities for prosecution.
“These seizures highlight how effectively the U.S Coast Guard and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection are working together to disrupt the flow of illicit drugs from South America into the United States and Caribbean nations ,” said Cmdr. Timothy Cronin, deputy chief of law enforcement for the Coast Guard 7th District. “We have to keep these drugs from penetrating our borders. More importantly, we have to get after the organized criminal networks that fuel the violence and instability in the Western Hemisphere.”
According to the Coast Guard, this has been a record year in terms of drugs seizures. Since October 2014, the Coast Guard has removed 130 metric tons of cocaine ($4.3 billion), the most since 2008. In addition, the Coast Guard and its federal partners have brought nearly 500 smugglers in more than 200 cases in for prosecution and seized over 135 vessels, both record highs. These numbers include seizures on both the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. |
Some Tough Guy Talk from the Respectable Negro.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma and Stand Your Ground Laws: An Escalating Spiral of Violence. When Will Black Men Finally Start to Defend Themselves Against White Street Vigilantism?
In thinking through the Prisoner’s Dilemma, there is an additional implication of the use of Stand Your Ground laws by white people (and those overly identified with Whiteness and White Authority). Should black and brown people, men in particular, apply a similar standard, acting preemptively based on the learned assumption that they will likely be shot dead by white men who claim “self-defense”? Stand Your Ground Laws, the concealed and open carry of weapons, and the court’s protection of white street vigilantes are creating an explosive mix where civic virtue, self-interest, and common sense demand that people of color win the Prisoner’s Dilemma of their lives by acting preemptively. Black self-defense is the inevitable result of white violence. Ultimately, Stand Your Ground laws may have a consequence that is very different from the one imagined by its supporters on the White Right.
First, does Devega, a college professor, not realize that there is more black on white murder than vice versa? Can he not see past the fact that the mass media massively publicizes white on black murder but hushes up white on black murder? Or is he deliberately taking advantage of media bias to pretend that blacks are poor innocent victims who never murder whites?
Second, Devega doesn’t realize that black power comes from soft power, not hard power. The stupid liberals weeping over Trayvon who don’t care a white about Chris Lane, Delbert Belton, or countless other victims of black on white murder, are the source of black power. From a poem in the 19th century (h/t to Jared Taylor):
Their tender hearts were sighing
As the negro’s wrongs were told
While the white slave was dying
Who gained their father’s gold.
(Quoted in Ann Norton, Alternative Americas, University of Chicago Press, 1986, p. 238.)
The tender hearts sighing of the rich white women is the wellspring of black power. Let them go forth and attempt to exert hard power. It will reduce their soft power, their cultural cachet, that comes not from them, but from their sponsors, their patrons, their masters on the liberal plantation.
Devega seems to really believe that his people are tough guys, and that we would somehow be afraid of the prospect of blacks really getting their violence on! This quote is pure delusion:
Black self-defense is the inevitable result of white violence. Ultimately, Stand Your Ground laws may have a consequence that is very different from the one imagined by its supporters on the White Right.
Hah! Bring it on, Chauncey! That’s attacking our strongest point by far! White men excel at violence like nothing else.
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Just a two-hour drive south of San Diego across the Mexican border lies a peaceful Baja California valley brimming with ripened grapes, delicious wines and gourmet cuisine concocted from the freshest of fresh local ingredients. Our Forbes Travel Guide editors take a peek at Mexico’s lovely—and somewhat little known—Valle de Guadalupe (Guadalupe Valley), a wine country destination screaming for a late summer getaway of the great outdoors, delicious food and plenty of vino.
Interested in trying a sweet alternative to beer? Venture over to our blog to explore Washington’s cider scene.
Where To Play
The Fiestas de la Vendimia, a celebration of the annual harvest, runs from Aug. 2 through 18 this year, which is why we recommend a late summer visit to the Valle de Guadalupe. Many of the valley’s wineries participate in the festivities by hosting special events: This year, there’s a wine pairing dinner at oft raved about restaurant Laja with special guest and prominent Mexican chef Daniel Ovadia on Aug. 7; a street party at the Plaza de las Artes in Ensenada on Aug. 8; and a wine pairing dinner at Viñas de Garza on Aug. 15—to name just a few of the happenings.
But no matter what time of year you visit the Guadalupe Valley, there’s plenty of reason to venture down the dirt roads that lead to the area’s wineries, and there are tons of varietals to sip. Founded in 1987, Monte Xanic offers cabernet sauvignon, merlot, malbec, petit verdot, sauvignon blanc, sémillon and more; and you can try tempranillo, zinfandel and grenache, among others, at Baron Balch’e. Comparatively shiny and new Hacienda La Lomita, built in 2005, uses slightly more modern winemaking technology, perhaps giving you a glimpse into the future of this wine region; and some of the inns boast their own wineries, as well, including Adobe Guadalupe (more on that in a bit).
Where To Stay
Far and away the most intriguing accommodations in Valle de Guadalupe are found at Encuentro Guadalupe by Antiresorts, an elegant contemporary boutique hotel made up of 20 separate “cabins” that blend with the desert scene (in their own way) without being the least bit rustic. The small, stylish, boxy abodes, anchored to the hill by stilts, offer floor-to-ceiling windows, minimalist décor and curved, open terraces that overlook the gorgeous green and brown valley. Guests are gifted a glass of house wine upon arrival to enjoy in the sleek, open lobby structure, and an infinity pool and hot tub set into the desert rocks offer a lovely place to relax and take in the amazing scenery.
If you’d prefer something a bit less avant-garde but equally quaint and luxurious, try Adobe Guadalupe’s petite, white adobe inn with red tile roof—its design was inspired by the desert architecture of Iran. There are just six rooms, decorated with a mixture of traditional Mexican and Persian furnishings and art, and the on-site winery and cellar, and horseback riding excursions, are sure to keep you entertained. La Villa del Valle, another six-room hotel with stunning panoramic views of the Mexican wine country, includes an orchard, vegetable garden, olive grove, labyrinth, vineyard and pool, as well as a bocce ball court, so you’ll have plenty of excuses to take in the valley air.
Where To Eat
Several restaurants stand out as Valle de Guadalupe’s culinary gems, one of which is Laja, whose oh-so modern and fresh gourmet cuisine focuses on simplicity—using few ingredients to allow individual flavors to pop. Some of those ingredients come from the restaurant’s own orchard and vineyard, and the rest are procured from nearby small producers, including local treats such as olive oil, roast beef and sprouts. And you know an eatery has achieved a certain status when it provides a heliport for arriving clientele.
Also try Corazon de Tierra next door to La Villa del Valle—its $65 prix fixe menu, offered between 1:30 and 8:30 p.m., changes daily based on what’s available from the property’s orchard and vegetable garden and focuses heavily on local seafood. A recent menu included an amuse bouche smoke yellowtail tostada with dehydrated sea lettuce and avocado puree, and a grilled oyster with Cortes cheese, Swiss chard and lamb fibers. Or, enjoy a lovely view of the sunset in the lounge area at Finca Altozano, which also serves locally inspired eats with mesquite roasted goodness. And we should point out that the surrounding valley provides an awfully pretty backdrop for eating fresh Baja California-style fare. —Amanda Arnold |
The University of Flatland uses a novel two-part practical test to determine whether Comp. Sci. undergraduates should be steered into practical programming or abstract theory streams. In the first part, the students are given a beaker, a bunsen burner, a stand, and a flask of water. They are told to boil water. Naturally, they fill the beaker, place it on the stand, light the burner, and are queued up to perform the second test.
In the second part of the test, they are presented with a beaker of water sitting on a stand over a Bunsen burner, and an empty flask. Most of the students light the burner and are led away to begin their studies in programming. But a precious few disassemble the apparatus and pour the water back into the flask, reducing it to a problem they have already solved . They are led away to begin the long road to their Ph.D. in Lisp, Recursion, and Category Theory.
When you take a problem with a straightforward solution and make it more complex by re-expressing it as a combination of patterns, you are pouring the water back into the flask.
define
lambda
if
quote
set!
define
let
let
lambda
equals
car
cdr
eval
define-syntax
call/cc
Like most the jokes I retell, this is not particularly funny. But let’s talk about “Design Patterns” and then come back to it. Design patterns allow developers communicate their intentions to each other with a common vocabulary.This makes sense. If I create a Flyweight and I want to describe it to another developer, having a word for it, along with a common understanding of what problem a flyweight solves, streamlines our communication. Design patterns in that light are jargon, a sub-language used by specialists to discuss their speciality.If it stopped right there, you would have the design patterns invented by Christopher Alexander and articulated in the incredible book A Pattern Language But it doesn’t stop there. In certain programming cultures, people consider Design Patterns to be a core set of practices that must be used to build software. It isn’t a case of when you need to solve a problem best addressed by a design pattern, then use the pattern and refer to it by name. It’s a case of always use design patterns. If your solution doesn’t naturally conform to patterns, refactor it to patterns.Is this madness? Yes… And no…Consider Scheme . Everything in Scheme is built out of just five primitive “special forms.” It is positively Forth-like in its economy of power. So it is clearly possible to build very powerful programs out of five primitives. So why not build programs out of thirty-five patterns?While we digest that, back to the joke. Scheme programmers are clearly the impractical theoreticians, aren’t they? Reducing everything to their five special forms that they have already solved and what-not. While the practical programmers look for the simple, direct way to boil water.So what do we make of the “everything should be one of these thirty-five standard design patterns” argument? I make of it the same thing that I make of the joke. It is clearly possible. But when you take a problem with a straightforward solution outside of the core patterns in one book and make it more complex by re-expressing it as a combination of patterns, you are pouring the water back into the flask.The argument that “everything should be one of these thirty-five standard design patterns” is an argument that fits the theoretician, not the pragmatist. It is motivated by a desire for building very complicated things out of very simple parts. That is possible. But it is a fallacy to believe that simplifying the constituent parts simplifies the software. Like boiling water, you can make it more complex when you place the pattern ahead of the solution.Of course there are arguments ad nauseam about standardization and readability. But I have this strong suspicion that at the core of it, the motivation is a belief that the world should be reduced to a simple set of easy-to-understand things that can be combined and recombined into complex solutions.And Scheme programmers? You may have noticed that although Scheme programs are built out of the five special forms, Scheme programmers do not write everything in the five forms: they use abstractions like continuations, macros, and functions to write expressive and powerful programs.If you re-wrote a complex Scheme program in the five primitives, would it really be easier to understand because one programmer could describe it to another using just five words in their common vocabulary?This is a follow-up to Newly Discovered Design Pattern: “Code Well.” Scheme’s five special forms: The ones I was thinking of are, and. And I’m not convinced you need. This is from memory, and furthermore just because you can build everything from a few primitives doesn’t mean that that’s how the implementation works. Smalltalk took this aggressive approach to building Smalltalk in Smalltalk, but I am not immersed in Scheme, I do not know what current implementations actually do.If you do a little Googling, you will find that people often refer to constructs likeas special forms, because they are not function calls. However, they are not primitive special forms because you can buildout ofand function calls.Given the primitive special forms, you also need a library with functions like, anddefined. Between the primitive forms and the primitive library, you can define metacircularly andfor all of the other special forms. From there, you can build a modern Scheme in Scheme.(There may be some other good choices for building “a Scheme.” You may want to considera primitive special form. If you don’t, you have to rewrite function calls (probably using CPS), and this means you are no longer running your Scheme programs in your primitive Scheme, but rather in your evaluator.)Keith Braithwaite’s critique |
House Republicans are proving that they're going to be serious about investigating . . . Hillary Clinton.
