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Steak and eggs is a pretty awesome combination! When Pre-Brands sent me some of their amazing, tender, grass-fed beef to play around with, I was thrilled! They also requested I come up with a steak and eggs recipe for their fall line up. Um, yeah! I wanted to make something fun, but not too crazy because let’s face it… no one wants to work that hard in the morning Grilling in the morning? Well, yeah. I mean, no shame, I was out on my back porch, 9am on Sunday….in my chonies… grilling. The clean up is easier, and if it’s super hot where you are, it won’t heat up the house. So yes, go all glamping style and grill your damn filet for breakfast. Coffee grounds and steak just work… especially for breakfast… and sage and eggs are my fav combo… so just trust me on this one and get to it. Don’t let the mushroom powder throw you off. You know those dehydrated shiitake mushrooms they sell with Asian foods? Grab those and throw them in your blender or food processor until they are dust!A great umami seasoning. I think Michelle Tam of Nom Nom Paleo coined it Magic Mushroom Powder. It truly is magic! |
UPDATE (5th Feb, 0:45 GMT): CoinJar has clarified that only the iOS version of its new app is available today. Anglo-Australian bitcoin exchange CoinJar has released a new mobile app, now called ‘CoinJar Touch’, saying new user-friendly features will speed up bitcoin payments and attract new users to digital currency. CoinJar’s Samuel Tate said the new app is in response to user requests for transfer in and out of bitcoin on its exchange “on-the-go”, and to manage their payments and contacts lists with greater ease. Users can send instantaneous payments to other CoinJar accounts by using Twitter-style user names instead of bitcoin addresses. CoinJar says it will also pay miners’ fees for payments to addresses outside its own system, speeding up regular payments as well. The system also allows for CoinJar users to make payments and transfers between fiat currency balances (AUD and GBP). They can pay anyone in bitcoin directly from a fiat currency balance, at the company’s posted exchange rate and a 2% fee. CoinJar has offered a fixed-price bitcoin brokerage and merchant services since its foundation in Melbourne in 2013. It recently opened a new headquarters in London and began serving the UK market as well as Australian. Focus on design The new app has been completely redesigned from CoinJar’s original offering, with a slick and responsive interface that looks more like a social network page than an electronic wallet. The aim is to compete not only with other electronic payment systems, but with the physical wallet as well, said Tate. “We’re trying to get as many people as possible using bitcoin through CoinJar, not just getting existing bitcoin users, so we needed to humanise payments for all the consumers who don’t have a clue what bitcoin is.” CoinJar paid a “huge amount of attention” to the design and use of the app to make sure it is easy for anyone to use, he added. There was a focus on making it fast, reliable and as easy to understand as paying with a card. “Any business that isn’t driven by an easy and beautiful user experience will falter. In the bitcoin space especially, this is becoming a real differentiator, so wallets built with this in mind are the ones that will take the market share.” Using the app CoinDesk was able to road-test the app before its release, and can say payments were indeed seamless and quick, especially between CoinJar accounts but also to external parties. Some aspects of the interface, like locating and displaying the user’s own QR code for in-person payments, could probably be made more intuitive. Overall, though, the app is uncomplicated and easy to get used to. Users of iOS devices with Apple’s TouchID feature may use that to log into accounts instead of a PIN. CoinJar Touch is now available on the iOS App Store. Image: Jon Southurst |
A string of complaints by customers charged for Uber trips they say they never took has security experts calling on the ride-hailing company to launch a formal investigation to make sure its databases haven't been breached. After CBC News reported on the story of Laura Hesp, who lives in Toronto but was billed for an Uber ride taken on her account by someone in Poland, several others came forward to report similar experiences. Uber has warned customers incidents like this may be the result of phishing scams, but experts CBC News spoke to think the company should investigate to rule out the possibility that its own databases have been hacked. The stories begin the same way. A person receives an unexpected email confirming an Uber cab is minutes away — except the customer hasn't ordered one and the trip is thousands of kilometres away in another country. George Sfeir, a 49-year-old Toronto man, says he was in his car on the way to his cottage in rural Ontario in July when he got a bill for an Uber ride he never ordered. It was one of six bills he would receive over the span of two days for trips taken in Las Vegas, Des Plaines, Ill., and other American cities that Sfeir says he never visited. Most of the trips ranged in price from $10 to $100. But when he received a bill for a whopping $982 rung up for an Uber trip in Chicago, Sfeir says he began to panic. Since CBC News published a story about a Toronto woman who received a bill for an Uber ride she never took, several other people have come forward with similar stories. Security experts say it could mean Uber's databases have been hacked. (Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters) "That was really scary," he says, adding that at first, even his credit card company didn't believe his story. "When I called MasterCard, they were surprised, saying, 'This can never happen. You need to have had your phone. Are you a scammer?'" It's a familiar story for Gary Mooney. Earlier this month, the 72-year-old was out for dinner with friends in Ontario's Prince Edward County when he got his first bill for a phantom Uber ride. It was one of three invoices he would receive, each for rides taken in Warsaw, Poland. "Being as how I wasn't anywhere near Warsaw, I got immediately suspicious. It looked like Uber had been hacked because I've never had any account … compromised before," Mooney says. Mooney says he received an email from Uber's fraud department offering to cancel the charges, advising that he should change his password. He thought he was alone until he read about Hesp. 'Somebody had to have hacked into Uber' "My feeling is that somebody had to have hacked into Uber … and was able to obtain this information from Uber data files." In each instance, Uber refunded the amounts and cautioned the account holders about the dangers of phishing scams. In a statement to CBC News, Uber said its security teams and automated systems continuously watch the company's network for suspicious activity. "When we detect fraud, including these instances caused by reused passwords or phishing, we work with consumers to quickly secure their accounts and refund unauthorized charges. We recommend riders use unique passwords for their accounts and contact our support team if they believe their accounts have been compromised," the statement said. "That's convenient for them to say, but I was surprised to see this article on CBC News about somebody else who had exactly the same problem," Mooney said. "That seems to suggest a pattern." And while consumers can take steps to protect themselves such as not reusing their passwords, cyber-security expert Daniel Tobok says Uber needs to investigate its own databases. "It's also on Uber to conduct some kind of an official investigation to see if their information was breached," Tobok said. Security expert Daniel Tobuk says the fraudulent fares could be more than just the result of phishing expeditions that snared individuals. He thinks Uber should launch an investigation into its own databases to make sure they haven't been breached. (CBC) After all, the ride-hailing service has been breached before. An investigation by Uber in September 2014 found one of the company's databases was accessed by a third party, leaving the names and driver's licence numbers for approximately 50,000 drivers exposed. The breach also affected up to 200 drivers' banking information and social insurance numbers of up to 100 drivers. Tobok wants to know if any of the information that might have been compromised in the 2014 breach might have been sold on what's known as the dark web, a part of the internet not indexed by search engines, where illicit activity often goes undetected. Uber says the 2014 breach compromised information concerning drivers, not customers, and that the incident is unrelated to the complaints communicated to CBC News. But Tobok wonders if it happened to drivers then, could it happen to customers now? "They need a little bit of homework on their end as well," he says. The executive director of Ryerson University's Privacy and Big Data Institute, Ann Cavoukian, agrees. "To suggest that all of this is from phishing expeditions, I question that," Cavoukian said. On top of that, Cavoukian says, the fact that the bogus trips are taking place overseas raises the question of unauthorized access by Uber operators in other countries to customers' personal information that might then be used for fraudulent rides. "It's incumbent on Uber to figure this out. Get in there and investigate." |
You’re considered a beginner for the first 10 years of your yoga practice. It’s a very humbling experience to say the least. Yoga is about enjoying the gradual unfolding process and being aware of how each pose affects the relationship to your breathing. We tend to hold our breath when we are in a stressful situation. Letting go your tension and just maintaining the flow of breathing helps you get deeper into the pose and quiet your mind. Everybody is different. There’s nothing “messed up” about your back just because it’s more rounded than others. It doesn’t matter that your heels can’t reach the ground when you’re in Downward Dog. I repeat, every-body is different and we are all on our own journey. Your pose doesn’t have to look like the perfection in the drawings or books. Don’t worry about doing everything perfectly. There is no perfect pose. Alignment is important but yoga isn’t about reaching a perfect pose. Be gentle with yourself and don’t try to make your pose pretty. How you treat yourself during your yoga session is how you treat yourself outside of it. Do you rush through your session? Do you immediately give up on a pose after 20 seconds once your feel some pain? Do you have trouble going to a yoga class but once you do, you follow through with strong intentions? Do you push yourself too hard every time? Related: How you do anything is how you do everything. Life is one big pose. Strive to be more ambidextrous from the get-go. You’ll notice one side of your body is sometimes stronger or more flexible than the other. The side that is weaker is the one that needs more time and attention! Note: Practicing ambidexterity is key to making you a better athlete in any sport! Related: Stand Evenly on Both Feet Growth is infinite. No matter if it’s your tenth time doing downward-dog or your thousandth time, you will always discover something new about that stretch. In other words, you could get something out of each pose, no matter what level you are at. As you progress deeper into a pose, it transforms into a different stretch and this process is infinite. Let go your head! When you’re in downward dog, or standing forward bend, simply nod or shake your head to let it fall! Shaking or nodding your head makes your neck immediately surrender to gravity. When you’re in Warrior 1, if your left foot is in the front, your bum will tend to go out toward the left. Move it to the right, draw the inner thighs closer together and you’ll feel a new stretch (possibly the hip flexors). Conversely, if your right foot is the front one, move your butt to the left (toward the midline). When you’re in Warrior 2, look over your fingers and SMILE! This makes any distressful pose become ridiculous. Little earthquakes (tremors) are there to remind you that you are alive when you’re being pushed to the edge. Be Here Now… On Vacation! You may have to do things later but when you’re doing your practice, don’t worry about it. Let your thoughts roll by as you just focus on your breath and stay in the present moment. Treat this hour or two in the studio as a vacation. Yoga Straps are a godsend for beginners. Yoga belts/straps (pictured on the right) allow you to grasp limbs that you couldn’t normally reach and help you hold the pose longer. You get much deeper into a pose and stretch much more effectively with them. I recommend Yoga Accessories 8′ Cotton Straps because they’re long enough for nearly everyone! Hope that helps! Thanks for reading and share this with your friends! |
" " ©Stephen Dunn/ Getty Images While Tiger Woods continues to play professional golf, his career as an endorsement icon was significantly crippled by his cheating scandal. The public consequences of bad romantic decisions are usually in direct relation to the public nature of the people involved. For a really juicy scandal, it's essential that the players have an authoritative or figurehead role in our culture, whether historically or in the current day. Actors on children's shows, politicians at the top of the food chain, monarchs and the heads of dynasties (whether they be Egyptian or Hollywood royalty) are held to a higher standard than the everyman, whose mistakes are simply tawdry. What's interesting about the career-ending public affair is the way we seize upon it. The people society elevates are held to a higher standard, and have much further to fall. In many cases, and increasingly, the popular imagination doesn't even bother to hide the schadenfreude -- pleasure in another's misfortune -- we take from these events, because there is a hidden disappointment we feel when these things are revealed: "If these people are just human, what we were doing worshipping them?" And in the case of politicians, an even more paranoid disappointment: "Who's driving this bus, anyway?" In this article, we'll explore 10 blockbuster scandals -- from history, politics, entertainment and the literary world -- and see what made each of them so sensational and destructive. |
Still? Donald Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch to fill Antonin Scalia’s seat on the Supreme Court on January 31st. According to Politico, Senate Democrats have not been able to figure out how they should respond in the six weeks following the pick, and are “paralyzed” by Gorsuch’s stellar record on the appellate bench: President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee has breezed through more than 70 meetings with senators. Opponents who’ve scoured his record have found little to latch onto. And some Democrats are privately beginning to believe that Gorsuch — barring a blunder at his Senate confirmation hearings next week — will clinch the 60 votes he needs to be approved without a filibuster. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York has been taking the temperature of the Senate Democratic Caucus but hasn’t begun whipping hard against Gorsuch, sources familiar with the matter said. Indeed, despite anger from the Democratic base that senators have cowered from a fight against Trump’s high court pick, the sole strategic decision the Democratic Caucus has made about Gorsuch ahead of his confirmation hearings is to make no decision at all. The problem for Democrats is as obvious as Gorsuch’s qualifications, and it’s that Gorsuch’s qualifications are so obvious. That hasn’t stopped Democrats from hammering Republican nominees to the Supreme Court in the past, such as John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Robert Bork. Gorsuch’s record gives them no real hook for those kinds of attacks on substance, and his personality makes it difficult to find a way to attack him personally, too. The charm offensive on Capitol Hill has been a rousing success. So far, the only opening Democrats have is the Chevron doctrine, which Gorsuch has questioned. In Chevron, the Supreme Court held that where the law has ambiguities, deference has to be granted to federal agencies for interpretation. If Chevron got reversed by a later court more interested in forcing textual application of the law and forcing Congress to address ambiguities, it would cut sharply into the authority of these agencies, on which progressives rely for activist governance. (The irony of this, as Steven Hayward pointed out at Power Line, is that the environmentalists lost in the Chevron decision.) Democrats are expected to hit Gorsuch on Chevron and on the application of stare decisis, as well as the usual issues of abortion and euthanasia, because … that’s all they’ve managed to dig up in six weeks — at least publicly. That esoteric issue won’t keep Americans glued to their TV screens during the confirmation hearings. If that’s all they’ve got, small wonder they’re “paralyzed.” They have no ammo against Gorsuch, and they risk exposing that on national TV if they decide to go all-out against him. That would trigger the use of the nuclear option by Mitch McConnell, and the next nominee will get an even freer pass — and Trump will know he can name anyone for the next opening, as long as Republicans will support him/her. Progressive activists see this too, and worry that Democrats have already thrown in the towel: “There’s a fierce urgency at the grass roots that is not being echoed by the Senate Democrats,” said Ben Wikler, the Washington director for MoveOn, which joined 10 other groups in a letter urging Senate Democrats to, essentially, step it up. “The notion that Democrats should wait until after the hearings to speak their mind is a strategy to win a race by running hard in the last 30 seconds.” Wikler misses the point. Democrats lost this race in November at the presidential and Senate level, the latter thanks to the change in the race rules forced by Harry Reid in November 2013. The only question is whether they run at all in this race, or just offer a default to husband what little political leverage they have for the next opening on the Supreme Court. That’s the real problem, and the source of the paralysis. If you want some legal analysis of Chevron, Steven Hayward suggests this video from NYU law students. Pay special attention to the third verse: |
In Portsmouth, N.H. July 12, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) conceded the Democratic presidential nomination to rival Hillary Clinton and endorsed her. Here's his full speech. (Reuters) Early this morning, before Bernie Sanders made his big speech endorsing Hillary Clinton today in New Hampshire, Sanders’s top policy adviser, Warren Gunnels, sent an email to a few dozen fellow Sanders supporters. “The Senator made the difficult decision not to file minority reports,” Gunnels wrote in the email, which was sent to all of Sanders’s representatives on the Democratic convention Platform Committee and forwarded to this blog. “You should be receiving an e-mail soon from the Senator about the next steps in the political revolution.” This dry language actually amounts to a very significant declaration: What it means is that the Sanders campaign will not further contest the makeup of the Democratic platform at the convention, even though Sanders did not get all the changes to the platform he had hoped for. Previously, the Sanders campaign had intimated that — even after he endorsed Clinton — it would file minority reports indicating his disagreement with various aspects of the Dem platform, which could have perhaps led to continuing disillusionment among his 13 million voters, whom Clinton very much wants to win over starting now. This matters for two reasons: First, it shows that Sanders actually did get a great deal of what he had hoped for into the platform. And second, it suggests that, while there may still be some lingering conflicts over various matters involving rules, the convention will go a lot more smoothly than many had expected — and so will the process of Democratic unity. In his speech endorsing Clinton today, Sanders said pretty much everything Clinton and her campaign could possibly have wanted him to say. He vouched unequivocally for the legitimacy of the outcome of the Democratic nominating contest, a message clearly designed to disabuse his supporters of the notion that the process was rigged. Sanders also declared unequivocally that Clinton would move us in the same direction that he would on may of his key goals, including universal health care, boosting wages, and combating inequality and climate change, an important signal to them that he and Clinton share many of the same broad goals for the country. Sanders also allowed during his speech that there had been large differences between him and Clinton — but, crucially, went on to note that the process of assembling a platform had produced “a significant coming together between the two campaigns.” That declaration — in the context of an allusion to their very real differences — was another key message to supporters, i.e, that the post-primary process has produced real results for Bernie’s movement. Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) and his supporters succeeded in getting their positions on climate change, the minimum wage and health care adopted in the official Democratic Party platform. (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post) And it has. The simple fact is that Sanders, by withholding his endorsement and pushing for changes to the platform, actually had some real successes. There has been a lot of debate around this point, but there is no denying it any longer. In his email to fellow Bernie-ites on the platform committee, Sanders policy director Gunnels summed up their victories this way: Thanks to your efforts, it is now the policy of the Democratic Party to increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, breakup too big to fail banks, pass a 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act, make public colleges and universities tuition free for working families, enact a price on carbon and methane, abolish the death penalty, establish a path toward the legalization of marijuana, expand Social Security, prevent the earned pension benefits of more than 1.5 million Americans from being cut, close loopholes that allow corporations to avoid paying taxes, create millions of jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, make it easier for workers to join unions, end disastrous deportation raids, ban private prisons and detention centers, move to automatic voter registration and the public financing of elections, eliminate super PACs, and pass a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United, among many, many other initiatives. It is often observed that Sanders himself didn’t come up with many of these ideas, and that the party was already moving to the left. But even if that is true, Sanders channeled and directed that energy into concrete changes to the platform. Would they really have happened at all if Sanders had never run? Indeed, these changes are precisely the reason why Sanders has decided not to file minority reports, even though he did not get his way on the Trans Pacific Partnership and on Israel. As the email from Gunnels puts it: As a result of our success and the realization that further platform fights would be portrayed in the corporate media as obstructionist and divisive, the Senator made the very difficult decision not to file minority reports. I know that many of you feel frustrated that we did not win every battle. I feel the same way. But all that means is that we must fight even harder to elect progressives at every level of government who will fight to advance our bold, progressive agenda…. In terms of the convention, there are still more battles to be waged. We are now focusing our attention on changing the rules of the Democratic Party in order to make it easier for progressive challengers to win elections. You should be receiving an e-mail soon from the Senator about the next steps in the political revolution. This hints at how Sanders and his top advisers hope to reconstitute his movement and keep it alive. Rather than stoke further divisions over policy at the convention — which could be counter-productive — Sanders and his people are pocketing their meaningful victories and moving to the next step. In other words, the best hope for converting the Sanders movement into lasting influence is to channel it into electing Democrats to the White House and Congress, and, crucially into putting pressure on them, once in office, to move in the direction of the movement’s priorities. (As the email indicates there could still be potential fights over rules governing future nomination processes, but those will be more procedural in nature.) It is often argued that Sanders’s success in shaping the platform is largely meaningless, because it is not binding on the nominee or the party. And that’s true. But the platform represents a party blueprint, a set of aspirations and principles and ideological goals that activists and organizers can use to measure the performance of party officials against — what Bill Scher calls a “progressive North Star” to use as a guide. There are no guarantees that the Sanders movement will amount to anything over the long term. As John Judis puts it, “political history is littered with dissident campaigns that made a splash but didn’t have much impact after they were over.” But nonetheless, Judis adds, there are indications that Sanders has articulated a broad “framework” that “may set the Democrats eventually on a more visionary and inspiring course – one that isn’t bounded by the shadow of Republican congressional dominance and the business campaign funding that has narrowed the Democratic vision for thirty years or more.” As I have argued, Sanders has attempted to shift our moral and ideological baseline, to get us to more forthrightly acknowledge the profound structural inequities and injustices that riddle our political and economic systems, and to stand more firmly for societal guarantees of a college education, health care, and a retirement with dignity, and for far more robust efforts to fight climate change and boost wages and the economy. Sanders has managed to help create a platform that demonstrates some real elite buy-in with his vision of where that baseline should be set. And as historian Michael Kazin points out, this has been a key ingredient in the eventual success of previous social movements in American history. Whatever the Sanders movement is destined to produce, if anything, the months of bitter politicking and arguing through the primaries and caucuses, and the post-primary process, have had largely positive effects. The often contentious hashing out of differences throughout both, and, now, the overall outcome, have been good for the party, and not, as many feared, destructive. The result is a better, sharper nominee — and a party that is better positioned for a tough general election. |
