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Já em 1992 alguém percebeu que Eduardo Cunha não deveria estar no lugar onde estava. Assim surgiu o primeiro “Fora Cunha”, impresso em um cartaz por um funcionário da extinta TELERJ. Hoje pela manhã o aposentado da TELERJ Adalberto Pestana mal podia acreditar no que seus olhos enxergavam. 24 anos depois o primeiro grito de “Fora Cunha” o desejo de Adalberto se realizou. Por sempre ter acreditado que um dia Cunha seria colocado pra fora, Adalberto agora já recebeu alguns convites para dar palestras sobre paciência e perseverança. Nossa reportagem também procurou o autor do “Fora Sarney”, mas esse já desistiu há muito tempo.

A blockchain advert has been capitalising on the huge attention on the 2018 FIFA World Cup. At half-time during the England 2-0 win over Sweden, the advert by a Hyundai subsidiary proclaimed the benefits of blockchain technology to almost 20 million viewers. Hyundai Ad Showcases Blockchain A blockchain advert by Hyundai Digital Asset Company (HDAC), presenting a high-tech vision of the future featuring internet-of-things (IoT) technology, has been featured in every half-time break. On July 7, it showed at half-time of the England clash with Sweden. This quarter-final hit 19.64 million viewers according to the BBC, lower than the 23.6 million viewers that watched England v Colombia. The advert, which is being featured on both BBC and ITV, was delivered by HDAC which is a subsidiary of the well-known South Korean car manufacturing company Hyundai. HDAC was founded by Chung Dae-sun, the nephew of CEO Chung Mong-koo, in 2017. The company aims to provide secure IoT ecosystems using private and public blockchains. The advert mentioned blockchain three times in on-screen text and once in a voiceover. It showed a family making instant payments using blockchain technology and highlighted that the house was also protected by it. Smart appliances were presented calculating meter readings and automatically processing payments of utilities. Their website states: “The technology can be applied to smart factories, smart homes, smart buildings, and various industries. Also, [machine to machine] transaction for mutual contracts and operation between IoT devices are implemented to bring a platform where rational consumptions and transactions are possible.” More importantly than the use-cases, the advert showed the technology as trustworthy. Mainstream media has attempted to portray Bitcoin, the most well-known example of blockchain technology, as a Ponzi scheme despite any similarities. As a subsidiary of Hyundai, back this technology, TV viewers will have a credible new perspective with a name they are familiar with. The advert also put the technology in a family setting, making viewers realise that blockchain technology can benefit them in everyday situations. Blockchain technology has already been used in projects such as OnePay FX, providing for faster cross-border payments, and KodakOne which protects photographer’s image rights. Bitcoin’s Changing Reputation Bitcoin has been struggling to evade its reputation as a means of payment for buying illegal items on the dark net. This has often led to criticisms that its anonymity could provide for money laundering even though having a permanent record of pseudonymous transactions is arguably a risky move for illegal transactions. For it to achieve widespread adoption, it needs to change the public and governments’ perception of it. This advert by HDAC solidifies blockchain technology in a clear way that it is safe and can be used in many innovative new ways. It is no wonder companies such as IBM, Santander and Bank of America are working with blockchain technology to provide better services for businesses and the public. With the backing of at least fifty large well-known businesses backing the technology, Bitcoin’s reputation will swiftly change. Image From Shutterstock