The House Judiciary Committee has turned an investigation into any possible collusion between President Donald Trump and Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign into a witch hunt, probing "decisions made by President Barack Obama’s Justice Department in its probe of Clinton’s use of a private email server, as well as alleged Clinton ties to foreign governments and the leaking of classified information," according to Bloomberg News
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The new focus comes after Democrats on the House panel sought further information on the role of Attorney General Jeff Sessions in the firing of former FBI Director James Comey. But Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., and Republicans instead pivoted and "turned it into a request demanding new probes into Clinton," according to Bloomberg.
"Until Mr. Mueller’s investigation is complete, it is redundant for the House of Representatives to engage in fact-gathering on many of the same issues he is investigating," Goodlatte said during a hearing last week. He added that because of the various investigations, "taxpayer dollars to investigate the Trump campaign’s connections — or lack thereof — to the Russian government," is unnecessary.
Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat on the House panel has said that Goodlatte has "done zero - absolutely zero -- as chairman to look into these things."
Investigating Hillary Clinton has been one of the only things that Republicans can get behind. On Inauguration Day, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, then a Utah Republican, promised, "the investigation continues."
So pleased she is not the President. I thanked her for her service and wished her luck. The investigation continues. A post shared by Jason Chaffetz (@jasoninthehouse) on Jan 20, 2017 at 12:31pm PST
But this latest twist comes courtesy of Reddit, where a conspiracy theorist gave them some ideas. Here's what Lawfare had to say about their latest windmill-chasing endeavor.
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The committee voted to adopt an amended resolution introduced by Representative Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) calling for a special counsel investigation into, variously, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s instructions to former FBI Director James Comey to refer to the Hillary Clinton email probe as a “matter” rather than as an “investigation;” Comey’s leaks to Columbia University law professor Daniel Richman; Comey’s leaks to New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt as far back as 1993 (when Schmidt, who graduated from college in 2005, would have been around ten years old); “collusion” between Comey and special counsel Robert Mueller; any knowledge on Comey’s part of the Christopher Steele dossier and of efforts by the intelligence community to surveill Trump or unmask his associates in a quest to damage Trump’s campaign or his presidency; immunity deals provided by the FBI to various Clinton aides over the course of the email investigation; whether Clinton secretly approved a deal to transfer U.S. uranium deposits to Russian control in return for donations to the Clinton Foundation; and yes, the specific circumstances of Clinton advisor Huma Abedin’s employment at the State Department. If this sounds like the work of conspiracy theorists, that’s because that’s exactly what it is. Wired reported on Friday that a Gaetz staffer appears to have crowdsourced the amended resolution with the help of r/The_Donald, a pro-Trump subreddit notorious for both its embrace of conspiracy theories and its gleeful offensiveness. The Reddit user, “Devinm666,” regularly posted on the forum praising Gaetz, referencing his work in Congress, and at one point publishing a picture of his congressional ID badge with his name and face blacked out. According to Wired, Gaetz confirmed that “Devinm666” is Devin Murphy, a legislative aide in his office.
Recently, conservatives have latched on to the idea that Clinton is still worthy of investigating — especially as the Trump administration spirals out of control. Last month, Sean Hannity had wondered why Sessions hasn't been investigating the Obama administration.
One day they'll find the true reason why Hillary Clinton shouldn't be president in 2016. |
Women have not yet won the legal right to drive a car in Saudi Arabia, though in July many began driving in a show of defiance, and some still are. So it's telling that King Abdullah chose to hand women a largely meaningless right -- voting in a non-democratic society where elected bodies merely "advise" the monarchy -- rather than the more practical right they were asking for. But the idea that a woman could sit on one of the country's representative bodies come 2015, when the king says he may appoint some directly (how's that for democracy), is still revolutionary. This is, after all, Saudi Arabia we're talking about. Just as the act of driving has normalized the idea of driving in some parts of the country where more women can get away with it, could the act of symbolic political participation get Saudis accustomed to the idea of women playing a real political role? That seems to be King Abdullah's bet.
Still, there are a number of ways this could fall apart. It won't take effect until 2015; the next four years will provide plenty of opportunities for the country's conservative clerical establishment to throw up bureaucratic roadblocks or to try and overturn the decision altogether. The nature of the elected assemblies could change dramatically by then. And King Abdullah's past efforts at promoting gender rights -- something he appears genuinely interested in -- have done little to address the underlying social dynamics that makes life for Saudi women so difficult. The massive women's university he built was a great way to train Saudi women for professional careers, but has done little to alter the cultural, legal, or political barriers that prevent employers there from actually hiring women.
The real news here might not be King Abdullah's announcement, or any similar top-down attempt at opening up gender rights, important as such legal changes may be. The real news could be that the driver for this change appears to have been Saudi women themselves. After decades of being denied political participation, Saudi women are taking it on their own by organizing, demonstrating, and planning. Abdullah wants to give Saudi women some ownership of the political space, but they already seem to have it. It's not much -- the monarchs are still in charge, challenged only by the clerical elite -- but women are clearly showing more sway.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com. |
Tim Fischer says 'lethal poison' flows to Australia from US weapons manufacturers. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Such a tariff should be calculated on a scale equal to the number of gun massacres in the US in the previous year, Mr Fischer suggests. On current figuring, that would equate to a tariff of 372 per cent this year. Delivering the Frank Larkins Oration at Melbourne University's International House on Thursday evening, Mr Fischer - who is Australia's former trade minister - pointed out that all US-produced guns and ammunition that were imported legally into Australia had benefited from a zero-tariff rating for some years. "So the lethal poison flowing from the dysfunctional gun policies of the USA is facilitated over US borders to this part of the world," he said.
"Now last year - 2015 - there were 372 'gun massacres' in the USA. "This year Donald Trump has threatened to take the USA out of the WTO. "Let me leave you with the thought that if he does, all OECD countries should immediately impose a tariff or 'Levy Assisting Gun Safety' or LAGS, equal to the number of gun massacres in the USA for the previous year. "So impose a tariff at 372 per cent." The FBI defines mass murder as the murder of four or more persons during a single event. The US' Congressional Research Service defines a "public mass shooting" as one in which four or more people selected indiscriminately, not including the perpetrator, are killed. On these definitions, a mass murder occurs, on average, almost every day in the US.
Mr Fischer conceded his was an unusual proposal "that will infuriate the NRA and the USA". "But at present you are 15 times more likely to be shot dead in the USA than Australia per capita," he said, adding that an estimated three-quarters of gun crime in Mexico is committed with weapons flowing over the border from the US. "The gun poison and policy dysfunctionality of the USA is now so bad, our human rights, miles from the USA, are impacted." Mr Fischer was National Party leader and deputy prime minister when he and prime minister John Howard pushed through Australia's gun laws in the wake of the Port Arthur massacre in 1996. Mr Fischer said that immediately after the Orlando massacre, where 49 people were shot dead in a nightclub on a single night, the US Senate had voted down approving weapons background checks on those on the "no-fly" list.
This demonstrated "sheer corruption of public policy settings" in the US, and proved that something was very rotten within the US power structure, Mr Fischer said. Voicing concern that "the shouting of Donald Trump types, the Bernie Sanders sway on the Democrats and Hilary Clinton", and protectionist pressures from the post-Brexit saga were endangering international trade, Mr Fischer said it was "time to rebrand the world trade equation if we are to win back the debate against those who contend all trade is a net negative and the root cause for all the economic ills in the world. "Elements of major political parties in the USA and other countries are today solidly against trade and so-called free trade," Mr Fischer said. "As we do battle in the public square, let us delete the term 'free trade' and insert a more accurate term: 'facilitated trade'." Follow us on Twitter |
Ariel Sharon (Hebrew: אריאל שרון; IPA: [aʁiˈ(ʔ)el ʃaˈʁon] (), Ariʼēl Sharōn, also known by his diminutive Arik, אַריק, born Ariel Scheinermann, אריאל שיינרמן; 26 February 1928 – 11 January 2014) was an Israeli general and politician who served as the 11th Prime Minister of Israel from March 2001 until April 2006.[3]
Sharon was a commander in the Israeli Army from its creation in 1948. As a soldier and then an officer, he participated prominently in the 1948 Palestine war, becoming a platoon commander in the Alexandroni Brigade and taking part in many battles, including Operation Bin Nun Alef. He was an instrumental figure in the creation of Unit 101 and the reprisal operations, as well as in the 1956 Suez Crisis, the Six-Day War of 1967, the War of Attrition, and the Yom-Kippur War of 1973. Yitzhak Rabin has called Sharon "the greatest field commander in our history".[4]
Upon retirement from the military, Sharon entered politics, joining the Likud party, and served in a number of ministerial posts in Likud-led governments in 1977–92 and 1996–99. As Minister of Defense, he directed the 1982 Lebanon War. An official enquiry found that he bore "personal responsibility" for the Sabra and Shatila massacre and recommended that he be removed as Defense Minister. His role in the massacre led to him being known as the "Butcher of Beirut" among Arabs.[5][6]
From the 1970s through to the 1990s, Sharon championed construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He became the leader of the Likud in 2000, and served as Israel's prime minister from 2001 to 2006. However, as Prime Minister, in 2004–05 Sharon orchestrated Israel's unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip. Facing stiff opposition to this policy within the Likud, in November 2005 he left Likud to form a new party, Kadima. He had been expected to win the next election and was widely interpreted as planning on "clearing Israel out of most of the West Bank", in a series of unilateral withdrawals.[7][8][9] After suffering a stroke on 4 January 2006, Sharon remained in a permanent vegetative state until his death in January 2014.[10][11][12]
Early life and education
Ariel Sharon at age 14 (second from right)
Sharon was born on 26 February 1928 in Kfar Malal, an agricultural moshav, then in Mandatory Palestine, to Shmuel Scheinerman (1896–1956) of Brest-Litovsk and Vera (née Schneirov) Scheinerman (1900–1988) of Mogilev.[13] His mother, Vera, was from a family of Russian Subbotnik Jewish origin.[14] His parents met while at university in Tiflis (now Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia), where Sharon's father was studying agronomy and his mother was studying medicine. They immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1922 in the wake of the Russian Communist government's growing persecution of Jews in the region.[15] In Palestine, Vera Scheinerman went by the name Dvora.