CLOSE Net neutrality - what does it really mean? Time Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai proposed regulations that would roll back rules protecting net neutrality. (Photo11: Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images) The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission is expected Wednesday to unveil his game plan for revamping net neutrality. Two years ago, the FCC — then supported by President Obama and led by Democrats — passed Open Internet rules that prevented Internet service providers from throttling or blocking content online. But Republican Ajit Pai, who voted against those rules as a commissioner and was named chairman by President Trump three months ago, has made no secret of his desire to replace those regulations. The rules have "had harmful effects on the marketplace," in part by depressing investment by Internet service providers, Pai said last week. The chairman is scheduled to make a speech in Washington Wednesday about the future of Internet regulation. As part of the speech, the chairman is expected to announce the FCC will begin taking public comment on the process to repeal the rules, according to a report from Recode, which cited unnamed persons familiar with the matter. The agency could hold an initial vote on the proposal at the FCC's next meeting May 18, these people told Recode. Conservative-libertarian group FreedomWorks, which opposed the passage of the rules in 2015, and the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council, which has supported the current FCC's regulatory reduction efforts, are hosting Wednesday's event. In recent weeks, Pai has met with representatives of businesses engaged in all facets of the online economy — from ISPs to tech giants such as Facebook — in preparation for the agency's net neutrality revisitation. Last week, Pai met with companies in Silicon Valley to listen to concerns. "I think they were appreciative that I was reaching out and trying to solicit a diversity of views among a diversity of stakeholders," he told reporters after Thursday's April 20 monthly meeting. Related: The NCTA, a trade group that includes as members broadband providers Comcast, Cox and Charter, told Pai that it opposes the current regulations, but "remains open to enforceable and reasonable open Internet protections," in a letter filed two weeks ago with the FCC. They argue the current rules, which use public utility-style regulation authority, squelch investment and innovation. In contrast, the Internet Association — its ranks include Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Netflix — has urged Pai and the FCC to uphold the current regulations. They stress the importance of provisions that prevent ISPs from slowing traffic and favoring their own content, especially as ISPs and mobile broadband providers expand their own libraries of Web sites and streaming channels. AT&T is seeking to acquire Time Warner, while Verizon has acquired AOL and agreed to buy Yahoo's Internet assets; Comcast completed its acquisition of NBCUniversal in 2013. "The Internet industry is uniform in its belief that net neutrality preserves the consumer experience, competition, and innovation online. In other words, existing net neutrality rules should be enforced and kept intact," the group said in its own recent letter. But other tech companies including Cisco have argued that paid prioritization could have benefits for consumers in some cases and should not be prohibited. Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins hosted Pai's meeting with representatives from companies including Apple, Intel, Facebook and Oracle, according to Recode. The chairman's office declined comment. Cisco did not return request for comment. FCC Commissioner and fellow Republican Michael O'Rielly said Thursday the 2015 net neutrality rules were "unnecessary" and that Congress should resolve the issue, which the FCC has been wrestling with for more than a decade. Pai maintains the FCC two years ago went too far. "There’s a reason why our Internet economy has been the envy of the world," he said. "It’s because from the dawn of the Clinton administration going forward until 2015 we had a light-touch regulatory framework that created incredible value for the American consumer." Supporters of the current rules are poised to counter any weakening. Democratic senators and Internet advocates have scheduled a Wednesday morning press conference to remind the public that the issue attracted a record four million public comments prior to the 2015 rules passage. Commissioner Mignon Clyburn and several Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce committee also plan their own Wednesday afternoon event to respond to Pai's expected announcement. Follow USA TODAY reporter Mike Snider on Twitter: @MikeSnider. Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2q3zXdz |
(Updates with Finance Minister comment) By Louise Egan OTTAWA, Jan 12 (Reuters) - Canada should push ahead with efforts to create a national securities regulator without necessarily waiting for consent from provinces opposed to the idea, a government-commissioned panel recommended on Monday. The panel said the global financial crisis highlights the need for a single Canadian regulator that can move with greater speed to address financial instability. “This is a report that speaks the language of modern financial markets,” said Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, who created the panel in February 2008.. Canada is the only developed nation in the world that does not have an overarching regulatory body that oversees capital markets. Instead, it has a patchwork system of 13 provincial and territorial regulators that requires companies to file documents such as prospectuses and financial statements in each jurisdiction separately. Provincial opposition, particularly from French-speaking Quebec, has traditionally hindered efforts to reform the system. “It’s time to give investors a stronger voice with better enforcement and quicker response. It’s time to create a common securities regulator, applying one set of principles, one set of rules, one set of fees,” the panel’s chairman, Tom Hockin, told a Vancouver business group. Critics of the current provincial-regulation system, including Flaherty, argue it adds unfair costs to investors and makes it harder from companies to raise capital. COALITION OF THE WILLING The panel’s report contained model legislation for the creation of a national securities regulator with “willing” provinces, even if there is no unanimous agreement. The panel stressed that such a structure would be strictly temporary. However, it suggests that if after an unspecified period of time, a “sufficient” number of jurisdictions still do not join in, that Ottawa could allow market participants to join the single national regime directly. For example, a company operating in Quebec could choose to be regulated by the national regulator even if Quebec is not participating in the regime and continues to regulate on a provincial basis. Once a market participant has “opted in” to the national regulator, it would be able to undertake a prospectus distribution in any province or territory. If some provinces are still holding out after a two-year transition period has passed following parliamentary passage of the new law, the panel recommends the federal government take unilateral action to impose a new regime. Hockin and Flaherty defended the measures on Monday as good for the whole country, and predicted provinces would sign on. “This is about market participants, about investors. This is not about provincial governments,” Hockin said. The panel cited constitutional experts saying the federal government has the constitutional authority to regulate markets. The report was welcomed by several financial industry groups, which see the current system as needlessly costly and inefficient. “At least it’s defined and it’s feasible. It puts a little discipline into the process it won’t just fizzle out into nothing,” said Ian Russell, president and chief executive of the Investment Industry Association of Canada. “The trick is we have to get the large provinces into this thing.” Ontario — which accounts for about 80 percent of all securities transactions — reiterated its support for a single regulator on Monday. British Columbia gave preliminary support. But the oil-rich Western Canadian province of Alberta said it was remained “steadfastly opposed to a single federal regulator”, which it said would intrude on its jurisdiction. “If this is going to work, the regional differences, different attitudes towards business, different attitudes towards regulation they’re going to have to be ironed out,” said Eric Kirzner, a finance professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. (With additional reporting by Allan Dowd, Natalie Armstrong, writing by Jeffrey Hodgson; editing by Carol Bishopric) |
Paz de la Huerta stars in Nurse 3D. Photo courtesy Brooke Palmer/Lionsgate Something is amiss at the Oscars of porn. More than 100 awards were given out at this year’s show, held in mid-January at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, including those for Movie of the Year, Best Comedy, and Best MILF Release. But careful viewers might have caught a snub that went unnoticed in the adult press. For all its cheerful inclusivity—the show celebrated even more obscure achievements, such as Clever Title of the Year (Cirque du Hole-A)—one genre was left out in the cold. The 31st annual AVN Awards had no “Woody” for 3-D porn. This marks a major shift in porn, if not for 3-D as a whole. It wasn’t so long ago that insiders believed the new technology would be the savior of an industry under siege from free competitors online. The optimism had its start in early 2009: With Avatar on its way to making billions, the San Fernando Valley mobilized for hard-core depth-sploitation. The director of Caligula—the notorious erotic film from 1979—said he was working on a 3-D sequel. One producer started selling stereo-pornography in a package deal with brand-new 3-D TVs, and another started shooting interactive 3-D scenes for viewing on your home computer. (Even Quentin Tarantino had talked of making 3-D porn.) Then in September 2010, Hustler put out its own big-budget, extra-blue version of Avatar—a sexed-up adaptation with naked Na’vi called This Ain’t Avatar XXX 3D. Also in September, AVN announced a brand-new category for its awards show: Best 3D Release. “Adult movie production may never be the same again,” wrote adult-industry reporter and erotic 3-D photographer Mark Kernes. The Avatar parody received the first of those awards in January 2011, and a follow-up by the same director, This Ain’t Ghostbusters XXX 3D, won the 3-D prize in 2012. By 2013, though, Best 3D Release had been relegated to the list of additional awards given out on a different day, like the technical achievements at the real Oscars. (“If you even make a 3-D film, you’ll get nominated,” Kernes told me at the time.) By this year’s ceremony, the prize had vanished altogether. “The main problem is there aren’t a lot of 3-D TVs out there. That’s the biggest hold-back,” Kernes argues. But there are other problems, too. For one thing, the studios had convinced themselves that 3-D DVDs could not be ripped and spread online. Having lost half its business to freebie websites since 2005, executives sought safe harbor in a new video format. But content pirates were not deterred. “The way it was sold to me is that you can’t torrent a 3-D movie,” says porn journalist Gram Ponante, “and of course that’s not true.” Shooting on This Ain’t Avatar took a full week, more than twice the time it takes to shoot most conventional sex films, but the movie sold just 6,000 units, Ponante says, barely enough to make back its production costs. (Ten years ago, the best-selling porn films would sell about 60,000.) The same occurred in mainstream soft-core. In 2010 Piranha 3D made a $60 million profit on topless ultra-gore and a dismembered penis flying off the screen. The sequel, Piranha 3DD, was released in 2012 and grossed just $375,000 in the U.S. An erotic import from China, 3-D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy, got lots of credulous press in 2011 for being the “world’s first ever 3-D porn film” (it wasn’t), but failed to sell that many tickets. And last week saw the release in theaters and streaming video of the latest tent-pole 3-D smut: Nurse 3D, the story of a man-killing, girl-kissing, clothes-not-wearing serial killer whose exploits are somehow neither sexy nor fun. Why is 3-D porn so unloved? The format has long been embraced by films that traffic in sensation, and are more or less indifferent to character or plot. (“Thrills, chills, a lot of dirt,” to steal a slogan from a 3-D horror classic.) Yet what success it’s had hasn’t been so dirty. Data from the MPAA suggest that moviegoers under 25 see twice as many 3-D movies as the rest of us, a fact that seems self-evident when you look at what’s been made and what’s now in production. Most 3-D films are geared toward brains that haven’t yet developed: popcorn action pics (e.g., Need for Speed and Godzilla) and kiddie fare (e.g., Rio 2 and Legends of Oz). Thrills, chills, and some animated parrots. Thirty years ago, trash auteurs were already lamenting the medium’s starchy fate. The 3-D revival in early-’80s horror and sci-fi was disastrously annoying, wrote John Waters in a 1983 cri de coeur for American Film. The gimmick would be much better used for smut, as it had been in Andy Warhol’s sex-filled Flesh for Frankenstein and the hard-core 3-D pictures of the ’60s and ’70s. “Porno, finally, is the only genre to demand the third dimension,” Waters argued. “Remember The Stewardesses? Huge breasts spilling out from the screen. Or Heavy Equipment? Gay male porno with, well, life itself gushing into the audience’s lap.” 3-D porn had begun much earlier, though. As the late Ray Zone describes in his book 3-D Revolution: The History of Modern Stereoscopic Cinema, naughty stereographs were common in the 19th century, and their popularity lasted for 100 years. In the 1890s a gentleman could look at 3-D scenes of women falling off of bicycles, their skirts scandalously aflutter. In the 1940s former silent film star Harold Lloyd started taking thousands of 3-D photos, some nude, of stars like Jayne Mansfield, Marilyn Monroe, and Bettie Paige. (These were finally published in 2004.) And as 3-D films took off in the early 1950s, so too did randy 3-D shorts. A sleazy 1952 feature, A Virgin in Hollywood, had two 3-D inserts—“The Blonde Slave’s Revenge” and “Madonna and Her Bubbles.” The latter is more engaging: A blonde in black knickers and a diaphanous skirt blows bubbles in the air and bats them girlishly toward the camera so they’re popping off the screen. Even Francis Ford Coppola shot some 3-D “nudie-cutie” color inserts in the 1960s. The Stewardesses, an erotic 3-D meditation on the subject of stewardesses, was a major hit when it came out in 1969. More explicit 3-D productions followed, notably from a pair of filmmakers, Steve Gibson and Arnold Herr, who’d been doing soft-core stuff till then. “There was this moment where everything kind of shifted,” they told Ray Zone in 2010. The porno theaters in Times Square started showing hard-core films, so they changed their style to meet demand. Since they were shooting in 3-D, they exploited the effect as much as possible. “Things would just hang out of the screen. They would hang there, legs, arms, genitals,” said Herr. They also used the pop-out for the culmination of a scene, what they called the “wet shot.” Could that be the place where 3-D porn went wrong? According to the eww-theory of its recent failure, no one wants to see negative parallax in a sex scene. At a porn industry event in 2012, one executive worried that “the things that can come at you are the things that a male viewer does not want coming at them.” Indeed, the major 3-D porn releases of recent years have been somewhat conservative in their use of the technology. There’s very little pop-out in This Ain’t Ghostbusters or This Ain’t Avatar, in fact. “They’re mainly using 3-D to increase the depth of field, kind of like the real Avatar,” says Gram Ponante. “It’s being done in a non-exploitative way, which is strange for porn.” Or maybe it’s just an extension of the problem that has afflicted all kinds of 3-D from the very start. If the medium is slowly dying, it’s because no one’s yet decided what it is or where it fits. As a schlocky gimmick, 3-D is too hard to implement and too expensive to produce. As something less obtrusive, like a better version of HD, it’s not been distinct enough to win an audience. 3-D porn is caught between these two extremes, self-conscious and uncertain of its own identity. You can see this hesitation in the 1977 3-D hard-core film The Starlets, where a young actress pays a visit to a casting director. He’s got a pair of red-blue glasses on, and he’s watching 3-D porn when she arrives—a 3-D-porn-within-a-3-D-porn. “That’s one of our new training films,” he tells her. “It’s pretty far out, isn’t it?” “Very impressive,” she says, reaching for his fly. “Can we go on watching while we rehearse?” “We’ll just start easy, towards the screen,” he says. They’ll have to do this very carefully. 3-D sex can be confusing. |
Story Highlights 58% view National Rifle Association favorably Conservatives, gun owners lead in support for the organization WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Despite a year of blistering criticism from gun control advocates about the National Rifle Association's hard-line stance against gun restrictions amid a spate of mass shootings nationwide, 58% in the U.S. have a favorable opinion of the NRA. In a year plagued with mass shootings, including a recent tragedy at a community college in Oregon, there has been a national debate as to whether the NRA, with its ardent support for gun rights, is somehow complicit in these shootings. For example, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has blamed the NRA for stifling the movement toward gun control. More broadly, some commentators in the news media and on social media have criticized the NRA for its theory that "a good guy with a gun" may stop "a bad guy with a gun" in mass shootings. Yet in a Gallup poll from Oct. 7-11, a solid majority of Americans (58%) say they have an overall favorable impression of the NRA. This includes the highest recording of "very favorable" opinions (26%) since Gallup began asking this question in 1989. In December 2012, soon after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, 54% of Americans had a favorable impression of the NRA. The highest percentage in Gallup's 26-year trend was in 2005, when 60% of Americans viewed the organization favorably. The lowest favorability rating was in June 1995, when 42% viewed the NRA favorably, at a time when the NRA sent out a fundraising letter calling federal law enforcement agents "jack-booted government thugs" in the wake of the Waco siege in 1993. This low favorability toward the NRA in 1995 was only compounded with the Oklahoma City bombing that spring, one month after the letter was sent to potential donors. This dispute resulted in former President George H.W. Bush publicly resigning from his lifetime membership in the NRA. Conservative-Liberal Divide Stark in Favorable Impressions of NRA While Americans overall view the NRA favorably, the favorable-unfavorable divide is pronounced among political ideologies. Among conservatives, 77% have an overall favorable impression of the NRA, contrasted with 30% of liberals. For conservatives this includes 41% who say they have a "very favorable" impression of the group. Ten percent of liberals share the same very favorable impression, with 45% saying that they have a "very unfavorable" opinion of the NRA. Gun Owners Solidly Support the NRA, Non-Gun Owners Mixed There is also a divide in support for the NRA among those who are gun owners and those who personally do not own a gun. Among gun owners, 78% have an overall favorable opinion of the NRA, while only 20% have an unfavorable opinion. The results are more mixed when examining non-gun owners. Forty-nine percent have a favorable opinion of the group, while 42% view it unfavorably. In the U.S., 28% say they personally own a gun. Bottom Line The gun safety organization has been a political advocate for gun rights, lobbying on behalf of particular legislative bills and candidates who support the Second Amendment nationwide, while lobbying against most restrictions on gun ownership. It has also stoked controversy by suggesting that more Americans should be armed in public places, and that guns are not to blame for mass shootings. In short, they believe that gun rights generally should not be restricted. Gallup's survey shows that, even after shootings nationwide, Americans overall still have a favorable opinion of the NRA, as they typically have, suggesting that the public may not be specifically blaming the organization for the crimes of those who commit mass shootings. Historical data are available in Gallup Analytics. Survey Methods Results for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted Oct. 7-11, 2015, on the Gallup U.S. Daily survey, with a random sample of 1,015 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. For results based on the total sample of national adults, the margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. Each sample of national adults includes a minimum quota of 60% cellphone respondents and 40% landline respondents, with additional minimum quotas by time zone within region. Landline and cellular telephone numbers are selected using random-digit-dial methods. View survey methodology, complete question responses and trends. Learn more about how Gallup Poll Social Series works. |
"I used to walk into stores and see the giant red, white, and blue veteran men's shirts with eagles all over and think, Why is there no vet apparel for women? How do I let people know I'm a vet? ," Noky told BuzzFeed News. Nadine Noky, a veteran of the Iraq war, was sick of never seeing any apparel for women vets. "People have an idea of what a veteran looks like: a guy coming from Iraq or Afghanistan, a WWII Vet," Noky said. "They don't think of women." So in March 2014, the Venice, Florida, native learned how to screen print and started Lady Brigade , which she believes is the first and only female veterans clothing line. The 29-year-old said that she's often approached while wearing the shirts by people surprised she's a veteran. Women now make up about 15.7% of the military, the largest portion in history. Noky believes it's time for the classic image of a veteran to change. Noky posted this selfie wearing one of her designs with the caption: "Headed to the VA for an appointment — gotta represent!" Noky was in the military from 2002 to 2007 and left the military as a specialist. She was deployed to Iraq in 2005, four months after the birth of her son, Sean. She now single-handedly runs the company out of her house in Florida where she lives with Sean, now 10 years old. "I wanted to stay away from red, white, and blue. I didn’t want any eagles, I didn’t want stars. I wanted to make shirts women will actually want to wear," Noky said. She designs and prints all the shirts herself, runs and designs the website and blog, and personally packages and sends each shirt. Before it was ever a clothing company, Lady Brigade was a Facebook group for women vets to address concerns and take part in the female veteran community, and it still serves that purpose. "Everything in the veteran community is so separate, you don't generally know there are any other women vets around. So I wanted to start a community where we could find each other," Noky said. She added, "Many women vets don't self-identify as veterans. Some don't even know they are veterans. They just don't associate themselves with the idea of it the way men do." |
BEIRUT (Reuters) - Iraq’s national security adviser briefed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on efforts to counter Islamic State on Tuesday, in the first such meeting since the United States launched air strikes on the radical group in Iraq. Militant Islamist fighters take part in a military parade along the streets of northern Raqqa province June 30, 2014. REUTERS/Stringer The United States and other Western governments have dismissed the idea of cooperating with Syria in the fight against Islamic State, which has seized large areas of Iraq and Syria. Western governments see Assad as part of the problem and say he must leave power. But the Shi’ite-led government in Baghdad, together with Iran and the Lebanese group Hezbollah, have been important allies for Assad since the uprising against his rule erupted in 2011. Shi’ite Iraqi militias have fought on Assad’s side against the insurgency spearheaded by Sunni Islamists. The meeting between Faleh al-Fayad, the Iraqi national security adviser, and Assad indicated that the Iraqi government aims to maintain those ties. It also points to the scope for possible indirect contact between Syria and the West over the fight against Islamic State via third parties such as Iraq. Fayad “put Assad in the picture of the latest developments in Iraq and the efforts that the Iraqi government and people are making to combat the terrorists”, Syrian state news agency SANA said. The meeting stressed “the importance of strengthening cooperation and coordination between the two brotherly countries in the field of combating terrorism that is hitting Syria and Iraq and which threatens the region and the world,” SANA said. There was no immediate comment from Iraq. Islamic State militants took over Iraq’s the northern city of Mosul in June and have loose control over northern and western parts of the country and around a third of neighboring Syria. Territory held by Islamic State in Syria includes most of Deir al-Zor province, which borders Iraq. INDIRECT MESSAGES BETWEEN FOES Joshua Landis, an expert on Syria at the University of Oklahoma in the United States, said it was likely Washington and Damascus would use Iraq to communicate indirectly about Islamic State. “We talk to the government in Iraq, they are going to talk to the government in Syria, and it is only going to be a matter of seconds before it is communicated,” he said. “I am sure American intelligence officers will factor that in and send messages through the Iraqis.” U.S. President Barack Obama said last week he would not hesitate to strike Islamic State in Syria. The Syrian government has said any military action taken without its consent would amount to an act of aggression. Assad told Fayad that efforts to counter terrorism must start with pressure on the states that support and finance it — a reference to Gulf Arab states Saudi Arabia and Qatar which Damascus accuses of sponsoring hardline insurgent groups. The United States, which backs the more moderate rebels fighting Assad, is leading efforts to forge an international coalition against Islamic State. Iraq has attended two conferences in recent days to rally international support to the cause but Syria has not been invited. A Lebanese official with close ties to the Syrian government said Fayad had expressed Baghdad’s displeasure at Syria’s exclusion from international efforts against Islamic State, echoing sentiments from Assad’s allies Russia and Iran. The Iraqis had told Assad that a new Baghdad administration of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi would continue the cooperation that existed when Nuri al-Maliki was premier, said the official who was briefed on the talks. That cooperation would remain as it was in Maliki’s era, or could be even closer “given that Syria and Iraq are in one trench confronting the ISIS danger”, the official said. Russia on Monday urged Western and Arab governments to overcome their distaste for Assad and engage with him to fight Islamic State. Iran has criticized U.S. efforts and its supreme leader has said he personally rejected an offer from Washington for talks with Tehran to fight the group. Assad’s allies are developing their own response, said Salem al-Zahran, a Lebanese journalist close to Damascus. Lebanese Shi’ite militant group Hezbollah, Assad supporters from Iran and Russia have been looking at new ways to work with Syria to counter the threat, Zahran said, citing discussions and observations on a recent trip to Tehran. “Syrians, Lebanese, Russians were there, and there were foreign meetings about an actual confrontation strategy.” |