“ As consciousness is returning to ordinary awareness after intense experiences of a mystical, visionary, or psychodynamic nature, most any style of music can be explored with delight. “ Psychedelics and music have long been linked, but at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where William A. Richards conducts research, music plays an important part in ensuring the stability off entheogen study participants. In this excerpt from Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences, Richards explains the role of music in his work. The excerpt is followed by the playlist Richards compiled. • • • • • • Part of a new guide’s orientation at Johns Hopkins entails becoming familiar with the supportive music used in a particular research study and the rationale for its selection. We have learned that in high-dose sessions, especially during the onset and intense period of entheogen effects, the supportive structure of the music is more important than either the guide’s or the volunteer’s personal musical preferences. In states of ego transcendence, the everyday self as the perceiver of music may no longer exist, having entered into a unitive awareness that is claimed to be quite independent of whatever sonic frequencies are coming into the ears through the headphones or loudspeakers. As the ego approaches its dissolution and when it begins to be reconstituted, however, the nonverbal structure of the music may provide significant support. Thus, sensitivity to the therapeutic potential of carefully selected music may be an important factor in enhancing psychological safety. One playlist that has been carefully developed through trial and error and has been found to work well with many different people over time is included at the end of this book. It includes a significant amount of classical music, symphonic and choral, as well as some Hindu chant, in the intense portions of the session and lighter selections near the return to everyday reality at the end of the day. We discovered in early research in the 1960s, notably with some alcoholics who had never appreciated classical music, that Brahms symphonies and similar works resonated deeply within them and proved highly effective in providing nonverbal structure and support. Many of those people not only discovered an appreciation of classical music within themselves, but went out and purchased records, tapes, or compact disks to facilitate the continuing integration of their experiences and for future enjoyment. It may be noted that, as consciousness is returning to ordinary awareness after intense experiences of a mystical, visionary, or psychodynamic nature, most any style of music can be explored with delight. At this time, one’s personal favorite selections may be enjoyed with fresh appreciation. A HOPKINS PLAYLIST FOR PSILOCYBIN STUDIES (2008 VERSION) States of Consciousness Research Antonio Vivaldi. Guitar Concerti. Los Romeros, Iona Brown, Academy of St. Mar­tin in the Fields. Philips 412–624–2 Andante, Concerto RV532 in G Major for 2 guitars, strings, and continuo, 3:30 Largo, Concerto RV93 in D Major for guitar, strings, and continuo, 3:53 Largo, Concerto RV356 in A Minor, 2:20 Paul Horn. Inside the Taj Mahal. Kuckuck 11062–2 “Mumtaz Mahal,” 3:21 “Shah Jahan,” 5:36 Ron Korb. Flute Traveller: A Musical Journey Across Five Continents. Oasis Produc­tions, SOCAN NHCD 205 “Alto Flute,” 2:16 Russill Paul. PM Yoga Chants Gaiam. Relaxation 3142. CD included with the book The Yoga of Sound. Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2004 “By the Stream,” 10:54 “Om Namah Shivaya,” 2:27 Edward Elgar. Enigma Variations. Leonard Bernstein. BBC Symphony. The Artist’s Album. DGG 457 691–2 No. 9, “Nimrod,” 6:08 Morten Lauridsen. A Robert Shaw Christmas: Angels On High. Robert Shaw. Shaw Chamber Singers. Telarc20 CD-80461 “O Magnum Mysterium,” 6:13 Russian Orthodox Chant. Sacred Treasures III, Hearts of Space. St. Petersburg Cham­ber Choir, 025041111423 “Alleluia, Behold the Bridegroom,” 5:29 Henryk Górecki. Symphony 3, Op. 36. Dawn Upshaw. David Zinman. London Sin­fonietta. Elektra Nonesuch 9 79282–2 Lento—Sostenuto Tranquillo ma Cantabile, 26:25 Johannes Brahms. Ein Deutsches Requiem, Op. 45. Herbert Blomstedt, San Francisco Symphony and Chorus. London 443 771–2 “Selig sind die, da Leid tragen,” 10:36 “Denn alles Fleish, es ist wie Gras,” 14:33 Johannes Brahms. Symphony 2 in D Major, Op. 73. Leonard Bernstein. New York Philharmonic. Sony. SMK 61829 Adagio non Troppo, 10:08 Johannes Brahms. Ein Deutches Requiem, Op. 45. Herbert Blomstedt. San Francisco Symphony and Chorus. London 443 771–2 “Wie lieblich sind Deine Wohnungen,” 5:34 J. S. Bach. Mass in B Minor. Robert Shaw. Atlanta Symphony and Chamber Chorus. Telarc CD-80233 Kyrie I, 10:21 Kyrie II, 4:24 Samuel Barber. String Quartet, Op. 11. Leonard Bernstein. New York Philharmonic. Sony SMK 63088 Adagio for Strings, 9:54 Antonio Vivaldi. Gloria in D Major, R589. Robert Shaw. Atlanta Symphony and Chamber Chorus. Telarc CD-80194 “Gloria in Excelsis,” 2:22 “Et in terra pax,” 5:58 J. S. Bach. Bach Stokowski. Leopold Stokowski. EMI CDM 7243 5 66385 2 5 “Komm süsser Tod,” BMV 478, 5:51 W. A. Mozart. Vesperae solennes de confessore, K/KV339. Kiri Te Kanawa. Sir Colin Davis. London Symphony and Chorus. Philips 412 873–2 “Laudate Dominum,” 5:11 Johannes Brahms. Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D Major, Op. 77. Jascha Heifetz. Fritz Reiner. Chicago Symphony. HMG 09026-61742–2 Adagio, 8:12 Henryk Górecki. Symphony 3, Op. 36. Dawn Upshaw. David Zinman. London Sinfonietta. Elektra Nonesuch 9 79282–2 Lento e Largo—Tranquillissimo, 9:22 Edward Elgar. Serenade for String Orchestra, Op. 20. Mark Elder. Hallé Symphony. CDHLL 7501 Larghetto, 6:29 Gabriel Fauré. Requiem, Op. 48. Choir of St. John’s College. Cambridge. George Guest. London 436 486–2 “In Paradisum,” 3:41 W. A. Mozart, Clarinet Concerto in A Major, KV 622. Jacques Lancelot. Jean-François Paillard. Orchestra de Chambre Jean-François Paillard. Erato 2292–45978–2 Adagio, 7:04 Arvo Pärt. Sanctuary. Richard Studt. Bournemouth Sinfonietta. Virgin Classics. CSC 7243 5 45314 2 2 “Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten,” 6:10 Bohuslav Matéj Cernohorsky. Cernohorsky Religious Works. Czech Madrigal Singers. Frantisek Xaver Thuri. Gioia Della Musica. Supraphon 11 1598–2 931 “Quare Domine, iraceris—Memento Abraham,” 8:58 Ludwig van Beethoven. Piano Concerto 5 (Emperor), Op. 73. Leon Fleisher. George Szell. Cleveland Orchestra. Sony SBK 46549 Adagio un Poco Moto, 8:25 Charles Gounod. St. Cecelia Mass. Barbara Hendricks. Georges Prêtre. French Radio New Philharmonic. EMI, CDC 7 47094 2 Sanctus, 5:18 Benedictus, 3:16 Russill Paul. The Yoga of Sound, Shakti Yoga. Relaxation, CD 3133 “Om Namah Shivaya,” 17:35 Richard Wagner. Tristan and Isolde. Jesús López-Cobos. Cincinnati Symphony. Telarc CD-80379 Prelude and Liebestod, 17:24 W. A. Mozart. Grosse Messe C-Moll. Leonard Bernstein. Chor und Symphonie­-orchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks. Deutsche Grammaphon 431 791–2 “Ave Verum Corpus,” KV618 3:56 Gustav Mahler. Symphony 5. Lorin Maazel. Vienna Philharmonic. Sony SBK 89850 Adagietto, Sehr Langsam, 10:33 Alan Hovhaness. Symphony 2, Op. 132: Mysterious Mountain. Gerard Schwarz. Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. Telarc 80604 Andante con Moto, 7:42 Joseph Canteloube. Songs of the Auvergne. Dawn Upshaw. Kent Nagano. Orchestre de l’Opèra National de Lyon. Erato 0630–17577–2 “Bailèro,” 5:36 “Perl’èfon,” 3:09 Richard Strauss. Death and Transfiguration. André Previn. Vienna Philharmonic. Telarc CD-80167 Moderato, 2:20 Tranquillo, 6:03 Russill Paul. The Yoga of Sound, Nada Yoga. Relaxation CD 3133 “Evening Shadows Fall,” 23:29 J. S. Bach. Bach Stokowski. Leopold Stokowski. CDM 7243 5 66385 2 5 Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor, BMV 582, 14:51 Enya. Watermark. Reprise 9 26774–2 “Storms in Africa II,” 2:59 Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Shaka Zulu. Warner Brothers Collection. Rhino/ WEA 081227998622 “King of Kings,” 4:07 Adiemus. Pure Moods. Virgin 724384218621 “Adiemus,” 3:59 John Lennon. The John Lennon Collection. Abbey Road Capitol 077774644624 “Here Comes the Sun,” 3:03 Gipsy Kings. Mosaique. Nonsuch 075596089227 “Caminando Por la Calle,” 4:22 Mercedes Sosa. Polygram International, Serie Millennium, 042283231429 “Gracias a La Vida,” 4:22 Leontyne Price. The Essential Leontyne Price: Spirituals, Hymns, and Sacred Songs. RCA 090266815722 “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” 3:24 Louis Armstrong. What A Wonderful World. Intercontinental 600 607707405826 “What a Wonderful World,” 2:21