The family arrived with the Third Aliyah and settled in Kfar Malal, a socialist, secular community.[16] (Ariel Sharon himself would remain proudly secular throughout his life.[17]) Although his parents were Mapai supporters, they did not always accept communal consensus: "The Scheinermans' eventual ostracism ... followed the 1933 Arlozorov murder when Dvora and Shmuel refused to endorse the Labor movement's anti-Revisionist calumny and participate in Bolshevik-style public revilement rallies, then the order of the day. Retribution was quick to come. They were expelled from the local health-fund clinic and village synagogue. The cooperative's truck wouldn't make deliveries to their farm nor collect produce."[18]
Sharon grew up to be bilingual in both Hebrew and Russian languages.[19]
Four years after their arrival at Kfar Malal, the Sheinermans had a daughter, Yehudit (Dita). Ariel was born two years later. At age 10, he joined the youth movement HaNoar HaOved VeHaLomed. As a teenager, he began to take part in the armed night-patrols of his moshav. In 1942 at the age of 14, Sharon joined the Gadna, a paramilitary youth battalion, and later the Haganah, the underground paramilitary force and the Jewish military precursor to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).[16]
Military career
Battle for Jerusalem and 1948 War
Operation Bin Nun (24–25 May 1948), during which Sharon was shot in the stomach, foot and groin.
Sharon's unit of the Haganah became engaged in serious and continuous combat from the autumn of 1947, with the onset of the Battle for Jerusalem. Without the manpower to hold the roads, his unit took to making offensive hit-and-run raids on Arab forces in the vicinity of Kfar Malal. In units of thirty men, they would hit constantly at Arab villages, bridges and bases, as well as ambush the traffic between Arab villages and bases.
Sharon wrote in his autobiography: "We had become skilled at finding our way in the darkest nights and gradually we built up the strength and endurance these kind of operations required. Under the stress of constant combat we drew closer to one another and began to operate not just as a military unit but almost as a family. ... [W]e were in combat almost every day. Ambushes and battles followed each other until they all seemed to run together."[20]
For his role in a night-raid on Iraqi forces at Bir Adas, Sharon was made a platoon commander in the Alexandroni Brigade.[16] Following the Israeli Declaration of Independence and the onset of the War of Independence, his platoon fended off the Iraqi advance at Kalkiya. Sharon was regarded as a hardened and aggressive soldier, swiftly moving up the ranks during the war. He was shot in the groin, stomach and foot by the Jordanian Arab Legion in the First Battle of Latrun, an unsuccessful attempt to relieve the besieged Jewish community of Jerusalem. Sharon wrote of the casualties in the "horrible battle," and his brigade suffered 139 deaths.[citation needed]
Jordanian field marshal Habis Al-Majali claimed that Sharon was among 6 Israeli soldiers captured by the Jordanian 4th battalion during the battle, and that Habis took them to a camp in Mafraq and the 6 were later traded back.[21] Sharon denied the claims, but Habes was adamant. "Sharon is like a grizzly bear," he grumbled. "I captured him, I healed his wounds."[22] In 1994 and during the peace treaty signing ceremony with Jordan, Sharon wanted to get in touch with his former captor, but the latter determinedly refused to discuss the incident publicly.[23]
After recovering from the wounds received at Latrun, he resumed command of his patrol unit. On December 28, 1948, his platoon attempted to break through an Egyptian stronghold in Iraq-El-Manshia.[citation needed] At about this time, Israeli founding father David Ben-Gurion gave him the Hebraized name "Sharon".[24] In September 1949, Sharon was promoted to company commander (of the Golani Brigade's reconnaissance unit) and in 1950 to intelligence officer for Central Command. He then took leave to begin studies in history and Middle Eastern culture at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Sharon's subsequent military career would be characterized by insubordination, aggression and disobedience, but also brilliance as a commander.[25]
Unit 101
A year and a half later, on the direct orders of the Prime Minister, Sharon returned to active service in the rank of major, as the founder and commander of the new Unit 101, a special forces unit tasked with reprisal operations in response to Palestinian fedayeen attacks. The first Israeli commando unit, Unit 101 specialized in offensive guerrilla warfare in enemy countries.[16] The unit consisted of 50 men, mostly former paratroopers and Unit 30 personnel. They were armed with non-standard weapons and tasked with carrying out special reprisals across the state's borders— mainly establishing small unit maneuvers, activation and insertion tactics. Training included engaging enemy forces across Israel's borders.[26] Israeli historian Benny Morris describes Unit 101:
The new recruits began a harsh regimen of day and night training, their orientation and navigation exercises often taking them across the border; encounters with enemy patrols or village watchmen were regarded as the best preparation for the missions that lay ahead. Some commanders, such as Baum and Sharon, deliberately sought firefights. Benny Morris, Israel's Border Wars[27]
Unit 101 undertook a series of raids against Jordan, which then held the West Bank. The raids also helped bolster Israeli morale and convince Arab states that the fledgling nation was capable of long-range military action. Known for raids against Arab civilians and military targets, the unit is held responsible for the widely condemned Qibya massacre in the fall of 1953. After a group of Palestinians used Qibya as a staging point for a fedayeen attack in Yehud that killed a Jewish woman and her two children in Israel, Unit 101 retaliated on the village.[16] By various accounts of the ensuing attack, 65 to 70 Palestinian civilians, half of them women and children, were killed when Sharon's troops dynamited 45 houses and a school.[28][29][30]
Facing international condemnation for the attack, Ben-Gurion denied that the Israeli military was involved.[16] In his memoir, Sharon wrote that the unit had checked all the houses before detonating the explosives and that he thought the houses were empty.[29] Although he admitted the results were tragic, Sharon defended the attack, however: "Now people could feel that the terrorist gangs would think twice before striking, now that they knew for sure they would be hit back. Kibbya also put the Jordanian and Egyptian governments on notice that if Israel was vulnerable, so were they."[28]
A few months after its founding, Unit 101 was merged with the 890 Paratroopers Battalion to create the Paratroopers Brigade, of which Sharon would also later become commander. Like Unit 101, it continued raids into Arab territory, culminating with the attack on the Qalqilyah police station in the autumn of 1956.[31][32]
Leading up to the Suez War, the missions Sharon took part in included:[citation needed]
During a payback operation in the Deir al-Balah refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, Sharon was again wounded by gunfire, this time in the leg.[16] Incidents such as those involving Meir Har-Zion, along with many others, contributed to the tension between Prime Minister Moshe Sharett, who often opposed Sharon's raids, and Moshe Dayan, who had become increasingly ambivalent in his feelings towards Sharon. Later in the year, Sharon was investigated and tried by the Military Police for disciplining one of his subordinates. However, the charges were dismissed before the onset of the Suez War.[citation needed]
1956 Suez War
Sharon commanded Unit 202 (the Paratroopers Brigade) during the 1956 Suez War (the British "Operation Musketeer"), leading the troop to take the ground east of the Sinai's Mitla Pass and eventually the pass itself against the advice of superiors, suffering heavy Israeli casualties in the process.[33] Having successfully carried out the first part of his mission (joining a battalion parachuted near Mitla with the rest of the brigade moving on ground), Sharon's unit was deployed near the pass. Neither reconnaissance aircraft nor scouts reported enemy forces inside the Mitla Pass. Sharon, whose forces were initially heading east, away from the pass, reported to his superiors that he was increasingly concerned with the possibility of an enemy thrust through the pass, which could attack his brigade from the flank or the rear.
1956 Israeli conquest of Sinai
Sharon asked for permission to attack the pass several times, but his requests were denied, though he was allowed to check its status so that if the pass was empty, he could receive permission to take it later. Sharon sent a small scout force, which was met with heavy fire and became bogged down due to vehicle malfunction in the middle of the pass. Sharon ordered the rest of his troops to attack in order to aid their comrades. Sharon was criticized by his superiors and was damaged by allegations several years later made by several former subordinates, who claimed that Sharon tried to provoke the Egyptians and sent out the scouts in bad faith, ensuring that a battle would ensue.
Sharon had assaulted Themed in a dawn attack, and had stormed the town with his armor through the Themed Gap.[34] Sharon routed the Sudanese police company, and captured the settlement. On his way to the Nakla, Sharon's men came under attack from Egyptian MIG-15s. On the 30th, Sharon linked up with Eytan near Nakla.[35] Dayan had no more plans for further advances beyond the passes, but Sharon nonetheless decided to attack the Egyptian positions at Jebel Heitan.[35] Sharon sent his lightly armed paratroopers against dug-in Egyptians supported by aircraft, tanks and heavy artillery. Sharon's actions were in response to reports of the arrival of the 1st and 2nd Brigades of the 4th Egyptian Armored Division in the area, which Sharon believed would annihilate his forces if he did not seize the high ground. Sharon sent two infantry companies, a mortar battery and some AMX-13 tanks under the command of Mordechai Gur into the Heitan Defile on the afternoon of October 31, 1956. The Egyptian forces occupied strong defensive positions and brought down heavy anti-tank, mortar and machine gun fire on the IDF force.[36] Gur's men were forced to retreat into the "Saucer", where they were surrounded and came under heavy fire. Hearing of this, Sharon sent in another task force while Gur's men used the cover of night to scale the walls of the Heitan Defile. During the ensuing action, the Egyptians were defeated and forced to retreat. A total of 260 Egyptian and 38 Israeli soldiers were killed during the battle at Mitla. Due to these deaths, Sharon's actions at Mitla were surrounded in controversy, with many within the IDF viewing the deaths as the result of unnecessary and unauthorized aggression.[35]
Six-Day War, War of Attrition and Yom Kippur War
Conquest of Sinai. June 5–6, 1967
"It was a complex plan. But the elements that went into it were ones I had been developing and teaching for many years... the idea of close combat, nightfighting, surprise paratroop assault, attack from the rear, attack on a narrow front, meticulous planning, the concept of the 'tahbouleh', the relationship between headquarters and field command... But all the ideas had matured already; there was nothing new in them. It was simply a matter of putting all the elements together and making them work." Ariel Sharon, 1989, on his command at the Battle of Abu-Ageila[37]
Conquest of Sinai. June 7–8, 1967
The Mitla incident hindered Sharon's military career for several years. In the meantime, he occupied the position of an infantry brigade commander and received a law degree from Tel Aviv University. However, when Yitzhak Rabin became Chief of Staff in 1964, Sharon again began to rise rapidly in the ranks, occupying the positions of Infantry School Commander and Head of Army Training Branch, eventually achieving the rank of Aluf (Major General).