ORG XMIT: S0368379594_STAFF 9/09/2001 -- Dallas Cowboy Quarterback (#17) Quincy Carter (cq), right, is kept out of the end zone by Tampa Bay defender (#97) Simeon Rice (cq) at Texas Stadium during the first quarter. The ball was on the goal line after this play, but Emmitt Smith lost yardage and the Cowboys had to settle for a field goal. Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott (4) watches from the sideline during the second quarter of their game against the Houston Texans on Thursday, September 1, 2016 at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. (Ashley Landis/The Dallas Morning News) The last time the Cowboys started a rookie quarterback on opening day, Hall of Fame coach Tony Dungy was standing on the sideline. But Prescott will be seeing a different game from the New York Giants in the season opener Sunday than he saw from the Rams, Dolphins and Seahawks in the preseason. Now it's Dak Prescott's turn. When Tony Romo went down in the third preseason game with yet another back injury, the Cowboys' offense became property of the fourth-round draft pick from Mississippi State. Prescott was spectacular in the preseason, completing 78 percent of his passes for 454 yards and five touchdowns with no interceptions. Well, there wasn't. Carter lost his debut, failing to generate a touchdown in a 10-6 setback to the Bucs. Carter was 9 of 19 passing for 34 yards with two interceptions and two sacks. "We were scared to death of Quincy Carter," Dungy said. "We didn't know what we're dealing with. You hear the guy is a tremendous athlete. You hear he's supposed to be this, and he's supposed to be that. But you haven't seen it. So we watched some of his college tape and all of his preseason tape, and you start telling yourself, 'There must be something that I'm not seeing.'" His Tampa Bay Buccaneers provided the opposition for Quincy Carter and the Cowboys in their 2001 NFL season opener. The Cowboys were so excited about their new quarterback, a second-round draft pick out of Georgia, that they cut veteran Tony Banks in training camp to put the offense in Carter's hands. "There's a difference between professional football and college football," Dungy said, "and there's a difference between preseason and regular season. It's played at a whole different speed, a whole different intensity level. A rookie quarterback is going to see things for the first time. Defenses will be doing things differently, with more coverages." Carter was one of four rookie quarterbacks to make their NFL starting debuts against a Dungy defense. They combined to complete only 30 of 75 passes for 287 yards with seven interceptions and 14 sacks. Dungy's defenses did not allow a passing touchdown to those four rookies and yielded only one touchdown of any kind in the four games -- and that came on a 20-yard drive after a turnover when John Elway handed the ball off on four consecutive plays. Yes, John Elway. Elway made his starting debut in 1983 against the Pittsburgh Steelers, for whom Dungy was defensive backs coach. He completed only 1 of 8 passes for 14 yards with an interception and four sacks. The Broncos wound up winning the game 14-10, but Elway was long gone by then. He was knocked out of the game in the second quarter with an elbow injury. "You could see John Elway had talent," Dungy said. "You knew he was going to be good. But you also knew it was going to be a struggle [for him] that whole first year. It's a different game, and there's too much to learn." Elway was the first pick of his NFL draft. So was Alex Smith of his. Dungy's Colts also provided the opposition for Smith's debut start in the fifth week of the 2005 season. He completed 9 of 23 passes for 74 yards with four interceptions and five sacks in a 28-3 loss. "I watched Alex on tape and liked him," Dungy said. "I remember going up to him after the game telling him, 'Hey, you're going to be a good quarterback.' I told him I coached John Elway's first game, and he never got out of the first half. 'You did better than he did.'" Dungy's Tampa Bay defense also provided the opposition in the debut start of Detroit's Mike McMahon in 2001. He completed 11 of 25 passes for 165 yards with no touchdowns or interceptions and three sacks in a 15-12 loss. The defensive game plan is simple, whether you're playing John Elway, Quincy Carter, Mike McMahon, Alex Smith or Dak Prescott. "Play run defense early -- load the box on first and second down and make him throw the ball," Dungy said. "Put him in second-and-9s and third-and-10s. Try to get him in passing situations. Then take away the short passes and make him throw the ball down the field. Put the ball in the quarterback's hands, and make him beat you. Make him throw five times every drive. Most of them can't do it early on. "The belief is if I can force this guy to throw 20 passes, we're going to win the game." The stats bear Dungy out. Since 1980, there have been 133 quarterbacks who debuted as NFL starters in their rookie seasons. Only 26 of those rookie quarterbacks threw fewer than 20 passes in their debuts. They combined for a 14-12 record. The other 107 quarterbacks who threw 20 or more passes have a combined 29-77-1 record. Only 43 of those 133 quarterbacks won their debut starts. Fifty-two of them failed to throw a touchdown pass, and 94 threw interceptions. "Peyton Manning came into the NFL as prepared as you could possibly be to play quarterback," Dungy said. "He had [Hall of Famers] Marshall Faulk and Marvin Harrison ... and they won only three games. "Unless you ride the running game, throw 14 passes and have a great defense to win low-scoring games, rookie quarterbacks don't win in the NFL." Listen to Rick Gosselin at 10:50 a.m. Tuesdays on Sportsradio 1310 AM/96.7 FM The Ticket with Norm Hitzges and Donovan Lewis. On Twitter: @RickGosselinDMN |
The title page of Rūta Vanagaitė’s best-known book contains two pictures of young men. “This one is a Jew,” she said, pointing at the picture on the left. “He was a bicycle-racing champion. Good enough to represent Lithuania in international competitions, but not good enough to live.” He was executed during the Holocaust. The man in the picture on the right was a Lithuanian executioner. “They are both us,” Vanagaitė explained. “But Lithuanians don’t like to think of them as ‘us,’ because one is a Jew and the other is a killer.” Her book is called “Us.” (The title has also been translated as “Our People.”) I met Vanagaitė at a New York City coffee shop on Wednesday. After a few weeks in the United States, she was scheduled to return to Lithuania on Friday. As we talked, she sounded alternately cavalier and frightened at the prospect of going home. “I want to try everything,” she said at one point. “I’m supposed to go in to the prosecutor’s office for questioning next week. I’ve never experienced interrogation before. Life should be interesting.” In a less upbeat exchange, when I asked her about her next project, Vanagaitė said, “Trying to avoid prison.” It was unclear what Vanagaitė might go to prison for—she had not been formally charged—but it has something to do with desecrating the memory of one of Lithuania’s national heroes. In hindsight, it’s clear that she had been hurtling toward this moment for a few years. In 2016, Vanagaitė, then sixty-one, was known as a theatre critic, a political public-relations consultant, an event organizer, and the author of popular nonfiction, especially a 2013 book for and about women in and past middle age. The book, which advocated living life to the fullest, was a phenomenal best-seller. Vanagaitė told me that her publisher asked her to follow up with a book about men. “I said I would do it, but first I have something else I want to write,” she said. That project was “Us.” Vanagaitė had become obsessed with something she had learned from a historian: that the Holocaust in Lithuania was carried out largely not by German occupiers but by Lithuanians themselves. “It involved a huge number of people rather than a handful of freaks, as I’d always thought,” she told me. She set out to learn what her own relatives had done during the war. Her grandfather, a civil servant, had taken part in making a list of eleven undesirables, all of whom happened to be Jewish, and all of whom were executed. It was conceivable that he didn’t quite know what the list was for. The case of Vanagaitė’s aunt’s husband was less ambiguous: he served as a chief of police under the Nazi occupation. Vanagaitė spent six months doing archival research and then set off to see the sites of mass executions. She cast about for an intern to accompany her on the road, and ended up with an unexpected companion: Efraim Zuroff, the head of the Jerusalem office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center—and the last of the Nazi hunters. “Us” has a subtitle: “Travels with the Enemy.” The meaning of “enemy” is as unstable as the meaning of “us”: the collaborators and executioners are the enemy here, and so are the Nazi occupiers. But Zuroff, who is a descendant of Lithuanian Jews, and Vanagaitė were also historical enemies. Together, they visited forty execution sites in Lithuania—about a fifth of the total number—and seven more in what is now Belarus. They also became lovers. As it happens, I interviewed Zuroff, in Jerusalem, for another story about five years ago. He told me that, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991, he had had high hopes for finding Nazi criminals in the three newly liberated Baltic states. He placed ads in local papers, offering a generous reward for information that would lead to the arrest of collaborators. He got a total of zero tips, and when we spoke he was still unsure about what had stopped people from coming forward. Was it a distaste for snitching, a sense of solidarity with fellow-citizens, or a fear of retribution? It was probably all of these things. Vanagaitė told me that, in her book, she didn’t thank the Lithuanian historians who helped her navigate the archives because they feared the attention that a popular book might bring. Vanagaitė did little to protect herself, though. “My objective was to shock,” she told me. She looked for examples that would haunt her readers, like the story of a group of trade-school students who didn’t want to go home for the summer in 1941. They got jobs on the execution squads instead. When the summer was over, they returned to school. “Us,” published last year, was a best-seller. Vanagaitė made new enemies, to be sure, but she kept her friends and family, and gained thousands of readers. She wrote the book about men that she had promised her publisher, and then she wrote a memoir, which she titled “A Chicken with the Head of a Herring.” This was an epithet that one of her online critics had used, and she thought that it communicated an appropriately ironic attitude toward the self-aggrandizing enterprise of an autobiography. Vanagaitė had achieved an exceedingly rare level of literary success: she lived off the royalties from her books. The day before the launch for her autobiography, in late October, Vanagaitė was doing interviews. One journalist asked her about the government’s plans to declare 2018 the year of Adolfas Ramanauskas, a legendary Lithuanian anti-Soviet resistance fighter. Ramanauskas led a guerrilla unit from 1945 to 1952 and lived under an alias for another five years before being arrested and executed. Vanagaitė had studied Ramanauskas’s K.G.B. file, and now she told the journalist what she had found in it: it seemed that Ramanauskas had at one point agreed to be a K.G.B. informant. She said that he may not have been the hero Lithuania holds him to be. On October 26th, Vanagaitė’s memoir was launched with a lavish party. There was chicken, herring, and bubbly. The following morning, Vanagaitė got a call from a journalist asking for her reaction to her publisher’s announcement that it was withdrawing all of her titles from all bookstores. Thousands of copies would be pulped. Vanagaitė’s source of livelihood was gone. Gone, too, was her ability to venture outside her home. She tried—after the initial barrage of phone calls, she went out, accompanied by her nephew, and was immediately accosted by passersby. “They called me a pro-Putin Jewish whore,” she said. What does Vladimir Putin have to do with it? The post-Soviet Lithuanian narrative centers on othering all the horrors of the twentieth century: in this story, Lithuanians are a good, pure, and freedom-loving people who suffered under the Soviet occupation of 1940 to 1941, the German occupation of 1941 to 1944, and the Soviet occupation of 1945 to 1991. In its broad outlines, the story is undoubtedly true, but, like any historical myth, it’s an oversimplification: thousands of Lithuanians collaborated with the occupations. Some Lithuanians are willing to accept the fact that their countrymen collaborated with the German occupation, but the Soviet occupation—which lasted nearly half a century, and still hasn’t been acknowledged by Russia—is a story that tolerates no challenge. Like most European states, Lithuania legislates memory. In a new book called “Memory Laws, Memory Wars: The Politics of the Past in Europe and Russia,” Nikolay Koposov, a Russian exile who teaches at Emory University, in Atlanta—and who has some sympathy for the project of setting legal boundaries of historical discourse—calls the Lithuanian law “an extreme example of the tendency to use memory laws to promote national narratives and shift the blame for crimes against humanity to others.” The law, enacted in 2010, was used the following year to prosecute Algirdas Paleckis, a Lithuanian diplomat who suggested that Moscow authorities who cracked down on Lithuania in January, 1991, had been aided by Lithuanian collaborators. Paleckis paid a fine, and his political career was effectively ended. If there have been other prosecutions since, none has been as high-profile as Paleckis’s—or as Vanagaite’s will be, if she is charged. Vanagaitė stopped going outside; she had food delivered. After about two weeks, she left the country, assuming that, after a few weeks, the controversy would die down. It did not. Vanagaitė issued a public apology, and when she talked to me she sounded if not contrite then at least understanding. “I realize that I’ve crossed a line,” she said. “When I was writing my book, I thought everything through. But in this interview I was very arrogant. What I should have phrased as a question I said as an affirmative statement. I should have asked if Ramanauskas is the hero we think he is. Instead, I said, ‘He is no hero.’ ” The distinction is not merely grammatical. K.G.B. archives are notoriously unreliable—Ramanauskas may indeed have been an agent, or the person who claimed to have recruited him may have been lying. Vanagaitė’s sources among historians believe that Ramanauskas went into the forest, where he became a guerrilla fighter, immediately after agreeing to be an informant. “I’ve destroyed everything,” Vanagaitė said. “I’ve destroyed my career as a writer, because no publisher will sign me now and no bookstore will agree to distribute my books.” She said that none of her friends will publicly support her now; her family stands by her, but she is afraid that the association will harm them. “Every country needs its positive myth. Ours was that we had the longest-running resistance movement in the world,” she said. Ramanauskas, who is said to have stayed in the forest, fighting, for seven years, embodied this myth. “Now I’ve destroyed that, too.” But then she added, “When I’m on my deathbed, I’ll write about that resistance movement.” |
The two bills would likely be merged together before the bill goes to the Senate. House GOP in border-crisis chaos House Republicans will vote to rein in the Obama administration’s power to halt deportation for undocumented immigrants — a surprise move that comes as they struggle to attract support for their bill to address the crisis at the border. The new plan, described by multiple GOP aides Wednesday evening, comes as House Republicans were unable to lock up 218 GOP lawmakers to vote for the $659 million emergency funding package. Story Continued Below On Wednesday evening, House GOP leadership was setting up a process that would schedule a Thursday vote on the Republican funding package. If it passes, the House would be required to vote on legislation targeting the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has shielded from deportation hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants who have grown up in the United States. ( Also on POLITICO: House votes to sue Obama) The House GOP language would block President Barack Obama from expanding DACA and prevent him from granting a similar reprieve to other immigrants here illegally. The administration is actively considering executive action on deportations, and a final decision is expected by the end of the summer. The latest twist from Republican leadership is a way to appeal to conservative Republicans, who want a vote to prevent the Obama administration from halting deportations. But a vote will only come after the House passes the other legislation. The Senate, meanwhile, is struggling to pass its border legislation. It scrambled to clear even just a simple procedural vote earlier Wednesday, and the funding measure drafted by Senate Democrats has already lost the support of three of its own members. The new House GOP strategy will give Democrats and Republicans a chance to vote separately on both bills. It’s not yet clear how Democrats and Republicans will react to the strategy. ( Also on POLITICO: Senate advances border bill) The new House GOP tack takes a page from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who had demanded a ban on expanding DACA in exchange for emergency funding to deal with the border crisis. He criticized the House Republican proposal in a statement earlier this week because it did not include language dealing with what Cruz called “Obama’s amnesty.” Cruz huddled with a smattering of House conservatives in his office Wednesday evening — over pizza and drinks — to discuss the latest developments on the border crisis. He told reporters that he was “encouraged,” particularly after hearing that the House may vote to roll back DACA. “That is the right thing to do,” Cruz said. Emerging from the meeting with Cruz, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) cast doubt that the initial $659 million border supplemental would pass, particularly if it had to rely solely on GOP votes. ( Also on POLITICO: Begich blasts Reid on amendments) “There is support for the DACA fix,” Bachmann said. “I think you will see the DACA-fix bill pass.” Even with the new DACA strategy, some conservatives Wednesday still weren’t satisfied. For instance, Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) said the measures still don’t provide adequate border security. And Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) is demanding tougher asylum language. Follow @politico |
Photographs of Japan from the Meiji and Taisho Periods (1868-1926) have captivated viewers around the world since they were first circulated. One photographer in particular captured Japanese life so beautifully that his work has been seen by countless people all across the globe. Until very recently, though, his name was virtually unknown. Now we know that the prolific photographer’s name was T. Enami – or rather, that was his trade name. He was born Enami Nobukuni, and his work made a deep and far-reaching impact on photography. Some of T. Enami’s most popular and memorable works were his stereograms: two nearly-identical 2D images taken from slightly different angles that, when viewed together through a stereograph, appear three-dimensional. Here they are animated to give the 3D effect, but all of the originals can be seen on Okinawa Soba’s Flickr collection. Enami started his career as a traditional photographer, but later embraced the more “modern” stereoviews and lantern slides. Judging from his carefully staged stereograms, he approached his work with a great deal of attention to detail. The colors on these stereograms were all hand-painted, and the resulting product was sold around the world. Today, collectors treasure these exquisitely detailed antique images. T. Enami ran a photography studio in Yokohama until his death in 1926. His work spanned a multitude of areas, including postcards, large-format prints, private portraits, glass transparencies, photo processing and print-making, and numerous commercial photography projects. His photographs have appeared several times in the pages of National Geographic, a true honor for any photographer. One of his half-stereoview images was even used on the cover of their 100th-anniversary book Odyssey: The Art of Photography at National Geographic. Despite his monumental contributions to early Japanese photography, T. Enami’s identity was not widely known outside of Japan until around 2006, when his descendants shared information about him with biographers and collectors. He was the only photographer of his era known to work in all contemporary commercial and artistic formats, and it can be said that his work has been seen by more people than that of the more established “masters” of his time. The appropriate credit is now being given to thousands of Enami photographs that were previously unattributed or simply attributed to the wrong photographer. Enami is now, finally, in his rightful place amongst the most influential early Japanese photographers. A detailed biography of T. Enami can be found at T-Enami.org, and even more of his animated stereograms can be found at Pink Tentacle. |
Stephen Moffat suggests 'Life On Mars' star could reprise role as The Master Doctor Who boss Stephen Moffat has hinted that John Simm could reprise his role as The Master in a future episode of the hit sci-fi drama. The head writer and showrunner discussed the future of the character at a recent screening of the show in New York, reports Digital Spy. Simm had apparently told Moffat that the departure of tenth Doctor David Tennant would signal the end of his association with the programme. However, Moffat added: “He [later] pulled me aside and said, ‘I didn’t mean that! Look at me, I’m fit, I’m okay!'” The showrunner has also denied reports that Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch could be set to take on the role, commenting: “Benedict has to wait in line, probably”. Doctor Who returns to BBC One and BBC America on Easter Saturday, April 23. Moffat recently likened the new series to a “ghost train” and has revealed one of the four main characters will die in the opening two-part episode. |
Gillingham sealed the League Two title, their first in nearly 50 years, despite being held to a draw by AFC Wimbledon. They took the lead when veteran striker Deon Burton found the net with a shot from deep inside the penalty box They then doubled their lead when Danny Kedwell deftly headed in a left-wing cross from Chris Whelpdale. The Dons struck back when Jack Midson scored from close range and Jon Meade levelled late on, but it was not enough to stop Gillingham taking the trophy. VIEWS FROM THE DRESSING ROOM Gillingham manager Martin Allen told BBC Radio Kent: Media playback is not supported on this device Highlight of my career - Allen "Amazing, 10 months of hard work. They've just kept going, getting points, breaking records, the first title Gillingham have won for 50 years and to be the manager on this special day is a magnificent feeling. "This is the best highlight of my career. I'm the worst Allen in the Allen family. The others are multi-talented, and for me, to be nicknamed Mad Dog just because I tackled people and make a living from football, and to be known as a manager who keeps clubs up, to be champions is unbelievable. "It's a lottery win, Christmas Day, money can't buy that. Priceless moment." AFC Wimbledon boss Neil Ardley told BBC London 94.9: Media playback is not supported on this device Ardley still hopeful of survival "It would have been great to get three points but playing the Champions away from home is never going to be easy. "If we can play like that next week then we will be OK and I still believe, I don't think York or Dagenham can overtake us if we win. "We have got to focus on ourselves and if we win we stay up, we have to keep going and do what we are good at." |
A frack sand mine near Cooks Valley, Wisconsin. (Photo: Mike Ludwig) This story is the first installment of Truthout’s Fracking Road Trip series on the wide-reaching impacts of the fracking industry. The bluffs rise up gently from the rolling hills and farmlands of Wisconsin’s Chippewa County. For years, the bluffs stood silent as small farming communities grew around them. The bluffs are too steep to farm and most of the trees in the area grow on the tops of bluffs and around their rolling slopes and steep faces. It’s unusually cold for April and trees stand as silhouettes against a layer of snow. This scene is quickly interrupted at the intersection of two county roads in the small township of Cooks Valley. A large bluff behind a farm has disappeared. The bluff has been blasted, churned up and turned into giant piles of sand. The sand will soon be trucked off to a processing plant, loaded back into trucks or perhaps onto a waiting train and then shipped to oil and gas fields in other states. The sand will be mixed with water and chemicals and forced deep underground to break up rock and release precious fossils fuels. This isn’t the kind of sand you find at the beach; it’s silica, or “frack sand,” a carcinogenic dust and a key ingredient in the hydraulic fracking process which has facilitated a nationwide natural gas boom and, according to opponents, an ongoing environmental crisis. Silica particles are uniquely shaped and prop open fractures in the underground rock to free the oil or gas. Cooks Valley may be far from the oil and gas fields, but like the rural neighborhoods in states where fracking rigs and gas pipelines have replaced pastures, the frack industry’s demand for natural resources has pitted neighbor against neighbor and turned this once tight-knit community upside down. In the Shadow of the Mine A frack sand processing plant in Maiden Rock, Wisconsin. (Photo: Mike Ludwig)Jane Sonnentag is a busy woman. Several children bounce around her humble kitchen as she holds her youngest child and laughs as she recalls her father advising her not to marry a farmer. She did not take his advice, and now Sonnentag and her husband Louis are raising seven children on their 160-acre farm nestled between the rising bluffs of Cooks Valley. Sonnentag has lived in the area all her life and her family has farmed there for generations. Her farm, she says, is a “little piece of heaven.” But Sonnentag’s farm is not as heavenly as it used to be. Since 2011, when a massive, out-of-state energy firm won a permit to set up shop in their neighborhood, the Sonnentags have lived in the shadow of a 234-acre frac-sand mine located on the bluffs behind their farm and home. Sonnentag explains that as many as 400 trucks, laden with silica sand or wastewater from a sand-processing plant, may roll past their home in a day. “I’ve got 400 trucks and seven kids and a yard this size … it’s not fun, you know, being by a stop sign, really,” says Sonnentag. “It’s like David verses Goliath, except I don’t have a slingshot.” For generations, mom-and-pop–sized mines in Wisconsin have supplied silica for a variety of purposes, ranging from water filtration to road paving. But in recent years, the industry has grown exponentially as the fracking boom in other states such as North Dakota, Ohio and Pennsylvania has increased the demand for silica across the country. Big mining and energy companies have swooped into rural communities like the Sonnentag’s to expand existing mines and break ground on massive new ones, turning Wisconsin’s western bluffs into giant piles of sand and its rural towns into centers of sand shipment and processing. There are now 70 active mines operating in Wisconsin, along with dozens of processing facilities. Three mines, each more than 100 acres in size, are currently operating within miles of Sonnentag’s home in Cooks Valley, a small township of less than 1,000 people. EOG Resources, a massive energy firm and former Enron subsidary (known at the time as Enron Oil and Gas), operates the mine near the Sonnentags’ home. The company’s local office told Truthout to contact its Houston office for comments on the mine and its impacts on nearby farms, but a representative there failed to respond to several inquiries. When EOG Resources was blasting apart the bluffs, Sonnentag says, the shock would shake her house. Once a blast knocked her to the floor. At times, dust from the mining operations would invade their farm. EOG Resources would dispatch a couple of water trucks every hour to wet down the dust and keep it out of the air, but the effort was “like taking a thimble to a dust bowl.” With dust blowing in the wind and hundreds of trucks passing their house everyday, the Sonnentags became increasingly concerned about their health. “There were not a lot of days we could go outside, because we have two kids who have asthma,” Sonnentag says. Silica dust is a known carcinogen and has been linked to lung disease and cancer among workers, and the federal government has set limits on silica exposure for the workplace – but has not set limits on public exposure. The frack sand industry in Wisconsin routinely assures the public that airborne silica poses no proven dangers to the public, but without any federal or state regulation of exposure, the industry’s assurances do little to ease Sonnentag’s mind. What if silica is the next asbestos, she wonders? Her family never signed up to be “test dummies.” And what about the water? Pointing toward the mine, Sonnentag says that EOG Resources is currently trucking wastewater from its sand-processing plant, where the sand is treated with water and chemicals, and dumping it back into the mine. “I always thought my kids would want to live here long after we’re gone, but now I don’t know. There might not be any air to breath and water to drink.” Regulators Stretched Thin The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) regulates sand mines as “nonmetallic mines,” a class that includes the small gravel pits and limestone mines that have long operated throughout the state. Tom Woletz, the DNR point person on frack sand, tells Truthout that DNR has regulated sand mines in this way for years, but now the frack-sand rush has brought much larger mines to the state. “The fugitive dust, that is a potential problem, and that’s what people are concerned about,” Woletz says. DNR requires mine operators to