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Even so, the incomplete transition in the Middle East was a dominant worry at the meeting. Democracy, the leaders said, could be rooted only in economic reforms that created open markets, equal opportunities and jobs to lower staggeringly high unemployment rates, especially among restless youths. “We’re seeing growth slow, budget deficits rise, in the case of Egypt, some foreign exchange reserves being lost,” said David Lipton, a senior director for international economic affairs at the National Security Council. “We and the countries both see the very high priority of keeping the countries stable so that the backdrop of democratization is one of economic stability rather than instability and chaos.” That challenge has grown acute in Egypt since the fall of President Hosni Mubarak. Revenues from tourism, a mainstay of the economy, have plummeted by 40 percent, the new military government says. Foreign investment has dried up. Factories are paralyzed by strikes. Meanwhile, prices for food and energy have surged, leaving people feeling deeply insecure ahead of crucial parliamentary and presidential elections in the fall. “We members of the G-8 strongly support the aspirations of the Arab Spring, as well as those of the Iranian people,” the leaders, who discussed the situation with the prime ministers of Egypt and Tunisia here, said in the communiqué. Officials said the aid would come from the member states of the Group of 8, which includes the United States, Japan, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Russia, and from international organizations, including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the European Investment Bank. Officials cautioned that the projected $20 billion in aid from international financial institutions would come in phases and be contingent on democratic and economic reforms. The pledge, an aide to President Obama said, was “not a blank check” but “an envelope that could be achieved in the context of suitable reform efforts.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story There is a fear, shared by both the American administration and democracy activists, that plunking down large dollar pledges upfront would risk funneling money into the hands of institutions, including the Egyptian military, which could misuse or simply siphon it off. Even such a large infusion is dwarfed by the scale of the two economies — $231 billion in Egypt and $47 billion in Tunisia. Mr. Sarkozy said that he hoped the total aid package would eventually reach $40 billion, including $10 billion from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait. Qatar is also urging its Persian Gulf partners to consider creating a Middle East development bank to help Arab states making a transition to democracy. Photo The economies of the Middle East and North Africa have been weak for years, and per capita growth over the past three decades was only half a percent, a fraction of the average for emerging economies, according to the International Monetary Fund. Weak growth and poor job opportunities are among the major factors that prompted the outpouring of unrest among young people in Egypt and Tunisia. But political change has, if anything, brought more economic pain. In Egypt, many people are again complaining of soaring food prices, just as they did last fall before the revolution. Many are now also wrestling with exaggerated expectations about how much the revolution will lift their personal fortunes. Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters. Labor unrest has swept the country as workers everywhere demand more pay. Newspapers report rumors of vast illicit fortunes to be recovered from Mr. Mubarak and his associates that many mistakenly believe will change the Egyptian economy. Old leftist political parties are re-emerging as though they have been frozen in time for the 30 years of the Mubarak police state to demand that the government again expand its role in the economy to help the poor, even at the price of discouraging foreign investors. In Tunisia, the revolution that ousted former President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali began in the country’s impoverished interior as a revolt against dismal economic conditions; it only later took on demands for political democracy and freedom as it reached the more affluent, educated and Westernized coast. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Now many inlanders are complaining that the resulting upheaval has not brought development or opportunity. Resentment of the coastal elite runs high, and some say they feel so disappointed they have soured on participating in the democratic process. In Tunisia, too, old leftist parties are trying to come back, and parts of the country’s strong labor movement are stepping up their demands or returning to radical roots. In both countries, unrest has led to security problems that have scared away tourists, an important source of revenue. Tourist demand has fallen so much that many airlines have canceled or scaled back flights. The Group of 8 leaders want their aid to help address those issues by broadening economic opportunity and breaking down trade barriers; Egypt, seeking to protect state industries, has some of the highest in the world. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development developed expertise in overhauling centrally planned economies in Eastern and Central Europe, which is why officials said its role would be central in the Arab world. Masood Ahmed, the Middle East director of the International Monetary Fund, said that to ensure stability Egypt needed to generate up to 10 million jobs over the next decade and Tunisia about 1 million. Turning to Libya, the Group of 8 leaders reiterated calls for its leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, to step aside, saying he and his government “have failed to fulfill their responsibility to protect the Libyan population and have lost all legitimacy. He has no future in a free, democratic Libya. He must go.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story The leaders also backed Mr. Obama’s call for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, but conspicuously left out a mention of his call for negotiations to be based on the 1967 borders. The group generally operates by consensus, and Canada opposed a reference to the borders. If the statement was going to mention the 1967 border, said Stephen Harper, Canada’s conservative prime minister, it should also cite other elements of Mr. Obama’s speech, including that Israel be recognized as a Jewish state and that the Palestinian state be demilitarized. “I would support any statement on finding peace in the Middle East that was balanced,” he told reporters. “I would not support any statement that was not balanced.” |
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Adam Federici's Wembley calamity contrasts his brilliant league season, says Reading boss Steve Clarke. The keeper fumbled Alexis Sanchez's tame shot in extra time, as Arsenal made the FA Cup final with a 2-1 win. He cried at full-time and staff of the Championship club consoled him. "His performances in the Championship have been crucial to this club. We stick by him. We don't lose because of him. We lose as a team and we win as a team," Clarke told BBC Sport. "This is the life of a keeper and Adam Federici is a top goalkeeper. "We will support him, we all understand his worth to the club, no worries on that." Clarke's side are seven points above the Championship relegation zone with four games to play but pushed Arsenal, equalising to force extra-time, before Federici played his part in the dramatic winner. "He's been our best player this season. If it wasn't for him we'd be in the bottom three," striker Jamie Mackie told BBC Sport. Federici tried to recover his mistake but it proved decisive in a fantastic FA Cup semi-final Arsenal's view - "The best player on the pitch" Federici's blunder contrasted with what was otherwise a superb display as the Australian made seven saves in a thrilling contest, most notably tipping Gabriel's goal-bound header on to the bar in the second half. Its timing, the occasion and the sheer desperation of his dive back towards his line in an attempt to retrieve the slip conspired to create a moment it will be difficult to forget in a competition packed with wonderful memories. Federici's reaction was that of a man who wanted the ground to open up and swallow him His opposite number Wojciech Szczesny was far less busy as he fulfilled cup duty having been dropped from Arsenal's league matches since New Year's Day. Szczesny, himself questioned by pundits for Reading's equaliser, knows all about Wembley blushes after gifting Obafemi Martins an 89th-minute winner when the Gunners suffered League Cup final defeat to Birmingham in 2011. "He was the best player on the pitch. I really feel for him, I have been there, done that," Szczesny told BBC Radio 5 live. "He can be very proud. It only went to extra-time because the goalkeeper was magnificent." Arsenal boss Arsene Wenger added: "I will tell Federici he has saved his team on many, many occasions. I don't think he should be ashamed of his performance, he played very, very well." BBC News Sports Correspondent Natalie Pirks said Arsenal fans made light of Federici's misfortune The MOTD view - "... for the rest of his life." Sympathy from opponents will not miraculously heal the pain etched on Federici's face as he sobbed before rushing down the tunnel - an image which surely represents the stark contrast to the Wembley dreams players hold. The 30-year-old could not seek comfort in the dressing room as he was immediately selected for drug-testing. A lonely place, with one moment running over and over in his mind, awaited the man who made it to Wembley having started his playing career at Huskisson Soccer Club in his homeland. "Adam Federici will remember that for rest of his life and people will mention it to him for the rest of his life," said Match of the Day pundit Alan Shearer. "He actually played very well but it's agony for him, the players and the fans." Steve Clarke and his staff consoled a distraught Federici before he quickly rushed down the tunnel Former Arsenal striker Ian Wright, a two-time FA Cup winner with the Gunners, said: "I am pleased with the win but I am distraught for Adam Federici. I would rather win on penalties. It is something you don't get over. He has to close his legs and get his body behind the ball. It is harsh but that is it." Danny Murphy, an FA Cup winner with Liverpool in 2001, added: "Adam Federici has played well, made some excellent saves, but that's a howler. I genuinely feel sorry for the lad. It took a slight deflection, but it is still no excuse." BBC Sport pundit Jason Roberts played with Federici during his time at Reading Kevin Davies suffered FA Cup semi-final defeat as a player for Chesterfield in 1997 and Bolton in 2011 |
UTSA research sheds light on factors affecting hiring of military veterans (Aug. 14, 2014) -- In the coming years, increased troop withdrawals from the Middle East may result in greater numbers of combat veterans searching for jobs in the private sector. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, military veterans have numerous problems gaining and maintaining jobs in the United States, and their unemployment rates are consistently higher than nonveterans. To help solve this problem, UTSA College of Business Ph.D. student in organization and management studies Christopher Stone is leading groundbreaking research on the factors affecting hiring decisions about veterans. The goal of this research is to uncover the issues that place limits on veterans' ability to secure jobs and to offer concrete solutions that both companies and veterans can take to help veterans enjoy a fulfilling work life. "Despite the fact that there is documented proof that veterans have a much harder time finding and keeping jobs, there has been limited academic theory or research that focuses on understanding why this is happening and how to solve the problem," said Stone. "Stereotyping and a lack of understanding of how military skills transfer over to civilian roles are only a few of the factors that often prevent highly capable veterans from being hired." Stone and his colleagues have expanded on a model of the factors affecting the treatment of persons with disabilities to explain the variables thought to influence employer decisions to hire veterans. These factors include attributes of the veteran, attributes of the observer, nature of the job, degree to which raters perceive that military skills transfer to civilian jobs, and the perceived difference between role requirements in military and civilian organizational cultures. Based on this model, they suggest that organizations and veterans can use these strategies to enhance their access to jobs: Organizations can increase positive contact with veterans, use education programs to dispel stereotypes, publicize veterans' job successes and change the organizational culture to emphasize the value of hiring veterans. Organizations can employ decision makers who value hiring veterans, recognize and reward those who hire veterans, expand recruiting to find talented veterans and give bonuses to employees who refer veterans to the company. Organizations can help familiarize decision makers with military jobs and the associated knowledge, skills and abilities that are similar to civilian positions. Outplacement organizations can socialize veterans in the norms, values and role requirements of civilian organizations. Veterans can use impression management techniques such as acknowledging their health conditions or disabilities up front and convincing decision makers that they have similar interests and values. Veterans also can use coaches, seek feedback and find successful role models to boost their self-esteem and decrease any self-stigmatizing that can inhibit their performance. Stone served in the Air Force for eight years, first in an aircraft maintenance unit overseas and then as a military training instructor at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland. Independent and entrepreneurial in spirit, once he left the military in 2007, he opened a business hear Lackland. In 2010, he sold the business and began his studies at UTSA. Stone's experience is vastly different than many of his fellow veterans, who weren't able to find suitable jobs after leaving the military. Witnessing this first-hand is what motivated him to pursue this research. "While most everyone agrees that veterans' unemployment is an important problem to be addressed, few have answers regarding what to do," said Mark L. Lengnick-Hall, UTSA management professor. "Christopher Stone's research will lay a foundation for understanding the barriers veterans face when they return to the civilian workforce and how to overcome them." Stone's paper, "Factors Affecting Hiring Decisions About Veterans," was recently published in Human Resource Management Review and presented at the 2014 Academy of Management annual meeting in Philadelphia, Pa. Nationally ranked and internationally recognized, the UTSA College of Business offers a comprehensive curriculum that expands the boundaries of a traditional business education. Internationally accredited by AACSB International, the college was named the No. 8 graduate business school in the nation for Hispanics by Hispanic Business magazine and has been nationally ranked by BusinessWeek, Hispanic Outlook and the Princeton Review. ------------------------------ For more information, visit the UTSA College of Business website. Connect online with UTSA on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram. |
AGRA: Two months after the Supreme Court ruling against instant triple talaq , Yasmeen Khalid, the wife of Aligarh Muslim University professor Khalid Bin Yusuf Khan, has alleged that she has become a victim of it and threatened to commit suicide in front of the vice-chancellor's house along with her kids if "justice is not done" to her.Yasmeen told TOI on Saturday that Khan, who is professor and chairman at the department of Sanskrit in AMU and has been with the university for 27 years, "wrongly" gave her talaq first on WhatsApp and then as a text message. She said she will have no choice but to kill herself along with her three children in front of VC Tariq Mansoor's house if she doesn't get justice by December 11."He (Khan) turned me out of the house and I have been running from pillar to post to get justice. But no one has helped me so far. However, with the help of police I did manage to get access to my house on Friday evening."Khan denied the allegations. He said, "I had not only given her talaq on WhatsApp and SMS but had also verbally told her in front of two other people and adhered to the time duration as per Sharia."Claiming to be the real victim in this case, Khan said, "To the contrary, she has been harassing me for the last two decades. She had hidden various facts from me before our marriage. I later got to know that she was not even a graduate, unlike what she had claimed. I will give her the third talaq too, on a proper date, and no one can stop me. I don't care what she does."Yasmeen said she is not just a graduate, but has done her MA and BEd from AMU.SSP (Aligarh) Rajesh Pandey said that police managed to get her entry into her house. He added that Yasmeen has not yet lodged a complaint against her husband and has been insisting on counselling. "In such a scenario, there isn't much the police department can do. We have called both of them here."A five-judge constitution bench of the Supreme Court in August this year termed the practice of triple talaq " unconstitutional" and asked Parliament to make a new law on the issue in six months. If the law doesn't come into force in six months, the SC's injunction on triple talaq would continue, the apex court held. It referred to the abolition of triple talaq in some Islamic countries and asked why "independent India can't get rid of it". |
THE MAN ON the radio says: ‘Taoiseach Leo Varadkar wants to lead a country for people who get up early in the morning.’ ‘Is that us?’, my son asks me. Eoghan is 15 and suffers from a rare neuromuscular disease. Indeed, it is early in the morning. 6am in fact. Each morning at this time we do about forty minutes of stretching and DIY physiotherapy on Eoghan’s bed. By my reckoning, Leo Varadkar is probably still asleep, an hour before he reportedly “heads to the gym”. Bully for him. The reason we do this at 6am is because we are a busy family with three teenagers and an energetic nine-year-old. Ours is a household with four school runs and two working parents juggling a frantic daily routine. There is literally no other time in the day for me to do this workout with my precious son. However, there is another reason for this pre-dawn DIY physiotherapy. Services have been decimated It is because services and supports for children and adults with disabilities have been decimated over the past ten years due to so-called austerity measures. Since 2011, as a member of Cabinet, Minister for Health and now Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar has signed off on every cut to health services and supports for the disabled and carers. As a consequence, Eoghan, and thousands of children and young adults like him have little or no access to meaningful physiotherapy, occupational therapy or speech therapy. Front line medical staff – consultant neurologists and surgeons in Temple Street, Crumlin and elsewhere – make heroic efforts to meet the growing demands placed upon them by chronic underfunding and catastrophic recruitment difficulties. Ireland now has amongst the lowest ratio of hospital specialists per head of population in the OECD. Likewise, in the Central Remedial Clinic, the front line physiotherapists, occupational therapists and speech therapists try their best to support a growing number of families like ours. Like other areas of health, the disability sector is in deep crisis. Eoghan is a beautiful young man When I work with Eoghan in the morning, I flex his legs, knee and ankle joints. We also work on wrists, elbows, shoulder and neck exercises. It is a labour of love. As a wheelchair user Eoghan is developing a very pronounced scoliotic curve to his spine. The neuromuscular disease has compromised his eyesight also and he has a number of other challenges including nystagmus in his eyes and intention tremors in his hands and fingers. The stretches help us with the muscular contractures in his legs. They help him to sit up straight for a long day in secondary school, preparing for the Junior Certificate. Eoghan is a beautiful young man and at 15 is blossoming – like all adolescents – into an adult in his own right. Like all teens, his identity is a work in progress, an incremental, ongoing negotiation. ‘Eoghan’ is how he describes himself. ‘I am Eoghan.’ Different, is how he is. Like all young people –whether they be straight, or LGBTI – Eoghan is aware of his identity, and of his difference. He accepts his difference, his uniqueness. He self identifies as such and regards himself as Eoghan. Lego enthusiast. Fan of House of Cards. Ireland labels Eoghan “disabled” and has disabled him However, Irish society has labelled Eoghan “disabled”. Adding injury to insult, Ireland has in turn disabled him. Ireland’s neo-liberal State – Leo Varadkar’s so-called “Republic of Opportunity” – sees Eoghan exclusively as a liability. His difference is constructed as “deficit”. As a citizen, Eoghan is of no value in a republic that is considered primarily an “economy” by its current vulgar and crass political elite. Eoghan is beginning to internalise his status as a second class citizen in our Republic. I first became aware of this during a discussion of his Classics syllabus for the Junior Cert. Eoghan remarked to me, ‘I could not be a God in ancient times. Because I’m disabled. I wouldn’t be allowed.’ In that simple statement, my son articulated the manner in which Irish society disempowers and actively discriminates against those of its citizens who are different by way of physical or intellectual need. Irish society discriminates against my beautiful son in a myriad of ways every day, from simple and casual barriers to self actualisation, to profound, brutal and frightening instruments of oppression. For example, to travel to the city centre like any other teenager, Eoghan must contact Pearse Street station at least 24 hours in advance in order to arrange for a staff member to be present at his local Dart Station with a ramp. Very often he has been stranded in Dart stations where the lifts have broken down. This is not the fault of individual Irish Rail staff – it is a consequence of cutbacks to the staffing of a vital public service. ‘It’s all right, Dad’ On our recent family holiday to Spain in July, Eoghan was stranded for over an hour on the Aer Lingus flight when it touched down in Barcelona. Apparently, his wheelchair “had gone missing”. He watched as all of the other passengers disembarked. He watched as buggies were brought to the aircraft door for younger passengers. He alone – and his siblings – had to wait on the aircraft for over an hour until, eventually, his wheelchair was “recovered”. The Aer Lingus crew were polite but shrugged their shoulders, ‘Not our fault’. Eoghan is a polite boy. Full of grace. ‘It’s all right, Dad,’ he told me when we eventually exited the deserted airport, long after midnight. As Eoghan gets older, and as I get older, I sometimes wonder at six in the morning – who will do his physio and stretches when I die? Who will hold him and lift him? Who will dress him in his favourite Leinster Rugby top and A&F tracksuit bottoms? Who will look after his most intimate care needs? What kind of hands will be placed upon him? Too frightening to contemplate I have always tried to resist this thought pattern. It is too heartbreaking. Too frightening to contemplate. As a parent. As a father. To be terrified about what will happen to my son after I die. Because I’ve seen the signs. In the casual and callous indifference displayed toward him by the most powerful sectors of Irish government and society. I also fear that the real answer to this question has been revealed this week. No fewer than 1,222 adults with disabilities – under the age of 65 – are confined to nursing homes across the Irish State. Words cannot express my horror, despair and anger at this phenomenon. Men like Micheal McGealy – effectively imprisoned in a nursing home for the last nine years. In his own words, Michael states that it feels like he has “lost” nine years of his life. Senator John Dolan, CEO of the Disability Federation of Ireland, observed yesterday that this phenomenon is “alarming” but “not surprising”. Two years ago, in August 2015, Senator Dolan told RTE that the same situation was a “scandal”. I’ve had enough Personally, I’ve had enough. Ireland is the only member state of the EU that has not signed the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities. Would Irish men and women tolerate a State that detained citizens on aircraft because of their sexuality or sexual orientation? Would Irish citizens tolerate a system that demanded 24-hours notice of travel of the LGBTI community? A State that confined over a thousand LGBTI citizens to an Irish style gulag archipelago of nursing homes? No. So, why impose this on the so-called “disabled”? I say no more polite lobbying for the “disabled”. We need a radical transition to a rights-based approach to the rights of our fellow citizens who are disabled by a discriminatory State. I’m up for the fight. I would ask all of our citizens, including the LGBTI community, to support us in this fight. In other words, as a father to a boy who is different, I am asking my fellow citizens to support a call for a Yes Equality campaign for our brothers and sisters disabled by a State that actively discriminates on the basis of physical and intellectual need. Is Leo Varadkar – Taoiseach for those who “get up early in the morning” – prepared to vindicate the rights of early risers like my son? Dr Tom Clonan is a former Captain in the Irish armed forces. He is a security analyst and academic, lecturing in the School of Media in DIT. You can follow him on Twitter here. |
On Anibal Sanchez and butterfly changeups Jason Beck Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jul 1, 2017 The 0–2 pitch from Anibal Sanchez to Yan Gomes seemed to float towards home plate before finally giving in to gravity and diving towards the dirt, low and outside, shy of the plate. It registered as a 64.1 mph curveball on Gameday. As research on Statcast showed, it was the slowest non-eephus, non-knuckleball pitch from a Tigers hurler since Randy Wolf threw a 64 mph curveball on Aug. 22, 2015. What Sanchez threw Saturday wasn’t a curveball, he said. He has a slow curve he’ll throw in the low 70s, but not that slow. “That’s his butterfly changeup,” catcher James McCann said. Butterfly changeup? “You’ll have to ask him,” McCann politely replied. Sanchez uses the Spanish term. “I call it La Mariposa,” Sanchez said with a smile. It got that name because of the way it flutters when he would throw it with the Marlins. “When you play catch, just playing around, I would throw that ball,” Sanchez said. “It’s more like a knuckleball. One of my teammates called it the Butterfly. I remember I threw it my first time in 2012 here in Detroit.” He would throw it on occasion over the years, an occasional super-soft twist off of what was then an arsenal of hard stuff he threw. He had an assortment of pitches around the same velocity, in the low to mid 90s. When he was on, he could throw them with such similar mechanics and velocity that hitters wouldn’t know what was coming until the pitch would break towards the plate. Those days are gone now. This is a different version of Sanchez, one that’s fighting for his job as a Major League starter. Instead of throwing a bunch of different pitches around the same velocity, he’s surviving at throwing at a range of speeds. In a league of hard throwers, he’s giving a different look. On Saturday, Sanchez threw pitches everywhere from 64 to 93 mph. He had breaking balls ranging from 70 to 81 mph. According to Statcast, he threw more pitches at 74 mph or slower Saturday (seven) than he had this season (six). He drew four swing-and-misses from an aggressive Indians lineup. “Especially those guys, they are really good,” Sanchez said, “and I want to put more separation from my fastball.” The butterfly changeup is arguably a changeup from his offspeed pitches. The spin rate on his offspeed pitches Saturday ranged from 2213 to 1314 rpm. “It looks like a curveball sometimes, sometimes like a cutter,” Sanchez said. “I don’t what they do when I throw them.” That sounds like a knuckleball, but it’s a little different. Regardless of the terminology, it’s the mentality that’s key for Sanchez right now. “The big thing for me is he’s executing pitches,” McCann said. “He established in early today, and he used all of his offspeed to both sides of the plate. He had a lot of success. … “Anytime a guy is locating his fastball, especially inner half of the plate — whether that’s 88 mph or 98 mph — and then they have a pitch that they’re locating that’s a 20 mph difference, it’s going to make that fastball play up. I mean, you saw numerous guys today that got beat by his fastball, and you look up there and it’s 90, 91, 92, touching 93. And you’re thinking, ‘Man, how is he getting that?’ You have to respect his offspeed stuff. And the fact that he’s throwing multiple offspeed pitches for strikes forces guys to respect more than just one pitch and not be able to just ambush a heater.” It’s not glamorous, but it’s not about that. For Sanchez, it’s about survival. “When I went to Toledo, I was learning how you feel when you want to make the big leagues again,” Sanchez said. “It’s like when I was in the minor leagues before and I wanted to make the big leagues, that feel. It makes you hungry to play, hungry to be able to get this guy out, hungry to be good. I found that down there. That came back.” He didn’t want to say he thought he was done, but he knew he was tested. “Thank God that I’ve gotten this opportunity again,” he said. “I’m so grateful for where I am right now, and I’m just going to continue working. I need to continue working, and I know I’ve got a long season.” |
Inquiring minds are watching a plunge in Petroleum Distillates and Gasoline usage. Reader Tim Wallace writes Hello Mish As I have been telling you recently, there is some unprecedented data coming out in petroleum distillates, and they slap me in the face and tell me we have some very bad economic trends going on, totally out of line with such things as the hopium market - I mean stock market. This past week I actually had to reformat my graphs as the drop off peak exceeded my bottom number for reporting off peak - a drop of ALMOST 4,000,000 BARRELS PER DAY off the peak usage in our past for this week of the year. I have added a new graph to my distillates report, a "Graph of Raw Data" to which I have added a polynomial trendline. You can easily see that the plunge is accelerating and more than rivals 2008/09 and in gasoline is greatly exceeding the rate. An amazing thing to note is that in two out of the last three weeks gasoline usage has dropped below 8,000,000 barrels per day. The last time usage fell that low was the week of September 21, 2001! And you know what that week was! Prior to that you have to go back to 1996 to have a time period truly consistently below 8,000. We have done it two out of the last three weeks. The second graph once again shows the year on year change in usage of distillates. The Obama "stimulus" package and Fed monetary actions masked the underlying systemic problems. The third and final graph shows the changes in usage off the peak year of 2007. Once again you can see the effect of the stimulus and how now we are heading below 2008/09 in an accelerating fashion. Looking at these numbers I believe we are about to have a surge in unemployment - by the end of April latest, possibly as early as beginning of March. Tim click on any chart for sharper image |