In the Six-Day War, Sharon, in command of an armored division on the Sinai front, drew up his own complex offensive strategy that combined infantry troops, tanks and paratroopers from planes and helicopters to destroy the Egyptian forces Sharon's 38th Division faced when it broke through to the Kusseima-Abu-Ageila fortified area.[16] Sharon's victories and offensive strategy in the Battle of Abu-Ageila led to international commendation by military strategists; he was judged to have inaugurated a new paradigm in operational command. Researchers at the United States Army Training and Doctrine Command studied Sharon's operational planning, concluding that it involved a number of unique innovations. It was a simultaneous attack by a multiplicity of small forces, each with a specific aim, attacking a particular unit in a synergistic Egyptian defense network. As a result, instead of supporting and covering each other as they were designed to do, each Egyptian unit was left fighting for its own life.[38]
According to Sapir Handelman, after Sharon's assault of the Sinai in the Six-Day War and his encirclement of the Egyptian Third Army in the Yom Kippur War, the Israeli public nicknamed him "The King of Israel".[39]
Sharon played a key role in the War of Attrition. In 1969, he was appointed the Head of IDF's Southern Command. As leader of the southern command, on July 29 Israeli frogmen stormed and destroyed Green Island, a fortress at the northern end of the Gulf of Suez whose radar and antiaircraft installations controlled that sector's airspace. On September 9 Sharon's forces carried out Operation Raviv, a large-scale raid along the western shore of the Gulf of Suez. Landing craft ferried across Russian-made tanks and armored personnel carriers that Israel had captured in 1967, and the small column harried the Egyptians for ten hours.[40]
Following his appointment to the southern command, Sharon had no further promotions, and considered retiring. Sharon discussed the issue with Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, who strongly advised him to remain at his post.[41] Sharon remained in the military for another three years, before retiring in August 1973. Soon after, he helped found the Likud ("Unity") political party.[42]
At the start of the Yom Kippur War on October 6, 1973, Sharon was called back to active duty along with his assigned reserve armored division. On his farm, before he left for the front line, the Reserve Commander, Zeev Amit, said to him, "How are we going to get out of this?" Sharon replied, "You don't know? We will cross the Suez Canal and the war will end over there." Sharon arrived at the front, to participate in his fourth war, in a civilian car.[43] His forces did not engage the Egyptian Army immediately, despite his requests. Under cover of darkness, Sharon's forces moved to a point on the Suez Canal that had been prepared before the war. In a move that again thwarted the commands of his superiors, Sharon's division crossed the Suez, effectively winning the war for Israel.[16] He then headed north towards Ismailia, intent on cutting the Egyptian second army's supply lines, but his division was halted south of the Fresh Water Canal.[44]
Sharon's 143rd Division, crossing the Suez Canal, in the direction of Cairo, October 15, 1973
Abraham Adan's division passed over the bridgehead into Africa, advancing to within 101 kilometers of Cairo. His division managed to encircle Suez, cutting off and encircling the Third Army. Tensions between the two generals followed Sharon's decision, but a military tribunal later found his action was militarily effective.
Sharon's complex ground maneuver is regarded as a decisive move in the Yom Kippur War, undermining the Egyptian Second Army and encircling the Egyptian Third Army.[45] This move was regarded by many Israelis as the turning point of the war in the Sinai front. Thus, Sharon is widely viewed as the hero of the Yom Kippur War, responsible for Israel's ground victory in the Sinai in 1973.[16] A photo of Sharon wearing a head bandage on the Suez Canal became a famous symbol of Israeli military prowess.
Sharon's political positions were controversial, and he was relieved of duty in February 1974.
Bar Lev Line
Following Israel's victory in the six day war, the war of attrition at the Suez Canal began. The Egyptians began firing in provocation against the Israeli forces posted on the eastern part of the canal. Haim Bar Lev, Israel's chief of staff, suggested that Israel construct a border line to protect its southern border. A wall of sand and earth raised along almost the entire length of the Suez Canal would both allow observation of Egyptian forces and conceal the movements of Israeli troops on the eastern side. This line, named after the chief of staff Haim Bar Lev, became known as the Bar Lev Line. It included at least thirty strong points stretching over almost 200 kilometers.[46]
Bar Lev suggested that such a line would defend against any major Egyptian assault across the canal, and was expected to function as a "graveyard for Egyptian troops". Moshe Dayan described it as "one of the best anti-tank ditches in the world."[47] Sharon, and Israel Tal on the other hand, vigorously opposed the line. Sharon said that it would pin down large military formations that would be sitting ducks for deadly artillery attacks, and cited the opinion of Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, who explained him "the great military disaster such a line could bring."[48][49] Notwithstanding, it was completed in spring 1970.
During the Yom Kippur War, Egyptian forces successfully breached the Bar Lev Line in less than two hours at a cost of more than a thousand dead and some 5,000 wounded.[50] Sharon would later recall that what Schneerson had told him was a tragedy, "but unfortunately, that happened."[51]
Early political career, 1974–2001
Beginnings of political career
In the 1940s and 1950s, Sharon seemed to be personally devoted to the ideals of Mapai, the predecessor of the modern Labor Party. However, after retiring from military service, he joined the Liberal Party and was instrumental in establishing Likud in July 1973 by a merger of Herut, the Liberal Party and independent elements.[16][30][52] Sharon became chairman of the campaign staff for that year's elections, which were scheduled for November. Two and a half weeks after the start of the election campaign, the Yom Kippur War erupted and Sharon was called back to reserve service. On the heels of being hailed as a war hero for crossing the Suez in the 1973 war, Sharon won a seat to the Knesset in the elections that year,[16] but resigned a year later.
From June 1975 to March 1976, Sharon was a special aide to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. He planned his return to politics for the 1977 elections; first, he tried to return to the Likud and replace Menachem Begin at the head of the party. He suggested to Simha Erlich, who headed the Liberal Party bloc in the Likud, that he was more able than Begin to win an election victory; he was rejected, however. He then tried to join the Labor Party and the centrist Democratic Movement for Change, but was rejected by those parties too. Only then did he form his own list, Shlomtzion, which won two Knesset seats in the subsequent elections. Immediately after the elections, he merged Shlomtzion with the Likud and became Minister of Agriculture.
When Sharon joined Begin's government, he had relatively little political experience. During this period, Sharon supported the Gush Emunim settlements movement and was viewed as the patron of the settlers' movement. He used his position to encourage the establishment of a network of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories to prevent the possibility of Palestinian Arabs' return to these territories. Sharon doubled the number of Jewish settlements on the West Bank and Gaza Strip during his tenure.
After the 1981 elections, Begin rewarded Sharon for his important contribution to Likud's narrow win, by appointing him Minister of Defense.
Under Sharon, Israel continued to build upon the unprecedented coordination between the Israel Defense Forces and the South African Defence Force, with Israeli and South African generals giving each other unfettered access to each other's battlefields and military tactics, and Israel sharing with South Africa highly classified information about its missions, such as Operation Opera, which had previously only been reserved for the United States.[53] In 1981, after visiting South African forces fighting in Namibia for 10 days, Sharon argued that South Africa needed more weapons to fight Soviet infiltration in the region.[54] Sharon promised that the relationship between Israel and South Africa would continue to deepen as they work to "ensure the National Defense of both our countries".[55] The collaboration in carrying out joint-nuclear tests, in planning counter-insurgency strategies in Namibia and in designing security fences helped to make Israel, South Africa's closest ally in this period.[56]
1982 Lebanon War and Sabra and Shatila massacre
As Defense Minister, Sharon launched an invasion of Lebanon called Operation Peace for Galilee, later known as the 1982 Lebanon War, following the shooting of Israel's ambassador in London, Shlomo Argov. Although this attempted assassination was in fact perpetrated by the Abu Nidal Organization, possibly with Syrian or Iraqi involvement,[57][58] the Israeli government justified the invasion by citing 270 terrorist attacks by the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in Israel, the occupied territories, and the Jordanian and Lebanese border (in addition to 20 attacks on Israeli interests abroad).[59] Sharon intended the operation to eradicate the PLO from its state within a state inside Lebanon, but the war is primarily remembered for the Sabra and Shatila massacre.[60] In a three-day massacre between September 16 and 18, between 460[61][62] and 3,500 civilians, mostly Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites, in the Sabra neighborhood and the adjacent Shatila refugee camp were killed by the Phalanges— Lebanese Maronite Christian militias.[63] Chatila had previously been one of the PLO's three main training camps for foreign terrorists and the main training camp for European terrorists;[64] the Israelis maintained that 2,000 to 3,000 terrorists remained in the camps, but were unwilling to risk the lives of more of their soldiers after the Lebanese army repeatedly refused to "clear them out."[65] The killings followed years of sectarian civil war in Lebanon that left 95,000 dead.[62] The Lebanese army's chief prosecutor investigated the killings and counted 460 dead, Israeli intelligence estimated 700-800 dead, and the Palestinian Red Crescent claimed 2,000 dead. 1,200 death certificates were issued to anyone who produced three witnesses claiming a family member disappeared during the time of the massacre.[61] Nearly all of the victims were men.[61][62]
The Phalange militia went into the camps to clear out PLO fighters while Israeli forces surrounded the camps,[66] blocking camp exits and providing logistical support. The killings led some to label Sharon "the Butcher of Beirut".[5]
An Associated Press report on September 15, 1982 stated, "Defence Minister Ariel Sharon, in a statement, tied the killing of the Phalangist leader Bachir Gemayel to the PLO, saying 'it symbolises the terrorist murderousness of the PLO terrorist organisations and their supporters'."[67] Habib Chartouni, a Lebanese Christian from the Syrian Socialist National Party confessed to the murder of Gemayel, and no Palestinians were involved.