TRACEY BENDINGER | Culture | Contact After watching an episode of Chef’s Table, Alexandra Dash was inspired to venture into the culinary world of the Italian crowd pleaser, risotto. Despite her good intentions, she is tonight deeply regretting her decision to make the time-consuming rice dish a mere 3 minutes into cooking. The Advocate reached out to Alexandra, who was more than happy to talk to someone while standing alone in her kitchen, constantly stirring and adding liquid to the risotto. “I don’t know how this dish has survived for so long,” she said. “It’s the most time-consuming thing ever.” “It’s probably not even going to taste that good, fuck!” It’s believed Ms. Dash is making a truffle and mushroom risotto after her and her partner, Phil, went truffle hunting at a farm on the outskirts of Betoota. “You wouldn’t think Betoota would be good for truffles but it’s actually perfect” explained Tim Fungai, the truffle farm’s manager. “There’s a small pocket out here that kind of has its own ecosystem, it really defies all we know about weather patterns” At the time of press, Alexandra still had at least another 30 minutes of stirring to do. It’s believed the risotto will almost certainly not end up being worth the effort. More to come.

"The temporary closure of our borders in the affected areas is only an interim measure designed to address the current security challenges and will be resumed as soon as normalcy is restored," he added, in a speech addressing deadly Christmas Day bombings by the Boko Haram sect a week ago.

Bueller? Peter J. Boettke and Rosolino A. Candela write, Chicago price theory in the Friedman/Stigler/Becker generation was not defined by the comparative analysis of the institutional conditions within which the constant adjustments and adaptations by economic actors to changing conditions produces a tendency towards equilibrium, as it had been under the Knight/Simons/Viner generation. Instead, price theory in the hands of Friedman/Stigler/Becker became an exercise in defining the optimality conditions given any situation within which human actors find themselves. From the conclusion: The Chicago “Tight Prior Equilibrium” imposes a logical discipline on the world of human affairs, but it does not invite an inquiry into the diversity of institutions that arise to ameliorate our human imperfections and potentially turn situations of conflict into opportunities for social cooperation. As a result, the “fresh water” economics of Chicago still leaves us thirsty, and the “saltwater” economics of MIT/Harvard cannot serve to quench our thirst, so we must look to those alternative streams of thought for satisfaction in our quest to understand the dynamics of the market process. In short, as I once put it, Chicago economics: Markets work, so use markets Harvard-MIT economics: Markets fail, so use government Masonomist: Markets fail, so use markets For Masonomist, the authors substitute the ABC’s. They write,

Today's Googlr doodle is a dedication to one of the most celebrated actress of Indian cinema, Madhubala. Today, Google dedicated its doodle to the iconic actor of the Indian cinema Madhubala. Popularly known as 'The Marilyn Monroe of Bollywood', Madhubala was known for her beauty, personality and sensitive portrayals of women in films. Raised in the slums of Bombay, she supported her family as a child star and soon became a leading lady known for her elegance on screen and considerable acting abilities. Born in Delhi on this day in 1933, Mumtaz Jehan Begum Dehlavi was raised in a town located near the Bombay Talkies film studio. Madhubala appeared in her first film at the age of 9, billed as Baby Mumtaz. In 1947 she landed the lead role in Neel Kamal at the age of 14, taking the name Madhubala. As the family's main breadwinner, she worked tirelessly to support her parents and four sisters. Madhubala appeared in nine films during 1949, including a spellbinding breakout performance in the box office hit Mahal. While her breathtaking appearance earned comparisons to Venus, Madhubala was a gifted actor with an understated style well suited for comedies, dramas, and romantic roles alike. She fell in love with Dilip Kumar, her costar in the 1951 romance Tarana, but her father, who managed her career, interfered. The actors' chemistry in the epic historical drama Mughal-e-Azam-one of the most popular and expensive movies in Bollywood history-was undeniable and unforgettable. Appearing in over 70 films over the course of a tragically brief career, Madhubala- who would have turned 86 today-was called "The Biggest Star in the World" in 1952 by Theatre Arts magazine. In 2008 she appeared on a commemorative postage stamp in India, where she is remembered by many as one of the greatest to ever grace the silver screen. Madhubala's life and career was cut short when she died on 23 February 1969 from a prolonged illness at the age of 36. Her film Chalak opposite Raj Kapoor was supposed to be released in 1966 as it needed a short spell of shooting, however, she couldn't even survive that strength and therefore, the film was left incomplete even at the time of her death.