In a video purporting to show Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau, the Nigeria-based terrorist group claims responsibility for the abduction of more than 200 teenage girls — many of whom are still missing. AS OUTRAGE grows about the kidnapping of nearly 300 Nigerian school girls, it is the first time that many people are hearing of the extremist group Boko Haram. But the organisation has a long history of terrorising people, here are some shocking facts about them: 1. “Western education is a sin” This translation of Boko Haram’s name has been criticised for not being entirely accurate but is a rough interpretation. A strict reading of the name suggests that opposition is not necessarily a blanket hatred of western education but is targeted specifically at this type of education being taught in Nigeria. However, kidnapping and threatening to sell off young girls as slaves seems to indicate that opposition is more than just a protest about the “foreign” school around the corner. RELATED: Boko Haram holding 223 Nigerian schoolgirls RELATED: US offers help as more girls taken In a video that claimed responsibility for the kidnapping, a representative of the group flanked by militants holding AK-47s, says: “I said western education should end.” He then said he planned to sell the girls. “Allah has instructed me to sell them. They are his property and I will carry out his instructions.” Local residents reportedly gave the group the name Boko Haram, its official name is Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad, which in Arabic means “People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad”. 2. It’s not just western education that is forbidden Boko Haram wants to create a “pure” Islamic state ruled by sharia law. It reportedly believes that Muslims should not participate in political or social activities associated with Western society. This can include voting in elections, wearing shirts and trousers, or receiving a secular education. RELATED: My life in Nigeria, a country ruled by lawless brutality RELATED: Angelina Jolie: Kidnappers are evil 3. They kidnap and rape women Long before they grabbed international headlines for abducting the teenage girls, they were known for kidnapping women in the street or from farms. “Now they are picking up women anywhere and using them to satisfy themselves,” a commander with the anti-Boko Haram group, the Civilian Joint Task Force, told Human Rights Watch in 2013. “Some of the girls we found hiding when we invaded Boko Haram camps around Sambisa [Forest] told us they were dragged into vehicles when hawking on the street. “When we return them home, their families are too ashamed to keep them because nobody will marry a girl who has been raped or has a child for these bad people.” 4. They think it’s OK to enslave women “Girls, you should go and get married,” Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau said in a video. “There is a market for selling humans. Allah says I should sell. He commands me to sell. I will sell women. I sell women.” Some women have reportedly been sold into marriage with the militants for as little as $12. Almost half the girls in Nigeria marry before they reach 18 years of age, according to figures from the United Nations Girls Education Initiative. Many struggle to get an education, only 66 per cent aged between 15 and 24 years old can read and write. 5. They believe in violence Boko Haram has been carrying out terrorist attacks for years and the International Crisis Group estimates that the group has killed more than 4000 people in Nigeria in four years. A religious compound was built in 2002 for the group and included a mosque and Islamic school. Many poor Muslim families enrolled their children at the school so they could get an education but it was instead used as a recruiting ground for jihadis. The group is known for using gunmen on motorbikes to kill police, politicians and anyone else who does not support the group. The group has killed clerics from other Muslim groups and a Christian preacher. It has been involved in bombings on Christmas Day in 2011, a New Year’s Eve attack in 2010, attacks during the inauguration of President Goodluck Jonathan in 2011 and further bombings on the UN headquarters in Abuja. 6. They use child soldiers Human Rights Watch states that they have recruited children as soldiers including those as young as 12 years old. 7. They hate Christians In a YouTube video the group’s leader Abubakar Shekau said their targeting of Christians was revenge for previous attacks on Muslims. “Either you are with us, I mean, we are Muslims who are following solid footsteps, or you’re with Obama, Francois Hollande, George Bush ... Ban Ki-moon and his people generally, any unbeliever ... kill, kill, kill,” Shekau says. “This war is against Christians, I mean Christians generally.” A US Congressional report released in November 2011 warned that the group was an “emerging threat” to the US and its interests. It suggested that Boko Haram could have formed ties with al-Qaeda linked groups in Africa, but the group has denied this. |
Vi Bergquist is the CIO of St. Cloud Technical & Community College in St. Cloud, Minn. Previously, she was a technology coordinator for the Great River Regional Library System, which consists of 32 branch libraries in six counties. She tells us that CIOs in Minnesota higher education often work together on projects, such as a CIO handbook that includes a mentoring program for new CIOs in the system. “It can seem like a pretty huge job when you first start out so it’s good to have someone you can turn to if you have questions,” she says. A proponent of new technology, she can’t wait to try a 3D food printer. What do you see as the role of social media for a CIO? Social media can play a valuable role for CIOs. That being said, it appears more CIOs are providing social media to their users than actually using it themselves. According to a 2012 harmon.ie study, only 10% of CIOs are using any form of social media. I firmly believe that CIOs not using social media are missing out on a tremendous resource. I have always believed, as the saying goes, that no one is as smart as everyone. Using social media, I can get good ideas from all over the world nearly instantaneously. I am regularly exposed to great thinkers, change makers, subject specialists and disruptors in areas that are vitally important to my work as a CIO. I like the idea of leveraging the thinking of the collective for the greater good. I believe the more access we have to data and information, the more we can improve our workplaces and the world, really. Removing barriers to information and data access can drive progress in all sorts of ways. We all do — or should — use data for decision making to improve overall quality and outcomes. Social media can be used for exactly this purpose. To play in the social media sandbox fairly, you also must be a contributor as well as an information collector and consumer. When I learn of something I think would help my colleagues or followers, I post that to my social media accounts. The sharing aspect of social media makes it invaluable for making human connections that would have been much harder to make it if were not for social media. What is the value of social media in higher education in particular? Having a good sound digital strategy is imperative in today’s education market. We have to meet students where they are, and where they are is online and using social media. If you want to get your message out and be heard, you need a multi-pronged social media strategy. A really good digital strategy can be a game-changer for a college or university, exposing them to entirely new markets outside their normal geographic boundaries. On my campus, we created a social media policy and procedure quite early on because we felt that social media would become important, which has proven to be true. We wanted to get a handle on who could create a page, who would hold the credentials for the page, and what kind of material had to be screened by someone before being posted. The system we created with our policy has worked well for us. In my work as a higher education CIO, I have sought out thought leaders in the field of educational technology and followed them. Were it not for social media, how else could a person so easily collect the wisdom of all of these great thinkers? It’s a real boon to our field. What challenges do you face as a woman CIO, and what do we need to do to get more women CIOs? I remember when I first become CIO at my college, over eight years ago now, and I began attending the Minnesota State College and University System CIO Council meetings with CIOs from the 32 campuses in Minnesota. At the time, there were only two women CIOs in our system. The number of women CIOs in our Minnesota system has now increased to seven, which is great, but it’s a pity we are actually bucking a trend in Minnesota. Wayne Brown recently said data he collected indicated that the number of women CIOs in higher ed has been on a steady decline from 2008-2013. The number has declined by 5%. The reasons for this are varied and to some extent unknown. I think it’s vitally important to have women CIOs in leadership roles because women approach leadership differently from their male counterparts. These differences serve to make the workplace a far richer experience. The feminine leadership style attributes identified by Carol Edlund and cited in Women and Leadership by Karen Klenke, which both men and women can possess, are well suited for today’s workplace. The feminine operating styles of cooperation, as opposed to competition; the preference for teams in organizational structure, as opposed to a hierarchy; a problem-solving style that combines intuition and rationality; and the feminine preference for a collaborative workplace are all qualities that today’s workplaces need and demand. I think the best way women CIOs can increase the number of women CIOs is to serve as a role model to other women. We should also mentor women who express an interest in the role of CIO. We should be growing our own female CIOs in our workplaces. I believe, as a general rule of thumb, everyone should always be working on training two replacements for themselves to ensure business continuity in the event of a departure. If at all possible, try to make sure one of them is a woman. |
A prestigious research institute in France said it had lost thousands of tubes of samples of the deadly Sars coronavirus. A routine inventory check at Paris' Pasteur Institute revealed that 2,349 tubes containing fragments of the virus responsible for the deaths of 774 people in 2002 were missing, the centre named after French chemist Louis Pasteur said. The institute was quick to reassure the public and said that the contents of the missing vials had no infectious potential. They contained only part of the virus and had no ability to spread. "Independent experts referred by health authorities have qualified such potential as 'non-existing' according to the available evidence and literature on the survival of the Sars virus," the institute said. In 2002 more than 8,000 people were infected by a pandemic of Sars - severe acute respiratory syndrome. The virus spread from China through Hong Kong and on to other countries before it was eventually brought under control. It is not clear how the tubes disappeared from one of the institute's safest laboratories. Management were made aware of the loss in January, Le Monde newspaper reported. For weeks, staff at the institute tried to find the missing vials, general director Christian Bréchot said. "We've looked for those boxes [containing the tubes] everywhere," Bréchot explained. "We went thought the lists of all the people who have worked here in the past year and a half, including trainees. We have scrutinised their profile to check if there was any conflict." Bréchot said that foul play was "highly improbable" but had not been ruled out. The tubes were stored in a high-security laboratory dedicated to research into highly infective viruses. Access to the lab is limited to a restricted number of personnel, who have to go through a disinfection process before they can leave. Bréchot suggested that the tubes, which were moved from one freezer to another in March 2013, might have been destroyed by a member of staff who forgot to record the procedure. Sars is an airborne virus, which spreads in a similar way to flu and the common cold. The Agency for the Safety of Health Products has opened an investigation into the missing tubes. |
John Alan Schwartz was on a California beach, trying to capture something life-affirming on camera. Or something that at least would contrast with death. He had a woman and a baby in a hot tub. This was going to be the final scene of his 1978 movie Faces of Death—a low-budget stunt project that would end up shifting the whole culture. The closing credits, in fact. By doing nothing more than living, on camera, they would serve as the bookend for an hour and a half of gory onscreen pretend death. "It was the evolution of life. How the end is just the beginning," he says now. "We were filming it, and then there was a scream about 50 yards up the beach." It was the sound of genuine horror. Advertisement "A dead surfer just washed up," Schwartz says. "A bloated individual still in jeans, with one sneaker on. A real surfer type." Consider it a message from above. Or below. Wherever. The actual face of death. The mom and child were fine. But a total stranger, someone totally unrelated to the fake-snuff-film project, was dead. Schwartz went back to work. On a thin budget and thinner expectations, he would end up changing the way the world looked at mortality, with a serious-seeming gimmick, delivered mostly on VHS tapes to a few traumatized but thrilled young viewers at a time. With a narrator in the guise of a doctor, the film brought the audience a string of vignettes of death, both real and fake ones. The device allowed the film to easily introduce footage too shocking for a normal movie. It wasn't every day that a movie went into an operating room to show heart surgery in which the heart started beating. Or captured a motorcyclist getting broken down to limb pieces by a tractor trailer. Some of the footage—napalm in Vietnam, seals being clubbed—was real. The media had shown death, after all. Schwartz says about half of the material was his own fabrication, though: faked images of death to haunt the living. It's hard to appreciate the impact now, at a time when death porn, like porn-porn, has become so easily made and even more easily procured. Mobile phones give everyone a device to capture humanity in its last stages; surveillance cameras watch store clerks being gunned down. You can pull up beheading videos on a laptop. That Schwartz anticipated this was remarkable. Even more remarkable, in retrospect, is the outrage he drew from a world that hadn't seen it coming. "There was an innocence about this back then," he says. I. Why Did John Alan Schwartz Steal Our Innocence? In the credits, he was listed as "Alan Black." Schwartz is one of few involved—those among the living—who are willing to embrace the film as part of their oeuvre. His then-boss's son, who collaborated with him, "doesn't want it as part of his legacy," says Schwartz. To this day, he honors the others' wishes that their names not be mentioned in connection with the film that changed his life. Advertisement Despite the nom de plume, his own real name is out there. So is he. And where he is today, in part, is doing YouTube movie reviews with his wife Joan. It's called "Two Jews On Film." When you watch it, you'd think he was goofy, not morbid or creepy. It's just your everyday couple that likes to get in front of a camera and disagree about the movies they watch together. The guy who made Faces of Death and the woman who married him are just like us! He was more than happy to discuss the project. Insightful. Open book. Seinfeldian vocally. Born in Manhattan. Raised in Mount Vernon, by way of a boarding school in Storm King Mountain. Off to Cal Arts where he studied in the theater department, the only undergrad studying direction. His roommate was an actor named David Hasselhoff. Schwartz is not a gossip, so all he'll say is that the Hoff was and is a great guy, and that his roommate did join him for the screening of Faces of Death at the Fox Theater in L.A. Schwartz figured he'd "come to Hollywood and make a fortune." He was a runner. He was a production assistant on In Search Of, the Leonard Nimoy-hosted investigation of the paranormal. He did all sorts of episodic work. Shows called Scandals, Made in the USA, Fantasies of the Stars. In the late '70s, Schwartz was working for an entertainment company owned by the family whose name he politely declines to divulge. He was editing an animal documentary when a Japanese crew came in. They wanted to make a movie about death. "Society doesn't like to look at death," Schwartz says. The Japanese, he says, "are totally fascinated with death and the macabre. Not the way we are. We take a look and then turn away." Schwartz didn't see this as an opportunity to build a career. He never intended it to be that. "It was just an incredible adventure to go around the world and tell a story about death," he says. He brainstormed and got to thinking about The Hellstrom Chronicle, a 1971 film that had presented an imaginary insect takeover of the world as documentary fact. Influenced by the Hellstrom structure, with its fictitious scientist narrator, he came up with the narrative construct of a doctor discussing "real" cases. That was the money thought. The doctor would enable the movie to bounce from death to death in a conceivably realistic framework. "The muse inside took me over when I wrote the narrative," Schwartz says. "Of all the things I've written, the most organic was Faces of Death. It was the creation of the doctor as a mouthpiece to say whatever I wanted to say, with nobody censoring me. We were our own censors, but we didn't censor anything. The darker we got, the more excited we were. "Part of the challenge creatively was how to make it look like real life, to actually fool people. We were way ahead of ourselves on that ground. It was a subject nobody was doing anything like this then, the odyssey of death. What is this reality we live in for a finite amount of time and then, all of a sudden, we're a memory? I still feel haunted by the images." II. Monkey Brains The monkey didn't die. Of all the images—the napalm bombing, the clubbing of the seals—the scene that's always stuck with me is the one with the monkey's brains. The one where there are three people sitting around a table and, apparently, breaking open a captive monkey's head to dine on the insides. "Cauliflower for the brains," Schwartz says. "Theater blood for the blood." I was still in grammar school when I saw that monkey. I can't remember exactly which friend's older brother passed it down the line to mangle our minds. But that monkey, oh that monkey. Schwartz doesn't remember the monkey's name. He doesn't remember the trainer's, either, only that the guy was dressed in Middle Eastern garb. They made a special table to restrain the monkey, then hit it in the head with Styrofoam mallets. "Him going so crazy was just perfect," he says. "When we cut away, we put a prosthetic head there. Cut back to a wide shot. Open the skull." Six years later, Steven Spielberg was serving up monkey brains to PG audiences in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Advertisement III. What Haunts The Haunter? Once the Japanese indicated what they wanted, he outlined a treatment and sent it off to a company called Shoshoku. They liked it. They liked it enough to commission Schwartz and the company for which he worked to go ahead and make it. So they did, culling footage of fatalities from film libraries around the world, from independent stringers and collectors, too, then producing their own. To be sure, there was the need to do some eyes-on research. Even doing a movie mixing faux death with the real thing, there are things one needed to see. Schwartz says he went to the L.A. County Morgue. Seven autopsies were going on simultaneously. The smell sticks with him decades later—-the odor of a "bad deli," he says. "Everything gave me the chills," he says. "It was just a matter of blocking out emotion. But, I remember seeing those multiple body parts from a motorcycle accident. One person with rope still around his neck. A baby autopsied at 6 or 7 months old." All that, though, paled in comparison with something more mundane. "We were going through the hospital in Manhattan, East 69th Street, and passed the dialysis area. An elderly woman looked at us and waved. I got so dizzy to see her blood all around her. It was all so surreal." Advertisement IV. What Had He Done? The rights to the movie were eventually sold off to brothers out of Chicago who set up Gorgon Video and released it. Schwartz thought his career was on the ropes once the movie came out. Asked when he knew he'd done something memorable, Schwartz says: "When I saw a Dan Rather report about a movie being banned in 48 countries because it tells the real story of death. The papers in my hand fell to the floor. My first thought was 'I'd never work in Hollywood.' "There was such negative criticism because everybody thought it was real, the sheer magnitude of scope." Truth: It was banned because it had never been done before, and because it showed death. Advertisement Fiction: Never work in Hollywood again? Not quite. "That quickly became, 'Everybody wants to talk to me,'" he says, noting that Jon Stewart paid homage during a chance encounter. "We did a good job fooling people, blending fantasy with reality," he says. Timing, it seems, was everything. The movie went on to gross $40 million, on a $450,000 budget. There would eventually be four full-length Faces of Death films and a mini-feature. The success didn't exactly yield him a personal fortune. Schwartz estimates he made "thousands" off the first movie; $15,000 is a safe guess. The sequels weren't all that profitable for him, either. "The companies that reap the benefits had nothing to do with making the movie," he says. Yet the original Faces of Death made his career via other means. His check-me-out list includes six movies (co-writer on House of the Rising Sun, Black Ice, and Quiet Rage) and involvement with a slew of television shows (including Knight Rider, Dragnet, The Fall Guy, Santa Barbara, and a pilot for something called The Atomic Outpost Avengers.) "The gods of the medium were on our side when we did this," he says. "Every door opened. We'd done something nobody else thought to do. Now, everything's reality based. Everybody who has a story can get on YouTube, maybe get picked up by the network. We live in a world that's dominated by reality TV. It's also cost effective to produce." V. The Aftermath Advertisement Besides "Two Jews on Film," Schwartz says he spends much of his time doing "something cathartic," writing the memoirs of his Faces of Death days. Twenty-five chapters outlined, eight done. "The way it's broken down now: Graphic moments. How we did it, the process, beginning to end," he says. "I've found that, when dealing with death, you have to have humor to protect their souls. Twisted humor that only people who deal in the macabre can identify with," he says. He had an idea for a show called New American Prophet that would delve deeply into the world's religions. He still wants to do it. "It goes to find true light in life. In dealing with religions from around the world, no matter what it might be, we need a new way of looking at religion. In turn, we'd be gaining a better perspective on our end. But in this country, sponsors are leery of supporting this. It's too much of a hot button for sponsors in America. All religions have something that touches heart, touches soul." He takes pride in the fact that some of his footage proved to be the "first to expose animal cruelty, among other things, to an innocent public." But there's a flip side to that. "One thing that made this notorious was that, once a kid saw it, a bit of innocence was taken away," he says. "When young, you're immortal. That's easily forgotten." So, there is a tinge of regret, then? "Woulda, coulda, shoulda. I'm not a big believer in living in the past. Assimilation of many life experiences. Too heavy. Too cumbersome. All you have is the moment you're living in." Schwartz is most surprised at how the film has not only endured, but positioned him as a character of wonderment to the public at large. He says he's available to lecture about it all, if you're interested in such things (you can contact him through his YouTube page). "I'm amazed by the notoriety it still has. People ask all the time about how create a cult classic. I've lectured at universities. It's been quoted by everybody up to The Sopranos. Jon Stewart bowed to me, 'I can't believe you made Faces of Death,'" he says. "It's been passed on generation to generation. Older brother forcing a younger sibling to watch. I was just focusing on the realities of this planet. How we respond is an individual experience. We knew that if it touched us, it would touch other people. "I don't know if it's a source of pride. I'm sitting on something extremely volatile to this day. Until we collectively, as a collective humanity, figure out what death is, I know it's always on a shelf somewhere." |
0 of 33 Seth Wenig/Associated Press Ryan Tannehill has now had two full seasons as the quarterback of the Miami Dolphins. During that span he has accomplished some good things and some bad. Tannehill has proven to be one of the toughest quarterbacks in the league during his time with the Dolphins. He has been sacked 93 times over the last two seasons. Tannehill will enter his third season with the Dolphins surrounded by uncertainty. His offensive line is in shambles, his running game virtually non-existent and some major free agents on the defensive side of the ball need to be re-signed. Tannehill will have to overcome and adapt to any changes that may be made during the offseason. For Miami to become a contender once again, Tannehill will have to improve his decision making and accuracy. There is no way of knowing what next season will hold for Tannehill and the Dolphins. What we do know is what the last two seasons have been. The following slides will break down Tannehill's performance from all 32 games over the last two seasons. Things weren't always pretty, but the leap he made from his rookie year to this past season was astronomical. With any luck, 2014 will bring another leap in performance. But for now I give you Tannehill's game-to-game performances thus far. |
Flipkart is disrupting not just the retail sector, but the job market as well. After launching better maternity benefits earlier this month, the e-commerce giant has moved several steps ahead and now rolled out another employee-friendly measure: an adoption assistance programme. Probably a first from an Indian company, the scheme offers Rs 50,000 adoption allowance "to use towards legal, agency, regulatory costs or any other expenses that may arise during the adoption process", the policy states. Women who are adopting a child under 12 months of age can avail of the same benefits as under its maternity leave policy. As per the company's maternity leave policy, women are allowed take six months paid leave and an additional four months flexible working hours. If the child being adopted is over 12 motnhs of age, women staff can get up to 3 months paid leave and an additional four months flexible working hours. Men, meanwhile, can avail up to six weeks of paid leave within the first six months of the adoption and an additional four months flexible working hours. Glad to share our new Adoption Assistance Program ! pic.twitter.com/YIa6fqMtGj — Flipkart Careers (@WorkAtFlipkart) July 13, 2015 Those who want to take additional leaves beyond these, but with no leave left, are allowed to take unpaid leave for up to three months. "Continuity on the same job is assured," the company's policy says. More over, the adopting parent can seek support on parenting, child care, emotional health, work-life balance, family health etc. For those planning to adopt, the company will also offer counselling and referral services. And the policy is getting a lot of praise on Twitter: @WorkAtFlipkart This is brilliant. Truly inclusive of different kinds of parenting needs. Kudos! .@Flipkart initiates Adoption Assistance Program , changing the dynamics of the industry as usual. Sheer brilliance. https://t.co/ajj07vjFZK — Juhi Sharma (@MissyJuno) July 13, 2015 Given that we have low #adoption rates in #India, and need to encourage adoption, this is commendable @Flipkart pic.twitter.com/4TFCChSdYY — Anant Bhan (@AnantBhan) July 13, 2015 Firstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button. |
Aleš "Freeze" Kněžínek will play for Renegades in their game against Counter Logic Gaming on Sunday for Week 3 of the NA LCS, according to a tweet from Rob "Leonyx" Lee, the team's General Manager, Friday. Freeze will play this Sunday. We gucci. — Leonyx (@Leonyx) January 29, 2016 Freeze has not played for Renegades since Week 1 of the NA LCS. He was unable to play during Week 2 for "personal reasons," and Ember's ADC Benjamin "Benjamin" deMunck stood in. Freeze is also unable to play his game on Saturday of Week 3; Team Dragon Knight's ADC Oh "Ohq" Gyumin will stand in. In Week 1 of the NA LCS, Freeze averaged a 5.50 KDA, playing Kalista in Renegade's win against Team Liquid and Lucian in their loss against NRG eSports. |
Photo by Bruce Young/ Lafayette College Dept. of Biology Two rare snakes from the American southwest the deadly Sonoran coral snake and the western hook-nosed snake have developed a novel way to scare off their enemies. When threatened, they emit rumbling air bubbles from the cloaca, the common opening for sex and excretion at a snake's rear end. Want to know what it sounds like? "Essentially, it's snake flatulence," says Bruce Young, an experimental morphologist at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania.As the world's leading expert on snake sounds, Young has listened to hissing adders, snoring hognose snakes, and growling king cobras, but he had never heard anything like the cloacal popping. When he brought specimens of the two species to his lab and hooked them up to a microphone, he found that they popped only in response to disruptive stroking or poking. The snakes use two sets of muscles to isolate a compressed pocket of air, which they release to the outside in a startling, explosive burst. "Hook-nosed snakes put so much energy into this pop that in some cases they'll fling themselves up off the ground," says Young. |
Singlespeeding can be an experience that demands more of a person, and so a person finds that extra drive, that extra strength to do something that perhaps he didnt believe he could accomplish before. Or even relate to. Singlespeeding is quiet. Its simple. Its pure. But its way more than that -- its personal. Boredom . Some of the people on this forum are extremely accomplished mountain bikers. They've ridden it all. Singlespeeding is a new challenge. Making a statement . There are a lot of people who are fed up with planned obsolescence, Shimano's dominance of componentry, and/or the over-engineering of today's bikes. Some people like making a statement about one of those things, or about noncomformity, stickin' it to the man, or maybe something else they think singlespeeding stands for. Cachet . It's a fringe activity. You're a member of a pretty exclusive club if you're a singlespeeder. There's always the danger of it being a trendy fad, which means someday it won't be cool anymore, but I don't think where anywhere near there yet. Pride . Let's be honest here. It feels pretty good doing that bad beeotch of a climb in a gear twice as tall as you would have on a geared bike. And people that aren't ordinarily impressed by others' riding are sometimes impressed that you can ride a particular trail AT ALL on a singlespeed. Those are the reasons that are most important to me, but singlespeeders are a diverse group (which is a good thing, in my little worldview) and here are some other potential legitimate reasons which I also respect: Elegance . A singlespeed bike (other than mine) has a really nice clean, elegant look to it, with no derailleurs hanging off various places, shifters cluttering up the handlebars, and shift cables running along the tubes. Now if you saw my bikes you'd know I'm not exactly seeking out a "clean" look, but I can appreciate it in others' bikes, and a lot of other singlespeeders appreciate it too. Momentum . 1. On a geared bike, when you start losing speed on a climb, you downshift, and you let off the power to do it ... which slows you down even more. On a singlespeed, you stand up and hammer. You get more momentum going up the hill (although it can be exhausing at times!). 2. Because you know climbing can get tough if you bog down too much, you pay a lot more attention to preserving your momentum, and you're less likely to sap away precious momentum with your brakes when you don't need to. 3. Because you carry more momentum going uphill into difficult technical sections, you have an easier time getting through them in the uphill direction. Why is technical terrain harder going uphill than downhill? Speed. Concentration . You don't have to think about what gear you're in. You don't have to plan your downshift ahead of time when you come to a stop in traffic. It's not like shifting is THAT much of a mental burden, but you'd be surprised how many brainwave cycles singlespeeding frees up for other things. Like paying more attention to traffic. Like paying more attention to your body english, line and speed when you attack that rock garden. See my writeup below under the "Inaugural SS ride at Cutthroat PaSS" for a better description of what I mean. Singlespeeding makes you a better technical rider. Weight savings . To be honest, I still have the rear derailleurs on my bikes so I can run gears when I want, so I'm not seeing that much weight savings. BUT even so, when I pull off my cassette and replace it with a single cog, I'm taking away about 220 grams. That's half a pound. I can easily feel the difference when I pick up the bike. Go truly singlespeed by stripping off the derailleurs, shifters and cables, and you can end up saving 2-3 POUNDS. People spend hundreds of dollars to lose that kind of weight off their bikes, but with singlespeeding you can do it for free. Durability . No rear derailleur to tweak on trail obstacles, no shifters to go bad, no front derailleur to jam, no 11-tooth cogs to wear out early and force you to replace your cassette before its time. Maintenance . No derailleurs to adjust, no jockey pulleys to lubricate, no cables to clean. Most of the maintenance most of us do, other than tires, is on the drivetrain. With a singlespeed all you have to do is take care of your chain. That's IT. Efficiency . A singlespeed's chain runs directly from the chainring to the rear sprocket and back. A geared bike's chain snakes around two jockey pulleys to a sprocket that is out of line (left-to-right) from the chainring by much as an inch. Even without the chainline issue the improvement is at least a couple percent, and compared to some of the more crooked chainlines you might run on a multi-geared bike, the difference can be quite a bit more than that. Believe it or not, you can feel the difference. Don't believe me? Find a bike shop that sells a few singlespeed bikes, and pull both a singlespeed and a geared bike off the rack. Now crank the pedals backwards pretty hard and let go. Notice how much longer the pedals spin on the SS bike? That's the difference in efficiency, and it's even more pronounced under load. Well, there are a lot of different possible reasons. And yes, people do ride them on trails. It's not as hard as you might think. I run geared some of the time (road rides, some mountain biking), and singlespeed some of the time (commuting, more and more mountain biking). Here are my reasons: Of course it takes a little time to come to love singlespeeding. Maybe the magazine boys aren't willing to make that commitment. Or maybe they've become so high and mighty in their own minds that they just want to tell the world what's right and what's not. Perhaps the care and feeding of their know-it-all egos is where their real commitment lies. It takes commitment to enjoy singlespeeding at its highest and most rewarding level. It takes a dedicated bike with one gear that cannot be shifted. Leaving a geared bike in one gear involves you in singlespeeding, but it doesn't commit you to anything. What's the difference between "involvement" and "commitment?" Well, think of the ham and eggs you had for breakfast this morning. The chicken was involved; the pig was committed. Singlespeeding is not just a bike. It's way more than the bike. Like I said before, it's a dicipline. That's where the mag editors don't seem to get it. Ever notice that the people who think singlespeeds are dumb are the people who don't ride them? Singlespeeds are real. Them that knows know they know. Them that don't know don't know they don't know. |