Robert Maroun Hatem, Hobeika's bodyguard, stated in his book From Israel to Damascus that Phalangist commander Elie Hobeika ordered the massacre of civilians in defiance of Israeli instructions to behave like a "dignified" army.[68] Hatem claimed "Sharon had given strict orders to Hobeika....to guard against any desperate move" and that Hobeika perpetrated the massacre "to tarnish Israel's reputation worldwide" for the benefit of Syria. Hobeika subsequently joined the Syrian occupation government and lived as a prosperous businessman under Syrian protection; further massacres in Sabra and Shatilla occurred with Syrian support in 1985.[69]
The massacre followed intense Israeli bombings of Beirut that had seen heavy civilian casualties, testing Israel's relationship with the United States in the process.[66] America sent troops to help negotiate the PLO's exit from Lebanon, withdrawing them after negotiating a ceasefire that ostensibly protected Palestinian civilians.[66]
Legal findings
After 400,000 Peace Now protesters rallied in Tel Aviv to demand an official government inquiry into the massacres, the official Israeli government investigation into the massacre at Sabra and Shatila, the Kahan Commission (1982), was conducted.[16] The inquiry found that the Israeli Defense Forces were indirectly responsible for the massacre since IDF troops held the area.[66] The commission determined that the killings were carried out by a Phalangist unit acting on its own, but its entry was known to Israel and approved by Sharon. Prime Minister Begin was also found responsible for not exercising greater involvement and awareness in the matter of introducing the Phalangists into the camps.
The commission also concluded that Sharon bore personal responsibility[66] "for ignoring the danger of bloodshed and revenge [and] not taking appropriate measures to prevent bloodshed". It said Sharon's negligence in protecting the civilian population of Beirut, which had come under Israeli control, amounted to a dereliction of duty of the minister.[70] In early 1983, the commission recommended the removal of Sharon from his post as defense minister and stated:
We have found ... that the Minister of Defense [Ariel Sharon] bears personal responsibility. In our opinion, it is fitting that the Minister of Defense draw the appropriate personal conclusions arising out of the defects revealed with regard to the manner in which he discharged the duties of his office— and if necessary, that the Prime Minister consider whether he should exercise his authority ... to ... remove [him] from office."[71]
Sharon initially refused to resign as defense minister, and Begin refused to fire him. After a grenade was thrown into a dispersing crowd at an Israeli Peace Now march, killing Emil Grunzweig and injuring 10 others, a compromise was reached: Sharon agreed to forfeit the post of defense minister but stayed in the cabinet as a minister without portfolio.
Sharon's resignation as defense minister is listed as one of the important events of the Tenth Knesset.[72]
In its February 21, 1983 issue, Time published an article implying that Sharon was directly responsible for the massacres.[73] Sharon sued Time for libel in American and Israeli courts. Although the jury concluded that the Time article included false allegations, they found that the magazine had not acted with actual malice and so was not guilty of libel.[74]
On June 18, 2001, relatives of the victims of the Sabra massacre began proceedings in Belgium to have Sharon indicted on alleged war crimes charges.[75] Elie Hobeika, the leader of the Phalange militia who carried out the massacres, was assassinated in January 2002, several months before he was scheduled to testify trial. Prior to his assassination, he had "specifically stated that he did not plan to identify Sharon as being responsible for Sabra and Shatila."[76]
Political downturn and recovery
"I begin with the basic conviction that Jews and Arabs can live together. I have repeated that at every opportunity, not for journalists and not for popular consumption, but because I have never believed differently or thought differently, from my childhood on. ... I know that we are both inhabitants of the land, and although the state is Jewish, that does not mean that Arabs should not be full citizens in every sense of the word." Ariel Sharon, 1989[77]
After his dismissal from the Defense Ministry post, Sharon remained in successive governments as a minister without portfolio (1983–1984), Minister for Trade and Industry (1984–1990), and Minister of Housing Construction (1990–1992). In the Knesset, he was member of the Foreign Affairs and Defense committee (1990–1992) and Chairman of the committee overseeing Jewish immigration from the Soviet Union. During this period he was a rival to then prime minister Yitzhak Shamir, but failed in various bids to replace him as chairman of Likud. Their rivalry reached a head in February 1990, when Sharon grabbed the microphone from Shamir, who was addressing the Likud central committee, and famously exclaimed: "Who's for wiping out terrorism?"[78] The incident was widely viewed as an apparent coup attempt against Shamir's leadership of the party.
In Benjamin Netanyahu's 1996–1999 government, Sharon was Minister of National Infrastructure (1996–98), and Foreign Minister (1998–99). Upon the election of the Barak Labor government, Sharon became leader of the Likud party.
Opposition to the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia
Ariel Sharon criticised the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 as an act of "brutal interventionism".[79] Sharon said both Serbia and Kosovo have been victims of violence. He said prior to the current Yugoslav campaign against Kosovo Albanians, Serbians were the targets of attacks in the Kosovo province. "Israel has a clear policy. We are against aggressive actions. We are against hurting innocent people. I hope that the sides will return to the negotiating table as soon as possible." During the crisis, Elyakim Haetzni said the Serbs should be the first to receive Israeli aid. "There are our traditional friends," he told Israel Radio."[80] It was suggested that Sharon may have supported the Yugoslav position because of the Serbian population's history of saving Jews during the holocaust.[81] On Sharon's death, Serbian minister Aleksandar Vulin stated: The Serbian people will remember Sharon for opposing the 1999 NATO bombing campaign against the former Yugoslavia and advocating respect for sovereignty of other nations and a policy of not interfering with their internal affairs.[82]
Campaign for Prime Minister, 2000–01
On September 28, 2000, Sharon and an escort of over 1,000 Israeli police officers visited the Temple Mount complex, site of the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque, the holiest place in the world to Jews and the third holiest site in Islam. Sharon declared that the complex would remain under perpetual Israeli control. Palestinian commentators accused Sharon of purposely inflaming emotions with the event to provoke a violent response and obstruct success of delicate ongoing peace talks. On the following day, a large number of Palestinian demonstrators and an Israeli police contingent confronted each other at the site. According to the U.S. State Department, "Palestinians held large demonstrations and threw stones at police in the vicinity of the Western Wall. Police used rubber-coated metal bullets and live ammunition to disperse the demonstrators, killing 4 persons and injuring about 200." According to the government of Israel, 14 policemen were injured.[citation needed]
Sharon's visit, a few months before his election as Prime Minister, came after archeologists claimed that extensive building operations at the site were destroying priceless antiquities. Sharon's supporters claim that Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian National Authority planned the Second Intifada months prior to Sharon's visit.[83][84][85] They state that Palestinian security chief Jabril Rajoub provided assurances that if Sharon did not enter the mosques, no problems would arise. They also often quote statements by Palestinian Authority officials, particularly Imad Falouji, the P.A. Communications Minister, who admitted months after Sharon's visit that the violence had been planned in July, far in advance of Sharon's visit, stating the intifada "was carefully planned since the return of (Palestinian President) Yasser Arafat from Camp David negotiations rejecting the U.S. conditions".[86] According to the Mitchell Report,
the government of Israel asserted that the immediate catalyst for the violence was the breakdown of the Camp David negotiations on 25 July 2000 and the "widespread appreciation in the international community of Palestinian responsibility for the impasse." In this view, Palestinian violence was planned by the PA leadership, and was aimed at "provoking and incurring Palestinian casualties as a means of regaining the diplomatic initiative."
The Mitchell Report found that
the Sharon visit did not cause the Al-Aqsa Intifada. But it was poorly timed and the provocative effect should have been foreseen; indeed, it was foreseen by those who urged that the visit be prohibited. More significant were the events that followed: The decision of the Israeli police on 29 September to use lethal means against the Palestinian demonstrators.
In addition, the report stated,
Accordingly, we have no basis on which to conclude that there was a deliberate plan by the PA [Palestinian Authority] to initiate a campaign of violence at the first opportunity; or to conclude that there was a deliberate plan by the GOI [Government of Israel] to respond with lethal force.[87]
The Or Commission, an Israeli panel of inquiry appointed to investigate the October 2000 events,
criticised the Israeli police for being unprepared for the riots and possibly using excessive force to disperse the mobs, resulting in the deaths of 12 Arab Israeli, one Jewish and one Palestinian citizens.
Prime Minister (2001–06)
President Bush and Prime Minister Sharon, White House , April 2004
After the collapse of Barak's government, Sharon was elected Prime Minister on 6 February 2001, defeating Barak 62 percent to 38 percent.[16] Sharon's senior adviser was Raanan Gissin. In his first act as prime minister, Sharon invited the Labor Party to join in a coalition with Likud.[16] After Israel was struck by a wave of suicide bombings in 2002, Sharon decided to launch Operation Defensive Shield and began the construction of a barrier around the West Bank. A survey conducted by Tel Aviv University's Jaffe Center in May 2004 found that 80% of Jewish Israelis believed that the Israel Defense Forces had succeeded in militarily countering the Al-Aqsa Intifada.[88]
The election of the more pro-Russian Sharon, as well as the more pro-Israel Vladimir Putin, led to an improvement in Israel–Russia relations.[89]
In September 2003, Sharon became the first prime minister of Israel to visit India, saying that Israel regarded India as one of the most important countries in the world. Some analysts speculated on the development of a three-way military axis of New Delhi, Washington, D.C. and Jerusalem.[90]
On July 20, 2004, Sharon called on French Jews to emigrate from France to Israel immediately, in light of an increase in antisemitism in France (94 antisemitic assaults were reported in the first six months of 2004, compared to 47 in 2003). France has the third-largest Jewish population in the world (about 600,000 people). Sharon observed that an "unfettered anti-Semitism" reigned in France. The French government responded by describing his comments as "unacceptable", as did the French representative Jewish organization CRIF, which denied Sharon's claim of intense anti-Semitism in French society. An Israeli spokesperson later claimed that Sharon had been misunderstood. France then postponed a visit by Sharon. Upon his visit, both Sharon and French President Jacques Chirac were described as showing a willingness to put the issue behind them.[citation needed]
Unilateral disengagement
In September 2001, Sharon stated for the first time that Palestinians should have the right to establish their own land west of the Jordan River.[16] In May 2003, Sharon endorsed the Road Map for Peace put forth by the United States, European Union, and Russia, which opened a dialogue with Mahmud Abbas, and announced his commitment to the creation of a Palestinian state in the future.
He embarked on a course of unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, while maintaining control of its coastline and airspace. Sharon's plan was welcomed by both the Palestinian Authority and Israel's left wing as a step towards a final peace settlement. However, it was greeted with opposition from within his own Likud party and from other right wing Israelis, on national security, military, and religious grounds.