¿Por qué no? Mientras que Flamengo armó un equipo millonario para jugar la final de la Copa Libertadores luego de más de 30 años, y mientras que River Plate jugará por el titulo del continente por segunda vez consecutiva, en Boca Juniors no quieren dejar pasar otro año más en blanco internacionalmente. Perder la final del Bernabéu y en ‘semis’ este año, fueron duros golpes para el ‘Xeneize’, que podría dar el batacazo si logra lo que, según desde Argentina, tiene entre manos: fichar para el banquillo a nada menos que Carlo Ancelotti. De acuerdo a información de FOX Sports Argentina, de Diego Latorre y Marcelo Benedetto para ser exactos, el técnico campeón de la Champions League con AC Milan y Real Madrid podría llegar a La Bombonera para la próxima temporada. La situación del técnico italiano es algo irregular en el Napoli, con el que marcha séptimo en la Serie A, aunque en la Champions League marcha segundo en la Grupo E. Pero además de lo deportivo, Ancelotti está en pleno conflicto con el dueño del equipo napolitanoy eso le habría la puerta a una posible salida en las próximas semanas. Aun así, los periodistas acotaron que la situación del país y el sueldo que pida el ex-Real Madrid podría complicar su llegada. Final de la Libertadores en Lima Conmebol decidió el martes mudar de sede la final de la Copa Libertadores, de Santiago a Lima, ante la oleada de protestas que persisten en la capital chilena. El órgano rector del fútbol en Sudamérica anunció la decisión tras un encuentro con representantes de los dos clubes finalistas, el campeón defensor River Plate de Argentina, y Flamengo de Brasil. Tras un cambio de formato a partir de este año, el cetro del máximo certamen futbolístico sudamericano se definirá en un solo partido, previsto para el 23 de noviembre. La fecha se mantiene, pero la sede no. ► “Me gustaría que un día viniera a Italia”: Lionel Messi ya respondió al desafío de Cristiano Ronaldo ► ‘Messi ento’ furioso: la rabia de Leo rumbo al camarín tras mal primer tiempo del Barça ante Slavia ► Era todo diferente: el último once del Real Madrid que ganó en el Bernabéu por Champions [FOTOS] ► Le cerró la puerta a Gareth Bale: Zidane sorprendió con respaldo a galés y anunció que se queda

Minimum Wage Artists On the reality of “starving artists” in the games industry To my fellow artists, creatives, illustrators, and concept designers, Do not work for less than minimum wage. Companies like Fantasy Flight Games ask artists to do a fully painted illustration and sign away nearly all rights to that piece for just $100. That is rude, disgraceful, and downright wrong. We need to bring this to light so it can stop. For a company pulling in tens of millions of dollars in revenue annually, surely they are capable of paying their freelance artists a reasonable rate. $100, assuming the average artist will take around 15 hours to complete the work (factoring in communication, research, revisions, actual painting, and invoicing), will earn the artist somewhere around $7/hour, less than the current US federal minimum wage. By most estimates, a freelancer should mentally divide any hourly rate they earn by half to compare it to any in-house, full time position (as a freelancer has additional taxes, has to factor in time for accounting and advertising, has to pay for health insurance, and has all of the overhead to supply their own equipment and work space). So that puts our functional wage for that job closer to $3.50/hour. “But I work a lot faster than that! I can make good money!”, they scream. You really can’t. If you do an $100 piece every working day of the year, ignoring all holidays and never taking a vacation even for Christmas, you will earn a grand total of $26,100 at the end of the year, before taxes. You will work like a dog to earn less than even the median American income to do a skilled job that helps your employer earn the position of one of the largest analog game companies. But the thing is, you won’t make that much. You’re not going to make a livable income. You’re not magically going to fill every hour of your day with doing paying work for companies. You will be like the majority of freelance artists in this field and earn below the poverty line. I’ve known far too many friends in this field who are at the top of their game and struggle to earn even $15,000. Most don’t even earn $10,000 in a year. But nobody talks about it. We all keep our mouths shut because money and rates are taboo subjects and we fear losing our jobs. We fear to lose the jobs that don’t even pay us enough to live. Still others will say “But you’re doing a job that you love! Don’t you enjoy doing art? Why do you have to bring money into it?” Please. Don’t get me started. I know more than a few carpenters who love their job, but a remarkable few who don’t think they deserve to be paid for their work. Something has to change. Artists need to be paid more. Not so we can sit comfortably and drink martinis or lounge on a beach all of the time. But just so we can be paid fairly and earn a decent, sustainable living. We’re not asking for much. We’re only asking for enough. So artists, do not be lured in by the prospect of working for “a big company” or for the illusory “prestige” of working on easily recognized IPs. A bad job is a bad job, and nearly anything Fantasy Flight Games will give you is a bad job. I made the mistake of doing a few jobs for $100 when I was starting out years ago. I hope you won’t make that same mistake.

A fire has broken out at a major mall complex in Thailand's capital, with initial reports from Thai emergency services saying one person has died and two were injured. The cause and extent of Wednesday's fire at Bangkok's Central World complex, which includes a hotel and an office tower, was not immediately known. The report of casualties came from the city's Erawan Emergency Radio network. Images posted by social media users showed thick black smoke pouring from the complex, with hundreds of evacuated shoppers filling a large open square next to the mall. The fire broke out during the congested city's evening rush hour. Sirens from emergency vehicles wailed as they tried to make their way through gridlocked traffic. Central World sits at a major intersection surrounded by shopping complexes, shrines and high-rise hotels popular with foreign tourists. It is near the main junction for Bangkok's elevated train lines, as well as the Erawan Shrine, which was the site of a deadly bombing in 2015. The mall typically would have been busy with shoppers as well as diners headed to the many restaurants inside. The Central World complex was among several Bangkok buildings set on fire by arsonists during mass anti-government protests in 2010.

Tamer Shaaban's video, a snapshot of the Egypt protests on Jan. 25, has accumulated nearly 2 million views on YouTube. via Huffington Post: Despite the attempt by the Egyptian government to shut down the Internet throughout the country, a a harrowing video montage of home video from the chaotic streets of Cairo. has surfaced on YouTube The protests began on Tuesday, January 25, when thousands of people blocked the streets to sound off about unemployment, government corruption, and the autocratic rule of President Hosni Mubarak, who has been in office for thirty years. The protests were inspired, in part, by the recent uprising in Tunisia, which began because of widespread anger over corruption and unemployment and ended with the ousting of president and strongman Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. The video was created by Tamer Shaaban, described on YouTube as "another Egyptian who's had enough."