monitor silica dust emissions and report them to the state, but DNR officials rarely visit the mines in person. Federal funding requires the agency’s limited staff to focus on major sources of air pollution such as large metallic mines. “Some of these mines are never going to see a DNR air inspector at all unless there is a complaint,” says Woletz. “We could use more people on the ground to make sure that these people are doing the appropriate things.” A state budget proposal could add two more compliance officers to the DNR staff, and Woletz says DNR could always use more people. But much of the responsibility to keep silica out of the air in rural neighborhoods falls on the industry, he says, and DNR can’t always be there to hold its hand. “There’s some really good [operators] out there, and there’s some that have a ways to go,” he says. In 2012 alone, the DNR issued violations to at least 15 frack-sand operators in the state, according to state records. Under state rules, a mine located near a child care center or a neighborhood operates under the same pollution standards as a mine located in the middle of a forest, according to Woletz. In many cases, it’s up to the county or local government to regulate trucking, mine locations and land use. With some residents supporting local measures to protect their homes and farms and other residents eager to cash in on the sand rush, local controversies over sand mine regulation have created brutal divisions in communities that would otherwise be models of Midwestern neighborliness. “There are family members up in Chippewa County that may never talk to each other again, ever,” Woletz admits. That’s a familiar story to Sonnentag, who was involved in a local push to regulate the sand mines in Cooks Valley under a local ordinance that was opposed by local landowners, including her neighbors. “Sand has dictated everything in this town … pitted neighbor against neighbor,” she says. The best man at her wedding will no longer talk to her. He wanted to start a mine on his land, Sonnentag says, and saw her family and other supporters of the ordinance as standing in his way. “It’s unfortunate, because he’s no closer to getting that mine started than I am to becoming a vegetarian,” Sonnentag says with a grin. A Fractured Community Sleet is turning the snow to ice outside of Sonnentag’s house, but her kitchen, busy with young children arranging pots and pans on the floor, is warm and cozy. Sonnentag chats with Victoria Trinko, who lives a few miles up the road on a small farm located across the street from a frack sand mine. The two women are discussing the local politics surrounding the ordinance they fought for years to put in place in order to regulate the sand mine operations. “It’s really split our community apart,” Trinko says. Earlier that morning, Trinko had returned to her home after volunteering at a Sunday pancake breakfast. She says the turnout was good considering the cold weather and a bit of friendly competition from another pancake breakfast at a local church. She takes a seat in her living room, where she has agreed to be interviewed by Truthout. A picture of her daughter, who is now studying abroad, hangs above the mantle. The conversation quickly turns to sand. Trinko is the Cooks Valley Board clerk and kept notes on the battle over the ordinance, which was first drawn up and passed in 2008 after residents learned that sand mines might open in the neighborhood. The ordinance addressed noise from blasting, hours of operation, silica dust control and the number of trucks allowed to rumble down the roads. Landowners who wanted to lease their properties to mining companies or open their own mines quickly hired a lawyer and sued the town to defeat the ordinance. It amounted to a “zoning ordinance” and was not properly filed with the county, they argued, and a local judge agreed. “So we appealed,” Trinko says, “and that made them all angry.” What followed was three years of litigation and showdowns in the local town hall. At one point, the town board was accused of embezzlement; at another, the pro-mining landowners tried to take over the board and dismiss Cooks Valley’s village powers, which, under state law, grant the township the authority to pass ordinances. “It’s gotten really, really nasty,” Trinko says. Neighbors have sued neighbors, and Trinko herself was sued (along with two board supervisors) over open records laws. Meanwhile, the town board continued to appeal the challenge to the mining ordinance, which eventually landed at the Wisconsin Supreme Court. As clerk, Trinko had been keeping notes throughout the whole fiasco, and eventually, she had to hand them over to the highest court in the state. “I was very proud of myself, I guess, or satisfied, that my paperwork held up in the [Wisconsin] Supreme Court,” Trinko says with a smile. In 2012, the Wisconsin Supreme Court reversed an appeals court decision and ruled in favor of the Town of Cooks Valley, and the township was finally allowed to begin enforcing the regulations it originally passed in 2008. As the battle over the ordinance wove its way through the courts, however, three mines were established in Cooks Valley, including those near the Trinko and Sonnentag farms. To date, the township has only completed the permitting process for one mine under the ordinance. A draft permit prepared by the township for the EOG Resources mine includes mandatory air monitoring and a $112,500 fee to be paid to the Sonnentag family, so they can build a new house, across the street and farther away from the mine’s trucking route. For Trinko, the matter of sand mining continues to be a big part of daily life. As town clerk, she receives permit notices and posts them in public places such as the local bar. But there are more personal issues as well. In 2011, after the mines began digging into the bluffs, Trinko said she could “chew on dust” when working outside her house. Soon she would have a sore throat, but not the cold that usually accompanies it. She says the symptoms disappear when she travels to visit relatives in other states. Trinko now believes she has developed asthma from living near the sand mines. She saw a breathing specialist who told her that the breathing problems were related to her living environment, but the specialist refuses to go on the record with reporters due to the ongoing controversy. Trinko says her daughter is worried the air pollution may be shortening her life, but she wants to stay on her farm. It has been in her family since her father bought it in 1936. Trinko points out the window to a bluff rising beyond the next pasture. “That bluff … that’s where my dad grew up,” Trinko says. Frack-sand mining and processing continues nearby, and another facility in the area is under development. “It would be very sad to see all the trees disappear. Plus, I am breathing this stuff.” |
Nudism is good for your body and your mental state, trust us, you’ll love it! Look at us, we’re all naked, why aren’t you? Take the plunge, get naked! Nobody will look at you! There’s no need to be insecure, take those pants off! We, the nudists, feel like being nude is the most normal thing to do. It’s our natural state of being, it’s how we were born. For us, nudity is nothing to be ashamed about, getting undressed among others is not something we have to give a second thought. It’s one of the best feelings we know. So we try to pass our knowledge to the others, always with the best intentions, but rarely realise how confident we appear to be. And sometimes this has a counterproductive effect. Just because we look so confident, the other feels even more insecure and is even more reluctant to join us. The mental step Getting naked among others is a physical action that takes less than a minute, often just seconds. But the first time comes with a mental preparation of days, weeks, for some even years. When we talk about being nude it’s like we talk about the most normal thing in the world. What we did last weekend? Well we slept in, had a late breakfast and then spent the afternoon at the nude beach. If there were others? Yeah plenty of them, but what did you expect…such a sunny day, we were almost packed like sardines. Often we forget how terrifying this may sound to the ones who haven’t taken the first step yet. A whole afternoon? Completely naked? Among that many others? We all come from different backgrounds and we all carry a 2000 year old backpack full of prejudices against nudity. Since we were little kids (well, those who weren’t raised in a nudist family of course), the government, the church, our parents and the public opinion have been planting ideas into our heads that public nudity is something not done, something bad. The naked body is something sacred or sinful (depends on who you ask) which should be kept to yourself and your partner. . Oh my god… If she’s too fat, than what am I? And then come the industries who will tell you how ugly you really are. And then you read in this article that supermodel Ulrike Hoyer was fired by Louis Vuitton because she’s too fat . Oh my god… If she’s too fat, than what am I? “Luckily” the industries offer you a solution. You have to wear this or that dress, you need to take this or that diet. Have some fat sucked out, get your boobs lifted, have your wrinkles removed and buy that expensive purse that will take away the attention of your body. Only then you will look like… well… we’ll leave that in the middle. And then you meet Nick and Lins saying “Come on, get naked, it’s no big deal”. We’ve all been there Some won’t admit it, some may have actually forgotten it, but most nudists will tell you that their first time was terrifying. You come to a place you’ve never been before, you have no idea of the rules, the habits, the do’s and don’ts , and you don’t know anyone. And above all that, everyone, including yourself, will be completely naked. You think about Eve and her apple, your mother telling you to get dressed before you leave your room, all those body parts that don’t look like those in the magazines and all the denigrating jokes that are made about them. You’re happy that you’re still wearing pants because you’re about to shit them. You think about Eve and her apple, your mother telling you to get dressed before you leave your room, all those body parts that don’t look like those in the magazines and all the denigrating jokes that are made about them. You’re happy that you’re still wearing pants because you’re about to shit them. We were no exception, you can read about our first time here . We were pretty scared, although we were in a favorable position. We weren’t raised in a nudist family, but both our parents never made a big fuss about nudity. As long as it stayed behind closed doors. We were in our late twenties, had average bodies and hadn’t developed many issues about them. But still.. our legs were shaking. Be ready to be vulnerable Our body and our brain are the two things that define who we really are. And yet we lie about both of them. Constantly. Lying about our brain is easy, because it’s mostly on the inside. The things that do reach the outside can be manipulated with our mouth. We decide what comes out and what stays in. When you’re at the bar with some colleagues, how many of you will admit that they didn’t understand a certain word? Or didn’t get the joke? Exactly. Lying about our body is more difficult, but we have clothes to do that for us. Or we distract the attention to our purse, our watch or our brand new car. We build an artificial wall around ourselves so we don’t have to show who we really are. Because by looking at our body you can tell a lot about us: if we’re into sports, if we have an office job, if we have given birth, if we have been eating healthy lately and so on. By taking off your clothes, you’re breaking down that wall. Brick by brick. Until everyone can see who you really are. You’ll be completely vulnerable. Okay, this probably doesn’t help you much over your fear, but listen to this. Everyone else does exactly the same. The only difference is that they don’t make a big deal out about it anymore because they’ve gotten used to it. They’re used to being vulnerable among others who are as vulnerable as them. And it liberated them. A feeling which they, and eventually you too, carry along to the “outside world” as well. When you have to do a big presentation, people will tell you that you have to imagine your crowd naked. That’s because up there on the stage you’ll feel vulnerable. If you see everyone else in an equally vulnerable state you will be able to relax. So we wish we could tell you that it really means nothing to take of your clothes, because it does. It’s a big step. But if you’re in a right state of mind, you will love it. At least we did. Picture credit: The photos in this post are coming from Google and Twitter. If you find one of yourself and you don’t want it to be on our blog, let us know and we’ll remove it. |
A newly released video of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could add some additional strain to the sometimes tense relationship between him and President Obama. In the video, which is from 2001, Netanyahu -- who reportedly did not know his speech was being recorded -- speaks frankly in Hebrew about relations with the Clinton White House and the peace process. As noted in Haaretz, Netanyahu seems to boast of his knowledge of the US by saying, "I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won't get in their way." He also boasts of manipulating the U.S. in the ongoing peace process, as the Washington Post points out: "They asked me before the election if I'd honor [the Oslo accords]," he said. "I said I would, but ... I'm going to interpret the accords in such a way that would allow me to put an end to this galloping forward to the '67 borders. How did we do it? Nobody said what defined military zones were. Defined military zones are security zones; as far as I'm concerned, the entire Jordan Valley is a defined military zone. Go argue." The video was broadcast on a TV program called "This Week With Miki Rosenthal" titled "The Real (And Deceitful) Face of Benjamin Netanyahu." In Israel's Haaretz newspaper, columnist Gideon Levy said of the video: |
Screen Shot 2015-10-20 at 2.59.32 PM.png The Oregon Historical Society has released 30 glorious minutes of 1970s news footage of the Portland Mavericks from its vaults to help promote a "Battered Bastards of Baseball" History Pub event. (Youtube/Oregon Historical Society) As the World Series approaches with the speed of a Noah Syndergaard fastball, the Oregon Historical Society has released 30 minutes of raw 1970s news footage of the Portland Mavericks from its vaults. Founded by Bing Russell, the baseball team brought together a band of hardball misfits who played four glorious seasons in the Rose City and inspired the acclaimed 2014 Netflix documentary "Battered Bastards of Baseball." Russell's son Kurt, a B-movie actor at the time, played on the team. The 16mm film footage, culled from the historical society's KOIN collection, also coincides with Monday's History Pub event "How to Win with 24 Outlaws." The free presentation about the Portland Mavericks by former team manager Frank Peters and pitcher/journalist Larry Colton is scheduled for 7 p.m. at the McMenamins Kennedy School Theater. Here's the official description of the event: Join us for beer and history, sponsored by the Oregon Historical Society, Holy Names Heritage Center, and McMenamins, in which you'll hear lively local or regional history while you enjoy a frosty pint or two of handcrafted ale. This month, hear these two former Mavericks' first-hand stories and experiences about their days with "the battered bastards of baseball." While we can't show the award-winning documentary Battered Bastards of Baseball (due to Netflix contractual rights), we will show the film trailer, followed by short presentations by Peters and Colton. Then we'll open it up to the audience for Q&A and see where the night goes. Sounds like a blast. If you see me there wearing my Cubs cap, don't be shy about saying hello. The Mavericks TV footage, with its retro styles and glimpse into 1970s Portland, is a lot of fun. If you have the time, here's the shot list, according to the historical society's YouTube page: - Date: 3/9/1973, "Frank Peters announces retirement from baseball saying his business interests in Frank Peters Inn and two more restaurants would preclude his move to Spokane with former Portland franchise. Took an opportunity to talk with him at his restaurant. Didn't look ready for spring training." - Date: 3/28/1973, "Portland will have a baseball team this summer. Announcement came this morning from John Carbray of the Eugene Emeralds. Worked closely with team's new owner, Bill Russell." - Date: 6/7/1973, "Portland Mavericks of the Northwest Class A League opened tryouts this morning and 135 athletes turned out to try out. Talked to coach Al Daniels." - Date: 6/9/1973, "More than 40 players suited up this morning for the third day of tryouts for the Portland Mavericks Baseball team at Civic Stadium. Players outnumbered fans who came to watch. Talked to coach Hank Robinson." - Date: 6/29/1973, "Portland Mavericks won their sixth consecutive baseball game last night. Defeated Walla Walla. Hank Robinson talks about second baseman, Reggie Thomas." - Date: 7/31/1973, "Mavericks hosted the Bellingham Dodgers. Reggie Thomas, the team's leading base runner, is back in uniform." - Date: unknown, Team Mascot PatKin - Date: 8/1/1972, "Maverick Manager Hank Robinson talks about suspension of Reggie Thomas." - Date: 8/28/1973, "Hank Robinson of Mavericks was indefinitely suspended for slugging an umpire in contest against Bellingham. Robinson talks about the altercation." - Date: 8/31/1973, "Hank Robinson says he feels suspension from Northwest League for one year is unjust. He talks." - Date: 9/4/1973, "Bing Russell seemed very pleased with new Class A baseball team. Talks about the future of the Mavs." - Date: 6/1/1974, "Tryouts for Portland Mavericks today. Owner Bing Russell talks. Player Coach Frank Peters also chats." - Date: 6/10/1974, "Portland Mavericks continuing workouts in preparation for their season opener next week. Talked to Maverick owner Bing Russell about the camp." - Date: 6/20/1974, "Frank Peters talks about attendance and stolen base record. Says feels will win league." -- Joseph Rose 503-221-8029 jrose@oregonian.com @josephjrose |
Our texture pack - admins and lead architects: Comeon and Rigolo FAQ: mac user Additional Notes For the official guided tour of Imperial City "ASMR style", go there: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RokIja_gA6s (on my ASMR channel: The French Whisperer).IMPORTANT: please note that this project will not be updated here anymore because we have left the site. The reason is that all the individual projects we had posted over 18 months have been suddenly removed by the moderation without a word of consideration for the work done, on the grounds that they would duplicate this project (even though they actually do not appear on this page because there is not enough space for more images). Apparently, the fact that we offer the possibility to download the city makes it impossible to create a single other page on the site to present it, regardless of the size or quality of the project. So I estimate that our future creations in the city cannot be properly presented here, and I see no reason to remain exposed much longer to the rudeness of some of the moderators (not all of them) in the future.However, the Imperial City project will continue to develop, and you can still discover all the removed sub-projects on its youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/Rigolo0 . From now on, future downloads of the city will also be posted exclusively on youtube.Check out animationcraftpg5 's great cinematic of the city:This is a project we are building on a server: a large, monumental city that is built in all styles from the 19th century and early 20th century (neo-classical, beaux-arts style, modern style...). We play in creative mode. All buildings are original, even though they are often based on existing buildings that we modify or merge as a source of inspiration.We wish to share our builds and have as many people as possible enjoying them. This means that you are free to download them, use them, and put our city on your server (if you do so, crediting usfor their creation will be appreciated).To date, active members on our Imperial City server are:- architects: Architecte, Geebee56, Juanmmag,ProijectoH, Siderial, Vincal, XQlusiveOther updates will follow so stay tuned!- texture pack?: see above- may I put this on my server?: yes, please just credit us- may I join the server and build too?: no, sorry, we are not recruiting because we want to remain a small team and control every new building- could you build something for me, I will pay (or not)?: no, thanks, we stay fully focused on our project- where is the city, I downloaded it but cannot find it in game?: the installation failed,the spawn is surrounded with buidings so you should find it immediately. Make sure you have correctly installed the save. Sorry we cannot provide furthertechnical assistance.- Can I visit the server ? : unfortunately notanymore, since we were griefed. We hope we will be able to reopen it soon to visitors; the adress will be unchanged:imperatus.verygames.net or 77.111.249.13:8126. In the meantime you can follow the Imperial City on the map viewer: http://77.111.249.13:8126/ ? Use unRarX for the save file- where can I play this map on a server? Several servers use the map, you can try Craftfest (IP: mc.craftfest.net)Have a look at the map viewer for an idea of the whole project:view #1:view #2: |
Missoula, MT –-(Ammoland.com)- Montana Shooting Sports Association's flagship bill, SB 122, to encourage the manufacture of ammunition components in Montana, will be up for Second Reading before the full House tomorrow, Tuesday, April 13th 2015. This bill could have more long term consequence for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms in Montana than any other bill this session. Please contact your Representative (not Senator) and ask him or her to support SB 122. contact any other Representatives you wish. While this is an important RKBA bill, it is also a jobs bill. It has the potential to create a lot of good-paying jobs in Montana. Plus, it won't cost the state one dime of existing tax revenue because there are no such businesses in Montana now. Get messages to legislators via the Message Center, 444-4800, or with the Online Message Form at: http://leg.mt.gov/css/About-the-Legislature/Lawmaking-Process/contact-legislators.asp#email ———————– Also, MSSA's suppressor bill, the “good” bill, SB 295, has gone to the governor for his signature. Governor Bullock has already said he wants suppressors legal for hunting. This is the best bill to accomplish that because it is much cleaner methodology than HB 250 for which he offered amendments. Please contact the Governor and ask him to sign SB 295. ————————- Contact the Governor Online: http://governor.mt.gov/Home/Contact/shareopinion By U.S. Mail: Steve Bullock Governor of Montana Helena, Montana 59620 By phone: 406-444-3111 Toll Free: 855-318-1330 FAX: 406-444-5529 Finally, if you're interested in the proposed CSKT water compact, I've written about that (off MSSA mission) at: http://progunleaders.org/Compact/ Thanks loads for your help and support! Gary Marbut, President Montana Shooting Sports Association http://www.mtssa.org Author, Gun Laws of Montana http://www.MTPublish.com About Montana Shooting Sports Association: MSSA is the primary political advocate for Montana gun owners. Visit: www.mtssa.org |
Major League Soccer executive vice president of player relations & competition Todd Durbin released the following statement on Saturday in light of the recent MLS return of Clint Dempsey. "I know there have been some questions in the media regarding MLS' allocation process," the statement reads. "I'd like to start by providing some detail on the relevant player rules. More detailed information is on our website. "Players come to MLS in a variety of ways, including through the SuperDraft, or when clubs 'discover' players. The vast majority of 'discovered' players tend to be playing overseas and occupy international player roster slots. "The allocation process is a ranking order similar to a draft order for those players who come to MLS outside the MLS Super Draft, who are not 'discovered' or who are not Designated Players. Generally, similar to the Draft order, the allocation order is based on a ranking of the previous year's performance. The most recent example of a player joining MLS through the allocation process was the signing of Carlos Bocanegra by Chivas USA. Toronto FC was first on the allocation ranking order and therefore Chivas had to make a trade with Toronto to acquire his rights. "When MLS clubs try to retain a player on their roster but he opts to sign abroad, the club that loses the player retains the right to re-sign him should he return. At times, the club holding this right can trade it to another team. A recent example is Robbie Rogers, who Columbus attempted to sign before he left MLS and signed overseas. When Robbie returned, Columbus had a right of first refusal to sign him in preference of other MLS clubs. That right was traded to Chicago, who in turn traded it to LA in exchange for Mike Magee. "For new players signed by an MLS club as a Designated Player, the allocation process does not apply. Examples of this include previous high profile player signings like David Beckham, Thierry Henry, Robbie Keane and US national team player Claudio Reyna when he signed with New York." |
This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com News GTA 1954 Brampton plane crash Gord McClure and Roma Watson share a laugh as they walk away from the approximate crash site, once farm field, now a Brampton subdivision. McClure, was 9-years-old at the time and says his family was finding pieces of the plane for 30 years. ( Tara Walton / Toronto Star ) On December 17, 1954, a Trans-Canada Airlines flight crashed in the rural outskirts of Brampton. Everyone on board lived, and the Toronto Daily Star called it a "Christmas miracle." The farm land the is now a Brampton subdivision, surrounded by schools and parkettes, in between Chinguacousy Road and Creditview Road, north of Bovaird Drive. /Toronto Star ( Toronto Star Archives Courtesy Toronto Public Library ) The front page of the Toronto Daily Star a day after a crash in Brampton farm fields. ( TORONTO STAR ARCHIVES ) Canadian golfer Marlene Stewart Streit, who survived the 1954 Brampton plane crash along with 22 others. ( SUBMITTED IMAGE ) 1954 cutline reads: Marlene Stewart is aided by mother who sobs with relief, Canada's Champion Golfer was Badly Shaken in Crash of Plane. ( TORONTO STAR ARCHIVES ) On December 17, 1954, a Trans-Canada Airlines flight crashed in the rural outskirts of Brampton. Everyone on board lived, and the Toronto Daily Star called it a "Christmas miracle." The farmland is now a Brampton subdivision, surrounded by schools and parkettes, in between Chinguacousy Road and Creditview Road, north of Bovaird Drive. ( Toronto Star Archives Courtesy Toronto Public Library ) Headline on Toronto Star report says 'How Lucky Can a Guy Get?' Asks Plane Survivor. ( TORONTO STAR ARCHIVES ) Roma Watson stands in front of an image of one of the Brampton farms where the 1954 plane crash occurred. ( TARA WALTON / TORONTO STAR ) Report an error Report an error Journalistic Standards About The Star More from The Star & Partners |
Chicago-based singer-songwriter Andrew Belle will follow up his acclaimed debut LP, The Ladder, with a second effort, Black Bear, later this month. “Black Bear is an album that conceptually reflects and touches on all of the most important relationships in my life,” Belle explained in a press release. “It’s a dialogue and a wrestling with God—a continuation of the story that I began with The Ladder.” While his music has always nested a little on the Mat Kearney side, this time around, Belle chose a different route, drawing his influence from alternative acts like Beach House, Washed Out, Bon Iver and M83 while crafting Black Bear. Since his 2008 debut, Belle has passed the years by traveling and performing with artists such as The Milk Carton Kids, Katie Herzig and Greg Laswell, participating in the Paste-sponsored touring group ‘Ten Out of Tenn’ and adding two EPs to his name, the most recent being The Daylight EP in 2012. Think you’ve heard Belle’s soft croons somewhere before? Chances are it was on popular TV shows like Grey’s Anatomy, Vampire Diaries and Castle. Black Bear will be out Aug. 20 on 1L Music/Elm City Music. You can stream the forthcoming LP, as well as check out a list of West Coast tour dates, below. Andrew Belle Tour Dates August 21 - San Diego, Calif. @ Casbah 22 - Los Angeles, Calif. @ Bootleg Theatre 24 - San Francisco, Calif. @ Brick & Mortar Music Hall 25 - Sacramento, Calif. @ Harlow’s Restaurant & Nightclub 27 - Portland, Ore. @ Mississippi Studios 28 - Seattle, Wash. @ Tractor Tavern |