Disengagement from Gaza
On December 1, 2004, Sharon dismissed five ministers from the Shinui party for voting against the government's 2005 budget. In January 2005, Sharon formed a national unity government that included representatives of Likud, Labor, and Meimad and Degel HaTorah as "out-of-government" supporters without any seats in the government (United Torah Judaism parties usually reject having ministerial offices as a policy). Between August 16 and 30, 2005, Sharon controversially expelled 9,480 Jewish settlers from 21 settlements in Gaza and four settlements in the northern West Bank. Once it became clear that the evictions were definitely going ahead, a group of conservative Rabbis, led by Yosef Dayan, placed an ancient curse on Sharon known as the Pulsa diNura, calling on the Angel of Death to intervene and kill him. After Israeli soldiers bulldozed every settlement structure except for several former synagogues, Israeli soldiers formally left Gaza on September 11, 2005 and closed the border fence at Kissufim. While his decision to withdraw from Gaza sparked bitter protests from members of the Likud party and the settler movement, opinion polls showed that it was a popular move among most of the Israeli electorate, with more than 80 percent of Israelis backing the plans.[91] On September 27, 2005, Sharon narrowly defeated a leadership challenge by a 52–48 percent vote. The move was initiated within the central committee of the governing Likud party by Sharon's main rival, Benjamin Netanyahu, who had left the cabinet to protest Sharon's withdrawal from Gaza. The measure was an attempt by Netanyahu to call an early primary in November 2005 to choose the party's leader.
Founding of Kadima
On November 21, 2005, Sharon resigned as head of Likud, and dissolved parliament to form a new centrist party called Kadima ("Forward"). November polls indicated that Sharon was likely to be returned to the prime ministership. On December 20, 2005, Sharon's longtime rival Netanyahu was elected his successor as leader of Likud.[92] Following Sharon's incapacitation, Ehud Olmert replaced Sharon as Kadima's leader, for the nearing general elections. Likud, along with the Labor Party, were Kadima's chief rivals in the March 2006 elections.
Sharon's stroke occurred a few months before he had been expected to win a new election and was widely interpreted as planning on "clearing Israel out of most of the West Bank", in a series of unilateral withdrawals.[7][8][9]
In the elections, which saw Israel's lowest-ever voter turnout of 64 percent[93] (the number usually averages on the high 70%), Kadima, headed by Olmert, received the most Knesset seats, followed by Labor. The new governing coalition installed in May 2006 included Kadima, with Olmert as Prime Minister, Labor (including Amir Peretz as Defense Minister), the Pensioners' Party (Gil), the Shas religious party, and Israel Beytenu.
Alleged fundraising irregularities and Greek island affair
During the latter part of his career, Sharon was investigated for alleged involvement in a number of financial scandals, in particular, the Greek Island Affair and irregularities of fundraising during the 1999 election campaign. In the Greek Island Affair, Sharon was accused of promising (during his term as Foreign Minister) to help Israeli businessman David Appel in his development project on a Greek island in exchange for large consultancy payments to Sharon's son Gilad. The charges were later dropped due to lack of evidence. In the 1999 election fundraising scandal, Sharon was not charged with any wrongdoing, but his son Omri, a Knesset member at the time, was charged and sentenced in 2006 to nine months in prison.
To avoid a potential conflict of interest in relation to these investigations, Sharon was not involved in the confirmation of the appointment of a new attorney general, Menahem Mazuz, in 2005.
On December 10, 2005, Israeli police raided Martin Schlaff's apartment in Jerusalem. Another suspect in the case was Robert Nowikovsky, an Austrian involved in Russian state-owned company Gazprom's business activities in Europe.[94][95][96][97]
According to Haaretz, "The $3 million that parachuted into Gilad and Omri Sharon's bank account toward the end of 2002 was transferred there in the context of a consultancy contract for development of kolkhozes (collective farms) in Russia. Gilad Sharon was brought into the campaign to make the wilderness bloom in Russia by Getex, a large Russian-based exporter of seeds (peas, millet, wheat) from Eastern Europe. Getex also has ties with Israeli firms involved in exporting wheat from Ukraine, for example. The company owns farms in Eastern Europe and is considered large and prominent in its field. It has its Vienna offices in the same building as Jurimex, which was behind the $1-million guarantee to the Yisrael Beiteinu party."[98]
On December 17, police announced that they had found evidence of a $3 million bribe paid to Sharon's sons. Shortly after the announcement, Sharon suffered a stroke.[94]
Illness, incapacitation and death (2006–14)
"I love life. I love all of it, and in fact I love food." —Ariel Sharon, 1982[4]
Sharon suffered from obesity from the 1980s and also had suspected chronic high blood pressure and high cholesterol – at 170 cm (5 ft 7 in) tall, he was reputed to weigh 115 kg (254 lb).[99] Stories of Sharon's appetite and obesity were legendary in Israel. He would often joke about his love of food and expansive girth.[100] His staff car would reportedly be stocked with snacks, vodka, and caviar.[4] In October 2004 when asked why he did not wear a bulletproof vest despite frequent death threats, Sharon smiled and replied, "There is none that fits my size".[101] He was a daily consumer of cigars and luxury foods. Numerous attempts by doctors, friends, and staff to impose a balanced diet on Sharon were unsuccessful.[102]
Sharon was hospitalized on December 18, 2005, after suffering a minor ischemic stroke. During his hospital stay, doctors discovered a heart defect requiring surgery and ordered bed rest pending a cardiac catheterization scheduled for January 5, 2006. Instead, Sharon immediately returned to work and suffered a hemorrhagic stroke on January 4, the day before surgery. After two surgeries lasting 7 and 14 hours, doctors stopped the bleeding in Sharon's brain, but were unable to prevent him from entering into a coma.[103] Subsequent media reports indicated that Sharon had been diagnosed with cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA) during his December hospitalisation. Hadassah Hospital Director Shlomo Mor-Yosef declined to respond to comments that the combination of CAA and blood thinners after Sharon's December stroke might have caused his more serious subsequent stroke.[104]
Ehud Olmert became Acting Prime Minister the night of Sharon's second stroke, while Sharon was only officially in office. Knesset elections followed in March, with Olmert and Sharon's Kadima party winning a plurality. The next month, the Israeli Cabinet declared Sharon permanently incapacitated and Olmert officially became Interim Prime Minister in office on April 14, 2006 until his new established government made him Prime Minister in his own right on 4 May.
Sharon underwent a series of subsequent surgeries related to his state. In May 2006, he was transferred to a long-term care facility in Sheba Medical Center. In July of that year, he was briefly taken to the hospital's intensive care unit to be treated for bacteria in his blood, before returning to the long-term care facility on November 6, 2006. Sharon would remain at Sheba Medical Center until his death.[105][106][107] Medical experts indicated that his cognitive abilities had likely been destroyed by the stroke.[108][109][110] His condition worsened from late 2013, and Sharon suffered from renal failure on January 1, 2014.[111][112]
After spending eight years in a coma, Sharon died at 14:00 local time (12:00 UTC) on January 11, 2014.[113][114] Sharon's state funeral was held on January 13 in accordance with Jewish burial customs, which require that interment takes place as soon after death as possible. His body lay in state in the Knesset Plaza from January 12 until the official ceremony, followed by a funeral held at the family's ranch in the Negev Desert. Sharon was buried beside his wife, Lily.[115][116][117]
Personal life
Sharon was married twice, to two sisters, Margalit and Lily Zimmerman, who were from Romania. Sharon met Margalit in 1947 when she was 16, while she was tending a vegetable field, and married her in 1953, shortly after becoming a military instructor. Margalit was a supervisory psychiatric nurse.[118] They had one son, Gur. Margalit died in a car accident in May 1962 and Gur died in October 1967, aged 11, after a friend accidentally shot him while the two children were playing with a rifle at the Sharon family home.[119][120][121] After Margalit's death, Sharon married her younger sister, Lily. They had two sons, Omri and Gilad, and six grandchildren.[122] Lily Sharon died of lung cancer in 2000.[123]
Sharon's sister, Yehudit (Dita) married Dr. Shmuel Mandel. In the 1950s, the couple permanently left Israel and emigrated to the United States. This caused a permanent rift in the family. Shmuel and Vera Scheinerman were greatly hurt by their daughter's choice to leave Israel. As a result, Vera Scheinerman willed only a small part of her estate to Dita, an act which enraged her. At one point, Dita decided to return to Israel, but after Vera was informed by the Israel Lands Administration that it would not be legally possible to split the family property between Ariel and Dita, and informed her that she would not be able to build a home there, Dita, believing she was being lied to, permanently cut her family in Israel off, and refused to attend the funerals of her mother and sister-in-law. She reestablished contact after Sharon's stroke. Sharon's sister has rarely been mentioned in biographies of him: he himself rarely acknowledged her and only mentioned her twice in his autobiography.[124][125]
Recognition
A $250 million park named for Ariel Sharon is under construction outside Tel Aviv. When complete, the Ariel Sharon Park will be three times the size of New York's Central Park and introduce many new ecological technologies. A 50,000-seat amphitheatre is also planned as a national concert venue.[126][127]
In the Negev desert, the IDF is currently building its city of training bases, Camp Ariel Sharon. In total, a NIS 50 billion project,[128] the city of bases is named after Ariel Sharon, the largest active construction project in Israel, it is to become the largest IDF base in Israel.
References
Further reading |
As Instagram reaches for the next plateau of user adoption, it’s undergoing a transformation from a curated photography platform into a public and private visual messaging service. This was demonstrated handily by its introduction of video last week in an effort to triage the effect that apps like Vine and Snapchat are having on its new endeavor.
Instagram began as a way to share photographs quickly and beautifully based around a particular location or event. As the early adopters took control, it began to take on the characteristics of a curated photography community. Power users with beautiful feeds of photographs dominated the user counts, followed by the news hounds posting images of breaking stories and then celebrities racking up massive counts with the selfie sauce.
But the next entrants into the Instagram universe were the most important. These were the teens who use it as a messaging platform, wantonly, with no regard whatsoever for ‘memories’ or ‘photographic integrity’ or even keeping their images for that matter. They post messages as text on a square page or photo, they post screenshots, they post anything and everything BUT photographs as they use the service to communicate with their groups of friends.
Some teens actually delete their streams, keeping only a few images or none at all to avoid Instagram ‘owning’ their stuff. They were, in fact, hacking Instagram to be just as ephemeral as the much touted Snapchat. And they were doing it all in the confines of what was ostensibly a sacred repository of cherished moments.