The blast, which also wounded 17, occurred when the bombmakers were unloading the device, authorities said Four suspected militants killed by their own bomb in Turkey Four suspected bombmakers have been killed and 17 people wounded after an explosion ripped through a village in Turkey’s mainly Kurdish south-east, security sources and the interior ministry said. The blast occurred on Thursday night in the Sarikamis district, about 25km (15 miles) from the city of Diyarbakir, as alleged Kurdistan Workers party (PKK) militants loaded explosives on to a small truck, according to the ministry. Electricity in Sarikamis was cut and homes near the blast site suffered damage, CNN Turk reported. Turkish journalists accuse Erdoğan of media witch-hunt Read more A photograph taken from a police helicopter and provided to reporters by the ministry showed what appeared to be a massive crater in a field caused by the explosion. Two of the wounded were in critical condition, security sources said. Witnesses reported hearing the explosion as far away as Diyarbakir. The blast followed a car bomb attack near a military facility earlier the same day in an Istanbul suburb that wounded seven people, and a car bombing in Diyarbakir on Tuesday that targeted police and killed three people. Turkey has been hit by a series of bombings this year, including two suicide attacks in tourist areas of Istanbul blamed on Islamic State, and two car bombings in the capital, Ankara, which killed a total of 66 people. A PKK offshoot claimed responsibility. After the blast, security forces set up checkpoints at Sarikamis and searched vehicles entering and leaving the village. |
Lewis Benson on “That of God” My post about “that of God” and the soul prompted a fair amount of comment and some interest in Lewis Benson’s essay on the phrase, so I thought I would digest its key points here. In 1970, Lewis Benson published an essay in Quaker Religious Thought (Vol. XII, No. 2) titled “That of God in Every Man” — What Did George Fox Mean by It?” He hoped, I think, that this essay would reverse the trend among liberal Friends toward using the phrase as the foundation for their Quakerism, since he felt that “when we jump to the conclusion that “that of God” is the central truth of the Quaker message, then we cut ourselves off from that which Fox made central; namely, the message about Jesus Christ and how he saves men.” (Benson consistently uses “men” to stand in for all people in this essay; I do not change his usage in my quotes below.) It didn’t work. His opening sentences are at least as true today as they were in 1970: “The phrase “that of God in every man” has been widely used in the twentieth century as an expression which signifies the central truth of the Quaker message. Many present-day Quakers, when asked what the Quakers believe, are likely to reply: ‘They believe that there is that of God in every man’.” Probably no one knew the work and thought of George Fox better than Lewis Benson. He prepared a massive concordance of Fox’s works and if you look “that of God” up, as I have done, you find more than 700 entries, counting all its cognates, and there are many of those; Benson lists a few in his essay. I am persuaded by Benson’s historical analysis and his critique, and by aspects of his discussion of its implications, and I have taken up his crusade, though for different reasons and with different goals. I feel that his essay is essential reading for any Friend in the liberal tradition. (You can download a pdf file at http://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/qrt/topdownloads.html.) So here are what I think are Benson’s salient points. How Fox used the phrase “that of God” Benson: “This phrase belongs to his [Fox’s] pastoral vocabulary rather than to his doctrinal vocabulary. Two salient facts point to an understanding of what Fox means by “that of God in every man”: first, it is not used by Fox to designate the central truth that he is proclaiming; and, second, it is used most frequently to refer to the response that Friends were trying to evoke by word and deed.” Where Fox got the phrase and the concept Benson and others agree that Fox got the idea from Romans 1:19: “[Because] that which may be known of God is manifest in them [shown to them]; for God hath showed it unto them.” The context of this declaration in Benson’s essay suggests that this latter clause echoes John 1:9, which was a key passage for Friends: “That was the true Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” Romans 1:9 does not use the phrase “that of God”, but Benson quotes Fox showing how Fox connected the idea with the phrase: “That Fox saw ‘that of God in every man’ in the context of Romans 1 is evident from the following passage written in 1658: ‘So that which may be known of God is manifest within people, wjhich God hath showed unto them . . . and to that of God in them all must they come before they do hold the truth in righteousness, or retain God in their knowledge, or retain his covenant of light . . . ” What did Fox mean by “that of God” The phrase “that of God” is not an idea about human nature “but points to the work of God in Christ,” as Francis Hall puts it in his comment after Benson’s essay. Benson elaborates: “The Creator imparts his wisdom to man. This is not human wisdom, but the voice and wisdom of the Creator. We cannot produce the equivalent of this voice and this wisdom from our human resources. It must be heard and received. There is a hunger in every man for this voice and this wisdom—a need to be taught what is right by the Creator. In every man there is a witness for God that summons him to remember the Creator. This is ‘that of God in every man.’ It is not an organ, or faculty, or gland. It is a hunger and thirst that God has put in man.” (emphasis mine) That of God is not a divine spark inherent in the human, some aspect of the divine in which the human partakes, as we modern liberal Friends tend to believe. Rather, that of God is a yearning for God and for God’s teaching and guidance that was put there as a kind of receptor for the gospel, for God’s wisdom, put there by God. “Answering” that of God Benson: “The verbs that Fox usually links with ‘that of God’ are ‘answer’ and ‘reach.’ The goal of Quaker preaching, either by word or deed, is to reach or answer something in all men. Fox says, “it is the light that makes manifest to a man when he is convinced: it answers to something, and reaches to something in their particulars.’ “Answering that of God” is not recognizing the divine spark in others, but rather offering ministry that satisfies the yearning in us for God’s truth. In the famous pastoral epistle that we quote all the time as our source for the phrase, we “will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one; whereby in them ye may be a blessing, and make the witness of God in them to bless you.” “Cheerfully” here does not mean in a lighthearted mood, but rather so as to cheer in a sense mostly lost to us since the 17th century, that is to spiritually uplift—to be a blessing. It’s also notable that Fox uses “world”, not “earth”, as many liberal Friends today often misquote him. “The world” comes from John’s gospel and stands for the world as it rejected Christ: “That was the true Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.” (John 1:9–10) That which does the answering Fox: “There is something in man . . . that answers the power which is the gospel.” Benson: “That of God in the conscience is not conscience itself, but the word by which all things, including conscience, were created.” This “word”, of course, is Christ the Word, John 1:3: “All things were made by him; and without hem was not any thing made that was made”. The twentieth century usage Benson: “Between 1700 and 1900 “that of God in every man” virtually disappeared from the Quaker vocabulary . . . How did this long-forgotten phrase get into the spotlight and stay in the spotlight?” What happened that modern liberal Friends have turned this phrase on its head and then made it the one slender pillar upon which all Quaker tradition was to balance? Benson’s answer: “The earliest instance of the revived use of “that of God” that I have been able to discover is found in Rufus Jones’ “Introduction” to his abridged edition of Fox’s Journal, first published in 1903, in which he expresses his opinion that the “larger truth” implicit in Fox’s early experiences is the discovery that there is a ‘universal principle, that the Spirit of God reaches in every man.’ He then adds: ‘To all sorts and conditions of men, Fox continually makes appeal to ‘that of God’ in them or to ‘the principle of God within man’ . . . In every instance he means that the Divine Being operates directly on the human life.’ In the following year he [Jones] wrote: ‘What was the Inner Light? The simplest answer is: The Inner Light is the doctrine that there is something Divine, “Something of God” in the human soul.’ As a consequence of statements like these, the phrase ‘that of God in every man’ began to acquire a meaning for twentieth century Friends that it did not have for Fox. The new ‘interpretation’ made ‘that of God in man’ the central conception around which everything else in Quakerism revolves.” Benson notes that in the last few weeks of his life, Jones began to have doubts about what he had done. It was only at this late time in his career that Jones actually began to systematically study what Fox meant by the phrase. Meanwhile, Jones had been propagating his misinterpretation for 45 years. In his failure to actually study the material he was interpreting, Jones prefigured our own practice. Most Friends use the phrase glibly, having read very little Fox, if any, who are ignorant of Benson’s essay, and haven’t thought through what either Fox or they themselves mean by the phrase beyond the divine spark idea. The idea spreads Benson believes that the AFSC is responsible for bringing this understanding of the phrase into common usage. “A major contributing factor in the dissemination of this idea has been the torrent of promotional literature and other publications that flows from the pens of the publicists and staff writers of the American Friends Service committee. . . . by frequently reminding us that its central motivating principle is ‘that of God in every man,’ [the Service Committee] has exerted a much greater influence on Quaker faith and thought than anything emanating from the Society itself.” This jives with my sense that you are most likely to see the phrase invoked as the foundation for the peace testimony and our other social testimonies, a topic which Benson takes up at length. “That of God” and membership But the phrase has come to dominate our thinking about more than our social witness. Benson: “Among Quakers today there is a widespread belief that the central truth of Quakerism is a principle that is not solely derived from the Christian revelation. . . . for a considerable number of Friends ‘that of God in every man’ is the symbol of a principle that transcends and comprehends Christianity. We know that it is the policy of some Monthly Meetings to make belief in ‘that of God in every man,’ which has been called ‘the Quakers’ creed,’ a primary and essential condition of membership, whereas faith in Christ is regarded as a secondary and non-essential factor in examining prospective members. I maintain . . . there is no such Christ-transcending principle in the thought of Fox.” My own meeting (Central Philadelphia) does not use the phrase in this way as a credal test in its membership process, but its membership documents are, in fact, full of the claim that our faith rests on the belief in that of God in everyone. Comments by T. Canby Jones and Francis B. Hall The Quaker Religious Thought issue with Benson’s essay also includes two comments by these two Quaker thinkers. Jones points out that it’s really hard to distinguish in Fox’s thinking between the Light and “that of God in everyone”. They have the same source, they work in the same ways. Fox was famously unsystematic in his thinking, and Jones confesses to still being “all hung up” on this distinction, even though he dwelt on the question for pages in his doctoral dissertation. “I can hear Fox laughing,” he says. I agree with Jones about this. I find it quite hard to follow Fox’s thinking a lot of the time. But I also agree with Benson about almost all of his points. We misuse the phrase “that of God” these days in ways that do violence to our tradition and to the testimony of integrity. We have narrowed our belief system down to this one principle and ravaged an ancient and rich tradition in the process. We have forgotten where our “modern” interpretation came from, and when, and we have falsely retrojected it onto our prophetic founder, who, it seems, never meant by it anything like what we mean by it. But, as my Friend Don Badgley often points out, it’s not what we believe that matters so much as what we have experienced. “Art thou a child of the Light, and hast thou walked in the Light?” Whatever “that of God” within us is, a divine spark or an inward yearning for Truth, is it connecting? Are we answering the knock on our heart’s door? Are we rising to face and follow the light, in spirit and in truth? But while direct experience of the Christ (and I will leave open for now the question of what and/or who the Christ is) may be the main question, the way that we present our beliefs still matters. The way we answer questions about our faith from the public, from newcomers, and from our children. What we say matters. As Fox put it, “What thou speakest, is it inwardly from God?” Advertisements |
In the last days of his life, Alberto Nisman could hardly wait to confront his enemies. On January 14th of this year, Nisman, a career prosecutor in Argentina, had made an electrifying accusation against the country’s President, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. He charged that she had orchestrated a secret plan to scuttle the investigation of the bloodiest terrorist attack in Argentina’s history: the 1994 suicide bombing of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina, the country’s largest Jewish organization, in which eighty-five people were killed and more than three hundred wounded. Nisman, a vain, meticulous fifty-one-year-old with a zest for Buenos Aires’ gaudy night life, had pursued the case for a decade, travelling frequently to the United States to get help from intelligence officials and from aides on Capitol Hill. In 2006, he indicted seven officials from the government of Iran, including its former President and Foreign Minister, whom he accused of planning and directing the attack, along with a senior leader of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Months later, Nisman secured international arrest warrants for five officials, effectively preventing them from leaving Iran. As the case made him a celebrity, he invested in blue contact lenses and Botox injections. “Whenever he saw a camera, that was it, he would drop everything,” Roman Lejtman, a journalist who covered the investigation, said. Over the years, the case, known by the Jewish organization’s acronym, amia, had exposed the flaws of Argentina’s judicial system. The presiding judge was indicted for trying to hijack its outcome, as were some of the country’s highest-ranked politicians. Iran’s leaders scoffed at Argentina’s demands to extradite the accused, and even issued a warrant for Nisman’s arrest. Nisman persevered, pressing the Iranians at every opportunity. From the beginning, he had the unstinting support of Argentina’s Presidents—first of Néstor Kirchner, who chose Nisman to supervise the prosecution in 2004, then of Cristina, who succeeded her husband in 2007. Every autumn, she travelled to New York and denounced the Iranian regime before the United Nations. Whenever Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, entered the main hall to speak, Argentina’s diplomats, under Kirchner’s orders, walked out. And then, in early 2013, Kirchner, known for her erratic manner and ruthless political acumen, made an extraordinary about-face. Following months of clandestine negotiations, she struck a deal with the Iranian government that would, she said, finally break the deadlock over the amia case. The deal called for the establishment of a “truth commission” that would allow Argentine judges to travel to Tehran and possibly interview the suspects. While many Argentines applauded Kirchner’s diplomacy, Nisman told friends that she had betrayed him by making a deal with the Iranians. Secretly, he embarked on another investigation, of Kirchner herself. On January 14, 2015, Nisman released the results, accusing the President of engaging in a criminal conspiracy to bury the amia case. “The order to execute the crime came directly and personally from the President of the Nation,” he wrote. Amid a public outcry, Nisman was summoned to testify before the Argentine Congress. He told friends that he’d begun to fear for his life, but he was determined to see the case through. A few days before his scheduled appearance, he sent a text message to a friend: “On Monday I am going in strong with evidence!” The night before Nisman was due in Congress, his body was found in his apartment, slumped against the bathroom door in a pool of blood. There was a bullet hole in his head and, on the floor next to his hand, a .22-calibre pistol and the casing from a bullet. In a trash can, police found a draft of a legal document, written by Nisman and never executed, clearing the way for Kirchner’s arrest. Over the next few weeks, every Argentine seemed to have an opinion about how Nisman had died; the case became the Latin-American equivalent of the J.F.K. assassination, grist for conspiracy theories involving spies and foreign governments and conniving politicians. Posters across Buenos Aires asked, “Who killed Nisman?” During the investigation, Nisman had received many death threats, but his friends say that he bore them lightly. At one point, an Israeli writer named Gustavo Perednik met with Nisman in a Buenos Aires café to discuss what he should name the book he was completing about the amia case. Perednik passed Nisman a list of potential titles. He picked one immediately: “The Assassination of Alberto Nisman.” “Very catchy!” Nisman said. On the morning of July 18, 1994, a man driving a Renault utility truck loaded with several hundred pounds of ammonium nitrate and TNT pulled up to the building that housed AMIA and detonated his payload. The six-story structure collapsed, leaving behind a scene of corpses, severed limbs, and wailing victims. Rescue workers spent weeks searching the rubble for bodies and survivors. The attack followed a nearly identical one two years earlier, in which a truck bomb exploded outside the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, killing twenty-nine people and wounding two hundred and forty-two. A wing of Hezbollah claimed responsibility, and many American officials believed that the Iranian regime had approved and helped carry out the attack. In the amia bombing, too, they suspected that Iran and Hezbollah, which often act together, were the main culprits. The Argentine government began an investigation, but it soon stalled. The police recovered parts of the Renault truck—and then allowed them to sit in a warehouse. Three years into the investigation, James Bernazzani, a senior agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was dispatched to Buenos Aires to help. When he and his team began examining the truck, they found bits of flesh and bluejeans stuck to a fragment of metal. Technicians at an F.B.I. lab quickly identified a man who they believed was the driver: Ibrahim Hussein Berro, a Hezbollah operative from Lebanon. Intelligence analysts determined that Berro’s family had been fêted by Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, shortly after the bombing. “The case we made would have stood up in the U.S. judicial system,” Bernazzani said. But the Argentine prosecutors decided to focus instead on what they called the “local connection”: twenty-two Argentines, including a number of police officers who they said had assisted in the attack. At the center of the case was a member of a local stolen-car ring named Carlos Alberto Telleldin, whom they accused of selling the Renault to the bombers. At first, Telleldin claimed to have sold the truck to a man with a Central American accent, but he soon changed his story to implicate police officers from Buenos Aires Province. Not long afterward, a video surfaced that explained the reversal. The video, aired on national television, showed the judge in the case, Juan Galeano, paying Telleldin four hundred thousand dollars and instructing him to accuse the police. According to prosecutors, the country’s President, Carlos Menem, had endorsed the bribe, possibly in an effort to embarrass the governor of Buenos Aires, a political opponent. “In Argentina, large court cases are not about themselves,” Pablo Jacoby, a lawyer for a group of amia survivors and victims’ families, told me. “They are used by politicians to settle their differences.” As the case wound through Argentina’s labyrinthine judicial system, absurdities multiplied. A fireman admitted in court that he had lied about finding a piece of the truck which had actually been discovered by an Israeli investigator. A lawyer who worked on the case said that he had been tortured by Argentine intelligence agents and interrogated about tapes of Iranians involved in the plot. “Every aspect of the case was a disaster, beginning with the initial investigation,” Claudio Grossman, who was dispatched by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to observe the trial, said. (He is now the dean of American University Law School.) “Argentina is a modern country, but there is no trust in the legal system, no faith that the system can solve problems.” In 2003, the prosecution finally collapsed, with a court finding all twenty-two defendants not guilty. Judge Galeano, Menem, and the head of the country’s main intelligence agency, side, were prosecuted. By the time the trial was over, it had compiled five hundred and eighty-eight volumes of evidence, heard twelve hundred and eighty-four witnesses, and lasted for nine years, making it the longest-running case in Argentine history. Néstor Kirchner, elected President that year, called the government’s handling of the case “a national disgrace.” A year later, Kirchner selected Nisman, then a junior prosecutor, to salvage what he could from the disastrous case and try again. Nisman was a surprising choice: he had been part of the team that led the initial amia prosecution, which carried on despite overwhelming evidence that the case had been corrupted. “I had lost respect for him,” Alejandro Rua, who worked on the prosecution, said. “He knew the case was bad, but he kept going.” Nisman’s friends saw it differently: as a junior lawyer, he had no choice but to go along. “No, thanks.” Even as a young prosecutor, in the provincial city of Olivos, Nisman was smart and ambitious and unabashed about showing it. In the courtroom, he talked so fast that judges sometimes had trouble understanding him. He had started working in the judicial system at age seventeen, as an unpaid clerk, telling friends that one day he’d be attorney general. “We were the youngest people in the country doing the job then,” Fabiana León, a friend from those days, said. “Alberto did not like to lose, so he’d fight a lot with the judges, always objecting and making appeals.” Two years after taking over the amia case, Nisman produced an indictment. In the course of eight hundred and one pages, he charged seven Iranian officials, including the former President, Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, and also indicted Hezbollah’s senior military commander, Imad Mugniyah. “The decision to carry out the attack was made not by a small splinter group of extremist Islamic officials,” Nisman wrote, but was “extensively discussed and ultimately adopted by a consensus of the highest representatives of the Iranian government.” Drawing on the testimony of Iranian defectors, Nisman wrote that the decision was made on August 14, 1993, at a meeting of the Committee for Special Operations, which included the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. Since the nineteen-eighties, Nisman wrote, Iran had established a “vast spy network” inside Argentina that gathered information, picked targets, and recruited local helpers. The coördinator of the amia operation inside the country was an Iranian named Mohsen Rabbani, who for many years was a leader at a mosque in Buenos Aires called Al Tawhid. It was Rabbani, Nisman said, who financed the attack, oversaw the purchase of the Renault, and directed the assembly of the bomb. Nisman tracked the movements and telephone conversations of Rabbani and others in the days and hours leading up to the attack, showing that most of the plotters were talking to one another and to the Iranian Embassy in Buenos Aires. Nearly all of them left Argentina before the bombing, as did the Iranian Ambassadors to Argentina and several neighboring countries. But Rabbani stayed behind. He had recently been appointed a cultural attaché at the Iranian Embassy, and was thus the beneficiary of diplomatic immunity. Remarkably, he remained in Argentina for three more years, proclaiming his innocence, and was never taken into custody. In a statement after the bombing, Khamenei seemed to praise the attack: “By gathering together groups of Jews with records of murder, theft, wickedness, and hooliganism from throughout the world, the Zionist regime has created an entity under the name of the Israeli nation that only understands the logic of terror and crimes.” Despite all the detail that Nisman gathered, the question of Iran’s motive was never definitively answered. Israeli officials believe that the bombing was meant to avenge an Israeli attack on a Hezbollah training camp in Lebanon a month earlier. But, according to Matthew Levitt, a former senior Treasury official and the author of a book on Hezbollah, planning for the amia operation began months before the Lebanon attack took place. Much of the testimony that guided Nisman toward the Iranian regime was provided by a man referred to in court documents as “Witness C”—Abolghasem Mesbahi, an Iranian intelligence agent who defected to Germany in 1996. Mesbahi, too, was vague about Iran’s motivations. He told investigators only that the regime regarded Argentina, whose Jewish population is the seventh-largest in the world, as an easy place to kill Jews. But he offered one clear explanation for the vexed legal process that followed: President Menem, he claimed, was a paid Iranian asset of long standing. For years leading up to the attack, Middle Eastern countries had sought to expand their influence in Argentina. Menem’s predecessor, Raúl Alfonsín, had cultivated relationships with Egypt and Iraq, collaborating on a medium-range ballistic missile called the Condor. Alfonsín’s government had also agreed to provide material and technical assistance to Iran’s nuclear program, which was beginning to raise concerns in the West. According to Mesbahi, Menem began receiving large sums of money from Iranian agents in the mid-eighties, when he was the governor of La Rioja Province. Menem is of Syrian descent, and the payments, usually made to companies that he was connected with, were intended to buy influence in the country’s Middle Eastern community. According to a former senior member of his Administration, Menem also received millions of dollars from other governments, including those of Muammar Qaddafi, in Libya, and Hafez Assad, in Syria, to pay for his election campaigns. Yet after Menem was elected President, in 1989, he halted arms deals with Libya and Syria and annulled the nuclear accord with Iran, according to Domingo Cavallo, his Foreign Minister. “The Americans told us, If you want to have a good relationship with us, cancel the agreement with the Iranians,” Cavallo explained. “So we did.” In Nisman’s telling, the cancellation of the nuclear agreement had prompted Iran to attack the amia center. He noted that, at the time, Iran was pressing Argentina to resume the agreement, but he offered little other evidence to support the allegation. Mesbahi suggested that Menem’s clandestine relationship with Iran continued through the amia bombing. Under interrogation, he claimed that Menem had agreed to whitewash Iran’s role, and in exchange received ten million dollars, wired to his numbered account at the Bank of Luxembourg in Geneva. The money was paid from another Swiss account, controlled by Rafsanjani, the Iranian President. The F.B.I. agent Bernazzani argued that a formerly credible defector was peddling bad information. “Mesbahi was full of shit,” he said. Still, many American officials believe that Iran was involved in the bombing. Hezbollah would never carry out such an operation without Iran’s approval, they said. “The assumption was that the Iranians were involved, because the attack was carried out by a unit that they created,’’ Robert Baer, a former American intelligence official who tracked links between Hezbollah and Iran, said. “Mugniyah never did anything without the green light of the Supreme Leader.” In 2007, Interpol’s general assembly endorsed Nisman’s indictment and issued “red notices” for five Iranian officials, calling on member states to arrest them. Interpol declined to issue warrants for the former Iranian President, Foreign Minister, and Ambassador—not because the proof did not merit them but because the agency’s bylaws prevent it from pursuing national leaders. In the years that Nisman presided over the amia investigation, he became a famous man. Separated from his wife, he was a fixture at Buenos Aires’ night clubs and sometimes appeared in gossip magazines with various girlfriends. He relished his image as a lone prosecutor going after terrorists in the Middle East. With a large staff and a big budget, he cultivated relationships with American intelligence analysts, conservative think-tank experts, and the staff of Senator Marco Rubio, who kept track of his work. He rented a luxury apartment in the chic neighborhood of Puerto Madero and indulged a passion for windsurfing. Claudio Rabinovitch, a co-worker and a friend since high school, recalled, “He told me, ‘Claudio, we are fifty years old, and it’s time to enjoy our lives!’ ” Yet Nisman remained intensely committed to his work and to his daughters, Iara and Kala, talking to them on the phone several times a day. After his father died, in 2004, he began to stay home from the office on Yom Kippur. It was a rare break. According to friends, the amia case had become a fixation: year after year, despite the lack of progress, Nisman kept searching for ways to hold the Iranians accountable. “Sometimes he would call me at two in the morning and tell me to be at the office at sunrise,” Diego Lagomarsino, a computer technician who worked for him, said. “Nothing Alberto did was surprising.” Nisman seemed to carry all the case’s complexities in his head. “It was unbelievable how he remembered every detail, precise dates and facts,” Rabinovitch said. In his home and office, nothing was out of place. Papers were stacked at tidy right angles; not a trace of dust could be seen anywhere. In a country famous for steak and wine, Nisman ate rice crackers and barely touched alcohol. He went to lunch several times a week at Itamae, a sushi restaurant around the corner from his apartment—always the same meal, eaten with chopsticks held together by a rubber band. As Nisman assembled his case, he cultivated a friendship with Jaime Stiuso, a senior official at side. Stiuso, then in his late fifties, was a shadowy figure; he’d joined the agency in the nineteen-seventies, when side was heavily involved in repression and torture. In the years since, he’d almost never shown himself in public. But, according to Juan Martín Mena, a highly placed Argentine intelligence official, “Stiuso was the dominant force in the agency.” Nisman also got assistance from the United States. According to diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks, American officials gave him guidance, helped him draft legal briefs, and lobbied foreign governments to support him. Between 2006 and 2010, Nisman met with U.S. Embassy officials more than ten times, at least once to speak with a senior official from the F.B.I. On one occasion, Nisman apologized for not telling the Embassy in advance that he had recommended Menem’s arrest. It’s unclear to what extent Nisman received help from American intelligence officers, but his visits to the Embassy fuelled speculation in the Argentine press that he was a puppet, dutifully following American and Israeli orders. “Yup! It’s time to feed the cattle.” Despite the many death threats he received—in phone calls, letters, and e-mails, many of them directed at his daughters—Nisman believed that his connections in side would keep him safe. The Argentine government gave him a round-the-clock team of bodyguards. Nisman often dispatched them to run errands, leaving himself unprotected. For years, Nisman had no greater supporter than Cristina Kirchner. Every September, when she travelled to New York for the opening of the General Assembly of the United Nations, she brought a group of amia survivors with her. In 2011, she told the assembly, “I am demanding, on the basis of the requirements of Argentine justice, that the Islamic Republic of Iran submit to the legal authority and in particular allow for those who have been accused of some level of participation in the amia attack to be brought to justice.” Kirchner and her husband had long presented themselves as the moral censors of the country, leading an unprecedented effort to confront Argentina’s history of political violence. From 1976 until 1983, during a period dubbed the Dirty War, military dictators carried out a brutal campaign against suspected guerrillas and their sympathizers. The purge swept up students, professors, newspaper editors, and priests and nuns. Suspects were kidnapped, interrogated, and tortured, and many were flown over the Río de la Plata and thrown into the water. In this way, as many as thirty thousand Argentines were “disappeared.” The military regime collapsed in 1983, following Argentina’s humiliating defeat in the Falklands War, but for decades the country’s civilian leaders largely refrained from investigating the crimes of the past. Each week, the mothers of people who had been disappeared gathered in front of the Presidential palace in silent protest. After Néstor Kirchner was elected, in 2003, he walked into the Naval Military College and demanded that portraits of the military leaders in the lobby be removed. On another occasion, standing before an assembly of officers, he announced, “I want to make it clear, as President of this nation, I am not afraid of you.” Some of the generals walked out. In 2005, Kirchner supported the repeal of two amnesty laws, and he instructed prosecutors to begin investigating. Néstor and Cristina were young, colorful, and smart; former law-school sweethearts, they prompted comparison to Bill and Hillary Clinton. In 2007, Néstor announced that he would stand aside to allow Cristina, then a senator, to run for President. After taking office, Cristina presided over the convictions of hundreds of officers for murder and torture. “What Néstor began, Cristina continued,” Raúl Zaffaroni, a former justice of the supreme court, told me. Kirchner proved to be a dramatic and polarizing leader. “Fear God,” she said at a cabinet meeting in 2012, “and a little bit me.” According to local lore, while Néstor was President, he got into a heated argument with one of his ministers during a dinner at the official residence, prompting the minister to storm out. When Néstor chased the minister in a golf cart and coaxed him back to the table, Cristina ordered him out again, saying, “He who stands up once from my table will never sit with us again.” In confidential cables released by WikiLeaks, American diplomats noted Kirchner’s “aggressive demeanor” and her apparent obsession with her looks. She reportedly spent “thousands of dollars every year on the latest fashion and having silicone injections in her face and hair extensions to make her appear younger.” The media gave her the nickname Botox Queen, and Kirchner sometimes played along, telling interviewers, “I was born in makeup.” In 2012, she displayed a surgical scar in a press conference and explained, “You know how I can be with aesthetics”—a play on a Spanish term for plastic surgery. “Politics before aesthetics.” Néstor had taken office in the middle of an economic collapse, with more than half of all Argentines living in poverty. He chose an unorthodox strategy, emphasizing growth, even at the price of inflation, a devalued currency, and the risk of another collapse. Cristina kept up his efforts, nationalizing the country’s main airline and a large oil and gas company and seizing control of billions of dollars in private pension funds. She spent heavily on the problems of the poor, initiating a universal child-benefit plan and increasing pension payments for the elderly. Most notably, she continued her husband’s aggressive approach to Argentina’s debt, which amounted to nearly a hundred billion dollars. After laborious negotiations, a majority of bondholders agreed to accept a buyout of about thirty-three cents on the dollar. In the view of many economists, this program carried the risk of crippling economic problems, forcing Argentina to make deals with China to bolster its foreign reserves. “Kirchner’s strategy has been a series of short-term fixes, none of which is sustainable,” Arturo Porzecanski, a professor of economics at American University, told me. “The model is nearing exhaustion.” A number of bondholders, mostly American hedge funds, continue to insist that they should be repaid in full. Kirchner has refused, referring to them as “vultures,” and the dispute has led to some extraordinary moments. In 2012, an Argentine naval vessel was seized at a Ghanaian port on one creditor’s request; the ship was released by a court order. The next year, Kirchner hired a private jet for a weeklong tour of Asia—at a cost of eight hundred and eighty thousand dollars—for fear that creditors would seize the Presidential plane. Kirchner has prompted growing comparisons to Hugo Chávez, the populist and authoritarian President of Venezuela from 1999 until his death, in 2013. Indeed, both Kirchners grew dependent on Chávez, especially after Venezuela purchased seven billion dollars’ worth of Argentine debt as the country was emerging from its economic crisis. Venezuelan money may have been instrumental in Cristina Kirchner’s election. In 2007, Argentine customs officers scanning luggage from a chartered jet from Caracas found eight hundred thousand dollars stuffed in a suitcase. Its owner, Guido Antonini Wilson, told the F.B.I. that the cash was part of a Chávez-directed effort to finance Kirchner’s campaign. Cristina Kirchner visited Chávez in Caracas and voiced support for his maverick foreign policy, warming to authoritarian states like China, Russia, and Cuba. Kirchner has at times blamed the United States for her country’s problems, describing it as a “hegemonic world power.” Last year, after an American court issued an unfavorable ruling regarding Argentina’s foreign debt, Kirchner seemed to allude to her own assassination. “If something happens to me,” she said, “look north.” Over time, Kirchner has grown more dictatorial and, according to muckraking reports, more corrupt. The Clarin media empire, her greatest antagonist, has published a series of compelling (if not error-free) stories about the Kirchners’ dealings with businessmen, as well as the spectacular increase in their personal wealth during their time in office. After a series of confrontations with the press, Kirchner began to deprive some media institutions of state advertising. In 2009, she introduced “reform” legislation that seemed tailored to dismantle Clarin. “She is trying to destroy us,” Martín Etchevers, Clarin’s communications director, told me. Under Néstor Kirchner, a prosecutor named Manuel Garrido was appointed to investigate corruption in the Argentine government. When Cristina curbed his powers, he resigned in protest. He later told the Wall Street Journal that the scandals around Kirchner “mirror the emergence of crony capitalism, oligarchs who rose during the past decade through their ties to government officials.” One matter on which Kirchner appeared steadfast was the amia bombing. But, after Néstor died, in 2010, and she won a landslide reëlection the next year, her stance shifted. When Kirchner travelled to the United Nations that year, she responded favorably to an Iranian offer to “investigate” the amia bombing. When Ahmadinejad rose to speak, Argentina’s delegates remained in their seats. And for the first time in years the survivors of the bombing stayed home. On January 27, 2013, Kirchner announced that she had struck an agreement with Iran to set up the truth commission. The agreement did not call for a trial of the Iranian suspects, and none of its findings would be binding. Still, Kirchner called the agreement “historic,” saying that it would help to finally resolve the case. On Twitter, she wrote, “We will never again let the amia tragedy be used as a chess piece in the game of foreign geopolitical interests.” The agreement with Iran was negotiated by Héctor Timerman, Kirchner’s Foreign Minister. Timerman is a paradoxical figure in Argentine public life: a Jew who describes himself as a “non-Zionist” and a sharp critic of the United States who lived for a decade in New York. Like many of Argentina’s leading political figures, Timerman was shaped by his experience in the Dirty War. He is the son of Jacobo Timerman, a prominent newspaper editor, who was detained in 1977 and tortured in a secret prison; his account of the ordeal, “Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number,” was an international best-seller. With his father in jail, Héctor Timerman fled to New York, where he lived in the West Village and helped found the human-rights organization Americas Watch. In 1989, he returned to Argentina to work as a journalist. In 2004, he came back to New York as part of Argentina’s delegation to the U.N., and in 2007 he went to Washington as Ambassador. “Being matchy-matchy isn’t a crime, Lois.” Timerman told me that he negotiated with his Iranian counterpart, Ali Akbar Salehi, in a series of secret meetings; over three months, beginning in September, 2012, they met in Zurich and Addis Ababa. He said that they faced an intractable legal problem. The Iranian constitution prohibits extraditing criminal suspects, and the Argentine constitution prohibits trying the Iranians in absentia. With no hope of resolving the case through standard legal channels, Timerman wanted to find some way of holding the perpetrators accountable. The truth commission would at least allow Argentine judges to go to Tehran and possibly interview the suspects. “We were going to tell them, ‘These are the charges against you,’ ” Timerman said. “You can’t go to the end of the trial, but you can start it.” The agreement created a national uproar. Some Argentine Jews accused Kirchner of surrendering to the Iranians; many objected to the term “truth commission,” which suggested that the perpetrators of the attack were unknown. (Even Timerman conceded that it was a “terrible name.”) Doubts arose about Timerman’s explanation, especially his contention that he had been talking to the Iranians for only a few months. Nisman declared that the agreement represented an “unconstitutional” intrusion by the President into the judiciary and, in a televised interview, insisted that the Iranian suspects be brought to trial in Argentina, saying, “These crimes can be judged only where they happened.” In private, Nisman told friends that he suspected there was more to the deal with Iran than Kirchner was letting on. Recalling that time, his friend Fabiana León said, “Alberto is on fire.” Shortly afterward, Nisman began investigating Kirchner and Timerman, with help from Stiuso, the senior intelligence official. He kept his activities secret, even from some people in his office. One person he confided in was Perednik, the Israeli writer. “He didn’t tell me all the details,” Perednik said. “But he was very excited. He said that by the time this was over Kirchner and Timerman were going to jail.” On January 12th, Nisman, on vacation in Europe with his daughter Kala, sent a text message to friends, saying that he was cutting his trip short and flying to Buenos Aires. “I have been preparing for this for a long time but I didn’t imagine it would happen so soon,” Nisman wrote. “I am putting a lot at stake with this. Everything, I would say.” He came back so abruptly that he left his teen-age daughter in the Madrid airport, waiting for her mother to pick her up. Nisman didn’t say what he was planning—“Some may know what I am talking about, others may imagine”—but the implication must have been clear. A month before, Kirchner had peremptorily sacked three top intelligence officials, including Nisman’s ally Stiuso. Argentine Presidents are immune from prosecution while in office, but Kirchner’s term was due to end in a year. People speculated that she fired them to protect herself from an investigation. “Nisman thought he was next,” Fernando Oz, a journalist who spoke with Nisman regularly, said. “He thought if he waited any longer he wouldn’t have a job and he wouldn’t be able to accuse her.” His team would be disbanded, and he would have nothing to show for a decade of highly paid and highly publicized work. In his messages to friends, Nisman wrote, “I know it won’t be easy. But earlier than late the truth prevails.” He signed off, “In case you’re having doubts, I’m not crazy or anything like that. Despite everything, I’m better than ever hahahahahaha.” On the morning of January 14th, just hours after his return, Nisman hand-delivered a two-hundred-and-eighty-nine-page report to a federal judge and made a sixty-page summary available to the media. He accused Kirchner and Timerman of “being authors and accomplices of an aggravated cover-up and obstruction of justice regarding the Iranians accused of the amia terrorist attack.” It was not an indictment but a call for further investigation. Among other things, Nisman wanted to interrogate the President. The report’s central argument is that, in addition to the public agreement to set up a truth commission, there was a secret agreement, in which the Argentine government would remove the Iranian names from Interpol’s wanted list. In exchange, Argentina would benefit from lucrative agreements to sell grain and buy Iranian oil, or possibly to trade them. To make the deal acceptable to the public, Nisman said, Kirchner and Timerman planned to come up with a “new theory” of who committed the amia bombing. The scenario closely aligned with one laid out four years earlier by the Argentine journalist Pepe Eliaschev, who had written that Timerman passed a message to Iran saying that Argentina was ready to “forget” the amia bombing, as well as the 1992 attack on the Embassy. Eliaschev claimed to have a copy of a memorandum that Iran’s Foreign Minister gave to President Ahmadinejad, saying, “Argentina is no longer interested in solving these two attacks, but instead prefers to improve economic relations with Iran.” The Iranian government was a growing force in the region. According to former Venezuelan officials, Hugo Chávez introduced Ahmadinejad to leaders throughout Latin America. Among other things, Iran and Venezuela had established a weekly flight between Caracas and Tehran, and the two governments had set up a two-billion-dollar fund for investments in both countries. American officials say that Chávez also granted safe haven to operatives from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and from Hezbollah. In 2007, Chávez agreed to allow Iran and Hezbollah to use Venezuela as the base for a drug-trafficking and money-laundering network, according to a former American official who worked on narco-terrorism investigations. The official told me that the network netted the Iranians and Hezbollah as much as a billion dollars a year, with the Caracas-Tehran flights often being used to ferry drugs. As Cristina Kirchner solidified her relationship with Chávez, Argentina grew closer to Iran. During her first term, trade between the two countries doubled, with Iranians buying large quantities of Argentine grain. In early 2012, when the International Monetary Fund threatened to impose sanctions on Argentina for lying about its inflation rate, Héctor Timerman travelled to Washington to discuss the matter with the Obama Administration. According to an American official who was at the meeting, Timerman asked the White House to pressure the I.M.F. to rescind the warning. When the White House declined, the official recalled, Timerman mentioned the international effort to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon and suggested that his government was considering taking Iran’s side. (Timerman denies making such a statement.) “When Héctor said that, you could have heard a pin drop in the room,” Dan Restrepo, an assistant national-security adviser at the time, told me. In Nisman’s view, Kirchner and Timerman were so eager to strengthen their alliance with Iran that they were willing to sacrifice national sovereignty. “Let there be no doubt,” Nisman wrote. “The criminal plan consisted of eliminating the charges that the Argentine courts had filed against the Iranian officials, and the best means that was found to clear those charges, provide immunity and portray the matter in the tidiest possible manner to a deceived nation was to sign the aforementioned agreement.” Nisman accused Kirchner of carrying out the scheme by a back channel involving civilians close to both governments. The heart of his accusation is a series of transcripts of recorded telephone conversations, many of which involve two Argentine activists, Luis D’Elía and Fernando Esteche. Both are fervent Kirchner supporters, have travelled repeatedly to Iran, and have led pro-Iranian demonstrations, in which they said that Iran was not responsible for the amia bombing. According to a Western diplomat in Buenos Aires, D’Elía—a former housing official in Néstor Kirchner’s government—is funded by the Iranian government. In Nisman’s account, the two men—along with Andres Larroque, a member of the Argentine Congress—worked as Kirchner’s emissaries. Most of the wiretapped conversations feature them talking to Yussuf Khalil, a Lebanese-Argentine with ties to the Al Tawhid Mosque in Buenos Aires, where much of the attack on amia was said to have been coördinated. The mosque remains a gathering spot for anti-Israeli and pro-Iranian demonstrations; D’Elía and Esteche have both spoken there. According to Nisman, Khalil acted as an agent of the Iranian government and stayed in close touch with officials in Tehran. Nisman’s report, evidently assembled in haste, is a rambling and sometimes maddening document. Although Nisman accused Kirchner of directing the secret deal and Timerman of carrying it out, there is no evidence tying either one of them directly to the alleged conspiracy. Most of the wiretapped conversations are cryptic and could be interpreted in ways that are not necessarily incriminating. Still, the accretion of detail and circumstance suggests that the men were discussing some kind of deal designed to lead to the removal of the Iranians from Interpol’s wanted list. The most mysterious figure in the transcripts is someone known only as Allan; according to Nisman, he is Ramón Allan Héctor Bogado, an intelligence agent who works directly for Kirchner. (Mena, the senior intelligence official, told me that there is no record of Bogado’s ever having been employed by side. But an Argentine news Web site later published a statement from someone claiming to be Bogado, who said that he had worked for the agency as an “inorganic,” an agent who works off the books.) In February, 2013, a month after the Argentine government announced the agreement for the truth commission, Bogado talked with Khalil, the presumed Iranian operative. “I have gossip,” Bogado said. “I was told there at the house Interpol will lift our friends’ arrest warrants.” Khalil responded, “Thank goodness!” “Brad! Who’s that singer I cry to when I’m drunk?” “Don’t worry,” Bogado says in another conversation with Khalil. “All this has been agreed to at the very top.” In a transcript from that May, D’Elía tells Khalil that he is acting on orders from the “boss woman,” and that the Argentine government was preparing to send the two of them, along with a contingent from the national oil company, to Iran in order “to do some deals there.” D’Elía had apparently just met Julio de Vido, the Minister of Planning. “He’s very interested in exchanging what they have there for grains and beef,” D’Elía says. The proposed trade deals were evidently linked to the Iranian parliament’s ratification of the public pact, which is commonly referred to as the “memorandum.” D’Elía suggests that this is a source of trouble. “There’s a political problem,” he says. “They need the memorandum to be approved, right?” “Yes,” Khalil responds. “This subject is quite clear.” In conversations recorded before the public pact was announced, some of the men in the transcripts seem to have inside knowledge of the negotiations. In December, 2012, a month before the announcement, Esteche told Khalil that Kirchner’s government intended to invent a culprit for the bombing. “They want to construct a new enemy of the amia, someone new to be responsible,” he said. “They aren’t going to be able to say it was the Israelis,” he continued. Instead, the blame would be placed on a “group of local fascists.” Bogado said much the same thing, months after the agreement between Iran and Argentina was signed: “There is going to be another theory with other evidence.” Bogado seemed to suggest that Nisman, despite his commitment to pursuing the Iranians, would be marginalized: “He’ll be twisting in the wind.” President Kirchner works in an ornate mansion in central Buenos Aires known as “the Pink House”—for the tint of its walls, once supplied by horse blood—but her official residence, in a northern suburb, is called Quinta de Olivos. Dating to the sixteenth century, Olivos, as it is known, is a white three-storied palace that resembles an enormous wedding cake. When I met Kirchner there, two months after Nisman died, the mystery was still dominating the news. I was ushered into a wide split-level room that had been set up as a television studio. Kirchner entered a few minutes later, in a flouncy dress and heavy makeup, followed by two dozen aides, nearly all of them men. With the cameras running, Kirchner reached over, before the interview began, to fix my hair. “Is there some girl who can help him with his hair?” she asked. “We want you to be pretty.” Then she began to straighten her own. “I want to primp myself a bit,” she said. “Excuse me, I’m a woman, besides being the President: the dress, the image—” “Divine!” one of her aides called from off the set. Once we started talking, Kirchner turned serious, deriding Nisman’s accusation that she had made a secret deal to forget the amia attack; she called it “ridiculous,” “not serious,” and an “indictment without any kind of evidence.” Kirchner told me that she believed Iran was probably involved in the attack, and that she had always insisted that the regime turn over the suspects. But after twenty-one years it was clear that the Iranians were never going to do that. “They never answered anything,” Kirchner said. “We were at a dead end.” She said that setting up the truth commission could allow an Argentine judge to question the Iranian suspects, and she described it as an important achievement: “We succeeded in persuading Iran to agree to have a discussion about the amia issue when they had refused it for decades.” Members of Kirchner’s government have unanimously rejected Nisman’s accusations; the cabinet chief, Jorge Capitanich, called them “absurd, illogical, irrational.” Timerman denied making a secret deal and claimed that he doesn’t even know the people listed in the complaint. “Who is this Khalil?” he said. “Why doesn’t someone go and find him?” Soon after Iran and Argentina signed their public agreement, Interpol released a statement saying that the arrest warrants would remain in place. The Iranian parliament declined to ratify the deal. Khalil, in the transcripts, seemed enraged. He told D’Elía that he had met with “the highest authorities” in Iran and added, apparently referring to Timerman, “I think that Russian shit screwed up.” For Nisman, the implication was clear: Timerman had promised that the notices would be lifted and when they were not the Iranians backed out. In his report, he notes that Salehi, the Foreign Minister, alluded to a secret agreement after the public one was signed. “The content of the agreement between Iran and Argentina in connection with the amia incident will be made public at the right time, and the matter of the accused Iranians is a part of it,” he said. What went wrong? Nisman believed that Timerman was planning to ask Interpol to lift the red notices. But Ron Noble, the head of Interpol at the time, told me that Timerman had asked on several occasions for the notices to be left in place. In any case, if Timerman had wanted the notices voided he would have needed an Argentine judge to dismiss the related charges. Noble pointed out that Interpol couldn’t act until those charges were dropped. Kirchner, too, emphasized that the disposition of the red notices wasn’t in her hands. “I could have publicly signed for the Iranians here in front of the whole world,” she said, “and it has no value.” Then what were Khalil and the others talking about? Timerman told me that it’s possible they believed that the red notices would be lifted but were themselves playing no part in it. He suggested that they were just opportunists trying to capitalize on the warming relations between the two countries. “Maybe they were hoping they would get some business deals,” he said. But this doesn’t explain their apparent conversations with officials in both governments, many of whom expressed advance knowledge of the deal. And it doesn’t explain a series of public statements about the agreement, which make up some of Nisman’s most intriguing evidence. His report points out that, in one of the final paragraphs of the pact, Timerman and Salehi agreed to a cryptic clause: “The agreement, upon its signature, will be jointly sent by both ministries to the Secretary General of Interpol as a fulfillment of Interpol requirements regarding this case.” That sentence is ambiguous, but it suggests that both countries expected some action from Interpol. The Iranian regime announced its expectation clearly. After the pact was ratified, the government-sponsored news agency issued a statement: “According to the agreement signed by both countries, Interpol must lift the red notices against the Iranian authorities.” After Nisman filed his report with the federal judge, he visited Patricia Bullrich, a member of Congress and a leader of the opposition. As they discussed the allegations, Bullrich began to fear that Nisman was heading alone into a political hurricane. “He was going to be destroyed by the President,” she told me. Bullrich, the chair of the Criminal Legislation Committee, suggested a hearing, thinking that publicity would give him some protection. She told me that Nisman had left her office in high spirits, eager for a fight. Word about the hearing spread quickly to Kirchner’s supporters. Diani Conti, a congresswoman from Kirchner’s party, said that she looked forward to confronting Nisman: “We’ve sharpened our knives.” Nisman spent his last days getting ready, and, at least outwardly, he was excited, nervous, and focussed. On Saturday evening, Waldo Wolff, a leader in Argentina’s Jewish community, sent a text: “How are you doing? What are you doing?” Nisman sent back a photo of a table filled with files and highlighter pens. “What do you think I’m doing?” he wrote. Claudio Rabinovitch, Nisman’s co-worker, saw him earlier that day. He told Nisman he was thinking about leaving his job, because he’d felt excluded from the secret investigation. Nisman, he said, refused to consider it. “Monday is the biggest day of my life,” he said. At about four-thirty on Saturday afternoon, Nisman asked Diego Lagomarsino, his computer technician, to come over. When he arrived, Nisman told him that the reaction to his report was more intense than he’d anticipated. “I’m afraid to go out on the street,” he said; he had sent his mother to shop for groceries. Then he asked Lagomarsino, “Do you have a gun?” Lagomarsino said he did, and Nisman asked to borrow it. Lagomarsino told me, “I got scared—I was shocked.” His gun, he told Nisman, was old and small, not worth bothering with. Nisman said he didn’t trust his bodyguards to protect him. “I love running in the morning—my shadow is so tall and thin.” Lagomarsino said that Nisman began talking about his family and grew more upset. “Do you know what it’s like when your daughters don’t want to be with you because they’re afraid something might happen to them?” Nisman said. Lagomarsino told me, “I had never seen him like this.” Nisman again asked Lagomarsino to bring him a gun. “I only need it to scare someone off,” he said. “If I’m in the car with the girls and a crazy guy with a stick comes up and says, ‘You traitor son of a bitch,’ I can shoot in the air and scare him away.” Reluctantly, Lagomarsino said, he got the gun and brought it back. It was an old Bersa, .22 calibre, a gift from his uncle. Lagomarsino said he showed Nisman how to load the pistol, how to hold it, how to squeeze the trigger. Nisman agreed that it was not really up to the job of protecting him. “Next week, we’ll go buy a new one,” he said. Nisman took the pistol, wrapped in a green cloth, and told Lagomarsino that he could leave. Pointing at his files, he said, “I have to get back to this.” I asked Lagomarsino if he had been worried that Nisman might kill himself. “No, no, no. Alberto? Never,” Lagomarsino said. “I was worried he was going to kill someone else.” At about twelve-thirty on the afternoon of Sunday, January 18th, one of Nisman’s bodyguards called his phone and got no answer. The bodyguard grew increasingly concerned. After he knocked on the apartment door, with no response, he called Nisman’s mother, Sara Garfunkel. Nearly ten hours after the bodyguard called Nisman, Garfunkel and another bodyguard entered his apartment with the help of a locksmith. They found Nisman on the floor of the bathroom, with a bullet in his head and Lagomarsino’s pistol next to his hand. He’d written up a shopping list. He was wearing a T-shirt and shorts. An autopsy determined that Nisman had killed himself and that no one else had been in the apartment when he died. He’d left no note. Two hours later, Damian Pachter, a journalist for the Buenos Aires Herald, wrote on Twitter that Nisman had been found in a pool of blood, not breathing. Four days later, Pachter noticed that his tweet had been quoted by the Web site for Télam*, the state-controlled media agency—but that it had been altered, to read that Nisman had been found dead. “Maybe it was because I hadn’t slept, but I got really scared,” he said. An old source advised Pachter to leave Buenos Aires and meet him in his home town, several hours outside the city. Pachter arrived before dawn and found a coffee shop