This story appears in ESPN The Magazine's May 23 WNBA Issue. Subscribe today! "I CAN RELATE to kids going straight to the league / When they recognize that you got what it takes to succeed / And that's around the time that your idols become your rivals / You make friends with Mike but got to A.I. him for your survival / Damn, I swear sports and music are so synonymous / Cause we want to be them, and they want to be us." -- Drake, "Thank Me Now" VIEWING FROM AFAR, Drake can look like the worst type of sports fan. Editor's Picks Drake's star-studded sports history: A timeline The Raptors' global ambassador is a fan of players, not teams -- unless it's Toronto or Kentucky basketball. Everything else (in the world) is fair game, apparently. There he is warming up with the Kentucky Wildcats. There he is at a Seahawks practice. There he is cheering on Manchester United ... then Manchester City ... then Chelsea. There he is with LeBron's Heat and wooing Stephen Curry like he's got a high school crush, laughing too loudly at jokes and pushing through the crowd to get next to them. Those of us who commit fiercely to one team, through the good and the bad, and the bad and the worse, can't abide him. He hops bandwagons. He grabs glory. He arrives just in time for the victory parade and leaves as the last drop of champagne runs out of the bottle. It's absurd, but maybe worthy of empathy too. On "Weston Road Flows" from Views, Drake explains that "a lot of people just hit me up when my name is mentioned / shout out to KD / we relate / we get the same attention." The biggest rapper alive sees himself in the same club as the athletes he admires and seems to understand their quest to define a legacy. He moved from Canadian teen television actor to crossover hip-hop star but was called "too soft" after all. He's spent seven years in the spotlight trying not to become a joke while having to embrace the joke he's sometimes been. At some point, Kobe Bryant realized that his legacy, no matter what he did, would be as a relentless gunner, so he put up 50 shots in his last game. Four albums in, the internet still sees Drake as a walking, talking meme, so he slips into a turtleneck and turns on the grandfatherly dance moves in "Hotline Bling." Takes his 50 shots and shrugs it off. But if Drake is a man successful beyond his wildest dreams, he is also, it seems, a man unfulfilled. He collects relationships, both romantic and platonic. He collects endorsements, awards and even allegiances with cities other than his own. In his boldest musical work, Drake's boastfulness revolves around loneliness. He wants love but trusts no one. He works too hard to have "real" friends. He has the world but is afraid to stay in a single place or with a single person for too long. In "Girls Love Beyonce," the love of fame is coupled with its costs. "I've been avoiding commitment / That's why I'm in this position / I'm scared to let somebody in on this." As a basketball fan, that hunger can make him come off like the kid who was always too busy with acting and rapping to give everything he had to sports, the one who still dreams of running out of a tunnel while smoke billows behind him. He grew up to have enough money and power to live out every sports fantasy he dreams up, and when he jumps out of his seat and claps near the ears of an opposing player, it's as if he thinks he's part of the team's bench. When he shoots an air ball -- no doubt wrecked by nerves -- during warm-ups with an actual college basketball team, he calls for another shot because he's sure he'll get one. He has his friends film him hitting a shot in a pickup game and tags Curry on the Instagram clip as if a jump shot made over a loose defense is the same as pulling up from 37 feet in Oklahoma City with virtually no time left on the clock. Kevin Durant is one of the many superstars Drake admires, and Drake doesn't hide that, despite being a Raptors fan. Noel Vasquez/GC Images Snicker all you want, but there's something human and familiar about this impulse. Throughout his catalog, Drake sings of a desire to belong -- at the top of the rap game, in circles where he once was denied access, with women he once was told were out of his league. In "Know Yourself," he describes the all-consuming momentum of the chase, saying he's turning into someone who "thinks about money and women like 24/7, that's where my life took me." Front-row seats to any game are a kind of testimony to his arrival, revenge taken out on his doubters. Maybe he moves from scene to scene and team to team because being accepted in places that adjust themselves to your presence is intoxicating. It must feel very cool. Indeed, Drake the musician says we should cut Drake the sports fan a break. In his tunes, he's owning his bad rap, leaning into the joke before anyone else makes it, following any team or player he loves and where he might be loved in return with a kind of playful self-awareness. "Man, this s--- so ill that we had to restart it / H-Town my second home like I'm James Harden," he says in "No New Friends." In "Summer Sixteen," it's "Golden State is running practices at my house." Then he runs to hug Kyle Lowry after a Raptors playoff win. It's all part of the show, all part of being in the club, pulling on a new team's jersey like that oversized turtleneck, sitting in the front row and cheering as if he couldn't be anywhere else. |
You’ve probably heard about HTML5 and the ability to embed video. Well this sounds all well and good but its been a bit of a mission getting my head around it and finally getting to a point where it actually works. I first started looking into it about 2 months ago when creating videos for the new Tribe website. Me and Ben (the web developer there) spent quite a bit of time scratching our heads and testing different methods until we came up with a solution that should work across all platforms. In this tutorial I’ll try my best to explain the process of getting HTML5 video to embed into a WordPress Blog, you’re not limited to a WP blog, you should be able to adapt it for any type of site. Bear in mind I don’t have a great deal of knowledge in the web area, so I apologise now if this is a little sloppy. Remember only HTML5 supported browsers can view the video, this currently includes the latest versions of Chrome, IE9, Firefox4, Safari, Opera and most mobile devices such as the iPhone, iPad etc. Okay there’s a few things you’ll need to get for this to work: Access to your own hosting, via FTP. I will be using Filezilla A video you want to host. (Here’s a link to the original source file used in the above clip) A file converter. I will be using xmedia Recode because its free and is the best WebM converter I’ve come across. A text editor Flowplayer Step 1 – Converting The Video To get the video to play across multiple platforms you need to convert your original file in to two formats, the new and open source WebM which is supported by Chrome, Firefox4 and Opera also a H.264 MP4 file that’s supported by safari, IE9, mobile devices and will be used by Flowplayer if the browser does not support HTML5 (IE8 and below for example) Download and install xmedia-recode. (Unfortunately this is only available for windows, I haven’t looked into mac alternatives) Open it up and you should see this screen: Drag your original file to where the highlighted area is in the above screen shot or click ‘Open File’. Select the imported video file by clicking it. Where it says format select ‘WebM’ At the bottom choose your destination for the converted video. I’ve chosen the desktop. Now click the ‘Filters/Preview’ tab and change the resolution. All the content on my blog is 555 pixels wide, for some reason you cannot enter this figure into the program, so I leave it at the nearest available option: ‘552×312’ Now click the ‘Add Job’ button at the top of the window. If you go to the ‘Jobs’ tab you can see that its been added to the list. The great thing about this program is its ability to batch process easily, So if you have a few files that need converting you can just keep importing them and adding them to the list. So now that you have the WebM ready to encode go back to the ‘Format’ tab. This time choose ‘MP4’ from the ‘Format’ roll down. Choose ‘MPEG-4 AVC /H.264’ from the ‘Codec’ roll down. Now select the ‘Video’ tab and make sure the settings are the same as mine below: Its important that these are correct, I have found if they are left as default then the video wont play on iPhones. Again make sure that you change the video resolu tion in the ‘Filters/Preview’ tab.. if you need to that is. Also worth noting that you should make sure the ‘Keep aspect ratio’ check box is selected when changing the size. Now click the ‘Add Job’ button again. If you click the ‘Jobs’ tab you’ll see two files listed and ready to encode.. only one thing left to do….. Click ‘Encode’ at the top. A pop up will appear with the encoding progress. Step 2 – Setting up your site I came across a problem when testing the video out in different browsers. Firefox4 could not display it for some reason. After some time and frustration I finally worked out it must be something to do with the settings on my server and not a codec issue. Ben showed me that the ‘.htaccess’ folder hosted on my server needed updating so the WebM format could be recognised by some browsers. I have to be honest I’m not entirely sure why or how but this solution works.. So login to your site via your FTP and locate your ‘.htaccess’ file and open it with a text editor. Add the following lines to the top of the document: AddType video/ogg .ogv AddType video/mp4 .mp4 AddType video/webm .webm Note that the .ogv file is probably unnecessary now that firefox4 supports WebM. Save the file and upload it back to your server. Now your site is ready to play the video content. Step 3 – Uploading the video Now that the site is ready you need to upload your video. Load up your FTP client and create a new directory, name it video. For organisational sake you could create sub directories for every set of videos you upload. Copy the files you converted in xmedia to the newly created folder. Step 4 – Embedding the video. So now you’re finally ready to embed the video! If you want purely HTML5 video playing on your site then the code below will do just that. If you want to support more browsers by including a fall-back flash player, read the rest of section then follow the instructions in step 5. <video id="movie" width="552" height="312" preload controls autoplay="autoplay"> <source src="http://www.digitalanthill.com/video/randomblog/powder.mp4 " type=’video/mp4; codecs="avc1.42E01E, mp4a.40.2"’ /> <source src="http://www.digitalanthill.com/video/randomblog/powder.webm " type=’video/webm; codecs="vp8, vorbis"’ /> </video> Key: preload = remove this if you don’t want the video to play as you load the page controls = remove this if you want to build you own controller autoplay=”autoplay” = remove this if you don’t want the video to autoplay Bold URLs = you need to replace these with links to the video you just uploaded The above code is the most efficient way (I’ve found) of getting a video to embed into your site. As long as you replace the bold areas with you own requirements it should work. You can (and probably should) take it one step further by adding flash support in there too. This will allow browsers that don’t support HTML5 to resort back to a native flash player. The following instructions will show you how to do just that. Step 5 – Enable Flash Download Flowplayer (free) and copy the ‘flowplayer’ folder to the ‘public_html’ folder on your server. |
So if An Inconvenient Sequel isn't here to convince you that global warming is real if it's banking on you knowing, what is it here to say? Published 1:00 PM, September 10, 2017 It's been over 10 years since the release of former US Vice President Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. The 2006 documentary film premiered at Sundance and went on to win two Academy Awards with its combined use of breathtaking shots of Earth’s landscapes and Gore's politician's charm in order to talk about environmental issues. But the real lasting legacy of the film is how it introduced the ideas of climate change and global warming to the popular public conscience. It served an all important role of breaking the ice for perhaps the most awkward meeting in history. Hello people, meet the state of your planet. But a lot has happened since 2006, culturally and environmentally. The conversation to do with climate change has matured significantly, though one would be fair to wonder if its pace has grown fast enough to match the progression of the phenomena itself. And especially with both the historic Paris Agreement of 2015 and recent political shifts in some of the world’s leading economies, now seems to be the right time for us to welcome An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power to keep us all updated on what we've done so far and to answer the question of whether we're doing enough. The film is poised to continue the legacy of set before it and to reignite public fervor for change. Frankly, to be inconvenienced by the truth of what's happening to the planet has never been so aptly timed. More than just an update Among others, Al Gore updates us all the progress in the renewable energy market like advancements solar and wind technology, on his work with the Climate Reality Project, and on, of course, the many catastrophic weather events that have rocked the new and developed worlds. But the film is more than just a simple catch-up. It's not just a part two to the first, taking up where it left off and rehashing the same concept. Though it carries on in the same vein of 'Wake up, take heed, we cannot continue on as we have!', it sends a message distinct enough from the first to warrant its existence. Where the first film focused heavily on convincing people of the fact of anthropogenic climate change, the sequel doesn't have to. Since the release of An Inconvenient Truth, one of the biggest developments in climate change advocacy is that we're all aboard the same boat now (mostly). The acceptance of climate change as a real, serious, and most of all, human influenced phenomena has become the norm (sure, okay, we still have so some deniers milling about causing headaches for the rest of us). But as a global society, we've, for the most part, accepted it as fact. Yale's Climate Opinion Map for 2016 showed less than 10 counties in all of the United States as neutral toward whether global warming was real or not. Since researchers first started tracking the American public's perception and awareness of global warming in 2008, the number of believers has swelled to 70% of their studies sample size, say Yale and George Mason climate scholars. Better yet, 19% reported to be very concerned. Compared to a similar survey done just three years ago, the numbers of people who understand the risks posed to developing countries and even to the United States itself have grown significantly. And these aren't surveys asking the opinions of climate experts, or even people in adjoining fields. These are the opinions of the public. Though parallel surveys for the rest of the world are lacking, we can still see a definite trend in where the consensus is going. So if An Inconvenient Sequel isn't here to convince you that global warming is real if it's banking on you knowing, what is it here to say? It swaps out the many before-and-afters that were a signature of An Inconvenient Truth for things more relatable. Okay, yes, there's still a bit of the whole 'what's changed in 30 years, the ice used to be this thick’. But where the first tried to tug at your heartstrings (Look what we’ve done to the planet!), the sequel tries to relate the facts to your life. My life. Anyone who’s been stuck in the rain, experienced a drought, or just thought the weather was being 'weird’. Water, water everywhere The film places a large focus on urban flooding. The before-and-afters of glacier melt are used directly to explain flooding in Florida, torrential rain incidents around the world, and stronger storms in the Pacific. The facts of how global temperatures are climbing upwards are brought completely out of the realm of the abstract and translated to be relatable by connecting them to recent typhoons. Droughts are connected to civil crisis. The film’s emphasis on the actual consequences of climate change show that the problem is communicated best by making it relatable. It needs to be addressed now, because it’s affecting our lives now. The sense of urgency is much more palpable in An Inconvenient Sequel. If An Inconvenient Truth appealed for you to consider the reality of climate change, An Inconvenient Sequel wants you to understand that it's the greatest issue of this generation. Just don't expect to see as many graphs, which were another signature of the first film. Screentime instead is given to intimate interviews with survivors of super typhoons, following Gore to frustrating meetings where coal and renewable energy clash, and shots of the former US Vice President standing in flood waters in disaster areas. There's also no shortage of natural disaster footage, even sans Al Gore. The science is still there to back it all up, don't worry we're not winging it with gut feelings, but now it's shown mostly in the easily digestible form Gore uses in his presentations. The data takes less of a starring role and emphasis is put on how much actual action is being done to educate. The Climate Reality Project Following Gore's work to make future climate advocates out of people from all disciplines is another anchor of the film. He does this through the Climate Reality Project was founded in 2006, the same year An Inconvenient Truth was released. A lot of the film feels like a lecture straight from one of these trainings, especially since we see snippets of so many, from the first one held Gore’s private estate ranch to a recent one held in Manila last year. The sequel shifts from focusing solely on climate change, to talking about climate change mitigating action. We, of course, get to see Mr. Gore's famous slideshow being presented to the trainees (and even him editing it to include recent news). You know the one, with the forms and figures of temperatures rising and incidences of hotter days growing more and more frequent. In the same forums, we also see Al Gore growing impassioned and his voice growing heavy with emotion, almost anger. He calls himself out a few times, saying he's gotten all riled up, perhaps a reflex of self control that stays on as a remnant from his politician days. It's not that he seems tired or frustrated, but the toll of having this conversation seems to be weighing heavier now that in 2006 and certainly more than decades ago when he started speaking about the impact human activities have on the environment. It's strange to see him get so emotional, especially here where he's preaching to the choir. Didn't everyone in those seats sign up and apply to be there? But, of course, it's not just Climate Reality Project volunteers that he has to deal with. Maybe the frustration is directed towards the other players in the movie, the ones who aren't on our same boat, the ones whose primary interests don't lie well with Gore’s and the environments. And who wouldn't get frustrated with that? Decades of climate work, not just under Gore's belt, but especially by the scientific community, have given what seems to be all the evidence needed to stop the discussion of whether this is real and provide grounds to move and talk about what needs to be done. Yet the conversation still gets bogged down by trying to convince people of the urgency of the matter. This happens with enough frequency that the sequel doesn't need to explain why it isn't carrying as much good news as you'd think it should. There's limitless resources on the problem, detailing just how bad it is and how bad it can get, as well as the measures needed to prevent getting to that point. But as An Inconvenient Sequel points out through the Paris Convention, it's often not up to climate change experts to decide on these measures. It's not even up to the scientific community, meaning all disciplines like economics, the humanities, ecologists, what have you. Paris was a good, watershed moment A significant portion of the documentary follows the 2015 conference of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), held in Paris, France. This event is what would lead to the Paris Agreement, now ratified by 160 of 195 UNFCCC members. The conference brought heads of state together to decide what the global community and each country should be doing about greenhouse gas emissions and adaptation to climate change. Now, let’s not get too into what they eventually agreed upon, besides that the parties eventually agreed to limit the increase of average global temperatures less that 2 °C above pre-industrial levels. A quick Google search will let you know whatever else you might want about it. For the documentary, a large point of drama goes into how hard negotiating this was. It highlights the conflict between the developed and developing worlds, particularly when it just comes to energy. The conflict between economic development and the need to step back from fossil fuels, scientific study or achievement that can't be done without political support, as well as question of who among nations must carry the burden of global warming, are a heavy themes. The issues of global warming and climate change can't be treated like they exist in a world dominated just by science. They’re human issues. And we humans do like our politics. Luckily, Gore can still play ball. Not to give too much away, but the film does well to highlight another aspect of just why Gore is so good at what he does. He can talk the science to the public, sure. But better yet, he can negotiate, communicate, and find compromises between the people who actually decide on policies, so something actually gets done. Houston, we have a problem As we wrote this, Houston was largely underwater thanks to Hurricane Harvey, another superstorm made more devastating by climate change. This weekend, as this is published, Hurricane Irma is set to wreck havoc in Florida as it has already done in Carribean countries. While no individual storm can be named a direct effect of climate change, the science all supports that rising temperatures over water and land are doing nothing but increasing their severity. The way we’ve built cities hasn't helped this. Between 1996 and 2011, Houston added 24% more pavement according to Samuel Brody of Texas H&M University. With that level of loss of surfaces that could actually absorb rainwater, and the flood levels now, it's not that big of a leap to see that many of our human activities, not just where we get our energy from, are adding to the problem. Global warming from carbon emissions isn't the only prong to this. How we make our clothes and food, where we live, how we build our cities, how we move, even how we commonly package and consume our water - they are all connected and the dots all point towards 'We cannot carry on this way’. In the film, a similar intense flooding event sent home from the 2015 Paris UNFCCC conference the delegates of India, one of the biggest dissenters against abandoning fossil fuels. One can't help but feel Mother Nature’s awful sense of irony. But there's nothing funny about natural disasters. Nor about how frequent and intense they are growing. Harvey is not an isolated incident, or even something isolated to one part of the globe. This year, over 1,000 people have died in the heavy flooding that hit South Asia in the summer. So unless we intend to just rebuild our whole world’s civilizations to withstand whatever weather may come our way (apocalypse bunker suburbs, anyone?), our only option for adaptation is to mitigate the effects of global warming and carbon emissions. The industrial age of life being fueled by coal has to die and stay dead or we may join it. According to the Asian Development Bank, by the end of the century there may be a billion climate refugees in the Asia Pacific region alone. Many countries stand to lose territory to rising sea levels, increasing temperatures, or the frequency of natural disasters being simply too much for settlement to make sense. The Paris Agreement is set to be enacted in 2020, but based on projections right now, temperatures could rise nearly 6 degrees in some parts of Asia and the Pacific, three times what the agreement says is the maximum allowed. The most at risk are Bangladesh, the Philippines, China, the Mekong Delta, the Indus Delta, and small island states. What we need to do An Inconvenient Sequel drills home two points: action needs to be taken now, and that taking that action won't be easy. The growing severity of natural disasters has made it very clear that we don't have the luxury of waiting much longer if we're going to adapt. That it won't be easy is drilled home by the entanglement of politics in the issue. The 2016 election of Donald Trump, who’s said many times that climate change isn't a real problem, as US President is just the latest in of hurdles the movement has to overcome. The film is raw and obvious in it's appeal to us the audience, but it's the furthest thing from desperate. It's not a Boogeyman film that's meant to scare you. Neither is it a doomsday message. Even if it's been edited after it's premier to include the US’ intent to back out of the Paris Agreement, the birth of which was such a victorious highlight in the film, the message doesn't see towards the pessimistic. Yes, the reality of climate change is getting even more grim and we're definitely running out of time for action, but it’s not hopeless. Rather, the Sequel ends with a similar call to action as the first film. Speaking truth to power has never been easy, for Gore or anyone else fighting this fight. The world wasn't built with climate change as it's primary concern. Scientists only started speculating on the possible effects of carbon dioxide emissions on global temperatures in the 19th century. It's an uphill battle to restructure how we live on this planet. It's a fight that's gone on much longer that it should have, but one that must be fought so we can still enjoy living on this planet. We just have to keep on doing it, on an individual level with our lifestyle choices, as well as on a community level with the way we let our societies function. We absolutely have to. It's our moral duty. An Inconvenient Sequel premiered in the Philippines last August 28. Our understanding is that blocked screening requests can still be entertained by contacting the Climate Reality Project Philippines through e-mail: philippines@climatereality.com. – Rappler.com Ally Munda is currently an Environmental Science student at the Ateneo de Manila University, collaborating with Professor La Viña on climate change and other environmental issues. |
In an interview with Hungarian state media’s Kossuth Rádió last Friday, internationally-known football referee Viktor Kassai discussed the value of the video assistant referee (VAR) system in eliminating major mistakes committed by referees during matches. Earlier this month, Kassai made history, employing VAR technology to award a penalty for the Japanese club Kashima Antlers during their FIFA Club World Cup Semi-final match against Atletico Nacional of Colombia, a game that the Antlers would go on to win. This was the first-ever live-trial of video refereeing technology, and the Hungarian Kassai was the referee (check out the video of the event here). Discussing this new way of refereeing on the show Sportvilág (Sport World), Kassai said that “VAR is a useful technology as it enables us, referees, not to make big blunders. Of course, there will still remain situations which can be judged in different ways, but cases when something is seen by everyone in the stadium except the referee will become a thing of the past.” Via MTI and Hungary Matters Image via realmadrid.com |