Many people are low on money these days and those with any little money left probably don’t even want to spend them. Instead, they can turn them into amazing works of art like the ones above.

(Bloomberg) — Facebook is launching a new group video chat product meant to capitalize on a world now stuck indoors and offer an alternative to services that have exploded in popularity in recent months, like Zoom. Messenger Rooms, a feature that will be available on Facebook’s core social network and its Messenger app, will allow video chats among as many as 50 people, and won’t require participants to have a Facebook account, the company said Friday in a blog post. Chats will be free with no time limit, and eventually users will be able to create a “room” from any of Facebook’s products, including WhatsApp and Instagram. The goal is a group video product that feels more social, and less corporate than what’s currently available, said Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg. People in Messenger Rooms will be able to use Facebook’s augmented reality filters, or jump between chats to visit different groups of friends, an effort to create “spontaneity and serendipity,” Zuckerberg added. “All the products [out] there were primarily focused on enterprises and we thought that there was an ability to do something in the consumer space,” the Facebook CEO said this week via video chat from his home. “It’s meant to be more casual. Not everything has to be planned out in advance.” Video chats have become a staple given the billions of people around the world staying indoors because of the coronavirus pandemic. Zoom Video Communications Inc.’s app, aimed at companies for business meetings before the outbreak, has jumped from about 10 million users to more than 300 million in a matter of months. Zoom’s shares declined 2% after Facebook’s announcement, reversing a gain of as much as 7.3% earlier Friday. Houseparty, owned by Epic Games Inc., which also lets users bounce between group chats, said it added 50 million new sign-ups in a 30-day stretch, as much as 70 times its normal amount in some markets. Facebook, too, has a number of video chat products already in high demand. More than 700 million people make voice or video calls every day on Messenger or WhatsApp, Zuckerberg said, a number that has increased since the emergence of Covid-19. The Menlo Park, California-based company started shifting product priorities last month after seeing those spikes in usage from people using its live video and calling features. The demand prompted Facebook to announce other video features this week, including the ability to save Instagram Live videos after they’re over, and start a video chat inside Facebook’s dating feature. Video chats on WhatsApp can now host eight people, twice the previous amount. Related Stories Australia Wants Make Google and Facebook Pay for News While Zoom has surged, it has struggled with a series of security mishaps that put users’ privacy at risk. It also suffered from “Zoombombing,” where internet trolls took over chats and posted pornography or racist content to unsuspecting participants. Zuckerberg said he has learned from Zoom’s early mistakes. Facebook users who create a chat can also select participants, eject people if needed or lock the room. The company won’t watch or listen to calls, and there is no ability for users to record video chats, a spokesperson said. The social network’s algorithms will help determine which available rooms to show users, Zuckerberg said, recognizing that not all Facebook friends are created equal. “We all have the random uncle or someone that you added a few years ago,” he said. “Not every one of your Facebook friends is someone you want to hang out with.” Zuckerberg said Facebook’s long-term priorities haven’t changed much. The company still is moving forward with plans to encrypt all its messaging services, and make them interoperable — meaning you’ll eventually be able to send a message from WhatsApp to a user on Instagram, for example. The Rooms video chat feature, he said, “is probably one of the first very clear consumer services that has integration and works across each of the apps. That’s an important piece – maybe an initial milestone on the path to broader interoperability.” Source: Facebook Is Taking On Zoom With a 50-Person Video Chat Feature Please follow my instagram: http://instagram.com/arminhamidian67 Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg debuts Messenger Rooms. The new video presence platform will make it possible for users to chat with up to fifty people at one time and connect to a video conference even if they don’t have a Facebook account. Like this: Like Loading...

Employers would have to pay a £1,000-a-year fee for every EU skilled worker they bring in after Brexit, under plans being considered by the Government. An “immigration skills levy” – already being introduced for staff from the rest of the world – could be extended to the EU, the immigration minister said. Robert Goodwill said the Brexit result showed voters believed that companies are relying too much on migrants to fill roles. They had made clear that not enough was being done to ensure that “the skills are available from our own people”, he told a House of Lords inquiry. Mr Goodwill said an apprenticeship levy, to be brought in later this year, would help the Government meet its commitment to train more than three million more apprentices by 2020. And he added: “In April this year, we are also bringing in the immigration skills charge for non-EEA skilled workers. “If you want to recruit an Indian computer programmer on a four-year contract, on top of the existing visa charges and the resident labour market test, there will be a fee of £1,000 per year. “So, for a four-year contract, that employer will need to pay a £4,000 immigration skills charge. “That is something that currently applies to non-EU and it has been suggested to us that could be applied to EU.” Mr Goodwill acknowledged he could not speculate on what the final immigration policy would be, when the final Brexit settlement is reached. However, he invited the peers to seriously consider including the immigration skills charge for EU skilled migrants within their inquiry report. “It would be helpful to the British economy and to British workers who feel they are overlooked because of other people coming into the country getting jobs they would themselves like to get,” he said. During the evidence session, the immigration minister also indicated that a seasonal agricultural workers scheme - allowing tens of thousands of people to work in Britain in low-skilled roles for less than six months - could be introduced after Brexit. It could hand the British farming industry a significant loophole to escape the promised restrictions on EU migration without counting towards the Government’s net migration target. Just before Christmas, the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) pressed ministers to introduce the seasonal agricultural workers scheme, to ensure the food and farming industry can recruit short-term migrant labour. The horticultural industry alone is estimated to need 90,000 seasonal workers by 2019, with 95 per cent of British-grown berries picked by workers from other EU countries. Mr Goodwill told peers that the NFU had pressed for the scheme because of the weakness of sterling and because the post-Brexit vote had put some EU workers off coming to Britain. He said: “A seasonal agricultural workers scheme would not contribute to net migration because that only includes those who come to work for more than 12 months and they come for less than six months." The minister reaffirmed the Government’s commitment to get net migration down below 100,000 post-Brexit.