that was open. While he waited for his source to meet him, he said, a man wearing sunglasses sat down next to him. Several hours passed, and the man sat quietly, ordering nothing. Finally, Pachter said, his source arrived and took a photo of the man. Pachter said, “That’s when I knew I had to get out of there.” He went immediately to a travel agency and bought a plane ticket to Israel, where he holds citizenship. While waiting for a connecting flight, he checked his e-mail. A newspaper editor in Israel had written to tell him that a copy of his plane ticket had been posted on the Twitter account of Kirchner’s office. Pachter has not returned to Argentina, saying that he fears for his life. He said he doesn’t know for certain why he was being followed or why someone in Kirchner’s office had posted his flight details. Pachter believes that Nisman was murdered, and that some element of the Argentine state was probably involved. He thinks that after Nisman was shot the killers moved his body and then altered the scene to eliminate traces of their work. “I think when I tweeted they were working on something, improvising the crime scene,” he said. In the weeks after Nisman’s death, Argentina boiled with conspiracy theories—blaming the C.I.A., Mossad, even British intelligence. Kirchner, on her Web site, endorsed the autopsy’s findings, saying that it was a “suicide.” Her allies insinuated that Nisman, faced with justifying a case he’d created out of thin air, had suffered a crisis of confidence. Since the end of the Dirty War, one of the animating ideas of Argentine public life is that politics should not be lethal. As a popular saying has it, “The blood never reaches the river.” Even so, Argentina has a continuing history of “suicides” that have turned out to be political murders. In 2007, Héctor Febres, a naval officer accused of torturing pregnant women—suspected guerrilla sympathizers—and, after they gave birth, murdering them and turning their babies over to military families, was found dead in his prison cell of cyanide poisoning. His death was ruled a suicide, but many Argentines believe that he was either killed or forced to commit suicide by his former comrades in order to prevent him from informing on others. Three days after Kirchner declared Nisman’s death a suicide, she reversed herself, saying that he had been murdered—in a plot to discredit her. “They used him while he was alive and then they needed him dead,” she wrote on her Web site, under the headline “The suicide (that I am convinced) was not suicide.” She didn’t say who “they” were, but a few days later Kirchner suggested that it was her own intelligence agency, side, and that therefore she would disband it and form another. The intelligence agency, she said, has “not served the interests of the country.” It’s possible that Nisman succumbed to some private torment unknown to even those closest to him. Viviana Fein, a prosecutor charged with investigating Nisman’s death, left open the possibility that he could have been pressured into suicide—if, say, his daughters were being threatened. But among Nisman’s friends and professional acquaintances I could find no one who believed that he would shoot himself. “Alberto? Never,” León, his longtime friend, said. “He had fantastic self-esteem, and he really loved his children.” Even after declaring Nisman’s death a murder, Kirchner allowed no sympathy for him. At a press conference, she suggested that he and Lagomarsino were lovers. She said that, as many had now suspected, she had fired the chiefs of side because they had opposed her agreement with Iran. Many Argentines did not believe her proclamations of innocence. In a nationwide poll commissioned the week after Nisman’s death, seventy per cent of those surveyed believed that he had been murdered, and half said they believed that the government was involved. Basic facts about Nisman’s death remain unexplained. No gunpowder residue was found on his hand, as is typical of self-inflicted gunshots. His fingerprints were found on the pistol, but not those of Lagomarsino, who had just lent him the gun. A few days after the death, the police said that they had discovered a third entrance to Nisman’s apartment: a corridor for an air-conditioner that connects to a neighbor’s apartment; there they found an unidentified footprint. Police checked a camera mounted in the service elevator, and it was broken. In the stairwell, there were no cameras at all. Evidence accumulated that the investigation into Nisman’s death had been so sloppy as to be fatally compromised. A woman summoned off the street to witness the crime-scene investigation (as required by Argentine law) described a partylike atmosphere. “They drank tea, ate croissants,” she said. “They touched everything. There were, like, fifty people in the apartment.” Police photos, provided to me by an Argentine journalist, show a group of police, without gloves, picking through Nisman’s belongings. Nisman’s former wife, Sandra Arroyo Salgado, a powerful judge, denounced the investigation and engaged a leading forensics team to review the autopsy results. The team concluded that no muscular spasm had taken place in his right hand, as would have been normal if he had fired a gun, and that, in all likelihood, his body had been moved. (A police photo shows what are purported to be bloodstains on Nisman’s bed, suggesting that his body had indeed been moved.) According to the forensics team’s written report, which the newspaper La Nación obtained, stains in the bathroom sink had been scrubbed away, and the position of the gun was inconsistent with Nisman’s having shot himself. The most likely scenario, the report said, was that Nisman had been shot, while kneeling, in the rear-right of his head, and that he died in “agony.” At a press conference that Salgado held to announce the findings, she said, “His death is an assassination that demands a response from the country’s institutions.” “If it’s my pride, I’m not here.” On February 18th, a month after Nisman’s death, tens of thousands of Argentines gathered to remember him and to protest what they described as the government’s failure to protect a prosecutor. In pouring rain, the demonstrators walked silently from the Argentine Congress to the Plaza de Mayo, in front of the building where Kirchner works. Many carried placards. One read, “You can’t suicide us all.” Kirchner accused the marchers of playing politics and stayed home. The next day, she celebrated her birthday. “In the Chinese horoscope,” she wrote on Twitter, “I am a snake.” During my interview with Kirchner, she seemed unnerved by talking about Nisman’s death. When I raised the question of whether she’d had him killed, she blurted, “No!,” and then handed me a printout of the statement that she’d written for her Web site. She seemed mostly disturbed by the damage that Nisman’s death was doing to her reputation—which, she suggested, only strengthened the case that she hadn’t been involved. “Tell me, who has suffered the most with the death of prosecutor Alberto Nisman? You tell me, Sherlock Holmes.” When I suggested it was she—that half the country believed she was involved in Nisman’s death—she nodded. “Exactly. This is one of the keys.” This view is widespread in Argentina, at least among Kirchner’s supporters. “Nisman’s case wasn’t that strong,” José Manuel Ugarte, a professor of law at the University of Buenos Aires, told me. “Kirchner would have survived it. I think the people who did this are people who wanted to destroy her government.” Much of the early suspicion focussed on Jaime Stiuso, the senior official in side. Juan Martín Mena, whom Kirchner appointed to help lead the newly created intelligence agency, portrayed Stiuso as the leader of a rogue faction that was running a smuggling network. He said that senior members of side had a history of selling sensitive information to private buyers and of using such information to coerce results from reluctant judges. Prosecutors say that on the last afternoon of Nisman’s life he tried repeatedly to call Stiuso, without success. They summoned Stiuso to answer questions and face embezzlement charges, but he vanished. One acquaintance of his said that he had fled to Uruguay; Kirchner thought that he was hiding in the United States. Mena said that he did not believe that Nisman was involved in Stiuso’s illegal activities. So why did Nisman and Stiuso decide to work together against Kirchner’s outreach to Iran? Mena told me that, in their desire to keep the amia investigation going, the two men “followed foreign interests.” Which foreign interests? “The United States and Israel,” he said. “One hundred per cent.” In the days before Nisman died, he believed that the Iranians were coming for him. When he met Bullrich, the congresswoman, he told her that he had overheard wiretapped conversations of Argentine military-intelligence officers saying they had passed his personal information to agents of Iran—on orders from Kirchner. Nisman said the Iranians knew “about him, about the investigation, with details about his family, about his daughters, about all the movements of his daughters.” Since the Islamic Revolution, the Iranian regime has maintained an aggressive assassination program. The regime has been accused of murdering at least eighteen people living outside Iran, most of them Iranian dissidents. The most notorious murders took place in 1992, when Iranian agents gunned down four Kurdish exiles at a Greek restaurant in Berlin. In that case, German prosecutors had pursued Iranian officials relentlessly, much as Nisman did. Yet no one in the Iranian regime seemed especially troubled by Nisman’s public allegations. And even if the regime wanted him dead why wait until after he gave his complaint to a federal judge? Many Argentines I talked with wondered whether he could have uncovered some other secret that caused someone in the Iranian—or the Argentine—government to kill him. By the time Kirchner announced the agreement about the amia case, Nisman’s obsession with Iran had expanded beyond Argentina. That year, he and his staff produced a five-hundred-page report outlining what it said was Hezbollah’s and Iran’s terrorist “infiltration” in Latin America. (A U.S. official called the report “spot on.”) A month before Nisman died, he told the writer Gustavo Perednik that he believed Argentina and Iran could be secretly discussing renewing the nuclear agreement of the nineteen-eighties and nineties. “Nisman said this was part of the big deal,” Perednik told me. In January, 2007, according to a former senior official in Chávez’s government, Ahmadinejad visited Caracas and asked Chávez to intercede with the Kirchners. The official, who attended the meeting, said that Ahmadinejad wanted access to Argentine nuclear technology. (The official is one of several who are coöperating with American investigators, building a case against Venezuela for helping smuggle drugs for Iran and Hezbollah.) Ahmadinejad didn’t specify what sort of technology he wanted. But the Iranian reactor in Arak, still under construction, uses similar technology to an Argentine reactor at Atucha. Both are heavy-water reactors capable of producing plutonium, which can be used in nuclear weapons. “Brother, I need a favor,” Ahmadinejad told Chávez, according to the official. “What it costs in terms of money, we will cover.” “I’ll take care of it,” Chávez replied. Ahmadinejad also asked Chávez to persuade the Argentines to remove the Iranian names from the Interpol list. Chávez agreed to try. The former Venezuelan official said that he did not know whether Chávez—or either of the Kirchners—acted on the request or, if so, what the Kirchners got in return. But Stiuso apparently shared Nisman’s suspicion that the deal was in process. He told Pablo Jacoby, the lawyer for the amia victims, that he was trying to make sure Argentina didn’t provide assistance to Iran’s nuclear program. “The real issue has always been the transfer of nuclear technology,” Jacoby said. “Stiuso told me he didn’t want the Iranians to get the bomb.” |
Credit: PIB PIB Credit: PIB In the biggest GST rejig yet, tax rates on over 200 items, ranging from chewing gum to chocolates, to beauty products, wigs and wrist watches, were today cut to provide relief to consumers and businesses.Giving a major reprieve to the common man, the Council also decided to bring all AC and non-AC restaurants under 5 per cent tax bracket.The massive pruning was done in the 28 per cent slab which will now be imposed on just 50 items from 227 earlier. Many of the items and services which were earlier taxed at 28% will now attract tax of 18% only.* As many as 178 items of daily use were shifted from the top tax bracket of 28 per cent to 18 per cent, while a uniform 5 per cent tax was prescribed for all restaurants, both air- conditioned and non-AC, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said* Currently, 12 per cent GST on food bill is levied in non-AC restaurants and 18 per cent in air-conditioned ones. Jaitley said the restaurants, however, did not pass on the input tax credit (ITC) to customers and so the ITC facility is being withdrawn and a uniform 5 per cent tax is levied on all restaurants.*Restaurants in starred-hotels that charge Rs 7,500 or more per day room tariff will be levied 18 per cent GST but ITC is allowed for them. While those charging less than Rs 7,500 room tariff will charge 5 per cent GST with no ITC benefit.* Today 177 items have been transferred from 28% to 18% bracket. Only luxury and sin goods are now left in the highest tax bracket including pan masala, aerated water and beverages, cigars and cigarettes, tobacco products, cement, paints, perfumes, ACs, dish washing machine, washing machine, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, cars and two-wheelers, aircraft and yacht.* The new 18% list also include wire and cables, furniture, mattress, trunk, suitcase, detergents, shampoos, hair cream, hair dyes, make up, fans, lamp, rubber tubes and microscope.* Chewing gum, chocolates, coffee, custard powder, marble and granite, dental hygiene products, polishes and creams, sanitary ware, leather clothing, artificial fur, wigs, cookers, stoves, after-shave, deodorant, detergent and washing power, razors and blades, cutlery, storage water heater, batteries, goggles, wrist watches and mattress are among the products on which tax rate has been cut from 28 per cent to 18 per cent.* Tax on wet grinders and armoured vehicles was cut from 28 per cent to 12 per cent.* 13 items have been shifted to 12% from 18% GST bracket including condensed mil, refined sugar, pasta curry paste, diabetic food, medicial grade oxygen, printing ink, hand bags, hats, spectacles frame and bamboo/cane furniture.* Puffed rice chikki, flour of potatoes, chutney power, fly sulphur recovered in refining crude and fly ash to 5 per cent from 18 per cent.* Six items have been moved from 18% to 5% bracket.* Eight items including Tax on idli dosa batter, finished leather, coir, fishing net, worn clothing and desiccated coconut has been shifted from 12% to 5%* Six items including Guar meal, hop cone, certain dried vegetables, unworked coconut shell and fish would attract nil GST tax as against 5 per cent now.* Penalty on late filing reduced: For nil tax, late filing penalty reduced to Rs 20 per day from Rs 200.* For others, late filing penalty reduced from Rs 200 per day to Rs 50 per day.*Invoices for Nov, 2017 to be filed by Jan 10, 2018*Invoices for Dec, 2017 to be filed by Feb 10, 2018*Invoices for Jan 2018 to be filed by March 10, 2018* There will be uniform rate of one per cent on both traders and manufacturers.* Composition scheme threshold has been increased to Rs 1.5 crore which require amendment of law. The cap on the scheme will be increased to Rs 2 crore.* In the current year, all taxpayers will have to file only GSTR-1.* New GST rates will come into effect from November 15* Nobody can charge tax over and above MRP* Taxpayers with annual aggregate turnover up to Rs. 1.5 crore need to file GSTR-1 on quarterly basis as per following frequency:* Taxpayers with annual aggregate turnover more thanRs. 1.5 croreneed to file GSTR-1 on monthly basis as per following frequency:Due dates for furnishing forms |
Themis Protopsaltou shifted packing boxes across the front room of his parents' flat in Veria, an agricultural town in northern Greece. Aged 31, and married with a two-year-old son, he was reluctantly having to go the way of many crisis-hit Greeks: move back in with mum and dad. "I've got no choice," he shrugged. "I'm young, I've taken every kind of labour possible since losing my job. But I can't support a family on the occasional pay-cheque of €30 a day. I'm not ashamed. It's not ordinary workers like me who have caused this crisis." Protopsaltou, who trained in mechanical engineering, once did skilled work in construction, including building work for Lidl supermarkets. Now he sits by the phone waiting for random shift work sorting peaches for a local farm co-operative for €29.45 a day. His wife, who trained in chemical engineering, was so desperate she took a job gutting fish in a market from 6am until 11pm. But even that dried up. Their rent of €250 a month for a cramped apartment had become too much, and they couldn't afford their own place. So Themis's parents – who are in their 60s – agreed to move into a tiny abandoned shop adjoining their flat - after all, empty shops are now two-a-penny in Greece - while Themis renovated their flat for himself, his wife and son. This way, at least there is semblance of privacy. Other families were faced with moving back in with pensioner parents and great-grandparents living in tiny spaces, sometimes a family of five squeezed into one room. "In Greece the family is everything, thank God, because right now it's all there is," said Themis's wife Maria, lighting a cigarette that she said she could hardly afford but helped her deal with the stress. "The family is the only thing that gives us faith. The government knows families will help each other: in a sense politicians are leaving it up to ageing parents to rescue the younger generations." Even before the crisis, Greece's social safety net was weak to non-existent and the strong ties of the traditional family filled the gap. For decades successive governments have neglected social structures knowing "mama and papa" would pick up the pieces. Unemployment benefits are small and don't last long, while creche provisions, elderly care and state support are limited. Greece has one of the strongest traditions of family responsibility in Europe. In rural areas at least, grandparents often look after pre-school children while mothers work, families care for their elderly or disabled at home, parents help around the house and feed the younger generation, sometimes even into middle age. For Greeks, the most popular means to cope with the stress and anxiety of the financial crisis is to spend time with family and friends – more than in any other EU country, according to a recent report by the Boston Consulting Group. But the Greek family is now coming under unbearable strain and cracks are beginning to show in society. With pensions slashed, older parents often feel powerless to help their destitute offspring. One person losing a job can have a disastrous knock-on effect on a dependent extended family. Homelessness is rising, food banks in Athens are struggling to meet demand, and suicide rates have risen sharply along with requests for psychiatric counselling. Young couples can't afford weddings and Greece, already struggling with its lowest birth-rate in decades, now has a generation of 30-somethings postponing having children because they can't afford to feed them. Perks for couples having a third child have been slashed, leaving families worried about making ends meet or paying for the private tuition that increasingly supplements a lacklustre state education system. Veria, a historic town of around 50,000 people, sits in the centre of northern Greece's rich and fertile fruit-farming region, surrounded by orchards of peach trees. On the shopping street the only premises doing much business is the "everything for one euro" shop. Elsewhere, a broker's sign reads: "We buy gold teeth." The Protopsaltous consider themselves to be Joe Average. "In fact, we're the lucky ones," Themis said. "I've still got some kind of work." Since construction work dried up last year, Themis has accepted anything from travelling a 140-mile round-trip daily to work on road building, which has now stopped, to carrying carcasses in a meat market. Veria is the heart of Europe's canned peach industry. Until recently, farm labour had mostly been confined to migrant workers. "Now there are 5,000 Greeks applying for 500 jobs for two to three months of seasonal work," he said. The problem is the last-minute calls for random shifts, never knowing when there will be work or people laid off. He feels increasingly anxious. "I can't sleep at night, worrying whether what little I do have in the bank is still safe or whether the banks will collapse." Eight out of nine of the couples they are closest to are in the same situation. But at least the Protopsaltous resisted the steady flow of credit-card offers that landed on their doormat a couple of years ago. Their best friends, a tile-fitter and his wife who doesn't work, borrowed €150,000 to build an apartment. With children of four, six and nine, they are now destitute and can't pay it back. Faced with going to their parents' flat and living five to one room, they have instead taken refuge in a storage space. "It's 50m square and open-plan. The mother and father sleep on a pullout bed, they've tried to build plaster-board partitions but you can hear everything," Maria said. For a Greek pater familias, this is emotionally hard. "Even for us, there's a loss of all hope, a sense that you're a failure. People feel embarrassed to go back to their parents and admit they haven't succeeded." Maria has long given up looking for a job that suits her qualifications. She has sold bathtubs and worked in a flower nursery. But the spectre hanging over all short-term, quick-fix jobs is that you'll be paid under the counter with no national insurance contributions. "It's a very stressful way of life." "We're so happy to be able to help Themis by giving him our flat," said his mother Panagiota, 64, sitting in her new living room in the disused shop. "My generation has seen real poverty. But we still worry about how our children will get through this crisis." Greek personal spending has been transformed. A recent survey found 73% of people had cut non-essential items. Maria hasn't bought new shoes for years. The couple once ran two cars, but now rarely use one. They used to eat at a taverna once or twice a month, now it's once a year. Supermarket trips happen perhaps once a month, and only to discount stores. Pre-prepared food is out, no more takeaway pizzas while watching the football. They make cheap stews that last two to three days. They used to go for coffee three times a week, but at €3 for an iced coffee they now make it at home. They have stopped their occasional weekend breaks to local hot springs. Greek domestic flights have dropped sharply as people cut travel. In one local village, even the periptero – one of the kiosks that are a key fixture of Greek life, selling cigarettes, drinks and snacks – was closing down. Cash-strapped locals were cutting down on cigarettes, no one was spending on chocolate, and definitely not bottled water, with families now refilling from the tap. Like most families in this northern region, the Protopsaltous depend on food donations from small family farms. Themis's father, a pensioner farmer, brings them fruit, vegetables and eggs. "If not, we couldn't afford eggs for €3 a box," Maria said. The financial crisis has seen a boom in "back to the soil" movements in Greece, with people growing their own produce. "But if I worry about survival up here, imagine how people must be suffering in Athens with no family close by and no farms," Maria said. "In Greece, we don't have a social security network, we have friends and family," said Tom Tziros, 47, an unemployed IT project manager in the northern city of Thessaloniki. His German wife worked in a local bookshop but with few able to spend cash on novels, her salary has been cut. The couple was forced to negotiate a cut in their €500 rent. Tziros's father delivers him vegetables from his farm in the region. But his father's pension has been cut and, with new charges for doctors' visits, he can barely afford crucial health checks. Many of his friends in their 30s live with their parents. "We'd love to have children but how could we feed them? Maybe if we move to Germany we could have kids," Tziros said. "Jobs are being cut, no one is buying anything. "Money just isn't circulating in this country. The government doesn't care about Greece. If they did, they would have found a proper solution. It's not just about imposing taxes - you have to protect work if you want to tax it." |
Janet Reno, the first woman to serve as Attorney General, has died at the age of 78. Why did she die? Her cause of death was from complications due to Parkinson’s disease, ABC News reported. She died on Monday, her goddaughter, Gabrielle D’Alemberte announced. She spent her last days at home with family and friends. Reno was only 57 when she was first diagnosed with Parkinson’s in November 1995, Neurology Now reported. She noticed a tremor in her hand during her morning walks around the Capitol. The tremor slowly got worse and a doctor diagnosed her with Parkinson’s. In 2006, she said her symptoms were still mostly confined to her left hand, but her hand would shake violently at times. She was always very open about Parkinson’s and willing to talk to others about it, announcing her diagnosis to the public shortly after she received it. You can watch part of the press conference where she announced her diagnosis here. Reno served as Attorney General from March 11, 1993 to January 20, 2001. She was appointed by Bill Clinton when she was 54. She was the second longest-serving Attorney General in history. Janet Reno was also at the center of many national political issues during the Clinton administration. She was Attorney General during the Branch Davidian raid in Waco, Texas. She was also Attorney General when the Unabomber was caught and convicted, and when Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were caught and convicted. She was also part of the leak about Richard Jewel after the Centennial Olympic Park bombing, and later apologized for what happened. She also figured into Whitewater, Filegate, Monica Lewinsky, and other cases that caught national attention. After she resigned as Attorney General, she ran for governor of Florida in 2002, but lost in the Democratic primary. |
The accolades keep mounting for this city on the sea, with its 300-year-old French Quarter and cobblestone streets, its bohemian beaches and burgeoning restaurant scene. In 2016, Travel + Leisure dubbed Charleston the very best city in the world (an announcement applauded by native son Stephen Colbert ). The same year, Condé Nast Traveler called Charleston the world’s friendliest city. But such proclamations often elicit ire amongst those who want to—or have to—ride bikes in Charleston. “Every time publications proclaim Charleston is one of the world’s best cities, they only tout amenities that appeal to tourists,” says Kurt Cavanaugh, executive director of the advocacy group Charleston Moves. And though there’s no denying genteel Charleston’s southern charm, the city is far from bike friendly. For all that makes Charleston so great, the vast majority of its residents can’t safely access that greatness by bike. RELATED: The 2016 Bike Cities Hall of Shame When it comes to bike mobility, Charleston harbors natural advantages as well as unique challenges. The flat terrain and relatively moderate climate make for ideal cycling conditions. In the historic core of the city, a peninsula bounded by two rivers and the Atlantic, narrow streets and short blocks naturally calm traffic, making bike riding a low-stress and efficient form of travel. In fact, in this dense part of the city, nine percent of residents use a bike as their primary mode of travel to work, according to data from the US Census Bureau. In 2010, in the country. But in 2014, when we reached out to local advocates, they said, “Please, don’t put Charleston on your list.” Cities of similar size have invested in bicycle infrastructure and implemented policies to promote bike riding. But on Charleston’s roadways, the city, county, and state governments have implicitly—and sometimes explicitly—discouraged cycling. Throughout Charleston, bike lanes and trails exist sparingly, and end abruptly. “When we ask for the inclusion of any bicycle infrastructure on roadway reconstructions, we’re frequently told by the county and state that it’s not in the budget,” says Cavanaugh. For its part, the city pleads no-fault when it comes to infrastructure. The state and county own and maintain the majority of roads and bridges within Charleston’s city limits. Yet, the city has made missteps, too. In 2013, citing concerns that locked bikes impeded the sidewalk, Charleston enacted an ordinance restricting bike parking to bike racks and corrals on its main drag, King Street. Today, riders who lock their bikes to a street sign while they shop or socialize downtown frequently return to find their bikes impounded. When asked why law enforcement couldn’t just impound bikes that actually blocked the sidewalk, city council member Perry K. Waring conceded that maybe the city should “revisit that law.” Itching to ride somewhere new? Get ideas from the life-changing rides highlighted in The Cyclist's Bucket List! Currently, no transportation issue looms larger in Charleston than a proposed two-way protected bike lane on the T. Allen Legare Bridge, a drawbridge that connects the more suburban West Ashley and James Island areas with the city’s dense peninsula, the cultural and economic heart of the city. Among the more than three-quarters of Charleston residents who reside outside the city’s peninsula, ridership numbers are dismal. In parts of West Ashley the Census-counted percentage of women who commute by bike—an important indicator of how safe cycling feels, according to advocacy experts—is zero (yes, zero). On the peninsula, female ridership is as high as 7.5 percent, showing the demand for safe bike facilities exists. Since the bike lane on the West Ashley bridge was first proposed in 1976, county and city officials have approved the design and construction of the project four times, in total. Yet it remains unbuilt. This spring, a temporary bike lane and accompanying traffic study showed replacing one of the bridge’s four northbound lanes slowed car traffic by about one minute. But, in July, city council chose to again vote on whether to build the bike lane. In debating whether to provide bike riders with safe access to the peninsula, Councilman Waring acknowledged that riders needed a better way to cross the river—lamenting that before such projects get approved, “bikers, in some cases, have to die”—yet still voiced opposition against the Legare bike lane, suggesting that a different bridge would be a better location. Then, seemingly unaware of the irony in voting against a project that promotes bike riding, he noted the poor cardiac health of his constituents in West Ashley, and expressed fear that the bike lane would slow down ambulance drivers. Between 2011 and 2015, 15 people were killed riding bikes in Charleston County (pop. 389,262), and two days after the city council vote on the bridge’s bike lane, a 22-year-old man riding a bike was struck by a car and seriously injured trying to cross the Ashley river. At the culmination of the contentious public meeting, Charleston’s mayor cast a deciding vote in favor of the bike lane. And for a brief time it looked like Charleston was making progress on bike mobility. But a month later, when the Legare Bridge’s bike lane came before Charleston County Council, the entity in charge of funding the project, another public meeting was held. At this meeting, city council member Marvin Wagner, who opposes the bridge’s proposed bike lane and believes “it’s just not safe for people to ride bikes on the road with cars,” addressed the county council and asked them to “save my bacon,” implying that the county should put a stop to the project. RELATED: The 50 Best Bike Cities of 2016 Seemingly siding with the bike lane’s opponents, county council members commissioned yet another study. This time, the county gave the state DOT (which owns the bridge) 60 days to see if a travel lane that already carries thousands of pounds of vehicular traffic every day could support a bicycle and pedestrian crossing. In response to the county’s decision, Jacob Lindsey, planning director for the City of Charleston, said, “We’ve commissioned the studies, and the bike lane is feasible.” What the city needs to move past its car-only culture, he says, is “political will.” Yes, this beautiful community on the sea may very well be the best city in the world. Unless you actually live in Charleston, and want to safely get around by bike. |