Southern California is poised to become the world's solar power capital as the Obama administration continues to stamp its approval on large-scale renewable energy projects across the Mojave and Colorado deserts. Since Aug. 1, the Bureau of Land Management has issued final environmental impact statements (EISs) for three commercial solar plants that, once built, will cover nearly 20,000 acres of BLM land in the desert regions and produce enough electricity to power nearly 1.6 million homes. Final EISs were issued on Friday to Tessera Solar's 850-megawatt Calico Solar plant and BrightSource Energy Inc.'s 392-megawatt Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System. Both plants are to be built in sparsely populated eastern San Bernardino County, California's largest county. The Calico and Ivanpah EISs follow the release of a final environmental impact statement for Tessera Solar's 709-megawatt Imperial Valley project in Imperial County, which borders Arizona and Mexico in the southeast corner of the state ( Land Letter, Aug. 5). While the issuance of a final EIS does not authorize construction, which is a state responsibility, it removes the last major regulatory hurdle in getting a large-scale energy project involving federal land off the ground. Collectively, the Tessera and BrightSource projects would produce more than triple the amount of solar power currently produced in the United States. And they are just the first of more than a dozen plants nearing final approval on federal lands in Arizona, California and Nevada. By the end of August, BLM plans to publish final EISs for three more commercial solar projects in the agency's California Desert District, said Linda Resseguie, BLM's solar program lead in Washington, D.C. And another three solar plants are expected to reach the final EIS stage by the end of the year, Resseguie said. These nine California plants, if fully built, would cover 41,229 acres of BLM land and have the capacity to generate 4,580 megawatts of electricity -- enough to power 3.8 million businesses and homes, according to federal estimates. "It's huge," Ken Zweibel, director of the George Washington University Solar Institute, said of the projects moving toward final approval. "These projects are going to change the very nature of solar energy in the world because there is nothing of this magnitude or scale that's going on." Industry officials, too, are excited about the Obama administration's commitment to solar power after years of positive statements from federal agencies supporting the renewables sector, but with few new power plants to show for it. "Our perspective is that finally the logjam seems to be loosening," said Monique Hanis, a spokeswoman for the Solar Energy Industries Association. "We're talking about gigawatts of electricity that can power tens of millions of homes." A looming deadline But concerns remain about the pace of permitting. The nine solar projects in Southern California, along with one in Arizona and four in Nevada, have been placed by the Interior Department on a "fast-track" permitting schedule that should qualify developers to receive lucrative federal grants from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The projects, however, must be under construction by Dec. 31 to receive federal stimulus dollars. "It's taken a while, and we are now getting near the end of the year," Hanis said. And not all of the fast-tracked projects are on pace to meet that year-end deadline. Examples include the proposed 550-megawatt Desert Sunlight Solar Farm project in Riverside County, Calif., and three Nevada projects totaling 610 megawatts, Resseguie said. The Desert Sunlight project "will likely not be permitted by the end of 2010," said Alan Bernheimer, a spokesman for First Solar Inc., the project's Tempe, Ariz.-based developer. First Solar officials said the project could still qualify for economic stimulus funding because the company has proposed by year's end to manufacture a significant number of the photovoltaic solar panels needed for the project -- thus qualifying as beginning construction by the deadline, Bernheimer said. "While it's true that the permit is needed before construction can start, projects may also qualify if significant physical work begins offsite by the end of 2010, such as manufacturing components for the project," he said in an e-mail to Land Letter. Resseguie acknowledged that permitting multiple large-scale solar power projects on such a tight schedule has placed the agency on a steep learning curve. "It is definitely new for the BLM, the size and scope for these types of projects," she said. "It's new for the companies, too, because we just don't have this large development anywhere else. So there are definitely going to be issues that we have not encountered anywhere else." Altering the landscape But others say the federal government is moving too fast in approving the projects, particularly in Southern California. The nine solar power projects, if built, would represent a major step forward in the Obama administration's efforts to dramatically expand the use of renewable energy from sources like solar, wind and geothermal power. It would also help state utilities meet Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's (R) directive that they generate 33 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020. But it will come at a cost. The solar projects would permanently alter the Mojave and Colorado desert regions' ecosystems, displacing rare plants and animals and straining already scarce water resources in one of the most arid landscapes in the country. Responding to such concerns, Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) introduced legislation last year that would place nearly 1 million acres of the Mojave Desert off-limits to energy development. Feinstein's "California Desert Protection Act" also outlined steps to ensure renewable energy projects are sited in areas that pose minimal environmental risk (Land Letter, Jan. 7). While introducing the bill last December, Feinstein said the federal government "has failed" to protect sensitive areas and criticized BLM for being "slow to direct development towards disturbed lands or to discourage proposals on lands acquired for the purpose of conservation." None of the nine fast-tracked solar projects would fall within the 1 million acres of desert that Feinstein wants to preserve. Still, some environmentalists remain unhappy that the government is driving so much renewable energy development toward public lands. "We need to get out of this mindset of where we're looking only to federal land to site these projects, to one where we're looking for the best places to site the projects," said Kim Delfino, California program director for Defenders of Wildlife, a national conservation group. "That's not to say public land does not have a role to play, but it can't be the only source." For its part, industry has made substantial efforts to avoid or minimize environmental impacts, including in some cases significantly revising project proposals. Example: BrightSource Energy's Ivanpah solar plant in the Mojave Desert. The original proposal called for the project occupying 4,073 acres of undisturbed land, "substantially affecting many sensitive plant and wildlife species and eliminating a broad expanse of relatively undisturbed Mojave Desert habitat," according to the BLM's draft EIS of the project. But in February, BrightSource agreed to scale back the project to avoid habitat for federally protected desert tortoises. The new proposal reduced the project's overall footprint by 12 percent and its total electricity output to 392 megawatts from 440 megawatts (Greenwire, Feb. 22). Another example is the Imperial Valley project, where Tessera Solar agreed to avoid building solar dishes on dry creek beds that are important for groundwater recharge and flood control. The result is that the company will build about 1,700 fewer dish systems, reducing overall electricity capacity at the plant to 709 megawatts from 750 megawatts. But there are some unavoidable impacts. Both the Ivanpah and Calico projects would impact desert tortoises. And the Imperial Valley project would fragment habitat for the flat-tailed horned lizard, which the Fish and Wildlife Service is currently studying for possible listing under the Endangered Species Act. "All of these projects have significant concerns," said Ileene Anderson, a staff biologist for the Center for Biological Diversity in Los Angeles. "These are good projects in bad locations." Scarce water resources Solar's rise in California, in particular, could also pose significant harm to groundwater aquifers. The Ivanpah, Calico and Imperial Valley plants would collectively consume an estimated 49.7 million gallons of groundwater a year, according to federal records. Water consumption ranks alongside wildlife habitat impacts as the biggest obstacles to permitting large solar plants, which by their very definition must be sited in areas of intense sunlight and scarce rainfall. That concern surfaced last year when National Park Service Director Jon Jarvis, while serving as the agency's Pacific West regional director, warned BLM in a formal memorandum that federal approval of dozens of solar plants could dramatically impact water supplies across the southern Nevada and California region (Land Letter, April 23, 2009). "This has been very much a concern for BLM as we started to get into and analyze these projects," Resseguie said. But as with wildlife habitat impacts, Resseguie credited the industry with taking innovative steps to reduce water consumption. Tessera Solar, for example, plans to eventually use treated wastewater to wash solar panels at its Imperial Valley plant. The proposal calls for building an 11.8-mile pipeline to the nearby city of Seeley to carry treated water to the desert facility. The company would pay for upgrades to the city's wastewater treatment plant to ensure the piped water meets federal quality standards. Streater writes from Colorado Springs, Colo. Copyright 2010 E&E Publishing. All Rights Reserved. |
Marine Le Pen, the leader of France's right-wing National Front (FN) party, is facing a potential investigation by the French authorities over "illegal campaign financing". Juges Renaud Van Ruymbeke and Aude Buresi, who are currently investigating one of Le Pen's officials, have extended their investigation on Wednesday 8 April to include the offence of "illegal campaign financing" by the party during the parliamentary and presidential elections of 2012. Two of Le Pen's relatives, David Rachline, senator and mayor of Fréjus (Var) and Nicolas Bay, MEP and Secretary General of the FN, are directly affected by the investigations, according to Le Monde. The judges have already launched an investigation against Frédéric Chatillon - a friend and confidant of Marine Le Pen dating back to their time together at law school - into the alleged "illegal financing" of the FN and Jeanne, Marine Le Pen's micro- party. On Wednesday 8 April, the judges charged Chatillon, who worked as Le Pen's unofficial public relations adviser and provided PR services to the Front National through his media company, Riwal - for "illegal funding of political parties by a legal person". Chatillon, and his company Riwal, are accused of having "in 2012 and 2013 provided the political parties, in this case Jeanne Association and the National Front, donations in any form whatsoever, be it property, services or other direct or indirect benefits, at prices below those usually practiced". Le Pen advisers directly affected In this new twist, however, the judges have explained that Marine Le Pen may be accused of illegally employing her two advisers, Rachline and Bay, as communications adviser and campaign spokesman respectively, through Riwal's use of "fictitious fixed term employment contract (CDD)" during her campaign for the presidential and legislative campaigns in 2012. The judges have claimed the wages "paid by the Riwal only during the presidential and legislative campaigns in 2012, amounted to disguised donations to the candidates." In practical terms, Bay was employed by Riwal for two months on a fixed-term contract, in May and June 2012 , as a "copywriter", during which time he received €6061 in income and €952 in overtime payments. Over the same period, Rachline was officially hired by Riwal, the communications company, as a "project manager", receiving €4,306 in revenue and €342 for overtime work. The figures may seen insignificant but the judges are expected to summon Marine Le Pen and her advisers Bay and Rachline. A widening investigation According to the judges, Riwal provided many "illegal" services to Marine Le Pen's micro party Jeanne, as well as its employees. These services could include granting interest-free loans between June 2012 and December 2013, the management of invoices for accounting work done on behalf of Jeanne, as well as "the payment of a bill of €412,000 to the National Front for services that could be realized by printers at very much lower prices, but which, in some cases were never made." The judges added a number of FN candidates never received those thematic leaflets for which Riwal had invoiced the party. The judges explained they are also looking into the fact that Riwal may have benefited from the National Front, which is alleged to have acted as a "permanent interest-free credit provider" for an outstanding debt reaching €942,767 at the tail-end of 2013. Questioned by Le Monde on Friday morning, Marine Le Pen merely stating in a text message that her two former advisers had "worked for two months at Riwal". While Rachline and Bay did not wish to comment, the FN's deputy party chairman, Louis Aliot, told BFM-TV on Thursday 9 April that there is "no illegal financing of the FN, I certify this to you". The judges' announcement comes days after Jean-Marie Le Pen confirmed his candidacy in upcoming regional elections, despite threats made by his daughter to expel him from France's far-right Front National (FN) party due to a deepening rift over anti-Semitic remarks. The party was thrown into chaos after Marine Le Pen said she would actively oppose her father's candidacy for the Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur region in the December elections. More to follow... |
WASHINGTON — On the campaign trail, Donald J. Trump falsely accused President Barack Obama of founding the Islamic State. He said Mr. Obama “did not get it,” in terms of fighting the extremist group that is based in Iraq and Syria, and vowed to obliterate them on the battlefield. But in the Trump administration’s first major announcement of its still-nascent plans to defeat the militants, Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson on Wednesday closely parroted Mr. Obama’s strategy. His comments came as talk of fighting the Islamic State was overshadowed by an attack in London that killed four and injured 40. It was not immediately clear who was responsible for the attack, or if the Islamic State was linked to it. “The great commonality among we who have gathered today is a commitment to bringing down a global force of evil,” Mr. Tillerson said at the start of a conclave of the 68-nation coalition to defeat the Islamic State that was held at State Department headquarters. In his 20-minute speech, Mr. Tillerson noted that over the past year, the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq and Syria had dropped more than 90 percent, and that 75 percent of the Islamic State’s online propaganda had been eliminated. Both gains occurred largely on Mr. Obama’s watch. |
I think that dexterity games are one of the most important factors to consider when trying to get people into our wonderful hobby. You might be thinking, “How could a game like Rhino Hero ever be more effective than Ticket to Ride or Carcassonne?” There are three main reasons that I feel confident making such a bold statement: Dexterity games are visually stimulating, extremely tactile, and play very quickly. Let’s unbox each one of those. A Sight for Sore Eyes The single biggest advantage that dexterity games have over more traditional board games is that they are incredibly visually stimulating. I have never played a game of [Go Cuckoo!](/reviews/go-cuckoo-review-josep-m-allue-viktor-bautista-i-roca/) or Ice Cool where people didn’t flock to it to find out what in the world we were playing. These games just *look* so foreign that they demand attention. With 4-5 people standing around a table, yelling and cheering every couple minutes, it is impossible to not draw a crowd. Don’t get me wrong, there are other kinds of games that can get people laughing and yelling in excitement, but when the crowed comes to see what happens, there’s usually no visual indicators as to what is going on. Take a game of The Resistance, for example. The same situation can arise, but suddenly all of the new viewers trying to get in on the excitement have to ask, “What is going on? How does this game work?” When someone walks up to a game of Junk Art they don’t have to ask what just happened, as a player’s pieces scattered around the table tell the story for them immediately. I’ve heard the question “Can I get in on the next game?!” more from any single dexterity game than I probably have from all of my traditional tabletop games combined. The excitement they build is simply contagious. Tactile Feedback The next factor here is how tactile these games are. Either you’re playing a stacking game, a flicking game, or a game with some other instinctive dexterous motion. No matter what, dexterity games get you using your hands. Not only are the pieces visually appealing, but they also just *feel* good. Some of my favorite board games out there use pieces that are very tactile. They often lend themselves to just being played with throughout the game. Think about it, have you ever played a game of Ticket to Ride where everyone dumps out there initial trains and just leaves them in a weird pile? I sure haven’t. Whenever I play, people tend to start organizing them into weird patterns or stacking them up. Play is brought out even in a game that doesn’t naturally encourage it and it’s very satisfying. Humans have always been wired to build and create, so why wouldn’t that naturally translate into play? For a while now, I’ve been using this term I came up with to describe this phenomenon in games. It’s called “Builders Satisfaction.” Basically, it’s the feeling of satisfaction you get when you actually build something unique in a game. Dexterity games are one of the most prominent sources of this. There’s just something about looking at a huge structure that you’ve built (probably seconds before it’s about to fall) and feeling proud of what you’ve created. King of the Short Attention Spans Let’s be honest, most people who are not already into board games don’t want to sit down for a couple hours to play a game that they know nothing about. I get it, board games can be scary and overwhelming sometimes. Dexterity games solve this problem by being quick and easy to learn. Most of these games take less than 30 minutes or so. Like I mentioned before, people are so quick to try to “get in on the next game.” While the excitement factor is a major contribution, another huge factor is that they’ve seen how quickly the games last and they’ve probably already picked up on the rules from just watching it. One of the coolest things about dexterity games is how instinctive they are. In most modern board games, you have to learn a set of rules and mechanics that govern the game. While that is true for dexterity games as well, the fact that the main mechanics are boiled down to instinctive reactions (like stacking or flicking) make these games extremely simple to learn and pick up. You can literally learn most simply by watching. This brings the barrier to entry down *significantly*. In addition to the instinctive nature that these games bring out, they also harken back to childhood days of playing games like Jenga and Operation. Dexterity games were a central part of childhood play for many people. Really, think back on some of the games that you may have played as a kid and you’ll probably be surprised how many dexterity games were in the mix. This extra familiarity just adds on to the confidence people have in jumping into something that would normally be so foreign. All in all, dexterity games are some of my favorite kinds of games, period. If you look at my shelf, you’ll see a surprising amount of flicking, stacking, and throwing games represented. While I’m not particularly good at them, there is a special kind of joy that comes from seeing friends, family, and complete strangers laugh with excitement when they make the perfect shot or knock down a tall tower of blocks. Few other games can encapsulate this kind of feeling and almost none can do it so easily. If you’re trying to choose which games to bring to a game night, I *highly* recommend tossing a dexterity game into your bag. Whether you end up playing with seasoned gamers or draw in some non-gamers, I know that you’ll have a great time! Next time in our Growing the Hobby segment, I will be looking at the importance of Party Games in bringing new players into the fold! — What are some of your favorite Dexterity games? Do you have any stories of introducing people to the hobby with them? Let us know in the comments below or on social media! |
What Is Meditation? When I take on a new Life Coaching client the first thing I do is to send them my intake forms to fill in so I can gather some background information. On one of the forms I ask them to rate their satisfaction levels out of 10 in 16 different areas of their life. There’s good reason for doing this and it’s largely because, even though a client may come to me with one issue, there maybe other issues underpinning that, that they are unaware of. One of the areas I ask about is that of meditation and it often provides fascinating conversation when we start working together. What Is Meditation? And the reason it’s fascinating is because the conversation unlike any other topic I ever discuss, follows pretty much the same pattern with the majority of clients. Me: You have 5 down for meditation, what prompted you to score it like that? Client: (quizzical look) I’m not really sure what meditation is so I scored it in the middle. Me: Would you be interested to know more if it could help you lower your stress, make you happier and improve your health? Client: Probably, but the problem is I’m pretty sure I couldn’t do it. Me: What makes you believe that? Client: Well, I have brain that is going 1,000 miles per hour and never shuts up. Me: I know exactly why that is. Client: Really, why? Me: It’s because you’re human. You may think I’m being flippant, but really I’m not. If you could climb inside my head (and please don’t do it, it’s full to capacity), you would notice that my mind is going all the time too. The human brain is wired and trained to chatter away to itself. Although your brain is only 3% of your body weight it uses, in the form of oxygen and glucose, about 25% of your energy supplies. Even when you’re asleep that amount doesn’t drop measurably because your brain is still hard at work making sure your heart is pumping, blood pressure being maintained, food being digested, new cells generated etc. There are a number of common misconceptions with meditation, some of which I covered off in my rather tongue-in-cheek post, 7 Reasons To Avoid Meditation. If you’re mind isn’t completely still you’re not meditating It’s only really for sandal-wearing, tofu-eating, dolphin-hugging hippies like Life Coaches You need to sit upright with your legs wrapped round each other like a contortionist A nap or hypnosis is just as good as meditating You need to do it for years before you see any benefit Meditation is a spiritual practice You need to do it for at least 30 minutes a day to see any benefit I think it’s enough to say they’re all wrong on some level, but I do want to address the points one by one and therefore by ruling out what meditation isn’t, we get closer to what it is. 1. If you’re mind isn’t still you’re not meditating I have been meditating for 5 years and I’m guessing in that time I have never managed to shut my thoughts off for more than 10 seconds in any one sitting. Pretty crap eh? Apart from the fact that there are many different types of meditation, many of which require visualization and thus involving the mind, meditation is a PRACTICE. What is meant by that, is that you pretty much never master it, you just do your best each time you sit. I’m sure there are a handful of people that get close to mastery, but my guess is (I don’t know this for a fact) that even expert meditators think they can improve on their practice. 2. It’s only really for sandal-wearing, tofu eating dolphin-hugging hippies like Life Coaches* I think this is the thing that puts so many people off and it’s total and utter bollocks. If you knew how many successful CEO’s, sports people, celebrities and ‘ordinary’ people meditated you would probably be shocked. And not because it’s not many either. A better and more accurate way of putting it would be; It’s only for people who want to be happier, healthier, more content and live longer. 3. You need to sit upright with your legs wrapped round each other like a contortionist. I can’t get into the lotus position, or even close. I also rarely meditate on the floor with my legs crossed. That’s because I have knee and back issues that usually mean the pain causes me to quit early. So I meditate either lying down or in a chair. It’s best to keep your spine straight, and it’s best to make sure you don’t nod off, but everything else is up for grabs which is why you can meditate walking and even in the shower if you like. 4. A nap or hypnosis is just as good as meditating Sorry but no, lovely though naps are they will not rewire your brain. Meditation can. I am a trained hypnotherapist and it has a lot of uses, but it has a lot more limitations than meditation. Hypnosis probably won’t make you happier or live longer (although I guess indirectly it can by helping you remove fears and change negative behaviors) and it won’t increase concentration levels or make you a kinder more content person. The main difference between napping and hypnosis and meditation is the latter is an active process the former two, passive. Meditation is something you do, not something you let happen to you. Note: if you are interested in knowing more about the power of hypnosis I wrote a post called What Is Hypnosis? 5. You need to do it for years before you see any benefit I’d say of all the clients that have adopted meditation whilst I have been working with them, about 80% have seen immediate or close to immediate benefits. Even if that benefit is only feeling more chilled for an hour or two afterwards. You can see benefits in lowering stress levels, increasing mood and improving concentration levels very quickly with meditation However, the benefits are cumulative too, so the longer you do it the greater the return. A bit like working out. 6. Meditation is a spiritual practice Of course it can be a spiritual practice and for many people it is, but it doesn’t have to be. You can just do it for the huge health and mood gains if you like, the choice is yours. 7. You need to do it for at least 30 minutes a day to see any benefit 5 minutes a day is better than nothing, so don’t stress that you don’t have time. My meditation teacher, Bodhipaksa from Wildmind has even produced a CD of guided meditations called “Meditations For Busy People’ that are all around 10 minutes or less. Check out his meditation store, and no, it’s not an affiliate link so I don’t stand to gain anything other than a very happy reader. Ok, so I have said what meditation isn’t, but I haven’t really said what it is so let me take a layman’s stab at this and please feel free to disagree. “Meditation is the acceptance of experience and the gentle effort to be continuously present with experience.” And that line comes directly from Bodhipaksa when I was struggling to come up with a one line sound bite , I e-mailed him. So thanks to him for bailing me out! That’s why you can meditate walking, or lying, or even doing the dishes (more in my next post). And the cool thing about the moment is it’s all you ever have, so if you’re not in it, you’re not really living to your fullest. Not so mystical and/or scary now, is it? In the next post I’m going to walk you through some basic meditations that you can try out without the need of a saffron robe or to shave your head, unless you insist. Then the post after that I’m going to take a look at the human brain and give you some interesting facts to chew on, some of which will be meditation related and some not. So stick around! I’m keen to know if you meditate and if not, what’s stopping you? * I do hug dolphins on a daily basis, and I do own a pair of sandals, but I don’t eat tofu. |