To illustrate, here is my feed:
And here is a completely random feed I came across while surfing hashtags:
Instagram has no need to be Vine (or even Facebook), though its new video feature really couldn’t be much more similar. In fact, ‘Instagram vs. Vine’ is a silly debate, as it’s the strengths of their respective networks that will determine their success, not which one has a better ‘video camera’.
What it does need is to be the messaging platform for its next several hundred million users, and that’s where video support and increased hashtag leverage comes in. Media content and hashtags are where the data is, that’s where the advertising opportunities are, and that’s where the necessary tween users are. Instagram videos are, as it‘s been pointed out, just about the right length for commercials.
Unfortunately for me, this is exactly the opposite of the way that I use Instagram. I like to curate moments of fantasy to share with my friends and those who choose to follow me. They’re bits and bobbles of my life that I find interesting enough to capture carefully and share sparingly. I don’t share there because of the filters — only one in ten of my photos now use filters — I do it because all of my friends are there to like them and my mom subscribes on Flipboard. And when I browse through my feed, it’s typically enjoyable, beautiful and inspiring.
Now, with video support, I’m forced to watch people who are much better photographers than videographers share poorly composed clips. And even when I toggle the noise off, my feed is still full of blurry, grainy thumbnails that pollute my otherwise gorgeous stream of images. There are a couple of conciliatory measures that could be taken, like allowing users to filter out video content entirely, letting posters choose a photograph as their video cover or adding a separate tab for just videos. But I don’t think any of those are very likely.
I think that a wonderful compromise would have been a recording feature that produced gifs instead of videos. I can even imagine Instagram founder Kevin Systrom walking out on stage to announce it.
“We could have done video but we wanted to do something uniquely Instagram. You call them gifs,” he says, “we call them Moving Photos. We’ve got 13 new gif filters too, including Scorsese, Muybridge, Spielberg, Jeunet and Fellini.”
A gif adds the motion necessary to expand the Instagram formula outwards without losing its nostalgic patina. Alas, that particular addition to Instagram’s network is not to be, as it heads off into the marker felt, emoji-heavy and screenshot-filled tween sunset.
Image Credit: Noah R.
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(CNN) Bobby Brooks decided early on not to make his sexuality a focal point of his campaign for Texas A&M University student body president.
He didn't need to. The 21-year-old junior has been openly gay since freshman year and served as executive vice president of diversity for the past year.
A proud Aggie, he wanted fellow students to judge him on his campaign promises to improve student services, such as dining and transportation, and student-faculty relations.
"I was open and out if anyone asked me but I didn't talk about it in my campaign," he told CNN. "I decided to celebrate it afterward so people would focus on the fact that I was the most qualified."
His moment came Monday when the school declared him the next student body president, making him the first openly gay student to occupy the post.
"Bobby Brooks is a respected leader on the campus and he is going to represent people of all different backgrounds -- 66,000 students," Texas A&M spokeswoman Amy B. Smith told CNN.
Others, however, made his sexuality an issue in the hotly contested election.
Destined to be an Aggie
Brooks has been an Aggie since the day he was born. His father, a US Army veteran and A&M alum, made sure of it.
Still, growing up in the conservative central Texas town of Belton he knew he was different and feared what it could mean for him.
"I was very nervous; I was afraid of myself," he said. "I used to just think it would go away, and I'd be fine one day. It was a very intense form of self-suppression."
He began to embrace his sexuality while studying abroad in France the summer before freshman year. He spoke in French to come out to his best friend: "Je suis gay," he recalls saying.
He suspected his mother knew and she eventually confirmed it, thanking him for being honest with her, he said. He was more worried about his father and let his mother share the news with him.
"Moms always know," he said. "I was nervous about my dad and he was very accepting."
When it came time to choose a school he said there was no question he would go to College Station, the state's oldest public school with a prominent Corps of Cadet program, though Brooks is not enrolled in it.
"I was sucked in by the spirit since the day I was born," he said. "There is no way I could have gone anywhere else."
This fall, for the first time since 2011, Texas A&M was not included in the Princeton Review's annual ranking of schools unfriendly to LGBT students. But he never worried about facing prejudice at the school.
He chooses his words carefully in describing campus climate toward the LGBT community.
"Most Aggies are very accepting but there are a few that have a negative view of people that are different than they are," he said.
A close election
The election concluded in February with Brooks coming in second with 4,214 votes, or 29% of ballots cast. The frontrunner, who earned 4,977 votes, was disqualified amid allegations of voter irregularities and appealed the decision twice before Brooks was declared winner.
During the appeals process, Brooks said people called him homophobic slurs in public, in one instance bringing a friend to tears.
He referenced the slurs in a Facebook post after his win. But he never lost sight of his school pride.
"I can't express enough wholehearted thanks to my family who encouraged my dreams, to my campaign team who sacrificed countless hours of free time, to every friend who smiled and hugged me when I shared this seemingly ridiculous idea, or to every person who searched me out to share their vision of how to make Texas A&M the best university in the world.
"To those of you who spoke poorly about me based upon my sexual orientation or personal religion (and talk gets around, my friends), I forgive you. I really do. To those of you who would make secret deals and meetings about our campus and our students, I implore you to not be lost in pride and to remember who it is that we are here to serve.
"I couldn't do this for any other university; Texas A&M has always had my heart, and it always will. I'm ready to get to work, Texas A&M. Are you?" |
Last week, I identified some notable African onomastic (onomastics is the science of personal names) influences in Gullah personal names. This week, I highlight a few African lexical influences in the Gullah English dialect. But before I do that, I'd like draw the reader's attention to the fact that Clarence Thomas, the only black person in the US Supreme Court and the second black person to ever be appointed to the US Supreme Court after Thurgood Marshall, spoke Gullah as a child-and still speaks it whenever he so desires.
In 2000, according to the New York Times of December 14, 2000, he told a 16-year-old high school student that his remarkable reticence in the Supreme Court and else has roots that go back to his childhood. As a child, he said, he was taunted by his peers and teachers for speaking his Gullah English dialect (which he said was more popularly known as Geechee in Savanah, Georgia, where he grew up) or for allowing Gullah influences to creep into his standard spoken English.
"When I was 16, I was sitting as the only black kid in my class, and I had grown up speaking a kind of a dialect. It's called Geechee. Some people call it Gullah now, and people praise it now," he said."But they used to make fun of us back then. It's not standard English. When I transferred to an all-white school at your age, I was self-conscious, like we all are... . And the problem was that I would correct myself midsentence. I was trying to speak standard English. I was thinking in standard English but speaking another language. So I learned that - I just started developing the habit of listening... . I didn't ask questions in college or law school. And I found that I could learn better just listening." Perhaps he meant to say he thought in Gullah and tried to translate his thoughts into Standard English and couldn't help the episodic, involuntary intrusions of Gullah.
Michelle Obama is also said to be descended from Gullah ancestors on his paternal side, although neither she nor her parents speak, or ever spoke, Gullah because their forebears left the Sea Islands many generations ago. It was her great-great-grandfather, Jim Robinson, according to some accounts, who spoke Gullah.
In the space I have, I can't possibly write about the hundreds of African words that have survived in the Gullah language when Dr. Lorenzo Turner recorded them in the 1930s and 1940s, soI list only a sample here.
1. "Agogo." Many Yoruba speakers recognize this word as the name for a bell or a bell-shaped metal musical instrument in their language. In Gullah, it means a cowbell, that is, a bell hung around the neck of a cow to make finding it easy. In modern times agogo is also used in Yoruba and other languages, such as Baatonu, to mean a clock, which is decidedly a semantic extension that derives from the notion of a bell as a time marker.
2. "Amin." Gullah people intersperse their supplications with "amin" instead of the English "amen." Amin is, of course, the Arabic version of the Hebrew "amen," which has been exported to and domesticated in English. It means "so be it" in both Hebrew and Arabic. The Gullah use the Arabic version of the word during their (Christian) prayers because that was the version passed on to them by their West African Muslim ancestors.
3. "Bakra." This Gullah word for "white man" is derived from "mbakara," the Annang/Efik/Ibibio word for white man. (Annang, Efik, and Ibibio are mutually intelligible dialects of the same language in Nigeria's deep south.)Turner said Igbo people also use "mbakara" to mean "white man." That's not entirely accurate. The Igbo word for white man is "ocha," but it is entirely possible that because Igbo, Annang, Efik, and Ibibio people are geographic and cultural cousins, Igbos understood-and even used-mbakarato mean white people in the 1930s when Turner conducted research for his book. Interestingly, many black people in the Caribbean Islands also usesome version of "mbakara"-such as buckra, bacra, andbuckaroo-to refer to white people. In some Texas and California communities in the United States, buckaroo and bucheroo are also used to mean a "cowboy."
4."Be the groun." This is an agricultural register in the Gullah dialect. It means to get the ground ready for farming, where "be" means "to clean, to remove debris." Turner discovered that in Wolof, a Niger-Congo language spoken in Senegal, the Gambia, and parts of Mauritania, "bei" means to "cultivate, to prepare ground for planting."
Because of the phonetic and orthographic similarities between the Wolof "bei," which is rendered as "be" in Gullah, and the English "be," "be the groun" used to be thought of as an incompetent attempt to speak Standard English. Thanks to Turner, we now know that the expression has its own Wolof-inflected syntactic and sematic logic independent of Standard English.
5. "Bidibidi." This means "small bird" or "small chicken" in Gullah. It is derived, according to Turner, from Kongo, a Niger-Congo language spoken in Angola (from where about 39 percent of Gullah people came, as I pointed out two weeks ago) and the Congo, where it also means small bird or small chicken. White linguists who studied Gullah had dismissed this word as "baby talk" for "small bird" because of the phonetic-and accidental semantic-affinities between "biddy" (the informal English word for small bird or fowl) and bidibidi.
6. "Da or dada." In Gullah, "da" and "dada" are used interchangeably to mean "mother, nurse, an elderly woman." Turner found parallels for these words in Ewe (spoken in Togo, Ghana, and Benin Republic) where "da" and "dada" mean mother or elder sister. Notice that in Igbo "ada" means "eldest daughter."
7. "Done for fat." Earlier researchers had thought that this Gullah expression meant "excessively fat." They thought the "done for" in the expression was an intensifier for "fat," which they said merely suggested that the Gullah people meant fat people were "done for," that is, doomed to die. But Lorenzo Turner's painstaking research shows us that "done for" is actually the phonetic Anglicization of "danfa," which is the Vai word for fat. Vai is a Niger-Congo language of the Mande branch spoken by a little over 100,000 people in what is now Liberia and Sierra Leone. So, basically, the Gullah people combined the Vai and the English words for the same condition- for emphasis. It should actually have been correctly written as "danfa fat."