"Economists today primarily serve the needs of powerful interests at the expense of society in general" is how Robert Johnson - the frighteningly honest Executive Director of INET - describes the self-indoctrinating field of study that remains in such seemingly high regard in the nation. In an excellent and forthright brief interview with Stifterverband, Johnson notes that "Economists are very much accused of 'only seeing the economy through the eyes of the model' as opposed to seeing the economy and building a model as a map of what reality is." And while "when the people become anxious they want the expert to tell them what's going to happen. And they feel good when their anxiety is relieved because they think they understand the future. But if the expert instead of telling the truth is selling snake oil - a false story - when that is unmasked the expert becomes the scapegoat." Overall he believes 'economists' did a great disservice to mankind and suggests a number of approaches to "cleaning up after that". Sadly, he opines, "At the core, economics is about politics and about power, and the question for the economists is whose power are you going to serve as an expert." |
Special feature on Huddersfield Town shown in America - 30 minutes in-depth feature on Huddersfield Town - Interviews include David Wagner and Danny Williams - You can watch the feature below via #HTTV Huddersfield Town has been featured in a 30-minute show on American TV Channel NBC Sports. The Premier League Rights Holders came to PPG Canalside to produce a special show on the Terriers for the American audience, to shed some more light on the story of Huddersfield Town. Presented by Roger Bennett of The Men in Blazers, the documentary relives Huddersfield Town’s dramatic Play-Off Final victory, looks back at the Club’s roots and describes what is special about Town. The Town special will include special, in-depth interview with Town Head Coach David Wagner, First Team players Tommy Smith and Danny Williams, Commercial Director Sean Jarvis, Club Ambassador Andy Booth and BBC Radio Leeds’ match day summariser/former player Matt Glennon. Alongside Town, Brighton & Hove Albion and Newcastle United have also been part of NBC’s ‘Promoted Series’ as all three promoted clubs are highlighted to American football fans. You can watch the documentary below courtesy of #HTTV! If you would like to watch another in-depth documentary produced by the American broadcaster then please subscribe to #HTTV+ by clicking here. The second documentary is focused on Town’s Head Coach David Wagner, considering his methods and background in football. |
On March 6, 23 days from now, the defending MLS Cup champion L.A. Galaxy host the Chicago Fire in the first match of a year that sees two teams enter the league and the beginning of a huge new television deal. Throw in the return of United States national team forward Jozy Altidore and midfielders Mix Diskerud and Sacha Kljestan, the arrival of (albeit aging) international superstars like Kaká and David Villa, and the general increased interest surrounding soccer in the United States, and you have the potential for another high point in the slow growth of the domestic league. That is, if it starts on time. Just more than a week ago, the collective bargaining agreement between Major League Soccer and the Major League Soccer Players Union expired. Desperate to secure free agency in what it sees as the last, best opportunity to do so, the MLSPU is standing firm. Last month, what was supposed to be two days of negotiations between the sides turned into a single, unproductive one with the players claiming the owners refused to address the free-agency situation and failing to see a reason to continue discussions. “There is no negotiation going on at this point with regard to free agency. That makes it impossible to get a deal done,” MLSPU executive director Bob Foose said. “… What we have heard from them more or less boils down to: ‘We’re not willing to have free agency because we don’t want free agency.’” Victor Decolongon/Getty Images While the two sides have resumed talks, key players are openly talking about a strike, a tactic that’s at once an effort to exert pressure on the owners and also ensure the union rank and file that all the players are serious and united. Fire captain Jeff Larentowicz and Galaxy center back Omar Gonzalez both uttered the “s” word. Toronto FC star Michael Bradley, whose return to MLS last year is still seen as a turning point for the league, lobbed a grenade: “Should we get to a point before the season where things and negotiations aren’t where they should be, we are ready to strike, and we are united as a group to make real progress in terms of the way players get treated in this league.” Galaxy defender Todd Dunivant, a senior member of the players’ executive committee who also has an economics degree from Stanford, said, “It’s a loss for everybody if that happens. But sometimes those things can’t be avoided. The players are ready to do what needs to be done to get what we feel is right.” Brad Evans of the Seattle Sounders offered, “I think at this point a strike is imminent if we don’t get what we want.” You get the point. We’ve seen this type of talk before. During the last round of negotiations five years ago, the players voted 383-2 to authorize a work stoppage if they didn’t come to an agreement two days before the season was set to begin. With the help of a federal mediator, the union and management found enough common ground to sign a deal, but it merely pushed the two biggest issues, free agency and player compensation, down the road. Half a decade later, we’re both in the same place and somewhere very different indeed. MLS finds itself in a stronger position as a league, with ownership groups paying $100 million expansion fees. It can pay Kaká $7.2 million and put Bradley, Altidore, and Clint Dempsey in the $6 million range — all enough for them to leave Europe and come Stateside. The average salary is more than $226,000. And yet, the median is just $91,827, with Kaká’s salary representing 5.5 percent of the total compensation. In 2014, six players made 28.5 percent of the money due to the designated player structure, which allows teams to pay up to three players as much as they want with only a fraction of that figure counting against the 2014 salary cap of $3.1 million. That won’t stop happening — TFC signed Sebastian Giovinco for $7 million a season, and more famous footballers could be en route — unless there are structural changes. Hence the battle over free agency, and the perception that MLS could be headed for a strike since neither side seems willing to give. Andrew Francis Wallace/Toronto Star The recent history of sports leagues versus labor unions doesn’t favor the MLSPU. The NFL destroyed the players during their 2011 negotiations. Later that same year, NBA players accepted a dramatic decrease in the percentage of basketball-related income they earned, a deal that wasn’t initially ruled a walkover but looks worse and worse with each passing year. Hockey players fared a bit better but still saw their total compensation drop from 57 percent of hockey-related revenue to 50 percent, a defeat no matter what other concessions they won. The MLS players have a few advantages in their favor, though. The two expansion teams, New York City FC and Orlando City, paid a combined $170 million to join the league, and their ownership groups won’t want to start their franchises with a work stoppage. Fox Soccer and ESPN, which are paying a combined $75 million per year to televise MLS (and U.S. national team games), won’t either. Public sentiment falls on the side of the players, too. It’s hard for a league that is getting Bradley & Co. to come back by (over)paying them millions to cry poor, no matter how many times commissioner Don Garber says MLS loses $100 million a year. It’s especially difficult since, before CBA negotiations began, so much of the talk from the league’s office focused on how well MLS was doing. The league needs this to be true as it fights for wider legitimacy among American sports fans, so can it just suddenly flip the script to win the negotiations? There’s also a noticeable split in the owner’s ranks. Some, like TFC’s Tim Leiweke, want to increase spending dramatically. “The league is going through a debate — the haves versus the have nots,” he said. “Are we going to count mints on the pillow and bring everyone down to the lowest common denominator? Or are we going to create a vision of what soccer can be in North America in the next five-to-10 years and challenge the system?” Others, like New England Revolution owner Robert Kraft, a man who has supported MLS from its inception, lost tens if not hundreds of millions doing so, and is only beginning to see that investment potentially turn back in his favor, understandably don’t. But the truth is that the current system allows both men to get their way: Leiweke can throw millions at Altidore, Bradley, and Giovinco, while Kraft can be more conservative (and still watch his Revs in the MLS Cup before jumping on a helicopter to the Patriots game). Still, if a players’ union was ever going to prevail against management, it seems like it should be the MLSPU in 2015. But it’s not likely to happen. Whether you talk to sources around the league or just think about the situation, you arrive at the same conclusion: Kraft needs MLS to play this season a lot less desperately than your average MLS player does. If MLS ceased to exist tomorrow, the owners would be disappointed. Portland Timbers owner Merritt Paulson would have to find someone else to get into Twitter fights with, but he would be just fine. The vast majority of the 500-plus players in the league, however, wouldn’t. They’d be out of jobs, unable to go to Europe or Mexico or anywhere else to play soccer professionally because they aren’t good enough or because those rosters are already settled. As the scheduled start of the regular season approaches, the union will continue to talk about staying together. “We’ve never been more unified as a group, we’ve never had a more clear kind of mission,” Orlando City goalkeeper Tally Hall said earlier this week. And that’s not untrue. But it’s also more or less meaningless. It’s the same story they pitched in 2010 before ultimately conceding. For the players, a flawed MLS without true free agency remains vastly superior to no MLS at all. Noah Davis (@noahedavis) is Grantland’s United States men’s national team columnist and deputy editor at American Soccer Now. |
Schmidt derides the use of terms like 'RINO.' Schmidt rants against GOP 'asininity' John McCain’s former senior adviser Steve Schmidt says he has “deep regret” for helping to create a “freak show” wing of the Republican Party when he had a hand in bringing former McCain running mate Sarah Palin to the national stage. Schmidt said Monday on MSNBC’s “Hardball” that it’s time for the GOP to stand up to the “asininity” embodied by Palin and others. Story Continued Below “For the last couple of years, we’ve had this wing of the party running roughshod over the rest of the party. Tossing out terms like RINO, saying we’re going to purge, you know, the moderates out of the party,” Schmidt said. “We’ve lost five U.S. Senate seats over the last two election cycles. And fundamentally we need Republicans, whether they’re running for president, whether they’re in the leadership of the Congress, to stand up against a lot of this asininity.” ( PHOTOS: Republicans on how to fix the GOP) Schmidt was responding to Palin’s op-ed over the weekend, praising Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) for his efforts to defund Obamacare even if it means a government shutdown and urging the Republican Party to go on “Cruz control.” “Hardball” host Chris Matthews asked Schmidt what he thought of the “Frankenstein monster” he created in Palin and Cruz. ( WATCH: Cruz promises to fight Obamacare "at every step") “You finally you saw it with Ted Cruz. Maybe he was the one that who’s got a bridge too far,” Schmidt said. “Maybe we’ll start seeing our elected leaders stop being intimidated by this nonsense, have the nerve, have the guts to stand up and … to fight to take conservatism’s good name back from the freak show that’s been running wild for four years and that I have deep regret in my part, certainly, in initiating.” |
Roger Clemens was acquitted Monday of all charges in his lengthy perjury trial, just blocks from where he had been accused of lying to Congress about never having taken performance-enhancing drugs. The most decorated pitcher in baseball history, whose legacy and Hall of Fame aspirations were seemingly derailed by the accusations of steroid use, wiped away a tear after U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton accepted the jury’s unanimous verdict. Clemens, 49, then hugged his four sons and kissed his wife, Debbie, before hustling from the courtroom to make a brief statement to a battalion of reporters on the steps of the District’s federal courthouse. “It has been a hard five years. . . . All of you who know me in the media and followed my career, I put a lot of hard work into that career,” he said, sighing and choking back tears. The verdict was a huge loss for the Justice Department, which was already reeling from the recent acquittal and mistrial of former presidential candidate John Edwards. Last week, the department announced that it would not retry Edwards on the campaign finance charges on which jurors deadlocked. The Clemens verdict is also the department’s second defeat in a prosecution of a baseball star accused of lying about taking performance-enhancing drugs. Slugger Barry Bonds was convicted last year of a charge of obstruction of justice, but a jury failed to reach a verdict on three other counts accusing him of lying to a grand jury when he testified that he had never knowingly taken the substances. He was later sentenced to house arrest and probation. Federal prosecutors and FBI agents, who have doggedly pursued the Clemens case since he was referred to them by Congress in 2008, did not flinch as the verdict was read and declined to comment after the proceeding. The District’s U.S. attorney, Ronald C. Machen Jr., issued a brief statement: “The jury has spoken in this matter, and we thank them for their service. We respect the judicial process and the jury’s verdict.” The trial was the second by Machen’s office of Clemens; the first ended in a mistrial last year after prosecutors presented barred evidence to jurors two days into testimony. Former congressman Tom Davis, the ranking Republican on the committee when it referred Clemens for prosecution, said he didn’t think the Justice Department had to bring the former pitcher to trial. “Clearly, the Justice Department has had a series of prosecutions against high-profile individuals that have been unsuccessful,” he said, defending the decision of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to refer the case because of what he called “gross discrepancies” in testimony. “We refer a lot of things that don’t get prosecuted,” he said. The nine-week trial, which included testimony from former teammates, forensics experts, a strength coach and even a housekeeper, ended abruptly: It took jurors just 11 hours to reach a verdict on six felony charges of perjury, obstruction of Congress and making false statements. Clemens, who joined the company of a handful of mostly executive branch officials charged with lying to Congress in recent decades, faced up to 30 years in prison if convicted. The trial appears to have come down to whether jurors believed Clemens or his chief accuser, Brian McNamee, a former strength coach with a troubled past. McNamee, who worked with Clemens on the Toronto Blue Jays and New York Yankees and as the pitcher’s employee, told jurors that he injected the seven-time Cy Young Award winner dozens of times in 1998, 2000 and 2001 with either steroids or human growth hormone. The shots, McNamee said, were designed to help the pitcher recover from workouts and improve his longevity. In February 2008, after his allegations surfaced in a report by former senator George Mitchell about steroid abuse in baseball, McNamee reiterated his claims to congressional investigators and during a nationally televised hearing before the oversight committee. Clemens testified at the same hearing that he has never taken steroids or human-growth hormone. The committee’s chairman and ranking minority member sided with McNamee and referred Clemens for investigation. Clemens was indicted in 2010. He did not testify at his trial. During the trial, prosecutors sought to bolster the credibility of McNamee, who admitted to lying or stretching the truth on numerous occasions. They presented physical evidence that McNamee claimed to have collected during his injections of ballplayers. Prosecutors said that McNamee gave them a needle that had traces of Clemens’s DNA and of steroid residue, as well as two cotton balls that contained Clemens’s DNA. The needle and cotton balls were stored in a FedEx box with other medical waste that the strength coach claimed were used on ballplayers, prosecutors said. Prosecutors also called Andy Pettitte, a teammate and close friend of Clemens’s, to testify. Pettitte told jurors that Clemens confided in him in 1999 or 2000 that he had taken human growth hormone to help him recover from workouts. But on cross-examination, Pettitte agreed with a defense attorney that there was a “50-50” chance he had misheard or misunderstood Clemens. Jurors declined to comment after the verdict. Michael Volkov, a former federal prosecutor and defense lawyer who has been tracking developments in the case, said jurors typically are unwilling to “nail a high-profile person without a very strong case.” The verdict suggests, Volkov said, that prosecutors were “unable to sell Brian McNamee to the jury and unable to corroborate any of his information with solid physical evidence or independent testimony.” Attention will now turn to Clemens’s legacy. If anyone had been all but guaranteed to make the Hall of Fame before the steroid allegations surfaced, it would have been Clemens. Over 24 years with four teams — the Boston Red Sox, the Blue Jays, the Yankees and the Houston Astros, “The Rocket” amassed 354 wins and nearly 4,700 strikeouts in almost 5,000 innings pitched. But then he was accused of taking drugs during baseball’s notorious steroid era, and those chances dimmed. It is not clear how the jury’s verdict will change the perception of his peers and sportswriters, who cast the ballots that decide Hall of Fame entry. Fay Vincent, a former baseball commissioner, said he did not think that the verdict “will have a great effect on his Hall of Fame chances. It clearly improves them somewhat, but I think the American public and the writers — we saw him testify, and he wasn’t very believable” during his congressional testimony. “I think there will be a considerable body of writers who will be very skeptical about his achievements,” Vincent added, although, “in the long term, that sentiment may diminish.” On the steps of the federal courthouse, Clemens’s lead defense attorney, Rusty Hardin, took the opposite view, saying that the former pitching ace “has always said using steroids is cheating and totally contrary to his entire career.” In light of the jury’s decision, Hardin said, skeptics should reconsider their own verdicts. Staff writers Sari Horwitz and Dave Sheinin and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report. |
Natalie Pinkham is joined by former BAR Team Principal David Richards and former Jordan Technical Director Gary Anderson to discuss the Abu Dhabi GP Natalie Pinkham is joined by former BAR Team Principal David Richards and former Jordan Technical Director Gary Anderson to discuss the Abu Dhabi GP Haas face a 'rude awakening' when they join the F1 grid in 2016, this week's F1 Midweek Report guests have warned. The newcomers, who are being assisted by Ferrari for their entry onto the grid, have spoken optimistically of being competitive in their first year of the sport. While incoming driver Romain Grosjean has warned "I have a feeling we could be a bit of a surprise for a lot of people", Haas boss Guenther Steiner is targeting a finish of seventh or eighth in the Constructors' Championship for the team in 2016. But despite their close working relationship with Ferrari, former BAR chief David Richards and ex-Force India Technical Director are wary about Haas's prospects. "Teams come into F1 with expectations, and Haas have all this help from Ferrari, but when they arrive for that first race, it is a very different matter altogether. It's quite a rude awakening," Richards warned. Speaking on this week's F1 Midweek Report, David Richards and former Jordan car designer Gary Anderson feel the Haas F1 team will face a rude awakening in 2016 Speaking on this week's F1 Midweek Report, David Richards and former Jordan car designer Gary Anderson feel the Haas F1 team will face a rude awakening in 2016 Anderson, meanwhile, voiced his concern about how little is known about the team ahead of their debut season, with their new car due to be on track in less than three months' time for pre-season testing at Barcelona. "It's December now and the first test is at the end of February, but we haven't seen anything yet," he noted. "We haven't seen the little snippet picture you normally see of a wind tunnel model. I haven't really heard of a group of people behind it all either. It's been a very quiet and they definitely have a rude awakening about what F1 is coming up." Meanwhile, Richards, who has been linked with a making a frontline return to F1 with either Force India or Manor, speaks disarmingly about his prospects of returning full-time to the pinnacle of motorsport and the realities of life on the road with the world's most global sport. |
DATE: Aug 24, 2012 | BY: Rudie Obias | Category: Sci-Fi When The Walking Dead started in 2010, fans of the comic book were not very happy when the TV series started to move away from the original source material. For the hardcore fans, the series was not faithful to the graphic novel therefore it was the worst thing ever made. One of the bonus features on the upcoming Blu-ray/DVD set of The Walking Dead season two will feature creator Robert Kirkman addressing his fan’s concerns for the direction of the series. Check out the 10-minute bonus feature: He points out that the spirit of The Walking Dead graphic novel is alive and well (no pun intended) on the TV series. The essence of The Walking Dead is that anything can happen at any time to any character. The TV series would be predictable to anyone who has read the graphic novel so it was important to the writers and showrunners of the series to change things around. It looks like the Blu-ray/DVD of The Walking Dead season two will be a good set to pick up before season three starts. Over the past few weeks, bonus features of the set have been popping up on the Internet. There were a few deleted scenes from the beginning of the season that show a possible new direction the series could’ve gone in and new making-of featurettes including how the glorious season finale was made. The Walking Dead season two Blu-ray/DVD will be released on August 28th and the season premiere of season three will air on October 14th on AMC. |
NO WAY Jose Look, let's look at it this way: Macs are easy to use and amazing at what they can do. But- they can't do much. Windows can do a lot more than Mac, but are buggy, badly made and crash every hour causing you to have to restart all. Report Post Yes, they are. And that's the truth. MORE OPTIONS. MORE CUSTOMIZABILITY. MORE DEV SUPPORT. MORE PATCHES. MORE SOFTWARE/APPS. MORE EVERYTHING. Windows is better for these few reasons and many more. For example, better at gaming. This is because of better hardware and software which allows your game to look great and play great. It also features controller support. Report Post Yes! Of Course! This is from a debate that I participated in earlier today: (written by me) Over the course of this debate I will be sticking to 3 major contentions. Definitions Mac - Any x86-Based (to exclude mobile devices) computing device created by apple PC - Any Non-GSM (to exclude mobile devices) capable devices, that are not embedded devices, that have unlocked bootloaders, that are not created by apple. Regardless of poor wording, the intent of the above is to exclude all phones, and tablets (with locked bootloaders) as well as embedded devices. But first in addition to the aforementioned definitions I will be providing "assumptions" that I propose simply for the purpose of argument. The first is that the targeted audience that we are speaking of, in terms of "superiority, is the low-high-end user, low being Chromebooks or other UMPC's such as the Nokia N900 or the raspberry pi, the high end being enthusiast PC's with latest generation i7's and SLI/Crossfire, that is made from parts. In addition to that audience, I assume we are also targeting the server audience, from the low-end to the enterprise-end user. Low end, being a home DNS server running on a raspberry pi, High end being whole floors filled with racks of high-end servers, used to serve thousands-millions-billions of customers/consumers around the world. For fairness to my opponent, I will assume that a "hackintosh" PC does not count as a "Mac" or as a "PC" and is irrelevant to this argument. In response I ask that the equivalent, Linux on a Mac, does not count as a "Mac" or a "pc" and is just as irrelevant. Seeing as both are "exploits/(I hate to use this word but...)hacks" Now on to my contentions. My first contention is that PC's are a better value than Macs. See my first piece of evidence: http://i.imgur.com... And my second: http://i.imgur.com... As is clear, for the even LESS than the Mac I, I got a PC that was FAR superior in power to that Mac, packaged with 680 bags of cookies, (my favorite cookies too :D ), 7,200 pop tarts, 1,450 bags of hot cheetos, 2250 bags of lays, and 1300 bags of regular cheetos. I believe my point has been made. My second contention is that PC's are more freedom-respecting, than macs. Macs, are locked down. On a Mac, I cannot access the EFI. My inability to access the EFI leads to: My inability to overclock my CPU. My inability to change the boot order of a mac. My inability to boot from a live cd/usb/removable storage. My inability to ... (the following are inabilites related to RAID Put my computer in Raid 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 0+1 and pretty much every other minor raid level except for the major levels, 0 and 1, and the minor JBOD raid. Unfortunately, I can't post the whole thing as I'm out of words but: http://www.debate.org/debates/PCs-are-superior-to-Macs/2/ Posted by: davidgumberg Report Post Power users vs Standard users Better I don't know, but for sure the more versatile computer is on the Windows PC, Macs are often used by the less technology savvy persons. The same goes for iPad vs Android. Also some big players are not available for Mac (ESRI arcgis for one). If you need full control choose a Windows PC if you just want internet browsing and e-mail, you'll be fine with a Mac. Posted by: Piet Report Post Believe that it is. Windows may be buggy sometimes, but it is well designed and easy to use. It offers a user-friendly environment for you to work in, and is compatible with more applications than Mac OS. Windows is improving, and even the disgusting blue screen has become extinct with the release of Windows 8. Apart from non-frequent system errors and crashes, Windows can run any program just as well as Mac, and that is further determined by hardware installations, not OS. You can almost always find an electronic that Apple has made its own version of, which I have nothing against. However, think about the cliff-hanging price that their products our sold at. Even if Apple makes unique products, a Mac computer definitely does not hold three times worth an everyday Windows computer. If you think about it, three Windows computers can be bought throughout spaces of time, keeping you up to date with the latest computers, anyway. Viruses and fast processing speeds? First of all, the reason a Mac computer is less vulnerable to a virus is because hackers know that more people use PCs than Macs, not because Mac computers are better defended. I hardly doubt Apple has the potential of dominating the computer market. A myth is that Windows is better with running games, but Mac is faster overall: What a joke, like I said, that is dependent on hardware. Macs do not have a better design compared to a PC. Look at what's for sale. There are all in one touch screen PCs, and ultrabooks can be easily judged for their powerful processing power. Retina display factor? Useless. I'd buy a 27" 3D monitor. Not only is Windows superior in the form of entertainment, but why would you want to use Mac OS to create graphs, documents, or to pay taxes? I have a PC-Mac emulator installed on my hard drive, but I used it and found that it was a useless OS with a terrible interface. Apple founded GUI. I'll give it credit for that, but I was dumbfounded when I found out that Apple infringed Microsoft copyright for including overlapping windows for Windows 2.0. You can't hold a full monopoly, and you'll have to suck up some competition. If you think that Apple created the way Siri works from scratch, you're wrong. If you think Apple thought of introducing the iPad before tablets, you're wrong. Apple copies products as well, and they infringe the companies that they think might've stolen their idea copyright, for ridiculous reasons. Windows may be lined with endless files of coded bits of programming, including DOS menus. Macs have those too, but they appear less frequently, and are harder to access. But if a programmer wanted to work with further details within a Macintosh program, they would still have to put up with those kinds of garbage. You could deem the two even, but I will always remain with Windows, which is trusted as a companion. Report Post It's a matter of preference I have access to Windows Vista, 7 and 8 computers and yes, sometimes they have crashed a few times, but never have they crashed to the extent that they don't work when you turn them back on. But it's not a battle of reliability or performance, it's a matter of opinion, an you can keep your opinion to yourself. Posted by: JonnyPC12 Report Post Macs are kids toys Macs are kids toys. Simply pretty white things for pretty rich people. It's disgusting, really, how people can allow themselves to be subject to the evil deception of Apple Inc. They are just weeding out money from people and selling them crap products that have to be replaced after a few years. If you want to repair and restore the hard drive, that'll be $300. If you want 4 more gigs of ram, that'll be $200. Not like they're already having you pay $1300 for a mediocre machine. Report Post Software and programs. Most software and programs created by leading companies are often incompatible with Mac operating systems. Price is also a big issue as people who want good, quality computers and who are on a tight budget. This often pushes them into buying lower quality things by force simply because they do not have the money to purchase something of better quality. Report Post Windows computers are better, cost less, and are more fun. Windows are not as expensive, and they can be customized and are easier to use. Also, they are better for gaming. The list goes on. But credit where it's do: Macs are really good for editing, but a PC that has really good specs for gaming costs around 700£. A Mac with these specs would cost around 2000£. Report Post |