Now that Pope Francis has officially affirmed a “very solid scientific consensus” that the earth is warming as a result of human activity and offered a point-by-point critique of an unsustainable, consumption-based economic system that is creating a planet of “debris, desolation and filth” it’ll be interesting to see how the Catholic GOP presidential candidates react to what is basically a searing indictment of their entire worldview. (Dibs on the campaign slogan “Debris, Desolation & Filth: Vote Republican.”) If early reactions are any guide, the candidates are going with some version of “the pope is a great guy, but when it comes to science and economics, he’s way out of his wheelhouse.” We got a preview of this from Rick Santorum in early June, when he said in a radio interview: “The church has gotten it wrong a few times on science. We probably are better off leaving science to the scientists, and focusing on what we’re really good at, which is theology and morality.” Conservative Catholic thinkers have been working to create a rationale for the Republican rejection of the climate encyclical by suggesting that there’s some kind of dichotomy between church teachings that involve issues of “morality” (i.e., sex and the sanctity of life), which are properly under the pope’s purview, and those related to empirical issues (like climate change), which are not. In a widely circulated First Things article, Princeton natural law scholar Robert George wrote back in January, “The Pope has the right and responsibility to teach and even bind the consciences of the faithful on the truth of proposed moral norms, including those norms pertaining to our obligations concerning the natural environment.” However, he said: The Pope has no special knowledge, insight, or teaching authority pertaining to matters of empirical fact of the sort investigated by, for example, physicists and biologists, nor do popes claim such knowledge, insight, or wisdom. Pope Francis does not know whether, or to what extent, the climate changes (in various directions) of the past several decades are anthropogenic—and God is not going to tell him. Nor does he know what their long term effects will be. If anything he teaches depends on views about these things, all he will have to go on is what everybody else has to go on, namely, the analyses offered by scientific specialists who have studied the matter. As a result, he said, “faithful Catholics are not bound by positions adopted by the Pope on such matters.” But clearly Pope Francis is arguing that addressing anthropogenic climate change is a Catholic moral obligation no matter the source of the information. He notes the long history of popes addressing the morality of the human role in ecological destruction and offering specific solutions related to consumption and the economy. His predecessor Pope Benedict proposed “eliminating the structural causes of the dysfunctions of the world economy and correcting models of growth which have proved incapable of ensuring respect for the environment.” And conservatives have tried to draft science to buttress their causes when it suits their needs, most notably when they insist that there is a “scientific consensus” that life begins at conception. Of course, they have also long insisted that it is anathema for Catholics to ignore papal teachings with which they disagree, but now seem willing to change their mind. But Laudato si, or “Praise be to you,” is likely to be the conservative Catholic’s Humanae Vitae—the encyclical that presents such a stark contrast between papal teaching and a preferred worldview that one must reject it. After all, how likely are today’s Tea Partyish, libertarian-leaning Republican Catholics to accept a teaching that asserts the need for a radical reordering of the existing economic order to protect the planet, calls for the replacement of fossil fuels with renewable sources of energy, decries business models centered on “maximizing profits,” and discredits the free market as a solution to the world’s problems? For Catholic Republican presidential candidates, the trick will be to maintain a suitably respectful tone for the pope himself while distancing themselves from his prescriptions for the planet. As Daniel Schultz notes, Jeb Bush said the following at a campaign event on Tuesday: … I don’t get economic policy from my bishops or my cardinals or my pope. And I’d like to see what he says as it relates to climate change and how that connects to these broader, deeper issues before I pass judgment. But I think religion ought to be about making us better as people and less about things that end up getting in the political realm. So all of a sudden Republicans want to keep religion out of the “political realm” and make it personal? This is the same man who as governor intervened in the personal moral decision of Terri Schiavo’s husband and used the power of the state to keep her alive based on Bush’s own religious convictions. This is the same party that for going on 50 years has asserted the right of religious conservatives to impose their morality on abortion, marriage and a host of other issues on all Americans through the political process. At least it’s nice to finally see them admit that at the end of the day, they’re as in favor of moral relativism as liberals—when it suits their needs.

ROSEVILLE, Mich. (WXYZ) — A video posted on social media is sparking a debate. An employee at the 7-eleven on Gratiot and 13 Mile Road in Roseville was captured washing his feet in a sink that is meant for washing hands. The sink is next to a coffee machine and across from a grill station. The footage turned stomachs while others came to the employee's defense. Emily Divel recorded the video and posted it to social media. "As I walked in I could hear him loudly spitting in the sink," Divel said. Divel said he then put his foot in the sink. Action News confronted the employee who said it was a religious practice. The unidentified employee said he's Muslim and it's mandatory he clean his feet, arms, and face at least five times a day. Customers had mixed reaction outside the store on Tuesday. The employee in the video talks to us tonight on @wxyzdetroit. Again he says, it’s a religious practice. pic.twitter.com/B1tGBQA9nY — Rudy Harper (@RudyHarperWXYZ) September 4, 2019 "I understand the prayer but washing the feet! You can wash your hands and have prayer but not your feet," said one customer. "We don't discourage religion but be sanitary working with food," Divel said. 7-Eleven released a statement: "We take the cleanliness of 7-Eleven stores very seriously so thank you for making us aware of this incident and allowing us to investigate this matter." State health inspectors are also now investigating.