8. "Dede." This means "correct, exact, exactly" in Gullah. Turner compared it with the Yoruba "dede" and the Hausa daidai (which he wrote as "deidei"), which also mean "correct, exact, exactly." In Kongo, dedede also means "similarity, correspondence." In my language, Baatonu, like in Yoruba, dede means "correct, exact, exactly."
9. Fulfulde counting system. One of the discoveries that pleasantly shocked me is the realization that the Gullah people still retain several Fulani numerals in their language. In Gullah (as in Fulfulde with only slight variations in accent and spelling), one is go, two is didi, five is je, six is jego, seven is jedidi, eight is jetati, nine is jenai, ten is sapo, eleven is sapo go, twelve is sapodidi, thirteen is sapotati, fourteen is saponai, fifteen is sapo je, sixteen is sapojego, seventeen is sapojedidi, eighteen is sapojetati, nineteen is sapojenai, etc.
The Gullah people who shared this counting system with Turner in the 1930s had no clue from which African language they inherited this counting system. My sense is that it was passed down to them from some of their Senegambian Fulani ancestors. Note that I wrote these words exactly as Turner wrote them. When I searched online Fulfulde dictionaries, I found slight variations in the modern spellings of these numerals, but it's remarkable, nonetheless, that the Fulfulde counting system has survived among the Gullah after more than 300 years of separation from its original source.
10. A reverse influence: In a chapter of my book,Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World, I discussed the African heritage of common English words and expressions, which entered the language through so-called African American Vernacular English (AMVE). I pointed out that some expressions/words started out as African-derived Gullah dialectal expressions, made their way to demotic African-American speech, and then to global conversational English through what I called "pop-cultured-induced linguistic osmosis." At other times, certain conventional colloquial (American English) expressions (such as "my bad," "to bad-mouth someone," "do your own thing," etc.) began life as calque formations from West African languages in African-American English before mutating to mainstream English. This is also true of many everyday words like "tote," "jitters," "phony," etc.
From reading Turner's book, I've discovered African-derived English words like "yam" (from the Mandingo yam or yambi, the Ga (Ghana)yamu), tote (meaning to carry), etc. entered English by way of Gullah.
To be concluded next week |
Our wealth has only grown since the carbon tax
Updated
Despite the dire warnings about the carbon tax, Australia's economy is still growing, creating jobs and registering a quite stunning lift in wealth, writes Stephen Koukoulas.
The carbon price has been a dud. A dud that has supposedly been fuelling an inflation blowout and is wrecking the economy.
News on Wednesday that the annual inflation rate has been a miserly 2.4 per cent in the 12 months since the carbon price was introduced puts paid, once and for all, to the claims that it was going to be an oppressive addition to cost of living pressures.
Furthermore, since the price on carbon came into effect, more than half a trillion dollars has been added to the combined value of housing and stocks listed on the Australian Securities Exchange. That is $500,000,000,000.00, or the equivalent of $22,000 for every man, woman and child, all of which has accrued in just over a year.
And this half a trillion dollar does not include dividends, in the case of stocks, or actual and imputed rent on dwellings. Dividend payments on stocks over that time are around an additional $65 billion or so.
This has been a period of stunning wealth creation in Australia, and more notable given many of the high-profile predictions that the introduction of a price on carbon would have on the economy.
Indeed, most of the high-profile doomsayers were in the leadership group of the Liberal and National Parties.
Opposition Leader Tony Abbott was forecasting that the carbon price would "act as a wrecking ball across the economy" or be an "absolutely catastrophic", and would "wipe out jobs big time" with towns like Whyalla "wiped off the map" because of it. Not only that, but it would create "ghost towns" and "discourage investment" in mining.
Shadow treasurer Joe Hockey was similarly alarmist, suggesting, "It's going to rip the heart and soul out of small business and families."
The half a trillion dollar lift in the stock market and house prices reflects a 23 per cent lift in the ASX since 1 July 2012 which had added approximately $275 billion to the value of stocks, while a 5.1 per cent rise in house prices has added approximately $235 billion to the value of housing over the same timeframe.
This is hardly the stuff of an economic wrecking ball or outcomes that are ripping the heart out of businesses and families. On the contrary, it is a stunning boost.
Mr Abbott also noted that "every time you buy an apple, buy a banana, you pay under Julia Gillard's carbon tax". The recently released inflation data shows fruit prices rose 0.2 per cent in the year to the June quarter 2013, which means that the price of a kilo of apples or bananas has risen by around 1 cent over the past year.
In terms of the jobs results, total employment has risen by 160,400 since the carbon price commenced, which again stands in contrast to the claims from the fear mongers.
Mr Abbott noted that "the truth about this carbon tax is that it's bad for business, it's bad for jobs".
The bottom line of all of this is that the economy is still growing, creating jobs and registering a quite stunning lift in wealth in the period since carbon was priced.
Also important is the recent policy decision of the government to move to an emissions trading scheme a year earlier than scheduled. Treasurer Bowen has estimated that this will cut the inflation rate by 0.5 per cent in 2014-15.
Carbon pricing has had almost no impact on the macroeconomy and inflation remains very low. If it were a "wrecking ball", none of these outcomes would have been recorded.
And it is also worth noting that because of carbon pricing, emissions are falling and renewable energy generation is growing, which is exactly what the policy was meant to do!
It is a near perfect policy for a substantial problem.
Which begs the question: Why change it?
Stephen Koukoulas is a Research Fellow at Per Capita, a progressive think tank. View his full profile here.
Topics: tax, climate-change
First posted |
An 1868 lithograph caricaturing a woman with a Grecian bend.
The Grecian bend was a term applied first to a stooped posture[1] which became fashionable c. 1820,[2] named after the gracefully-inclined figures seen in the art of ancient Greece. It was also the name of a dance move introduced to polite society in America just before the American Civil War. The "bend" was considered very daring at the time.[3]
The stoop or the silhouette created by the fashion in women's dress for corsets, crinolettes and bustles by 1869 was also called the Grecian bend.[4][5][6] Contemporary illustrations often show a woman with a large bustle and a very small parasol, bending forward.
The term was also given to those who suffered from decompression sickness, or "the bends", due to working in caissons during the building of the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City.[7] The name was given because afflicted individuals characteristically arched their backs in the same manner as the then popular "Grecian bend" fashion.[8]
Appearance in popular music [ edit ]
There were many songs published with "Grecian Bend" in their titles. The term "Grecian bend" appears in the song "The Garden Where The Praties Grow" by Johnny Patterson:
Have you ever been in love my boys
Or have you felt the pain?
I'd sooner be in jail myself
Than be in love again
For the girl I loved was beautiful
I'd have you all to know
And I met her in the garden
Where the praties grow
She was just the sort of creature boys
That Nature did intend
To walk right through the world my boys
Without the Grecian bend
Nor did she wear a chignon
I'd have you all to know
And I met her in the garden
Where the praties grow |
The Canadian Press
PILOT BUTTE, Sask. -- Patrick Maze is used to seeing flax and weeds on his farm field east of Regina, but where did the brand-new beautiful house come from?
Maze was driving by his land last week and noticed the home sitting on a big trailer where there should have been nothing but rolling prairie.
After doing a double take, Maze came back later with his border collie, Scarlett, to investigate.
"I thought it was strange," he said. "Seeing a house was quite shocking."
Maze figured either a moving company delivered the home to the property by mistake or the rig that was hauling it had mechanical problems.
In the hope of solving the mystery, he posted some pictures on Facebook and asked his online friends for advice.
Some neighbours also came by who were just as puzzled.
It turns out the house was being transported from Winnipeg to the owners who live just outside of Lumsden, Sask., but there was a problem with permits.
The moving company left the house in the field until the paperwork could be sorted out.
"I know I don't get to keep it,"' Maze laughed. "It is no big deal."
Brenda Robertson, who owns the house with her husband, said it finally showed up on Thursday around noon at their rural property and was being set to be placed on its foundation.
Robertson said the house was originally supposed to arrive in September, but there were delays because of highway construction in Manitoba.
She and her husband are relieved their new home wasn't damaged as it sat in Maze's field for a week, unattended, including on Halloween night.
"I was really excited to get it," she said. "The house is all fine and there was no vandalism."
Robertson said she and Maze have not spoken to each other but are now neighbours in a sense, even though they live about 40 kilometres away from each other.
"It all worked out." |
CLOSE President-elect Donald Trump called for unity in a Thanksgiving address posted on social media. (Nov. 23) AP
President-elect Donald Trump on Nov. 20, 2016. (Photo11: Carolyn Kaster, AP)
WASHINGTON — After a long and bruising political campaign, President-elect Donald Trump Wednesday called in a video for the nation to "speak with one voice and one heart."
"It is my prayer, that on this Thanksgiving, we begin to heal our divisions and move forward as one country, strengthened by a shared purpose and very, very common resolve," said Trump, as he looked directly into the camera.
The video posted on YouTube came after Trump announced the selection Wednesday of two more Cabinet officials — South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley as ambassador to the United Nations and Michigan billionaire Betsy DeVos as secretary of Education.
"We have just finished a long and bruising political campaign," Trump said. "Emotions are raw and tensions just don’t heal overnight. It doesn’t go quickly, unfortunately, but we have before us the chance now to make history together to bring real change to Washington, real safety to our cities, and real prosperity to our communities, including our inner cities. So important to me, and so important to our country. But to succeed, we must enlist the effort of our entire nation."
This week, Trump has walked back some of his most controversial proposals during the campaign against Democrat Hillary Clinton, including a call to have Clinton prosecuted for the use of a private email server while secretary of State.
In a meeting with The New York Times Tuesday, Trump also said he was reconsidering his call to have terrorist suspects waterboarded after he met with retired Marine general James Mattis, who is under consideration to be Defense secretary. Mattis, Trump said, told him he did not find waterboarding valuable in interrogating suspects.
In the video, Trump asked for the support of all Americans to help the nation heal.
"I am asking you to join me in this effort," he said. "It is time to restore the bonds of trust between citizens. Because when America is unified, there is nothing beyond our reach, and I mean absolutely nothing.
"Let us give thanks for all that we have, and let us boldly face the exciting new frontiers that lie ahead."
The president-elect is spending the holiday at his estate Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., before returning to New York over the weekend to resume selecting members of his Cabinet.
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