December 5, 2012 Danny Katch talked to Rockaways resident Kizzy Parsons about the hardships she and her children have had to endure in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. HURRICANE SANDY left an estimated 40,000 people homeless in New York City. While Mayor Michael Bloomberg holds regular press conferences asserting that officials are doing everything they possibly can, the city has in fact closed down its evacuation centers and is only providing about 1,000 storm refugees with housing--in hotel rooms scattered across this immense city. The disconnect between the wealthy politicians who congratulate each other on their handling of the storm and the reality faced by its working-class victims goes much deeper than these numbers. Nationally, the attention of our political and media elites has moved on from Hurricane Sandy to the so-called "fiscal cliff"--a crisis manufactured by the two parties to justify making drastic cuts to social programs. Meanwhile, Sandy remains a very real crisis here in New York, where nobody knows how many are living without heat, facing the icy cliff of winter. Kizzy Parsons is a former home health aide who lived in a pretty two-bedroom apartment in Rockaway with Kizziah and Destiny, her 10- and 1-year-old daughters. Kizzy's family isn't officially homeless because they never left their home. But her apartment--cold, dark and with mold growing up the walls and on Destiny's stroller--is uninhabitable by any measure. Rockaway Beach Boulevard after Hurricane Sandy The bank that foreclosed on her landlord earlier in the year has shown no interest in repairing the building. Twenty-three days after storm, Kizzy got a one-time check from FEMA for $2,900, which you might think was a lot of money until you put yourself in Kizzy's shoes. As Leni, a volunteer relief worker who is trying to help Kizzy, explained: If you go into a hotel you're living out of one room, and you have no kitchen. You're talking about having to eat out every single meal every single day...a minimum of $60 every single day in feeding three people. Cheapest case scenario--$69 a night for a hotel room in the shittiest neighborhood in New York City, and then eating at fast food joints three meals a day. We're still talking about $120 minimum a night and you have to launder your clothes, you have to get your kids to school, you have to pay for transportation, you have to live. So do the math. How long is that going to last? NUMBERS ALONE don't capture Kizzy's story, which she generously shared with me: [On the night of the storm], I did go get gas for the car, and if it got really serious, we were going to be able to leave. So once we went to go start up the car to leave, she wouldn't start, so we couldn't get out of there. We were stuck. It was horrifying to see that water rising and rising, and you didn't know if it was going to stop. Once I saw it cover my car, that's when we started to panic. The neighbors from downstairs came up here and we just all stayed together and prayed. We watched it from the window and were like, "Oh my god." We saw boats--it was crazy. I don't ever want to experience that again. It hurt me that I worked so hard for my car and then I didn't have it anymore. When Sandy hit, I didn't have any insurance. I canceled my insurance two weeks before Sandy because I couldn't afford it. It had lapsed twice already. I was hoping to wait to get a job and save my money to get my insurance back. I can't even do that any more. Oh man, it was so stressful. After the storm, every time I looked out the window, I saw water. When the night came, I saw red and blue lights--and the cops weren't even passing. When the storm hit, there were flashing lights and water, so that's all I kept seeing every time I looked out the window. It was crazy. I was crying because I worked hard for the things that I have. It hurts because I come from a family that didn't have anything. I'm the only one who had a car, a nice house, stuff like that. Anyway I've got my life--at least we're still here. That's what matters. I can probably get a job and get another place, but it wasn't easy. My mom lives in a senior citizen building--she just got her power back about a week ago. My brothers are staying there with her, but it's just one bedroom, so I didn't want to go over there. I didn't want to go to a shelter because when my big girl was 3 years old, we ended up in a shelter, and we didn't get out until she was 4. I said I'll never go back to a shelter again, and I never ever went back. I have friends that were back four or five times. They had stopped the programs, like Section 8 housing. So then you had to wait for them to put the program back on again in order for you to move. That meant you stayed in the shelter longer. I did get a program called Housing Stability Plus, a five-year program. I came out, I got my first apartment in the Bronx. I was there for five years. I moved from there and ended up moving here and was able to pay my own rent. I didn't really finish school, and I always wanted to be a nurse. But because I didn't have the education, being a home health aide brought me close to that because I had to take care of people, administer medications and take their sugar. I'm the kind of person who loves to help people, so I loved working in the medical field. Everything was okay before Sandy, too. I wasn't working, but [the kids] have a father and he gives me a little money. We had a roof over our head, lights, gas and all of that. We had a refrigerator full of food. We were fine. My daughter was going to school every day. She was doing well. She loves school. I wasn't working. I was in a bad car accident. I was getting compensated for my lost wages. But I didn't end up going back to work. I have a dislocated disk in my back. I've been in so much pain. If I cough, I drop to the ground because that's how bad the pain is in my back. I've just been trying to be strong with all this. It's not about me. I just want to make sure my kids are okay first and foremost. That's what I've been really trying to focus on. I was just trying to be strong about this whole situation for my girls. I don't want them to see me crying or sad. My baby, every day, she wakes up with a big smile and makes me happy--"Hi, Mommy!" That's been keeping me going. My [older] daughter was like, "Mom I want to go, I want to go." So that's when I started looking for the hotel. I tried to call a few hotels, but nobody had rooms. Everything was full everywhere. And that's when my spirit went back down. [My older daughter] really wanted to leave because it was too cold and she missed her TV. Her school [which re-opened three weeks after the storm] wears uniforms and because there's nothing in our area anymore, we can't do laundry--that was the reason why she didn't want to go to school. I got the FEMA money the day before Thanksgiving, so I took the kids shopping, and we kept asking their father, "Are you going to take us out for Thanksgiving?" and he didn't tell us until that day that he wasn't coming. We was all dressed nicely and he didn't come, so we just stayed here and played games--Uno and stuff--and we just made the best of it. Everybody was out with their family having Thanksgiving, and my kids were left here in the dark and the cold. The people next door, they got their lights so they could have their Thanksgiving. They were out there laughing--we could hear them. And they didn't knock on the door and say do you want to come over here with the kids and hang out with us? I realized that I don't have nobody but me and my kids, and I got to keep that in my head. So I'm just trying to be strong, as a mother, as a human being. I just want to start over. Eventually I would have had to leave anyway, but now was the real deal. I cry sometime because this was my home. I have my baby here, my 1-year-old. This is what she knows. I want to move out of Far Rockaway. That whole situation was terrifying for me. I don't ever want to experience that again. When Katrina happened, it was devastating. I wouldn't have imagined that to happen over here. And when it did, it was unbelievable--I couldn't believe that we were going through this. I just need shelter for me and my kids--some place they can call home and just get back to their lives. It bothers my big girl. We just want our apartment back, somewhere warm and clean. I just want them to be happy. KIZZY IS currently staying at Leni's house, and the two of them are trying navigate the complex relief bureaucracy--a process that left Leni disgusted: If [Kizzy} can't get this done with a volunteer helping her, how are other people doing this? How are other people expected to survive this in any way that maintains their quality of life--or even half the quality of life they once had? I get the prioritization. On a scale of 1 to 10, [Kizzy is] probably a 5 as far as the health of her, her children and their safety. But that still does not make her situation acceptable. What's terrifying to me is that there are still many people in this situation, and they're even worse off. Nobody knows how many New Yorkers are shivering in freezing houses, dangerously relying on gas ovens for heat. We don't know how many children are in danger of developing lifelong illnesses--or being abused by a parent unable to hold it together as well as Kizzy has. Mark Greenfield was one of the relief volunteers who first met Kizzy. He says he's come across "general situation" dozens of times, and two other times he's come across situations of a similar magnitude. "One was a very similar situation," he says. "A family with a 1-year-old baby, unlit, without electricity, mold everywhere. I walked in and felt nauseous even with my mask. [They were] living in an isolated area with no car, little information about help. Part of that is this disaster. Part of it is poverty and empowerment." Where does the humanitarian crisis caused by Hurricane Sandy end and where does the already existing crisis of mass poverty and unemployment begin? Back in April, Peninsula Hospital--the nearest facility to Kizzy--closed down, leaving only one hospital to serve over 100,000 people in the Rockaways. One month before the storm, the number of people living in city shelters had reached 46,000. A few months earlier, Bloomberg, whose net worth is $25 billion, claimed that homelessness had risen because "we have made our shelter system so much better that...it is a much more pleasurable experience than they ever had before." Men like Michael Bloomberg should not be in charge of deciding the fate of women like Kizzy Parsons. |
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, CEA Arvind Subramanian (right) and Economic Affairs Secretary Shaktikanta Das at the Delhi Economics Conclave . (Source: Express Photo by Renuka Puri) The government is considering providing a legal backing to Aadhaar, which is under examination of the Supreme Court as to whether it is an invasion on the right to privacy of citizens. Advertising “Concerns have been raised that steps must be taken to remove the sense of uncertainty regarding Aadhaar. The need and utility for this has been universally accepted. There is a challenge pending before the court. The question is whether it violates the right to privacy. This will take some time and we can’t have a situation where Aadhaar is accepted with central kind of activity but not accepted for other activities… the draft legislation is already ready,” finance minister Arun Jaitley said adding that Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile (JAM) is here to stay for providing benefits to people. [related-post] Currently, according to the Supreme Court’s order last month, the government can use Aadhaar number for MGNREGA, Jan Dhan Yojana, pension and provident fund schemes along with public distribution system and LPG subsidy, but it will be only on voluntary basis and no person shall be deprived of any benefit for want of Aadhaar. Further, expressing satisfaction that India remains one of the fastest growing economy amid huge global turmoil, Jaitley said that the country is working towards achieving higher growth, which is the best antidote to poverty. According to the government, India is poised to grow between 8-8.5 per cent in the current fiscal as compared to 7.3 per cent in the last fiscal. Calling rationalisation of subsidies as “unsung reforms”, Jaitley said that the Centre is looking to extend the cash transfers scheme to other programmes. |
Donald Trump will lead a better America once the Democrats smarten up and stop playing obstructionist, taking a cue from their strong progressive wing. This is about unity, but not just for one political party. The Nation as a whole is fractured deeply and in many ways. The first step towards healing the divides is by changing our political rhetoric. Forgetting about political gamesmanship, dangerous Russian conspiracies and constant charges of racism, sexism, and all the other isms those outside the mainstream opinion are labeled without a second thought. Instead, we need the Democrats, led by the new agers and progressive thinkers, to force a change of focus on to policy. Good, strong liberal policy working together with the Trump administration can bring true progress to all of America. Infrastructure, health care, union jobs, fair trade are all areas that Democrats can overlap with the Trump administration. That will be the only way the ‘Left’ can build a case that convinces voters to come back in 2018. Russia fear mongering won't be enough. Trump vilification won't be enough. What will be enough is unity, not just within the Democratic party, but with the rest of America. We are not two separate nations fighting for different goals, we are one nation made up of a diverse ocean of individuals that, for more than two centuries, have used our vast differences to establish one of the most remarkable societies the world has ever known. Let's continue this tradition to build our own vision of the United States of America together and proudly pursue the best world imaginable for generations to come. Democrats and Trump supporters do not have to be bitter rivals. In fact, it behooves both factions to move forward prioritizing our the special bond we all share as Americans. As always, thank you for taking the time to read what I have to say. Please consider reaching out to me here on Twitter. I'd love to further this discussion. |
Since 2008, economically and socially, we’re also seeing the rise of the ‘deferers’ – the high-IQ kids who deferred eating the marshmallow, now grown-up, and are reaping all the fruits of prosperity in our ‘new economy’, getting richer than ever while the ‘eaters’ are on the lower echelons of society, stuck with crappy, low social status jobs and bad relationships, assuming they even have jobs. …In follow-up studies, the researchers found that children who were able to wait longer for the preferred rewards tended to have better life outcomes, as measured by SAT scores,[2] educational attainment,[3] body mass index (BMI),[4] and other life measures.[5] In follow-up studies, Mischel found unexpected correlations between the results of the marshmallow test and the success of the children many years later.[5] The first follow-up study, in 1988, showed that “preschool children who delayed gratification longer in the self-imposed delay paradigm, were described more than 10 years later by their parents as adolescents who were significantly more competent.” This is just more evidence of how little ‘free will’ we have, how from a very early age through simple experiments it’s possible to separate society’s future winners from the losers. Beyond the experiment sample, marshmallow ‘eaters’ are analogous to people with poor impulse control and or mediocre IQs that until recently did well economically and socially due to an abundance of overpaid jobs that rewarded mediocre talent, but now in light of recent economic changes find themselves much worse-off than the ‘deferers’, with fewer opportunities in an economy where ‘average is over‘ and productivity, efficiency, merit, quantifiable results, and talent rule. From Paul Graham: Economic Inequality and The Refragmentation: Everything has become much more efficient (both in the stock market and in corporate america) and competitive, with droves of college graduates applying for jobs that can be completed by high-school dropouts. The 2008 recession gave employers a great excuse to thin the herd, and keep it thin long after stock prices and earnings made new highs. There were too many people being overpaid to do jobs that could otherwise be automated, outsourced, or simply eliminated. Today the low-paying service sector dominates, as the labor force becomes bifurcated with the ‘creative class’ or ‘cognitive elite’ on one extreme everyone else on the other. This echoes James Altucher in his best seller Choose Yourself of how companies used the 2008 financial problem as an excuse to ‘thin the herd’, ushering a new era of hyper-productivity, with S&P 500 profits & earnings growing long after the crisis subsided: As you can see, profits are at record highs, and I predict they won’t be falling anytime soon: This parallels the rise of the ‘gig’ and ‘temp’ economy – ‘DIY’ jobs that, unlike the overpaid salaried jobs of a decades ago, may not pay much, are more demanding, have no perks, and where DIY-entrepreneurs are directly accountable for their success or failure. But as I discuss in Pencil Pushers, the problem with the ‘gig’ economy is that it requires top 5% skills to make a top 50% income, and by virtue of the Bell Curve most people just won’t cut it. There are other gig jobs that are less intellectually demanding – landscaping, dog walking, or making greeting cards. But even then, while a top 5% IQ is not required for these jobs, a top 5% work ethic is (because you have to get the customers yourself, promote yourself, etc), and most people don’t have that either. In the ‘old’ economy, you could get away with a ’50%’ work ethic and a ’50%’ talent. From a social darwinistic standpoint, these ‘eaters’ are at a major disadvantage. |
he spot fixing scandal, which has derailed the sixth edition of the Indian Premier League, will destroy more high profile careers in the coming weeks as police confirm links through interrogation. It is reliably learnt that a leading India batsman is under scrutiny of the Delhi police. This 23-year-old batsman from Mumbai also represents Rajasthan Royals and was overlooked for the Champions Trophy in England. The Board of Control for Cricket in India, which is trying to sound holier than thou under intense public pressure, seems to have been as culpable as the bookies. The BCCI's Anti Corruption Unit (ACU), which was set up in 2012, has not acted with any seriousness. A typical case was when the spot fixing incident reared up in IPL 5 in 2012 in which five players — Shulabh Srivastava, Amit Yadav, Abhinav Bali, T.P. Sudhindra and Mohnish Mishra — were let off with a mere ban, instead of pursuing a criminal complaint, which could have expanded the scope of the investigation and netted bigger fish. The BCCI could have used that chance to send a clear message across. Instead, it deliberately evaded action and encouraged the bookies to believe that they had a free run. This would have continued to be true if the Delhi police had not acted. Former cricketer and MP Kirti Azad said that the BCCI should have handed over the case of the five players involved in spot-fixing in IPL 5 to the police: "I had suggested to them (the BCCI) that they should transfer the case to the police for further investigation instead of carrying out the probe themselves. But they turned it down and now we all know what has happened." Sources revealed to this newspaper that the Delhi Police was very close to naming this Mumbai player but then decided against doing that at the last minute. His phone records and "purported" links with bookies are being investigated. An update on this player is expected in the coming week. This newspaper has also come to know that the after-match IPL parties were the favoured venue for meetings between bookies, the middlemen and players who they thought would cooperate. As an IPL player, who preferred to remain anonymous, told this newspaper, "These parties serve as the perfect platform for the bookies to come close to the players. They (bookies) try to gain the confidence of the players before they make their next move. They go to the extent of giving expensive gifts like designer watches, which the players generally accept," said the player. Bookies would befriend vulnerable players, particularly from the second string, including new recruits to the franchises or Ranji Trophy players. The next step was to locate a "senior" player close to the target, who could serve as both mentor and protector. "To carry out spot fixing, the bookies need the assistance of a senior player. That senior player need not necessarily be the captain; he can be a bowler who gets to bowl his quota of overs. So somebody like Sreesanth came in handy — he is a bowler. The beauty of the whole operation is that the senior player, in this case Sreesanth, does not need to come into direct contact with the bookie. Sreesanth's friend Jiju was in touch with the bookie. In this way, the bookie ensures that the senior player has no clue to his identity in the event that the player is arrested," said the player. The IPL player said that in certain cases the bookies also send escort girls to hook these senior players. "There have been many instances when these bookies would send very costly escorts and even arrange accommodation for these players in expensive hotels. Once the player accepts the accommodation and the escort from the bookie, one can be fairly certain that the player has agreed to do some fixing. I know of a lot of players who were offered escorts and five-star hotel stays. But almost all of them refused," said the player. "The careful — and most are careful — avoid taking even the hint of a favour from unknown people, or anyone who cannot be fully trusted. In Sreesanth's case, it was his implicit faith in his friend Jiju that led to his arrest. I think he was indiscreet apart from being greedy," the player said. |
A California company that makes unmanned drone aircraft for the U.S. military has unveiled a tiny flying drone that looks like a hummingbird. The airborne spy is part of a new kind of military technology that also has civilian uses. Several years in development, the so-called nano-hummingbird is a smaller and more maneuverable version of drones now used by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. It looks like a real hummingbird with quickly flapping wings, and just like the real bird, can hover in mid-air and fly backwards. The company that created it, AeroVironment, develops and tests drones outside Los Angeles. They give observers an eye in the sky, and spot objects and track people on the ground. The tiny bird-like drone has a camera and transmitter and a wingspan of just 17 centimeters. It is operated remotely and flies by moving its wings, says project manager Matthew Keennon. "It's being manipulated and controlled to allow the forward and backward flight, the rotation and also the side-to-side flight. And all that's happening by just changing the curvature and the shape and different aspects of the wing movement at a very high speed," noted Keennon. The tiny drone is still experimental. The challenge and the funding came from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which asked for an airborne vehicle that would mimic something in nature. Project manager Keennon says the challenge was huge and the work has been exciting. "Because every time we made an improvement, got better, we were just so amazed," added Keennon. While the company is developing some of the world's smallest drones, it is also testing one of the largest. Called Global Observer, this unmanned craft is thin and sleek but has a wingspan almost equal to a Boeing 747. It is powered by liquid hydrogen and can hover in the stratosphere, says AeroViroment's Steven Gitlin. "And it's designed to fly for up to seven days at a time at about 65,000 feet [20,000 meters] altitude and carry a payload that either helps somebody see what they want to see or relays communication from one point to another," explained Gitlin. The company spokesman says airborne drones are used for military surveillance, but also have civilian uses. "Applications like first response, search and rescue, law enforcement, border security, even facility security and event security - anywhere a bird's-eye view in the sky in real time can help somebody do their job more effectively and more safely is a potential application for this technology," added Gitlin. And the new nano-hummingbird will go places that larger drones cannot. AeroVironment engineers say the device will still be in development for the next few years, and may not reach the market in its present form. But they say the technology developed for the device will be used in future products. |
JAKARTA/SINGAPORE (REUTERS, AFP, THE STAR/ASIA NEWS NETWORK) – An earthquake of magnitude 6.5 struck west of Indonesia’s island of Sumatra on Sunday (Aug 13) but there was no tsunami risk, seismologists said as panicked residents fled their homes. There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage in the quake, which hit at a depth of 35km at 10.08am (11.08am Singapore time), at a distance of 73km west of the city of Bengkulu, according to the United States Geological Survey. “The earthquake was quite strong and shallow, it was felt all the way to Padang, West Sumatra, but there was no threat of a tsunami,” Mochammad Riyadi, an official at Indonesia’s meteorology and geophysics agency told AFP. He said officials were checking if there were any casualties or damage. Several Twitter users reported that they felt the tremors in Singapore. When contacted, the Singapore Civil Defence Force said it received two calls about tremors, but there were no requests for any assistance. The Straits Times understands the calls came from Sengkang and Tanjong Rhu. Just felt earthquake tremors in Singapore O: — Jocelyne Sze (@jocelynesze) August 13, 2017 currently experiencing tremors at my home nowwwwwwww. is it indo earthquake big big — Thaddeus Ong (@dogmacatmamagma) August 13, 2017 Tremors felt in Singapore. Hope everyone in Sumatra is safe. #Earthquake — Phoebe Feehily (@phoebefeehily) August 13, 2017 Professor Kerry Sieh, director of the Earth Observatory of Singapore at the Nanyang Technological University, said the earthquake happened near the 8.4-magnitude quake that struck Sumatra in 2007. With a magnitude of 6.5, the latest quake was milder. The 2007 quake would have had about 1,000 times the energy compared to the 6.5, said Prof Sieh. He added that people who felt the tremors in Singapore would likely have felt them from the upper floors of tall buildings, which sway more during distant earthquakes compared to the lower floors of buildings. Bengkulu resident Neng Hasnah said the quake felt very strong for a few seconds, forcing her and her family members to flee her house. “I was carrying my seven-month old granddaughter and I had to run, all the neighbours also ran outside their homes,” Hasnah told AFP. Tremors were also detected in Johor Baru. Johor Fire and Rescue Department (Bomba) public relation officer Mohamad Riduan Akhyar said that occupants in two buildings felt the tremors at about 11am. He added that the buildings were the Customs Tower in Tebrau and the Inland Revenue Board building in Tampoi, reported The Star. "We received an emergency call over the incident at about 11.23am and officers were deployed to the areas. "Both buildings were evacuated as a safety precaution," he said in a statement here on Sunday. He said no injuries were reported. Indonesia sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire where tectonic plates collide, causing frequent seismic and volcanic activity. An earthquake struck Indonesia’s western Aceh province in December 2016, killing more than 100 people, injuring many more and leaving tens of thousands homeless. Additional reporting by Audrey Tan |
UPDATE: 2/15 11:00 a.m. ― On Valentine’s Day, the Women’s March revealed that the “general strike” that was announced early last week will take place on March 8th, International Women’s Day. In an Instagram post, Women’s March organizers wrote: “We saw what happened when millions of us stood together in January, and now we know that our army of love greatly outnumbers the army of fear, greed and hatred. On March 8th, International Women’s Day, let’s unite again in our communities for A Day Without A Woman. Over the next few weeks we will be sharing more information on what actions on that day can look like for you.” Read the full post below. PREVIOUSLY: On Monday morning, the Women’s March announced on Instagram that there will be a “general strike.” The Instagram post is simple and gives little to no information, reading: “General strike: A day without a woman. Date To Be Announced.” The caption reads: “The will of the people will stand.” The will of the people will stand. A photo posted by Women's March (@womensmarch) on Feb 6, 2017 at 8:03am PST Although details about the strike are scarce ― the above Instagram post appears to be the only information that has been made public, and Women’s March organizers did not respond to The Huffington Post’s request for comment ― the general reaction has been largely positive. As of Monday afternoon, the initial Instagram post had already received more than 17,000 likes. The Women’s March also posted the news on Twitter and Facebook, where many users commented in support of a strike. Many celebrities retweeted the news in support. “Hit ‘em in the wallet,” writer and comedian Corinne Fisher wrote on Twitter. Feminist writer Jessica Valenti added: “I am so here for this.” This is what I'm talking about. Hit 'em in the wallet. https://t.co/rEj1ckAjra — CORINNE FISHER (@PhilanthropyGal) February 6, 2017 I am so here for this https://t.co/OkPhhBYYzk — Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) February 6, 2017 This is not the first post-election strike aimed at engaging women. On Inauguration Day, more than 7,000 people participated in an organized Women’s Strike to protest President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence. Paulina Davis, vice chair of the New York chapter of the feminist group National Women’s Liberation and one of the strike’s organizers, told HuffPost in January that they hoped to have as many as 20,000 participants. Although the strike didn’t reach the lofty goal, Davis explained how impactful a strike can be. “If 20,000 women pledge, it’s a show of force. If 20,000 women say, ‘I’m not going to work today,’ people are going to feel that,” she said. “They’re going to feel that in the work place and they’re going to feel it at home.” |
Video (01:42) : The dog now splits his time between the South Hyland Pet Hospital in Bloomington and the home of Dr. Vicki Schulz, one of its veterinarians. Faint whimpers on a subzero night caught the ear of the pickup truck driver visiting the garbage dump on the edge of a northern Minnesota reservation village. Clayton Van Wert followed the sound to one of several bins inside the fenced-off yard. The metal dumpster was in flames. Van Wert said he pounded on the side of the dumpster and heard "howling, crying" before a puppy "emerged from the bottom." With his gloved hands clamped onto the 4-foot-high edge of the bin, Van Wert hoisted himself up and peered down at the puppy in the trash, its fur charred a deep brown. Van Wert plucked the discarded pooch from the bin Friday night, called for help and was still fighting back tears days later as newly named Phoenix, a husky mix, is being nursed back to health by a Twin Cities veterinarian. "I don't believe that he got into the dumpster on his own," said Van Wert, 55, who operates a towing and auto recovery business out of his home in Redby and is a lifelong dog owner. "He had to be put in there … by a very, very sick person." Phoenix, a dog rescued from a burning northern Minnesota trash bin. "I reached in, burned my hands and singed my hair, and grabbed him by the front legs," Van Wert said. "When I got back on the ground, he immediately started to walk." Van Wert said he was amazed how calm and trusting the dog was toward him. "He came over to me, and he was just like there was absolutely no fear," Van Wert said. As he lowered a comforting hand to the rescued pup at his side, Van Wert noticed its coat looked like "a burnt marshmallow. I touched his fur, and it just disintegrated." Van Wert called a tribal conservation officer, who arrived at the dump and delivered the dog to Red Lake Rosie's Rescue shelter on the reservation. From there, the puppy was moved to Act V Rescue, which is based in Bloomington and routinely receives injured pets from the reservation with the ultimate goal of finding them a loving home. Phoenix, so named by the operators of Rosie's after the mythological bird that is consumed by fire and then rises from the ashes, now splits his time between the South Hyland Pet Hospital in Bloomington and the home of Dr. Vicki Schulz, one of its veterinarians. "Most of his hair was charred … and his feet were very swollen on the left side, and he has significant burns on his knees," said Schulz, who believes the 5-month-old dog is roughly about half the size he should be, almost certainly from malnourishment. "He either belonged to someone or is one of these pups that runs around from place to place and looks for food." For the next two to four months, Phoenix will undergo skin grafts as part of his extensive — and expensive — treatment. Donations to the nonprofit Act V can be made at http://www.actvrescue.org on behalf of Phoenix or the other animals that the animal hospital treats pro bono. Authorities on the reservation Monday said they have not tracked down whoever is responsible for the pup's near-death abandonment. "We don't have cameras by the bin," said officer Kendall Kingbird, acknowledging that it will probably take a guilty conscience to break the case. "But we're still going to do what we can to find the person." |