For voters tired of the status quo, Donald Trump’s gaudy lifestyle was part of his populist appeal, suggesting both his inability to be bought and his enmity toward his better-heeled peers. And in his first two months in office, the president has certainly delivered on at least one of those two fronts, refusing to compromise any of his creature comforts. He has traveled to Mar-a-Lago, the Trump-owned Palm Beach club he has dubbed the “Southern White House,” most weekends since he took office, and visited other Trump-owned properties on the rare weekends he has stayed in Washington. First Lady Melania Trump has yet to move into the White House, opting to stay in Trump Tower in Manhattan until their son, Barron, finishes his school year. His two adult sons, who took over day-to-day operations of the Trump Organization while the boss is in the Oval Office, are traveling around the world to open new hotels. Ivanka Trump, meanwhile, has taken an office in the West Wing and is in the process of obtaining a security clearance to serve as an unofficial adviser to her father. Three of his adult children, along with his eight grandchildren and their spouses, traveled to Aspen earlier this week during what is spring break for private schools along the Acela corridor. As the Trumps know better than anyone, there’s no such thing as a free trip to Mar-a-Lago, or to Aspen, and all this shuttling to-and-fro with Secret Service protection adds up. Based on internal agency documents, The Washington Post reports, the Secret Service has had to request $60 million in additional funding for next year in order to keep up with the Trump lifestyle. The Secret Service declined to share with the Post how much it spent to protect previous First Families. Nearly half of the new figure—$26.8 million—would go to protecting the First Family and the gilded Trump Tower triplex where Melania has opted to stay for the time being. The money will go toward “residence security operations at the president’s private residence in Trump Tower,” with roughly $12.5 million earmarked to cover “personnel related costs in New York,” as well as additional undisclosed costs, already spent this year, to put in “equipment and infrastructure to secure Trump Tower,” the fiscal 2018 budget documents show. The ask also included more money to protect the unusually large First Family. President Trump is 70 years old—the oldest president to be sworn in for a first term. He has five children, two of whom have eight children between them. Eric Trump announced earlier this week that he and his wife, Lara, are having a baby boy in September, bringing the total count of Trumps to 19. The Secret Service asked for six additional full-time-equivalent positions for the Trump detail, the Post reports. The remainder of the proposed budget additional funding—$33 million—would go toward travel costs. It is no secret that the president is fond of taking trips to Mar-a-Lago. The Trump children have also jetted to Dubai, Vancouver, and Aspen since he took office, for both business and pleasure. All of these trips require advance and detail, and thus, come out of the agency budget. They also require a great deal of money from local police protection. Between Election Day and Inauguration Day, the Post reports that New York police spent about $24 million to secure Trump Tower, and on any given day, the city spends between $127,000 and $145,000 to protect the First Lady and First Son in Manhattan while President Trump is in Washington—which has been most weekdays and a handful of weekends, as well.

Thursday, June 16, 2016 GLENDALE, ARIZONA – Arizona Coyotes General Manager John Chayka announced today that the Coyotes will hold their prospect development camp July 4-8 with on-ice sessions starting Monday, July 4, at Gila River Arena. On-ice sessions are set for 2:00-4:15 p.m. on July 4, 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. on July 5, 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. on July 7 and 10:30 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. on July 8. The players will participate in an intrasquad game on July 8 at 7:00 p.m. The practices and game are free and open to the public. Among the top prospects expected to attend the camp include former first round draft choices Dylan Strome (2015) and Brendan Perlini (2014). In addition, prospects including forwards Christian Dvorak, Ryan MacInnis, Max Letunov, Christian Fischer, Michael Bunting and Conor Garland as well as defensemen Kyle Wood, Dysin Mayo, Kyle Capobianco and Connor Clifton and goaltenders Marek Langhamer and Adin Hill will attend. The camp will provide players with NHL coaching and instruction in both on and off-ice workout sessions. Players will be available to the media following their on-ice training sessions. A full roster for the camp will be released at a later date.

KINGSTON, N.Y. — The St. Patrick's Day Parade and Shamrock Run foot race won't be held Sunday because of concerns about the spread of the coro…

UPDATE: July 22, 12:10 p.m.: The Seinfeld Emoji app is now available in the Apple App Store. Three collaborators made a collection of Seinfeld-inspired emoji that could be coming to your iPhone very soon. A free iOS app called Seinfeld Emoji has been submitted to the Apple App Store (and is awaiting approval). Potential emoji include everything from Jerry wearing Google Glass to other series-related objects like the marble rye and puffy shirt. Jason Richards, who is behind the popular @Seinfeld2000 account, came up with the concept. He recruited designer Kevin McCauley to draw about five Seinfeld emojis, but McCauley — being a huge Seinfeld fan — came back with about 20, many based on his favorite jokes and characters. Shahruz Shaukat, a developer at BuzzFeed, connected with the duo online and started to develop the app as a side project (unaffiliated with BuzzFeed) a few weeks ago. "It’s a real thing that people will actually be able to use," Shaukat told Mashable. "It will let people use these on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Messages, Mail and so on." The character names are slightly off, since Richards uses variant names (Jary instead of Jerry; Newmie instead of Newman) to distance his project from the official franchise. The app also includes other random emoji — such as the Apple Store and President Obama — which are reoccurring references in the Seinfeld2000 universe. While reports that new official emoji are in the works to launch later this month, Shaukat said the app might be a work around the typical challenges affiliated with third-party emoji on Apple devices. "It’s very limiting what Apple (or even Android) lets us do with emoji, mostly for technical reasons," he said. "We came up with a unique approach stays within the rules and what’s technically capable, but still lets people use them however they want and share wherever they want." If the demand is high, the team said the app could be available for Android in the future, too.