Vladimir Putin has promised to quit as the leader of the United Russia party after his presidential inauguration on May 7 and suggested Dmitry Medvedev as his replacement. The chairman of United Russia’s Supreme Council, Boris Gryzlov told Putin that he was sure that the party congress would support Medvedev’s candidacy for the leader’s post. United Russia introduced the post of party leader in 2008. Vladimir Putin was the first and so far, the only person to hold this position. Previously the top post in the party was the Chairman of the Supreme Council, occupied by Boris Gryzlov and after 2008, Gryzlov remained the head of United Russia’s parliamentary faction and speaker of the Lower House. The party had informally announced Putin as its leader even earlier – when they used Putin’s image and a program called Putin’s Plan during the parliamentary elections in 2007. Putin’s popularity and support allowed United Russia to get over 64 percent of votes at these elections. The 2011 parliamentary poll showed a radical decline in the party’s popularity. It received slightly over 49 percent of votes, still getting the majority of seats, but losing the ability to make changes to the constitution without other factions’ support. According to Russian law, changes to the constitution can be made only with the support of two thirds of the Lower House. After the poll, the head of the party’s faction, Boris Gryzlov gave up his MP’s mandate, saying it “was not right” for him to remain in the speaker’s post for the third time in a row. Last year’s elections were marred by mass protests against alleged violations and so-called extensive use of administrative resource – pressure from state officials of high and low rank to vote for United Russia. Elections officials acknowledged some of the violations, but said they did not affect the final results and there was no need for a re-run. Voters became increasingly disenchanted with a force that many believe is made up mostly of unelected bureaucrats, constantly seen enjoying lavish lifestyles. United Russia became known as "the party of crooks and thieves" among protesters, and once even held a formal meeting aimed at deflecting such claims. Tens of thousands of people in Moscow and St. Petersburg took to the streets, protesting against the party – and the movement also moved to the Web, with dozens of online parodies of MP interviews, sketches and short films posted on the subject. Many of the country’s media personalities also contributed, writing songs and poems, collecting money for organizing the protests and so on. Punchy, acerbic virtual political campaigns were a huge part of this year’s political events, with every side trying to be as creative as possible in sinking opponents and making their candidate shine. Before the parliamentary elections, Vladimir Putin announced the foundation of the Popular Front – a movement for people supporting United Russia’s course, but choosing not to enter the party ranks. United Russia said it would give up a quarter of its parliamentary seats to Popular Front members in exchange for support in the election. The movement has not yet been officially registered, and its program documents are still in development. Putin has never been a member of United Russia – the party says this is right in order for it to have full dialogue with other parties and political forces. Experts have explained the fall of United Russia’s popularity, saying that voters want more precise programs from political parties, not vague concepts like Putin’s Plan. The head of the Institute of Modern Development, Igor Yurgens said that United Russia is currently an assembly of people with completely different political beliefs, united only by their loyalty to Putin as future president. The expert said that the current political process requires a split between leftist and rightist members within the party. “The simultaneous presence of socialists, social democrats and billionaires from the Forbes list who skillfully defend big business and who are in essence rightist politicians is impossible for a ruling party with its need to develop and hold a single political course,” Yurgens was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency. He also added that United Russia’s results in the latest poll “were not especially good” and the party understands that it must make changes. Vedomosti daily has suggested that putting Medvedev in Putin’s place as United Russia leader would allow both politicians to retain networks of reception offices throughout the country – Medvedev would get Putin’s current network, and Putin will inherit Medvedev’s network when he is sworn in as President. Besides, the article suggested that Putin would retain control over United Russia through his presidential administration even after leaving the post of official party leader. Opposition MPs said that the changes in United Russia’s leadership are not likely to change the party’s course or politics. Communist Sergey Obukhov said it does not matter for his party who is the official leader of the parliamentary majority. The politician said members expect all decisions to be taken in the presidential administration, with Putin and Medvedev simply “demonstrating a game of politics and democracy”. Maksim Rokhmistrov of the Liberal Democratic Party faction said that Medvedev taking the post of United Russia leader will not change anything in the country. United Russia is de-facto run by Putin and Medvedev together anyway, he said. However, Rokhmistrov added that it was unlikely that Medvedev will form a truly new government if he takes the post. The politician said that if Medvedev really wants changes, he should turn down the proposal. |
Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker was one of at least 23 governors Monday opposed to allowing additional Syrian refugees into their state following Friday’s terrorist attacks in Paris. New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan took it one step further, becoming the first Democratic governor Monday afternoon to call for a complete freeze of Syrian refugees entering the United States until the government can “ensure robust refugee screening.’’ “The Governor believes that the federal government should halt acceptance of refugees from Syria until intelligence and defense officials can assure that the process for vetting all refugees, including those from Syria, is as strong as possible to ensure the safety of the American people,’’ said a statement from Hassan’s communications director, William Hinkle. Advertisement The White House, however, said Monday it remained committed to its plan to accept at least 10,000 Syrian refugees in 2016 under the current process of “rigorous screening and security checks.’’ Refugee resettlement agencies also pointed out that states do not have the capability to prevent legally-admitted refugees from residing in their state, as immigration and refugee policy is governed at the federal level, per the Refugee Act of 1980 and, more recently, the Supreme Court. “As the federal government has the exclusive legal authority for resettling refugees, the Governor cannot block resettlement but believes that the federal government should work closely with emergency management and safety officials from the states to ensure local safety concerns are addressed before resuming any resettlement plans,’’ Hinkle added. Hassan is running for Senate in 2016 against Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte, who has also opposed allowing Syrian refugees into the country until the government can guarantee they are not affiliated with the Islamic State. The Guardianreported Monday that at least five of the eight Paris attackers had visited Syria, before returning home to Belgium or France. New England’s governors have thus far been split over how to deal with the refugee crisis. Maine’s Republican Gov. Paul LePage joined Baker and Hassan, reiterating his continued opposition to allowing Syrian refugees into the United States. Advertisement “To bring Syrian refugees into our country without knowing who they are is to invite an attack on American soil just like the one we saw in Paris last week and in New York City on 9/11,’’ LePage said in a statement Monday. “That is why I adamantly oppose any attempt by the federal government to place Syrian refugees in Maine, and will take every lawful measure in my power to prevent it from happening.’’ Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy, a Democrat, told NBC Connecticut the state would stick to its commitment to bring in roughly 1,600 Syrian refugees having completed existing background checks. In Vermont, Democratic Gov. Peter Shumlin also said his state was willing to accept those fleeing the war in Syria and lambasted those who would try to impede refugees entrance into their state, according to the Burlington Free Press. “The governors who are taking those actions are stomping on the qualities that make America great,’’ he said at a press conference, “which is reaching out to folks when they’re in trouble and offering them help, not hurting them.’’ Shumlin added that he trusted the existing screening process, adding, “We root out folks who should not be accepted.’’ As Rhode Island lawmaker battled Monday over whether the state should reject or accept any refugees from Syria, Democratic Gov. Gina Raimondo said it was a moot argument, per a statement to WPRO’s Tara Granahan: “We haven’t received any requests to help, so there’s nothing to decide at the moment. If a request is made, we will coordinate closely with the White House and with Col. O’Donnell. Anything Rhode Island may do in the future to support our nation’s efforts to respond to this humanitarian crisis and help those in need must include robust background checks and security procedures to keep Rhode Islanders safe.’’ In September, Raimondo said Rhode Island would “be ready to help’’ if they’re called upon to accept refugees from the war in Syria. Advertisement According to the New York Times, a total 1,854 Syrian refugees were admitted to the United States since 2012, compared to the tens of thousands accepted — per the Los Angeles Times — in some European and Middle Eastern countries . The focus may be on Europe, but most Syrian refugees are closer to home http://t.co/2kUndP7FTC pic.twitter.com/R0LsGOMPJr — Mitchell Landsberg (@LATlands) September 20, 2015 “Slamming the door in their faces would be a betrayal of our values,’’ President Barack Obama said Monday in Turkey. “Our nations can welcome refugees who are desperately seeking safety and ensure our own security. We can and must do both.’’ |
Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images Last night, the LA Times' Louis Sahagun reported a piece of data dynamite the Energy Information Administration plans to detonate under California next month: There now appears to be just 600 million barrels of recoverable tight oil in the state's vast Monterey shale play — a downward revision of 96% from the agency's 2011 estimate. The revision seems to have been predicted in a report from geoscientist J. David Hughes, best known for his work on Canadian oil formations, and published by the Post Carbon Institute in December. Hughes warned that Monterey's geology, while superficially similar to marquee tight oil plays in Texas and North Dakota, actually contains an enormous number of irregularities that would make it difficult to ever successfully extract the resources. "The target strata in the Bakken and the Eagle Ford plays are less than a few hundred feet inthickness and are flat-lying to gently dipping," the report said. "The shale deposits of the Monterey are much thicker and much more complex, with target strata up to 2,000 or more feet in thickness, and atdepths that can range from surface outcrops to more than 18,000 feet within a span of fortymiles or less." The EIA did not respond to requests for comment. BI had previously talked with experts who said there were so many unknowns about the Monterey that it wasn't really on anyone's radars as a potential new chapter in the Great American Shale Boom. "It is not a focus right now," ITG's David Howard told us in December. "The market has moved away from really paying attention California unconventional and I follow the market." So, it's debatable whether it can reasonably be called "a blow to the nation's oil future," as the LAT's Sahagun put it, since no one was really factoring it into that future in the first place. But it certainly makes things extremely awkward for California. The state had pinned its hopes on a March 2013 USC study that argued tapping the Monterey could create up to 2.8 million jobs by 2020 and add up to $25 billion to state and local tax revenue. "Californians drive 332 billion, that's billion miles a year, fed almost entirely by oil products, so we have got to start hammering at the demand, as well as the sources of fossil fuel," California Governor Jerry Brown told CNN Sunday. In September 2013, Brown — often labeled as having a thumb as green as Shrek's — signed into law a bill that allowed the small-scale fracking that already occurs in to continue, with a view toward one day tapping what was thought to be Monterey's vast and accessible deposits. Brown's office had no comment Wednesday. The good news is that outside California, the findings may not mean all that much. The most recent revisions to the country's marquee shale plays like the Bakken have actually gone upward. Reached by BI Wednesday, Hughes said his analysis of other mega American shale plays don't differ greatly with the EIA's. "So far I don't see any kind of radical downgrade that might occur," he said. But for the Golden State, the second coming of a black gold rush looks to have been a mirage all along. |
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The BBC's Jon Sopel reports: "The organisers - many of them veterans from the Vietnam era - invited us to join the front of the parade" Illegal immigrants in the US often get better care than the nation's military veterans, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has said. "We're not going to allow that to happen any longer," he told a bikers' rally in Washington DC. Mr Trump did not provide any evidence for his assertion. Last year, the billionaire sparked anger by attacking the military record of Senator John McCain, a former prisoner of war. Mr Trump said Sen McCain was only considered a hero because he was a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War. He then added: "I like people who weren't captured." Since then Mr Trump, who never served in the military, has tried to repair the damage by frequently honouring veterans at his rallies and holding fundraising events for them. Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Donald Trump: "We have to take care of our vets" His latest comments came at the annual Rolling Thunder motorcycle rally on Sunday, which was dedicated to remembering POWs and those missing in action. Despite previous criticism, many in the crowd cheered Mr Trump. "What I like about Trump is that he is one of us. He's not a politician," 52-year-old Louis Naymik was quoted as saying by the Associated Press news agency. Mr Trump - who has made controversial comments on a number of issues - was speaking ahead of the 7 June California primary. He is running unopposed in California after his Republican rivals pulled out and he reached the number of delegates needed to secure the nomination. It has yet to be formalised. The Associated Press says Congress and many states have written an assortment of laws and policies designed to restrict government services to people in the country illegally. |
Image copyright NATHAN G Image caption Goofy (centre) with Chockalingam S and Bala Manian, the two partners of Opn Advertising Goofy, the canine worker of an advertising firm in the southern Indian city of Chennai, has a visiting card and a "corner seat", and he performs multiple roles in the office. The BBC's Geeta Pandey recently dropped in to meet him. When I knocked on the door of Opn Advertising and pushed it open, Goofy came running and gave me a warm welcome by wagging his tail and licking my hands. "He came to us about 10 years back," says Bala Manian, a partner in the company, who has known Goofy for a long time. " We found him sitting in front of a tea shop. He was either abandoned or had run away or had lost his way." Image copyright NATHAN G Image caption Goofy offers his business card For the first few days, Ms Manian says, they tried to look for a permanent home for him. "Then we realised that he was too adorable to give away. Besides, he seemed very comfortable here, so we decided to adopt him. In a way, he adopted us." Soon, Goofy became a "core member" of the office. Image copyright NATHAN G Image caption Goofy attends an office meeting Image copyright NATHAN G Image caption Goofy plays multiple roles in the office The visiting cards at the firm list out all the designations, including that of "the office dog", and the employees choose whatever describes their role best. Goofy, however, is not just the office dog - he's the receptionist "who opens the door and greets visitors", he's the human resource manager "who sits on recruitment interviews" and "anyone new joining the office gets to know him first". "He does everything except for writing creatives," says Ms Manian. "He doesn't write, he barks, but pretty much he handles everything else for the company." She says Goofy has "an acute creative sense" and his word is generally taken as final. "Sometimes we can't decide between two ad routes we are going with, so we show them to him, the one he doesn't tear up or chew up, we present that to our client." Image copyright NATHAN G Image caption Goofy has a fixed place in the office where he sleeps at night Staff members take turns to feed him and walk him and he has a "corner seat" in the office where he sleeps on a cushion at night. "During the day, there's no fixed seating in the officer so we all work around Goofy's schedule," says Ms Manian, adding that they gave up trying years ago to persuade him to move. "We sit where Goofy is not sitting. If you ask him to move, he looks at you with such offended eyes that you'd better move with your laptop." Image copyright NATHAN G Image caption Goofy's colleagues say he helps them relax in office Image caption Goofy has his own visiting card Goofy has strong preferences, his colleagues say - for instance, he prefers female company to male and chooses the lift over the staircase. But his colleagues vouch for his good behaviour - they say he never barks and is never aggressive with people. Several studies have shown that having a pet around the office boosts morale and helps people relax. And Goofy is an ace in that department too, says Aakriti Sinha. "He manages to put people at ease, brings the stress levels down and resolves conflicts. "When two people begin to argue, he goes and sits in the middle and defuses the situation." |
There are lots of music subscription services that let people listen to all the songs they want for $10 a month. Apple thinks that price is too high. Sources say Apple is talking to the big music labels about a new set of rights and features it would like to include in a revamped version of the Beats Music service it bought earlier this year. Among the things Apple wants is a new pricing structure that would allow it to sell the service for less than the $10 level it’s at now. Discussions are in their early stages, sources say, and Apple isn’t planning on overhauling Beats Music until next year. Last month, Apple said a TechCrunch report that the company was planning to “shut down” Beats was not true. But people familiar with the company’s thinking said it might alter the service over time. Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr declined to comment. Getting the labels to sign off on a price cut will require some work on Apple’s part. After initially resisting the notion of subscriptions, in part because they worried all-you-can-eat services would cut down on CD and download sales, music executives eventually agreed to let services like Rhapsody, Spotify and most recently Beats offer all-you-can-stream services for $10 a month. Now download sales are indeed dropping, while revenue from streaming services is picking up. But it’s unclear how much of the download decline should be attributed to subscription services like Spotify and Beats, and how much of it stems from the use of free services like YouTube, Pandora and even Apple’s own iTunes Radio. Meanwhile, many music industry observers believe there is a limited pool of consumers willing to pay $10 a month to rent music — especially since few people spent that much money on music during the CD era. Spotify, the world’s biggest on-demand subscription service, says it has more than 10 million paying users. But a recent survey suggested that only 25 percent of music streamers spent more than $10 on music every three months. Additional reporting by Dawn Chmielewski. |
The End of Manor Downs On the way back from Manor Downs, on Route 290, down 35, and then to the Statesman building just across the river, I used to think of my lead, the beginning of a journalism story, for the horse racing I just covered. It seemed to me the 20 minutes it took to drive was the perfect amount of time to come up with the way I was going to begin the story, often with some pithy description of the race or some quirk about the winning horse (I remember one horse that liked to sleep before racing). Most horses were “honest,” according to the trainers, so I had learned that I needed to ask more about the horse’s personality or the story behind his or her purchase, in order to get something I could use. Journalism was work I had done before I came to graduate school, and it was largely separate from my graduate school work, though it wouldn’t be for long—my experience in Manor led me to my current project, a cultural explanation of horse racing. (And somehow, I ended up teaching journalism. But that’s another story.) I don’t remember thinking exactly that there was a point where Austin ended and not-Austin began, because if the Austin American-Statesman was covering something, it was by coverage definition part of Austin. But thinking about it in the context of my experiences before, during, and since my life in Austin as a graduate student, of course, there was a divide. Some of that divide was language. Some of it was geography. Some of it was subject matter. A lot of it was my own perceptions of authenticity and my place in the world. But I felt it then and I feel it now, somewhere between Manor Downs and the Austin American-Statesman, Austin ends. * * * I worked there at Manor Downs at first because of the money. I came to graduate school without funding, and though I located a good gig my second semester there, and then had part-time work (20 hours was the magic number to get in-state tuition and health care) for the rest of my time, I really needed the money during the period I started working. I had left journalism for graduate school, with no intention of ever going back to journalism. But I sent out my resume to The Austin American Statesman and got a gig recording football scores at the paper on Friday night.[1] One Friday, the Statesman’s sports editor approached me. “You’re from New York, right?” “Actually, Connecticut,” I said.[2] “Close enough. Anyway, would you like to cover horse racing for the paper?” he asked. I hesitated a second, simply because I had come to graduate school to get out of newspaper work. But I said yes and started soon after. * * * So for the next two years or so, I went to the racetrack three times a week during the track’s two racing seasons, sitting on the bleachers in an Hawaiian or polo shirt, alternately handicapping (picking who would win) and reading books from my graduate program. Manor raced quarter horses, which meant the races were as short as 220 yards and lasted as few as 20 seconds. There was a lot of sitting and reading and sometimes staring at the landscape. I had always lived in places with lots of trees and hills, and I looked at the flatness as a novelty for much of my time there. I had been a reporter for two and half years before school and wrote for the college paper before that. So I was able to get used to the rhythm of racetrack journalism fairly easily. You learn the expectations of your editors and then set out to fulfill them. All the desk wanted from me was 500 words or so about the race and perhaps a preview of the next day’s race. As someone who often had to condense a 2 1/2 hour meeting into the same length in 30 minutes, the racetrack writing was the easiest 50 bucks I ever made.[3] But even after I took a teaching assistantship with the School of Nursing at UT (they were desperate for writing instructors—all the graduate students there wanted to do clinical work), I kept the horse racing gig simply because it was interesting, an experience like I never had before. The daily life of being somewhere you initially perceive as exotic is a weird one; you know that what you are doing is different, and it certainly was for me. But it also becomes completely normal. I sat there day after day, learning to understand this particular style of racing, the people who attended it, and to some degree Texas. At the same time, I recognized how much I loved graduate school, particularly my field of American Studies. I had never been around people I felt so comfortable with, who shared the same passions as I did. Conversations could go on for hours, even days, and I learned so much about the world through my reading and discussion that I became one of those professors who does not discourage students from going to graduate school, even though job prospects can be shaky. I found the experience so valuable that I would recommend it to any like-minded person.[4] The two sides of my life sometimes melded together. I would bring fellow graduate students out to the racetrack, and I met a smart, beautiful woman at the track, who became my companion in seeing and doing Austin things. I ended up writing about the racetrack’s design for a class and then a master’s thesis. My graduate school friends were often surprised by how easily I got along at the racetrack, how comfortable I was talking to racing officials, trainers, and jockeys, who were so much different than I was. My only explanation was that we shared the same passion for horse racing. * * * When I think of Manor Downs, I think real Texas, even though I shouldn’t. I feel as if my experience there was my glimpse into what people in Texas might have been really like as opposed to my fellow graduate students, most of whom had no Texas ties. And that strikes me now as a bit dangerous. In Manor, I sat for hours at a time on an air-cooled bench, in other words with no air-conditioning, unlike my endless hours at the PCL, the graduate-oriented library at UT. The seasons were spring and fall, so that was okay. It was dusty. People wore cowboy hats, not ironically, but to protect themselves from the sun. People wore big belts with their names on it or for their triumphs on horses without irony. There was no self-consciousness at the track, nothing to make someone think that one was playing at Texan. At Manor, I was in a Texas of Texans, unlike Austin, which was its own Texas thing. But there were definitely divides at the track. Don, a trainer who was born in Missouri but had lived in Texas for 25 years, was still not considered Texan. And then there was race (though not class). For example, it seemed to me that Hispanic trainers and jockeys were underbet, which means given their success, they attracted less money than they should have, a not infrequent occurrence in general. My friend Michael tells me that women trainers in Europe are also routinely underbet. More disturbingly, I was privy to the infrequent but regular expression of racial epithets. It made me recall the trip I made to Texas in college, when I was spirited around by two friends of a friend, who seemed funny and nice, until they rolled down the window and yelled a racial epithet at a walking African American. I said nothing then, and nothing at the racetrack, something I still regret. I also didn’t respond when the racing secretary made a Jewish joke at my expense after I complained about losing a race I feel I should have won. In Austin, I was not witness to the same type of racial outspokenness, though I know from my close friend of mine who is African American that whites uttered racial epithets regularly at her in Austin itself or refused to hand change directly to her (more than once). We used to argue about Austin’s liberalism, and I argued with her that a place that voted overwhelmingly to restrict development (the Save Our Springs initiative) and voted for a green city council (this was in the 1990s) was by definition liberal. She argued that no place could liberal that wasn’t racially progressive, and I now agree with her. * * * The racism expressed at Manor Downs poisoned my experience there and in Texas. I tell this story not to indict Texans or even the racetrack (and even if it were an indictment, the statute of limitations would long be over—it was more than 20 years ago). Still when trying to tell the story of this racetrack, I found it impossible to ignore the racism, though it was a very small portion of my experience. It’s now taken over this essay, and I wonder whether that’s always true, that racial incidents tend to implant themselves in a locale like invasive weeds. At the same time, the end of Austin, the edge of Austin, and the beginning of Manor do not lie solely or perhaps at all among racial lines. Austin was more self-conscious than Manor. For all of Austin’s pleasure, it was always worried about its maintenance. Manor Downs too was worried about staying open, but it had no doubts about the function of its track. It was open for racing. Austin was just open, for possibilities, for change, for business, for the environment, for weirdness. And yet, when I think of Austin, I don’t think of weirdness. I think of my absolute context there. Manor seems the weird place to me, which is why I am writing about it. Now, Manor Downs has closed, likely due to the same problems that plagued it when I worked there, the small crowds except for an occasional day that coincided with an important race either there or broadcast from far away. But like all memories, the races still run in my mind. Notes [1] I was told if a game score did not come in, I was supposed to call the local community’s Dairy Queen. [2] I first lived in the Enfield neighborhood of Austin when I moved to Texas—many of the streets in that neighborhood are named after Connecticut towns and cities: Hartford, Wethersfield, Winsted, Poquonock, Sharon, Enfield, Woodlawn are all cities in CT. [3] Often when I came into the newspaper, someone on the sports desk would ask to see my wallet, to see how I did. [4] As long as you don’t look at graduate school as a vocational school. It is, but only for conducting your own research, and even that… Jonathan Silverman is an Associate Professor of English and Co-Director of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He is the author of Nine Choices: Johnny Cash and American Culture (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010) and the co-author of The World Is a Text (Pearson, 2012), now in its fourth edition. |
Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin confirmed plans on Wednesday to consolidate Russia’s space industry under a single state-controlled corporation within a year. MOSCOW, September 4 (RIA Novosti) – Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin confirmed plans on Wednesday to consolidate Russia’s space industry under a single state-controlled corporation within a year. The United Rocket and Space Corporation, to be formed as a joint-stock company, will contain all organizations in the aerospace industry, with the exception of a few defense companies, he said. Plans for the restructuring were first announced in July. Consolidation will help the government pursue a “unified technical policy” in the space sector as well as remove current redundancies and avoid potential ones, Rogozin said, adding that the new corporation would absorb 33 space organizations, including 16 enterprises. Initially 100 percent controlled by the government, the corporation will undergo an initial public offering (IPO) after two or three years, the deputy prime minister said. Russia’s federal space agency, Roscosmos, will remain the corporation’s controlling executive body. It plans to increase its personnel from 190 to 450 people. The federal government should also take a controlling share in Rocket and Space Corporation Energia as part of the consolidation, Rogozin added. The state currently has a 38 percent stake in Energia, which is the developer of the Soyuz and Progress spacecraft and one of the leading enterprises in Russia’s space industry. Russia’s space sector has been plagued by complaints of inefficiency, lack of productivity and lack of oversight, following a string of rocket failures and satellite crashes over the last several years causing billions of rubles in losses. Most recently, a Russian Proton-M rocket crashed shortly after takeoff in July, destroying the three satellites it was carrying for the Glonass navigation system, Russia’s answer to the United States’ Global Positioning System (GPS). The Russian space industry’s proposed consolidation, the government says, will help increase oversight and lower the accident rate. |
Institute of Jewish Policy Research says Jews are leaving some European countries in large numbers but says no parallels with 1930s can be drawn Some European countries have seen an increase in the number of Jews leaving to live in Israel but the numbers fall short of an “exodus”, according to a new study. The Institute of Jewish Policy Research compared recent trends of Jewish migration with cases of mass migration in response to persecution or major political upheavals in the past. Jonathan Boyd, the IJPR’s executive director, said: “There is no evidence of an exodus of Jews from Europe, even though the numbers of Jews emigrating to Israel from some countries in recent years – most notably France – are unprecedented.” He added: “It is clear that Jews in parts of Europe are genuinely concerned about their future, most likely because of antisemitism, but the levels of anxiety and apprehension are nowhere near those experienced during previous periods of intense stress, like the 1930s and 1940s. Drawing those types of parallels has no basis in empirical reality.” The IJPR looked at six countries – France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Sweden and the UK, which account for about 70% of European Jews. It concluded there had been an increase in migration, especially from France, Belgium and Italy; but in the UK, Germany and Sweden levels of migration were not unusual. Suggesting a definition of an exodus as 30% of the Jewish population, it said 4% of Jews in Belgium and France had left for Israel between 2010 and 2015. The proportion leaving from the UK, Germany and Sweden was between 0.6% and 1.7%. The context, said the report, was a significant demographic transformation of Europe, with an inflow of migrants from the Middle East, north Africa and south Asia, which had implications for European culture, traditions and politics. “It is against this background of demographic change and political reckoning that European Jews and Jewish communities try to orientate themselves. Irrespective of the degree of their religiosity and communal involvement, the process is neither easy nor light-hearted for most Jews,” said the report. “It takes place both in the shadow of the Holocaust, an event that showed to Jews and others the scale of possible tragedy when a small and vulnerable minority is drawn into ideologically-inspired military conflict, and in the context of painful and difficult discourse about the State of Israel that affects many Jews at a gut level.” It said the differences between the two groups of countries pointed to “the existence of two distinct post-2000s trajectories of migration to Israel”, it said. “On the one hand, there is the British pattern, constituted by the UK, Germany and Sweden, where ‘business as usual’ seemingly prevails, and on the other, there is the French pattern, constituted by France, Belgium and Italy, where new winds seem to be blowing.” According to a report by Human Rights First, antisemitic incidents in France doubled from 423 in 2014 to 851 in 2015 and were becoming increasingly violent. Figures collated by the UK’s Community Security Trust suggested an 11% increase in antisemitic incidents in Britain in the first six months of 2016. Daniel Staetsky, the author of the IJPR report, said: “European demographic and political landscapes are changing … Large segments of Jewish populations in European countries perceive antisemitism to be on the increase. There is no perfect tool to measure the prevalence and strength of antisemitic attitudes in the general public, but some phenomena can be measured by their effects. “Migration plays a very central role in Jewish demography, as Jews are known to move in response to a particularly acute deterioration in the political or economic situation. If Jews feel unwelcome in Europe, their movement out of Europe will serve as the first sure sign of that.” Two years ago, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, urged European Jews to migrate en masse to Israel following terrorist attacks in Paris and Copenhagen. “Israel is your home and that of every Jew. Israel is waiting for you with open arms,” he said. However, European politicians and Jewish community leaders called on Jews to stay in Europe, saying terror was not a reason to emigrate. |
The new SimCity's road-building tool will allow players to set down roads in almost any configuration, filling in connecting structures like bridges and tunnels automatically and guiding players like their own personal civil engineer. "It all started with a desire to build cities that weren't on grids," SimCity creative director Ocean Quigley told Polygon. "It was the initial, fundamental decision to allow players to build cities with more free-form shapes. And once you make that decision, you need to change your fundamental architecture - including how you define roads." For the first time in a SimCity game roads and paths are 3D objects. In previous titles, roads were 2D paths, preventing players from building roads crossing under a bridge or having bridges intersecting. "It's more than just filling cells with road tiles, but building an actual object path," Quigley said. "It's an artistic challenge. You're laying a spline out through 3D space. We've built the tools to let players transparently create some pretty complex 3D structures." "Roads are really really hard." Quigley says the team wanted to make the drawing system intuitive, allowing players to "free draw" roads between points and have the system fill in the gaps, interpreting how the road will lay over the landscape and smoothly integrating them into the environment. "When I worked with Will Wright on SimCity 4, he told me, ‘The one thing I've learned from working on SimCity is that roads are really really hard,'" Quigley said. "We did a whole bunch of initial exploration for how roads would work before the new SimCity even got off the ground. It's such a nasty and difficult problem." Quigley's uphill battle to create perfectly curved roads continued for nearly three years. He convinced SimCity 4's road engineer Venkat Ajjanagadde to join the new SimCity team due to his smart work on title's road system. The team experimented for a few months before hitting a dead end, so they scrapped everything and started fresh. "He's a very very bright guy," Quigley said, "one of the only people I know bright enough to pull [the roads] off, and it took him a year and a half. It's only really solidified in the last few months, and that roads are working the way we want them to. We still have polish and cleaning up to do. "Because there's no grid this time around, roads serve as the underlying architecture of cities, driving areas' spatial organization, including building orientation and distance between them." Quigley and his team hope to create more organic looking cities by including four different categories of roads: curvy, for smooth continuous arcs and 90 degree turns; simple straight roads; city block roads, which create rectangles that allow buildings to develop back to back against each other; and freehand or "wiggly" roads, which players draw freely across landscapes and is useful when creating switchback mountain paths or roads that hug coastlines. "You do the draw you want, and under the hood we've built the infrastructure to make the draw succeed." Power, water, sewage and even pedestrians will all travel down paths created by roads, creating the network between buildings. Maxis wants to make sure players' attempts at drawing roads always succeed, so the program will automatically fill in gaps over bodies of water or canyons with bridges and automatically burrow through hills to create tunnels. "Imagine you have a perfectly flat city, just a chunk of prairie somewhere," Quigley explained. "If you draw a road, all you have to do is put down a road and it works, don't need to take height into consideration. In a city separated by a canyon, with chunks of land on either side, if you draw from one end to another over the canyon, the program will automatically build a bridge and do the modifications to make that bridge work. You do the draw you want, and under the hood we've built the infrastructure to make the draw succeed." Roads even have a minimum slope angle of 30 degrees, aping the steepest road in the world, Baldwin Street in New Zealand. Players aiming to plunge roads straight down cliffs can go for this angle, otherwise they will need to draw switchbacks or curved roads sloping down a mountain. Players who want to build cities packed with aesthetic bridges and tunnels will need to choose a terrain that supports those opportunities — so, not Quigley's prairie. "The system will try to find the cheapest way to get from point A to point B, and if it can't do a straight road it will build road cuts and retaining walls, and bridges and tunnels as a last resort," Quigley added. "You can't build unnecessary bridges or tunnels either. "Think of it as having a civil engineer on staff round the clock to make sure you don't build unnecessary infrastructure," Quigley said. |
In this Feb. 21, 2017, Chung Young-chul shows his rice field during an interview in Seosan, South Korea. Chung takes a drag on his cigarette and watches as wild ducks fly across rice fields and land on a reservoir in this remote farming village. He’s among nearly 2,000 people - ex-gangsters, ex-convicts, former prostitutes, orphans - who were once imprisoned here, forced to work without pay for years and are now largely forgotten.(AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon) SEOSAN, South Korea (AP) — Chung Young-chul takes a drag on his cigarette and watches as wild ducks fly across rice fields and land on a reservoir in this remote farming village. He’s among nearly 2,000 people — ex-gangsters, ex-convicts, former prostitutes, orphans — who were once held here, forced to work without pay for years and are now largely forgotten. “Some died after they were beaten and got sick. Others died of malnutrition or in accidents,” said Chung, 74. “It was worse than a prison camp ... We were starving slaves.” They were victims of social engineering orchestrated in the 1960s by dictator Park Chung-hee, late father of just-ousted President Park Geun-hye. His 18-year rule was marked by both a dramatic economic rise and enormous human rights abuses. He cleared city streets of so-called vagrants and put them to work on land and road projects as free labor to help rebuild the country after the 1950-53 Korean War. The victims say they’ve never received a proper investigation or compensation. ___ In Chung’s village in Seosan city, about 130 kilometers (80 miles) south of Seoul, about 1,770 people were made to work without pay in land reclamation projects. They lived in army-style barracks. Some were ordered to marry female inmates, mostly ex-prostitutes sent from government-run shelters, in two rounds of mass weddings. Ex-workers say local officials told them repeatedly that they would be given some of the land they reclaimed, but that never happened. Only about a dozen of the workers, mostly in their 70s, still live in this village; the rest left or have died. Those remaining pay rent to authorities to farm rice on the land they reclaimed. After repeated legal defeats, some have accepted a recent government proposal to buy the land at market prices in installments over 20 years, though they know they’ll probably die before they complete the payments. They’ve always been poor and falling rice prices have made them poorer. Deeply in debt, Chung said he and others are pushing to file joint petitions with as many government offices as possible to appeal for help again. “We have no money to hire lawyers,” he said. “We are the only ones abandoned by South Korea’s legal system.” Past media reports during Park Chung-hee’s rule, which ended with his assassination in 1979, largely portrayed the people here as making a fresh start with government help. The true nature of their story has been shielded from the public; official records are limited and many workers won’t talk about what they believe were their dark past. “Governments in South Korea have been very indifferent to them,” said Kim Aram at the Seoul-based Institute for Korean Historical Studies, one of the few experts on the issue. “Now, it’s important to let the people know about the truth of this story because it’s completely unknown to them.” ___ Chung was left alone at an early age. A North Korean bomb killed his mother in the Korean War, and he was separated from the rest of his family when he fell off the roof of a train carrying refugees. He worked as a shoeshine boy with other orphans in the southeastern port city of Busan, then became a member of the “Apache” gang, collecting protection money from bars and teahouses. “We felt strange when we spent a day without fighting” other gangsters, he said. Chung’s life changed after Park seized power in a 1961 coup and attempted to “purify” society by rounding up people deemed vagrants and putting them to work. In 1962, Chung said marines carrying rifles smashed down his shack door and took him to a rehabilitation center where hundreds were detained. They were told they were now members of the Republic of Korea Juvenile Pioneering Group. Chung was sent to a land reclamation site in southern South Korea. About six months later, he volunteered to move to Seosan because he hoped he’d have a better chance to escape. But that was virtually impossible. His supervisors, senior inmates working under a civilian leader, stood guard every 30-50 meters (100-160 feet) and watched inmates even when they went to the toilet. Each day they used shovels, pickaxes, carts and their bare hands to cultivate reclaimed land. They built waterways and a reservoir. Most meals were only a bowl of rice and a thin soup made of dried Chinese cabbage leaves. They caught and ate frogs, snakes and rats. At night, they were often ordered to recite Park’s lengthy “revolution promises.” Those who stammered were beaten. Chung likened his experience to the horrible accounts by escapees from North Korea’s notorious political prison camps. “Some don’t believe what they’ve testified but we trust their testimonies by 100 percent because that’s what we had endured, too,” he said. Some of the South Korean inmates died, through illness, beatings or accidents, but there is no official data on fatalities. Local officials reached by The Associated Press said they have no information on the operations, and many of them acknowledged they have never heard about the ROK Juvenile Pioneering Group. But a handful of experts like Kim Aram and local villager Kim Tae-young, who works with remaining inmates on land disputes, said the suffering was tense. By the time the pioneering group was dissolved — which came as Park’s government shifted to export-driven industrialization — control had loosened and many inmates had already left. __ Ex-inmates said they had cultivated about 357 hectares (882 acres), but that it was too salty and uneven. Seosan officials “tentatively” distributed the land to the roughly 300 remaining inmates and other poor people in the village between 1968 and 1971, according to farmers and villagers in Seosan. Some simply sold their parcels — for as little as a sack of potatoes, Chung says — but others cultivated the land. By the time ex-inmates began harvesting rice, the government imposed rent for using state-owned property, Chung and other villagers said. They staged a legal fight, but a local district court ruled against them in 2000 in a verdict upheld by higher-level courts. In 2011, the state-run Anti-Corruption & Civil Rights Commission recommended that the government lower the prices of the land to reflect ex-inmate’s previous labor but a ministry in charge of government-owned land used the market rates. There are 278 families who farm the reclaimed land in Seosan, including about a dozen ex-inmates, including Chung and Sung Jae-yong. “It’s really shameful ... but I’m paying the installments with the help of my children,” said Sung, who lowered his head and wept. “I’ve been enduring it until now because I wanted my hard work to pay off. But things have become terrible.” Chung called Park Chung-hee a “gangster” who ruined his life. “He captured us and put us here. So he should have taken responsibility for our lives to the end,” he said, tears rolling down his cheeks. ___ Follow Hyung-jin Kim on Twitter at twitter.com/hyungjin1972 |
Marc Lasry sits beside former President Bill Clinton, during the first half of an NBA basketball game between the Milwaukee Bucks and the Brooklyn Nets on Nov. 2, 2015, in New York. According to a memo released by WikiLeaks, Lasry was helpful in “killing potential unfavorable stories in the Enquirer” of the Clintons. | AP Photo Clinton donor allegedly killed National Enquirer stories A memo from the WikiLeaks trove claims Marc Lasry used his financial ties to the tabloid to help kill Clinton stories. A top donor who had a major stake in the National Enquirer helped avert damaging stories about the Clintons in the tabloid, according to a 2011 memo released Sunday by WikiLeaks. The donor, hedge fund billionaire Marc Lasry, “has been helpful on a number of fronts,” according to the memo, which was written by longtime Clinton aide Doug Band in Nov. 2011, including “killing potential unfavorable stories in the Enquirer.” Story Continued Below At the time the memo was written, Lasry’s hedge fund, Avenue Capital Group, owned some of the $513 million in debt accrued by the Enquirer’s publisher, American Media, Inc., and Band’s memo asserts Avenue “owns a controlling share of the debt.” Neither Band nor Lasry responded to requests for comment on Sunday, but representatives for Lasry’s firm and the National Enquirer denied the claim in the memo. “Nobody influences the editorial decision-making process at the National Enquirer other than its editors,” said a representative for the tabloid. A spokesman for Avenue Capital Group, Todd Fogarty of the public relations firm Kekst, said Band’s memo “contains a number of inaccuracies,” including the claim that Lasry sought to influence the National Enquirer’s coverage on behalf of the Clintons. Fogarty called it “ridiculous to say that Marc or Avenue influenced the editorial direction of the National Enquirer in any way.” Avenue Capital hasn’t had a stake in American Media since August 2014. Clinton’s team has refused to publicly confirm the authenticity of WikiLeaks’ trove of emails stolen from the private account of campaign chairman John Podesta, and has accused Russian entities of being behind the hack. Other favors done by Lasry for the Clintons, according to Band’s memo, include raising and donating huge sums of cash for the Clinton Foundation, lending his plane to the family and employing Chelsea Clinton at Avenue Capital. Band for years worked closely with Bill Clinton on the former president’s business ventures and on the Clinton Foundation’s Clinton Global Initiative, and he also worked as a paid advisor to Avenue Capital. In the memo, he takes credit for introducing the Clintons to Lasry and for helping Chelsea Clinton land a job at Lasry’s hedge fund as a chemical industry analyst. At the time of the memo, though, Band was engaged in a turf war at the Clinton Foundation with Chelsea Clinton, who had flagged as potential conflicts of interest Band’s paid consulting work outside the Clinton Foundation. In a previously unpublished portion of the memo, Band cited Lasry’s overlapping involvement with the Clintons’ foundation and the family’s personal finances to highlight the difficulty in disentangling the various phases of what Band derisively called “Bill Clinton, Inc.” “Mr. Lasry is a good example of the complex relationships a friend/supporter can have within the Foundation,” Band wrote in the memo, crediting Lasry with personally donating $142,500 to the Clinton Foundation and committing $2 million more, while raising “several hundred thousand dollars” from others in “two Foundation fundraisers at his home.” Band also indicates that Lasry helped Marc Mezvinsky – Chelsea Clinton’s husband — in raising money for Mezvinksy’s hedge fund. But the claim about Lasry’s intervention at the National Enquirer stands out in light of recent developments in the presidential race. On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the National Enquirer paid $150,000 to a former Playboy playmate for exclusive rights to her story about having an affair with Donald Trump, but it never published the story. Karen McDougal, Playboy's 1998 playmate of the year, claims to have had an affair with Trump from 2006 to 2007, while he was married to his current wife, Melania Trump, according to the report. American Media Inc. confirmed the payment, but said it was for a column. |
Mix veterans with championship experience with neophytes yet to learn the NBA way and what do you get? Chris Bosh simmering and smoldering in a corner of the Miami Heat locker room after a loss to the league-worst Minnesota Timberwolves. After yet the latest meltdown in a season that now has the Heat a season-worst seven games under .500 going into Friday's game against the defending-champion San Antonio Spurs at the AT&T Center, Bosh found himself as much at a loss as his team. "We're not learning anything, just not learning anything. I'm talking about executing very simple things. Out of ATOs, we're not executing that," he said of mix-ups that even are coming after timeouts, after explicit instructions from coach Erik Spoelstra. "We're not executing late-game situations. We're not making the shots that we can make. We're not trusting each other. We're not boxing out when it's time to box out." But the Heat are routinely going through mind-blowing droughts: Last Friday, enduring a 37-2 second-half surge by the Dallas Mavericks. Tuesday, being outscored 25-1 by the Detroit Pistons to close the first quarter. And then on Wednesday night, blowing a 10-point fourth-quarter lead at the Target Center against the lone NBA team still yet to win 10 games. "It was a missed opportunity," Bosh said of the latest fiasco. "And we're not going to get it back. Things are slipping away from us." For the Heat, it was yet another how-low-can-you-go moment, added to previous losses to bottom-feeders such as the Philadelphia 76ers, Orlando Magic and Utah Jazz. While these latest losses to the Pistons and Timberwolves have come with Dwyane Wade sidelined with a strained right hamstring, Bosh said this is no time for patience. "We're about to be out of the playoffs race, not the race, but as far as the seeds, we're about to be out," Bosh said. "We're not concentrating. I don't understand that. It's a game we could have got. And all we had to do was concentrate, locking in." At minimum, Bosh said there has to be greater focus on detail. "And that doesn't even promise us a win," he said. "It's like we're shooting ourselves in the foot just by not focusing on the game. I don't even know what we're focusing on. It's not the game." With the Eastern Conference limited beyond the top five or six teams, the Heat had played with a cushion for most of the season at the bottom of the playoff seedings. But they exited Wednesday's loss just a half-game ahead of Brooklyn for the conference's eighth and final ticket to the postseason, with Detroit and an Indiana team that may yet get Paul George back this season still lurking. "It's interesting, and we're making it more interesting than it has to be," Bosh said. "It's difficult enough trying to win games in this league, especially in our situation. So it really takes all the focus that we can, because we're not that good, just to show up." In recent seasons, uneven play, lack of focus, disinterest from others often was overshadowed by the play of LeBron James. With James now with the Cleveland Cavaliers, Bosh said every Heat component has to take stock of their potential contributions, has to be focused for the duration. "Guys have to know that they're important, whatever they bring to the table," he said. "Whether you're playing one or 40 minutes, it counts, it matters. The guys on the bench, in shootaround, in the walkthrough, in everything we do, I know it's tough to focus and concentrate, but we only do this for two, three hours a day. You've got the rest of your day after that." iwinderman@tribpub.com. Follow him at twitter.com/iraheatbeat or facebook.com/ira.winderman. |
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