Peruvian police officers recently pulled off a major drug bust, seizing 325 kilograms (715 pounds) of cocaine ready for shipment out of the central jungle. The Mar. 7 operation was significant, representing nearly one-third of the cocaine seized so far this year in Peru. But authorities were even more pleased with the capture of a small plane for smuggling the drugs to neighboring Bolivia and, from there, to parts unknown. In the 1980s and 1990s, cocaine-ferrying planes dotted Peru's skies. Now they're back: the US State Department says small planes are now the “primary method of transporting cocaine” out of the country, replacing sea transport. In its annual report on narcotics released earlier this month, the State Department estimated that upward of 180 metric tons were exported this way in 2013. But how to stop these flights is a vexed issue. A significant number of countries in Latin America, most recently Venezuela in late 2013 and Honduras in January 2014, have enacted laws allowing local air forces to shoot down suspected drug planes over their territory. Peru has a similar law, but it has been suspended since April 2001, when the Peruvian Air Force, accompanied by a CIA support plane, mistakenly shot down an aircraft carrying missionaries. A US Baptist missionary from Michigan, Veronica Bowers, and her adopted infant daughter were killed. Her husband, young son, and the pilot survived. Thirteen years on, some Peruvian lawmakers argue the time has come to reinstate the shoot-down policy. “Peru is the only country that does nothing to stop irregular flights over its national territory," says Congressman Carlos Tubino, a retired general. "The policy of keeping the Air Force out of the fight against drugs has been an absolute failure and the results are there for anyone to see, but no one wants to make a decision." Tubino acknowledges that the incident with the missionary plane was a tragedy, but he says that the policy should be revived and last November authored legislation to that effect. He's now pushing for the congressional defense committee to approve his bill and send it to the floor for a vote. Peru is currently the world’s largest grower of coca – from which cocaine is extracted – and cocaine producer. Coca plants cover close to 150,000 acres, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. President Ollanta Humala’s government has made strides in dealing with the coca-cocaine problem, eradicating 93,900 acres of coca, which would have yielded 290 metric tons of cocaine, in the past two years. This year's eradication target for this year is about 74,000 acres. Inaction in tackling the drug flights means Peru will continue waging an “indirect war against drug trafficking that is focused on eradication and stopping precursor chemicals used to make cocaine, but without an interdiction strategy,” says Tubino, an opposition politician. “It is simply inexplicable.” Alternative options Peru lags its neighbors in cocaine interdictions, according to local and international reports. In 2013, Peru seized approximately 8 percent of the cocaine it produced, while Bolivia was above 20 percent and Colombia topped 40 percent. But Carmen Masias, head of Peru's anti-drug agency, DEVIDA, says a revived shoot-down policy isn't the way to go. Ms. Masias prefers a non-lethal strategy that includes tearing up clandestine runways and using police aircraft to force planes to land, which is how the Mar. 7 operation unfolded. DEVIDA says that 110 clandestine airstrips were destroyed in 2013, with another 20 eliminated in the first two months of this year. “We have made progress with [coca] eradication and development, including alternative crops. We have had important success, but recognize that the challenge is enormous,” Masias says. Peru's government recently turned its attention to coca production in a a Maryland-size stretch of jungle known as the VRAEM, named after valleys formed by three rivers. Since 2003, the area has been under a state of emergency because of terrorist activities by remnants of the Shining Path and has an estimated 49,000 acres of coca production. Get the Monitor Stories you care about delivered to your inbox. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy Eradication has never occurred in most of the zone, but this year the government wants to tear up 39,500 acres manually. Peru, unlike Colombia, does not allow aerial spraying for eradication so plants are yanked out using shovels and picks. As Peru debates the merits of shooting down drug planes, Tubino supports extending eradication to the VRAEM. Not to do so “would be like extending the welcome mat to drug cartels," he says. |
Get the biggest politics stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email Jeremy Corbyn said last night that Britain faces a “historic” moment as voters head to the polls today. On the final day of campaigning, he claimed the nation has never had a clearer choice at a general election than between his vision for socialist Britain, and Theresa May ’s grim Conservatism. He said: “Never before has there been a clearer choice between the parties... a choice quite simply between hope and fear. “Wouldn’t it be great if on Friday we woke up to a Labour majority, a Labour government for all of our communities across the whole of the country, to deliver social justice that we all crave?” On a whistle-stop tour, the Labour leader made speeches to huge crowds in England, Scotland and Wales – despite grim reports that the Tories are on course for victory. A new ICM poll for the Guardian put the Conservatives on 46% with Labour well behind on 34% and the Lib Dems trailing on 7%. While some polling firms insist the race is tighter, most Labour candidates were gloomy about their prospects and feared they could take a drubbing. But speaking in London, Mr Corbyn insisted his anti-austerity message had hit home. (Image: Getty) He said: “Labour’s campaign has already changed the face of British politics. As we prepare for government, we have already changed the debate and given people hope. "Hope that it doesn’t have to be like this, that inequality can be tackled, that austerity can be ended, that you can stand up to the elites and the cynics.” In comments that will be seen as a bid to stay on as leader if Labour loses, he insisted he has already succeeded in shifting the centre ground of British politics. Video Loading Video Unavailable Click to play Tap to play The video will start in 8 Cancel Play now He continued: “This is the new centre ground. The place where most people actually are. “The policies the majority actually want, not what the Establishment and its media mouthpieces insist they should want. “This is the new mainstream, and we have staked it out and made it our own – together.” Labour said Mr Corbyn has addressed more than 100,000 people at mass rallies since the election was announced on April 18, while his Facebook videos have reached millions more. Making her own final pitch to voters on polling day, Tory leader Theresa May tried to put her rocky campaign behind her and switch attention back to Brexit. (Image: Getty) She said: “If we get Brexit right, we can build a Britain that is more prosperous and more secure. “A Britain in which prosperity and opportunity is shared by all.” But it came as she faced widespread outrage for threatening to rip up human rights laws in the wake of the recent terrorist attacks. Such a move would be another stunning U-turn after her own party manifesto vowed to keep the existing human rights laws. Opponents accused Mrs May of a cynical attempt to deflect any blame for the atrocities. She was Home Secretary from 2010-16 and has presided over cuts to 20,000 police officers. (Image: PA) In 2011 she axed control orders, which allowed terror suspects to be placed under 18-hour curfews. She replaced them with a watered-down system known as Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures – T–Pims. The PM insisted yesterday: “Now we are seeing the threat evolving, becoming more complex, it’s right we look again at what powers are needed to be able to ensure the police and security services have what they need.” But Mr Corbyn hit out at her bid to divert attention from police cuts and alleged failings by MI5. (Image: Daily Post Wales) He said: “Don’t believe would-be terrorists and suicide bombers will be deterred by longer sentences or restricting our rights at home. “The right response to the recent attacks is to halt Conservative cuts, invest in our police and security services and protect our democratic values, including the Human Rights Act.” Warning the PM that “you can’t keep our country safe on the cheap”, he went on: “Theresa May is refusing to put in the resources that are needed. "She has slashed funding for the police, our courts system and Border Force. I will do everything necessary to keep our people safe.” Amnesty International UK Director Kate Allen also blasted Mrs May’s “reckless and misinformed” plan to interfere with human rights. (Image: Getty) She added: “Amnesty International will not stand by silently when threats are made to ‘rip up human rights laws’. Human rights are there to protect all in society – that is just pure common sense.” And Lib Dem leader Tim Farron accused the PM of “simply posturing”. He said: “We have been here before – a kind of nuclear arms race in terror laws. "It might give the appearance of action, but what the security services lack is not more power, but more resources.” |
Microsoft has started testing a new mini-view for the Groove Music app in Windows 10. The new feature utilizes the new CompactOverlay feature in Windows 10 which allows apps to create a picture-in-picture-like window for apps that show up on top of all other windows. As for the Groove Music app, the new mini-view shows the album art and lets you switch between different settings without actually opening Groove Music which is certainly quite useful. The feature is, however, a bit redundant since Groove Music already integrates with the volume controls in Windows 10 which offers the same functionalities. The new mini-view does let you skip to a certain part of the currently playing song, which isn’t available in the volume controls, so at least there’s an extra bit of functionality. And if you care about music videos, the min-view will also let you watch them while you are working on something else without disrupting your work much. Gallery Microsoft seems to be testing the new mini-view for Groove Music with Windows Insiders but you likely won’t get anytime soon. That’s because Microsoft has temporarily paused updates for stock apps in the Windows Insider program, meaning that there isn’t any way of you getting the latest version of Groove Music at the moment. From the looks of things, some Windows Insiders were a bit lucky and they were able to get it a bit early than everyone else. Groove Music Developer: Microsoft Corporation Price: Free Thanks for the screenshots, M Rankin and Srikanth Marepalli! |
There are Kagglers, there are Master Kagglers, and then there are top 10 Kagglers. Who are these people who consistently win Kaggle competitions? In this series we try to find out how they got to the top of the leaderboards. First up is KazAnova -- Marios Michailidis -- the current number 2 out of nearly 300,000 data scientists. Marios is a PhD student in machine learning at UCL and a senior data scientist at dunnhumby (organizer of the Kaggle competitions 'Shopper Challenge' and 'Product Launch Challenge'). Marios Michailidis Q&A How did you start with Kaggle competitions? I wanted a new challenge in the field and learn from the Grand Masters. I was doing software development about machine learning algorithms, which also led to creating a GUI for credit scoring/analytics by the name KazAnova- a nick name I frequently use in Kaggle to keep reminding myself the passion I have for the field and how it started, but I could only go so far by myself. Kaggle seemed the right place to learn from the experts. What is your first plan of action when working on a new competition? First of all to understand the problem and the metric we are tested on- this is key. To as-soon-as possible create a reliable cross-validation process that best would resemble the leaderboard or the test set in general as this will allow me to explore many different algorithms and approaches, knowing the impact they could yield. Understand the importance of different algorithmic families, to see when and where to maximize the intensity (is it a linear or non-linear type of problem?) Try many different approaches/techniques on a the given problem and seize it from all possible angles in terms of algorithms 'selection, hyper parameter optimization, feature engineering, missing values' treatment- I treat all these elements as hyper parameters of the final solution. What does your iteration cycle look like? Sacrifice a couple of submissions in the beginning of the contest to understand the importance of the different algorithms -- save energy for last 100 meters. Do the following process for multiple models Select a model and do a recursive loop with the following steps: Transform data (scaling, log(x+1) values, treat missing values, PCA or none) Optimize hyper parameters of the model Do feature engineering for that model (as in generate new features) Do features' selection for that model (as in reducing them) Redo previous steps as optimum parameters are likely to have changed slightly Save hold-out predictions to be used later (meta-modelling) Check consistency of CV scores with leaderboard. If problematic, re-assess cross-validation process and re-do steps Create partnerships. Ideally you look for people that are likely to have taken different approaches than you have. Historically (in contrast) I was looking for friends; people I can learn from and people I can have fun with - not so much winning. Find a good way to ensemble What are your favorite machine learning algorithms? I like Gradient Boosting and Tree methods in general: Scalable Non-linear and can capture deep interactions Less prone to outliers What are your favorite machine learning libraries? Scikit for forests. XGBoost for GBM. LibLinear for linear models. Weka for all. Encog for neural nets. Lasagne for nets, although I learnt it very recently. RankLib for functions like NDCG. What is your approach to hyper-tuning parameters? I do this very manually. I have only tried once to use something like Gridsearch. I feel I learn more about the algorithms and why they work the way they do by doing this manually. At the same time I feel that "I do something, it's not only the machine!". After 40+ competitions I've found that I can get to the top 90% of the best hyper parameters with the first try, so the manual approach has paid off! What is your approach to solid CV/final submission selection and LB fit? In regards to CV, I try to best resemble what I am being tested on. In many situations a random split would not work. For example: In the Acquire valued shoppers' challenge we were mainly tested on different products (offers) than these available on the train set. I made my CV to always try to predict 1 offer using the rest of the offers as this could resemble the test leaderboard better than a random split. About final selection, I normally go for best Leaderboard submission and best CV submission. In the case of a happy collision, I select something as different as possible with respectable CV result just in case I am lucky! (A prayer to the god of overfitting is my secret 3rd submission) In a few words: What wins competitions? Understand the problem well Discipline ; To have a well-thorough and documented approach that you follow religiously and defines all the modelling process/framework from how you cross-validate, select models, avoids over fitting (which requires a lot of ...discipline). Allow room to try problem-specific things or new approaches within that framework The hours you put in Have access to the right tools Make key partnerships Ensembling What is your favourite Kaggle competition and why? The Acquire valued shoppers' challenge, not only because I won and it is relevant to what my team does, but I also had the honour to collaborate with Gert Jacobusse. What was your least favourite Kaggle competition experience? DecMeg, BCI and such channel-wave type of competitions. They have big data and are very domain specific. I found it hard to even make my CV working properly, plus I did quite bad. Hopefully I will improve. What field in machine learning are you most excited about? I like recommender systems if it can be considered a separate field. There is a broad spectrum of techniques you can use (which are field specific) and to be able to understand what the customer likes is very challenging and rewarding. Which machine learning researchers do you study? I study: Steffen Rendle, Leo Breiman, Alexander Karatzoglou, Michael Jahrer & Andreas Töscher, the Machine Learning and Data Mining Group at National Taiwan University, and Jun Wang & Philip Treleaven. Can you tell us something about the last algorithm you hand-coded? It was LibFM for Avazu competition as I believed it could work well in that particular problem. I could not make it work as well as LibFFM apparently. How important is domain expertise for you when solving data science problems? For some competitions it is really important. The fact that I am employed in the recommendation science field and the kind of work that we do within my team, has helped me win the Acquire valued Shoppers challenge. However I think you can go a long way by following standard approaches even if you don't know the field well, which is also the beauty of machine learning and the fact that some algorithms do a significant job for you. What do you consider your most creative trick/find/approach? I do multiple ensemble meta-stacking if I can use the term. During the course of my univariate model tuning I save all the models' outputs. Then I make meta-models with the univariate models selections and most of the times I end up with different ensembles of Meta models. Sometimes I go to third Meta model with Meta models as inputs (Meta-Meta model). How are you currently using data science at work and does competing on Kaggle help with this? Classified! Kaggle does help in optimizing my methods, learning new skills, meet nice people with same passion, be up to date with new tools and generally stay in touch with what's going on in the field. What is your opinion on the trade-off between high model complexity and training/test runtime? That is a big discussion in principle. I guess there is a trade-off, but there needs to be an understanding that better models are not necessarily the most interpretable ones and that a more complex model (that is likely to score better) is not necessarily less stable/more dangerous. I guess the optimum solution should be somewhere in the middle (e.g. not an ensemble of 100 models nor Naive Bayes) How did you get better at Kaggle competitions? Did I ?! 😀 I guess what has helped a lot is: Seeing previous solutions and end-of-competition threads Participate in Kaggle forums Learn the tools Read papers, websites, machine learning tutorials Optimize processes (use sparse matrices, cut unnecessary steps, write more efficient code) Save everything I've done and reuse (and improve). E.g. I keep a separate folder for each competition I've completed. Dedicate time (had to reduce video games) Collaborate with others I have found the following resources useful: Are partnerships important in achieving good results? Very. Sometimes you cannot measure the impact from one competition only as what you learn from the others may be applicable in the future too. I've been very lucky to have made good and fun collaborations so far and I have learnt from all, especially: Bio Marios Michailidis is Senior Data Scientist in dunnhumby and part-time PhD in machine learning at University College London (UCL) with a focus on improving recommender systems. He has worked in both marketing and credit sectors in the UK Market and has led many analytics projects with various themes including: Acquisition, Retention, Uplift, fraud detection, portfolio optimization and more. In his spare time he has created KazAnova, a GUI for credit scoring 100% made in Java. Marios loves competing on Kaggle and learning new machine learning tricks. He told us he will create something good for the ML community soon... |
But quite frankly the most dramatic lesson he taught me was the vicious cruelty of suicide. Suicide has a blast radius, and if you are within the blast radius, you are forever affected. There isn’t a week when I don’t feel myself at the edge of crying because I think of Aaron. That sadness is forever. And that sense of responsibility is forever. The ten people closest to Aaron could each tell a story about how they feel like their failure to do something led to his suicide. Perpetually, these people within the blast radius live their life with that reflection. And that’s just deeply, deeply cruel. Kitchener: What do you think is the most important thing you taught Aaron? Lessig: I was always focused on figuring out how to engage the real world to reach a real end. We’d often have these exchanges when Aaron would start in a very disengaged, reactionary, revolutionary place. I would try to walk him back, to recognize there might be a way for us to engage here. I think I helped him engage more constructively on the issues we cared about. Kitchener: At what point in your relationship with Aaron did you feel yourself becoming his mentor? Lessig: I don’t think I can pin down any one moment when I got my mentoring badge. Over time, I recognized that we had a common set of values—we both believed we had an obligation to make the world a better place—then our relationship became an ongoing test of whether we could each live up to those values. We had to constantly question whether we had genuine reasons for doing one thing over another. Kitchener: How did Aaron challenge you to do that? Lessig: Aaron trapped me into giving up my work on internet law and copyright policy to take up work on political corruption. He came to me and said, “I don’t think you’re going to make any real progress on what you’re doing while there is still deep corruption in the way the government works.” At first I tried to push him off. I said, “Aaron, it’s not my field as an academic.” Then he said, “Is it your field as a citizen?” Kitchener: Did it sometimes feel like Aaron was the mentor and you were the mentee? Lessig: When he died, I referred to Aaron as my mentor. There was this reciprocal power that each of us had on the other. It certainly held me to account. Kitchener: How has Aaron’s death affected the work you do now? Lessig: Aaron radicalized me in a profound and potentially destructive way. He moved me away from being the quintessential member of the establishment to a committed dissident. I’ve launched a series of increasingly crazy projects. Before he died, Aaron had this objective: How do we get to a place where we don’t believe that our government is deeply corrupted? I want to take any risk necessary to advance that mission. Kitchener: What kinds of things have you done in his memory? |
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The parents of a 10-year-old boy who police say accidentally shot his 8-year-old cousin while they played with a gun on Saturday afternoon said they've taught their son to alert an adult when they see a gun and to never play with one. The 10-year-old boy's mother said she was working as a nurse in Ravenna when she got the call about the shooting. She said her son should have known to tell an adult at the home they had a gun. "They know better," she said. "We're not sure where they got the gun. They were playing at the park and came home right before it happened." cleveland.com is not naming the parents in order to protect the child's identity. The shooting happened about 2:45 p.m. at a home in the 3500 block of West 120th Street, off Lorain Avenue. The two boys, along with the 8-year-old's twin brother, were playing with the gun when it fired. A bullet hit the 8-year-old in the upper left shoulder. The bullet went through the boy's shoulder and out his arm. He was taken to Fairview Hospital in stable condition, according to police. A man could be cited for failing to secure a gun, according to police. Neither the mother or father of the 10-year-old boy were at the home at the time of the shooting. The 10-year-old boy's mother said all three boys are traumatized by the incident. Cleveland police spent more than two hours at the home interviewing family members and collecting evidence, including what appeared to be a blood-soaked shirt or towel. Investigators also marked the blood trail leading outside the home, to the porch and onto the driveway. Police also had several people at the home take gunshot-residue tests. The 10-year-old boy's father said there was a bullet hole in the upstairs bedroom from the shooting. Two adults were home at the time of the shooting, the boy's father said. He said he has no guns at the home and that he's told his son to stay away from guns. "He seriously could have been dead," he said. "It's seriously amazing that he's not He could have been seriously hurt. He could have been in a coma." To comment on this story, please visit our crime and courts comments section. |
Pensacola, Florida (CNN) -- As oil drifted onto beaches as far east as the Florida Panhandle, a BP official said Saturday the company was pleased with its operation to funnel crude up from the ruptured undersea well to a drilling ship a mile above on the Gulf of Mexico. BP Senior Vice President Bob Fryar said the company funneled about 250,000 gallons of oil in the first 24 hours from a containment cap installed on the well to a drilling ship on the ocean surface. "That operation has gone extremely well," Fryar said at an Alabama news conference. "We are very pleased." That's about 31 percent of the 798,000 gallons of crude federal authorities estimate is gushing into the sea every day. The company's progress was not enough to temper the frustration seething among residents along the coastline. Tony Kennon, the mayor of Orange Beach, Alabama, confronted Fryar at the afternoon news conference for not acting promptly when reports of tar balls washing ashore surfaced. Visibly upset, Kennon said local officials have been asking to meet with BP officials for over a month, but their requests went unanswered. "If you sensed our frustration, you would have been here a lot sooner," Kennon told Fryar. "People in Orange Beach are starving to death now because they can't get out to catch the fish." BP engineers are hoping to increase the amount being funneled to the drilling ship but have to be careful about the pressure within the cap that was placed on the well head a few days ago, said Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the federal government's response manager. Allen told reporters at a briefing Saturday that BP plans to shut valves in the cap -- which are allowing oil to escape -- once the pressure is eased. The ultimate capacity of the operation is 630,000 captured gallons a day, still shy of the amount spewing. Earlier, coastal residents had anxiously awaited news of BP's progress as elevated southerly winds pushed the perimeter of the spilled oil to shorelines as far east as the Florida Panhandle. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted that scattered tar balls and light sheen would impact beaches as far east as Bay County, home to popular destinations in Panama City. Florida beaches remained open Saturday but the number of beachgoers was down. Sun and surf were interrupted by sticky brown globs of oil washing up on the sugary sand and workers with blue rubber gloves and plastic bags trying to keep the beach clean. Florida Gov. Charlie Crist walked the beach accompanied by "Margaritaville" singer Jimmy Buffet, who is building a hotel on the Pensacola shoreline. "I saw some tar balls," Crist said. "It's terrible when you see something like that. It breaks your heart." Florida Sen. George LeMieux, a Republican, demanded that BP donate $1 billion for a cleanup fund for the five Gulf states and said that President Obama "needs to push them to do that." "I want to see this president more engaged here on the ground, working through problems," LeMieux said. The oil slick has already threatened ecologically sensitive lands along the Gulf Coast. Images of oil-drenched pelicans were all over the internet, prompting even more public anger toward BP. Obama sought in his weekly address Saturday to ease fear along the Gulf Coast by reaffirming his commitment to clean up the worst oil spill in U.S. history. "It's brutally unfair. It's wrong," Obama said in the address, recorded a day earlier in Grand Isle, Louisiana. "And what I told these men and women -- and what I have said since the beginning of this disaster -- is that I'm going to stand with the people of the Gulf Coast until they are made whole." It appeared that BP was making progress after capping the breached well head, Obama said, but he said the federal government was "prepared for the worst." He cited a series of statistics that illuminated the "largest response to an environmental disaster of this kind in the history of our country." They are as follows: • 17,500 National Guard troops authorized for deployment. • 20,000 people currently working to protect water and coastlines. • 1,900 vessels are in the Gulf assisting in the cleanup. • 4.3 million feet of boom deployed with another 2.9 million feet of boom available, enough to stretch 1,300 miles. • 17 staging areas across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida to rapidly defend sensitive shorelines. Meanwhile, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Saturday reopened an area of the Gulf to fishing. After reviewing images and data, the agency reopened more than 13,000 square miles west of the Florida Keys and Dry Tortugas. At the same time, it closed 2,275-square miles off the Florida Panhandle, extending the northern boundary just east of the western edge of Choctawhatchee Bay. That means that 32 percent of the Gulf still remains off-limits for fishing. The BP well erupted after an explosion and fire on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig on April 20. Eleven people on board died and the BP-leased rig sank two days later, leaving up to 19,000 barrels (798,000 gallons) of oil pouring into the Gulf daily, according to federal estimates. BP has struggled to contain the gushing oil, trying myriad methods to plug the well and divert the crude. Thursday was the first time the British oil giant was able to report progress, when it successfully lowered a containment cap on the ruptured well. Even if the funneling procedure is able to contain most of the oil, the solution is temporary, Allen said. The gushing well can only be killed after BP completes drilling of two relief wells. Allen said the first relief well is about 7,000 feet below the ocean floor. BP will have to go down to between 16,000 and 18,000 feet to be able to intercept the breached well. The long-term threat, Allen said, will not go away until a relief well is completed. BP has said the earliest that will be done is August. |
A dozen off-duty soldiers from Fort Lewis engaged in a 30-minute gun battle last weekend against a group of alleged drug dealers. Hundreds of rounds from handguns, shotguns and semiautomatic weapons were fired, witnesses said, but no one was hurt. When the police arrived in the drug-ridden neighborhood, they arrested two young men suspected of being crack dealers and took the soldiers' weapons, which were privately owned. The gunfight involved members of the Army Rangers, an elite force of light infantry, and it happened Saturday night outside the home of one of them, Sgt. Bill Foulk. The next day, scuffles broke out among several Ranger supporters and opponents, who said they were being falsely accused of selling drugs. Again no serious injuries were reported. Filming Leads to Threats Aligned against the Rangers in the shooting were 15 to 20 people described by the police as members of a gang, the Hilltop Crips, which has been implicated in drug dealing. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Sergeant Foulk, 32 years old, said the gang members had become upset earlier Saturday that he was filming, from his second-floor window, the comings and goings at a yellow bungalow that has a reputation of being a crack house. He said they had threatened him and he had called fellow Rangers for help. The shooting began soon after the soldiers arrived. |
Thank you for checking out MPP's first annual "Top 50 Most Influential Marijuana Users" list. In order to come up with the final ranking, we asked our supporters to choose from nearly 200 influential people to help us narrow down the list to the final 50 you see here. We took the 37 individuals who received the most votes from our supporters and added them to MPP's top 13 automatic qualifiers (including people like Clarence Thomas). Then all 50 were ranked using the criteria below.In order to have qualified for the list, each individual must (1) have tried marijuana at least once, (2) be alive, and (3) be living in the U.S. or be a U.S. citizen. We also asked our supporters to adhere to the definition for the "Power 50" list that's used by "Out" magazine, which employs the following criteria: "the power to influence cultural and social attitudes, political clout, individual wealth, and a person's media profile."In sum, we're not concerned with an individual's popularity, or even whether he or she supports marijuana policy reform. Rather, the 2012 "Top 50 Most Influential Marijuana Users" list is meant to identify people who have used marijuana and achieved high levels of success or influence.We hope you enjoy this list. We're excited to see how the most influential marijuana users change from year to year. (Prediction: Newt Gingrich will drop off the list.)Source: mpp.orgAuthor: mpp.orgContact: Contact Us Website: 2012 Top 50 Most Influential Marijuana Users |
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