MIDLAND — Medical marijuana will not be a booming business in the city of Midland any time soon. The city approved a zoning text amendment that will prohibit medical marijuana dispensaries and co-ops within the city limits after it is published. City Manager Jon Lynch said it typically takes a week or two for publication in the newspaper. "The language we are considering would prohibit any business or organization in violation of local, state or federal law from operating within the city limits," said Keith Baker, director of planning and community development. "Because the possession, growing and distribution of marijuana is still prohibited by federal law, we will be banning those establishments within the city limits." The amendment is not intended to impede patients who are qualified to use medical marijuana or caregivers who are licensed to grow marijuana for a limited number of patients. This zoning amendment was born out of the vagueness of the state's 2008 Medical Marijuana Act, which allowed for patients suffering from debilitating illnesses to have access to marijuana as a treatment method. Qualified caregivers, or growers, are licensed through the Department of Community Health to provide marijuana to up to five qualified patients. Caregivers must be 21 years old and cannot have been convicted of a felony involving illegal drugs. According to Baker, the law prohibits additional people from becoming involved in the distribution of medical marijuana which is why the city has opted to prohibit dispensaries and co-ops. In addition, he stated that caregivers are not allowed to be compensated for either their time or profit from their growing activities. Mayor Maureen Donker summarized the intent behind the zoning text amendment for clarity after the staff presentation. "Essentially, if I am a caregiver, I do not become a pharmaceutical company," she said. City Attorney James Branson cautioned the city council that this may not be the last they hear of this issue. "I do see where this could be a challenge," he said. "You could have a patient or a caregiver say this is hampering his or her ability to follow the law, but I feel this is the best way to address the issue. It is a way of moving forward with the limited guidance that you have at this time." Baker said the staff has been reviewing the Medical Marijuana Act and other municipalities' handling of the issue for months in preparation of this amendment. Midland has become the 12th municipality to ban dispensaries and co-ops. The text of the amendment is available online at www.midland-mi.org.

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Minnesota's move to raise $2.1 billion in new taxes, largely from the wealthy, to fund government programs puts it among a handful of states controlled by Democrats that are adopting more liberal fiscal policies at a time when many Republican-dominated statehouses are pushing to cut taxes. The Minnesota tax package, which Gov. Mark Dayton signed into law Thursday, aims to raise the revenue largely for expanding early-childhood education programs and freezing tuitions at state universities, as well as closing the state's budget deficit and funding some jobs initiatives and property-tax refunds. The measure was backed by the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, which holds control of both legislative chambers and the governor's office in Minnesota for the first time in more than two decades. The legislative session, which ended this week, also saw the passage of measures legalizing same-sex marriage and expanding union-organizing powers over the steady objection of Republican lawmakers. "It is just what government should be doing, and just what Republicans refuse to acknowledge government should be doing," Mr. Dayton said of the tax plan. The measures contrast starkly with initiatives to cut or eliminate taxes on individual and corporate incomes that have dominated the discussion in much of the country, thanks to Republican control of nearly half the statehouses. In Minnesota, Republicans said the tax increases would cause jobs and residents to leave the state for nearby places like Wisconsin and North Dakota. State Rep. Greg Davids called the legislation an overreach by the majority party, putting Minnesota "so far out of the mainstream."

WASHINGTON -- The IRS said Friday that the number of taxpayers whose tax information may have been stolen by computer hackers now exceeds 700,000 - more than double the agency's previous estimate. The tax collecting agency said 390,000 more taxpayer accounts may have been compromised than the 334,000 it warned about a year and a half ago. The breach was first discovered in May 2015, and the increase first reported by The Wall Street Journal. The sensitive information can be used for identity theft or to claim fraudulent tax refunds. The thieves accessed a system called "Get Transcript," where taxpayers can get tax returns and other filings from previous years. In order to access the information, the thieves cleared a security screen that required knowledge about the taxpayer. Get Breaking News Delivered to Your Inbox The IRS says it is immediately moving to notify taxpayers, offering identity theft protection services and giving them access to a program that assigns them special ID numbers that they must use to file their tax returns. "The IRS is committed to protecting taxpayers on multiple fronts against tax-related identity theft," said IRS Commissioner John Koskinen. "We are moving quickly to help these taxpayers." In addition, hackers have tried to access almost 600,000 additional IRS accounts in an attempt to gain private information on taxpayers. The IRS has earlier said that agency investigators believe the identity thieves are part of a sophisticated criminal operation based in Russia.

I like zoos. Really I do. I applaud today’s zoological parks for their increasing emphasis on naturalistic exhibits, their breeding programmes for endangered species, and their efforts to educate the public about wildlife conservation. But the truth is, I mainly like zoos for the same reason that other people do: because I love watching animals. Animals in captivity might satisfy our desire to cross the existential barrier that separates us from other creatures. Yet the sad reality is that, for the most part, zoo animals have become, as the art critic John Berger put it in 1977, ‘a living monument to their own disappearance’. The greatest pleasure of animal-watching still comes from observing free-living creatures in their natural environment. With enough disposable income, you can go to India, South America or Antarctica on animal-watching trips, ‘bag’ a view of the African ‘Big Five’ (elephant, rhino, lion, leopard, and buffalo), or take a boat to admire great whales exhaling geysers of salty breath. The wild animals of the world have long inhabited the depths of the human imagination no less than they have occupied the natural habitats of our shared planet. There isn’t a human society on Earth, however primitive or high-tech, that doesn’t concern itself with animal imagery, whether the critters are domesticated or free-living. Indeed, the human fascination with animals is so ancient and so widespread that it seems to be a cross-cultural human universal. The Chauvet Cave in southern France contains careful, loving depictions – painted an estimated 34,000 years ago – of more than a dozen distinct animal species: predators such as cave bears, cave lions and dire wolves, as well as herbivores such as cattle, horses and mammoths. There is at least one pair of woolly rhinos, evidently fighting. In our culture, animals loom large in children’s stories, not to mention as toys, clothing, even furnishings. But many adults in urban areas and/or technologically advanced societies lose much of their animal-interest as a concomitant of ‘growing up’. Most likely, ‘growing up’ in this sense is itself a deformation of our deeper, animal-oriented human nature. It is imposed upon us by a world where transportation is by car, bus, train and airplane, rather than by horse or bullock-cart. We receive meat and milk from a store rather than from our own flocks or hunting efforts; we defend ourselves with electronic protection systems, the police, personal firearms or social convention rather than via warnings uttered by semidomesticated camp followers. For many of us, it’s simply difficult to keep or even perceive other animals in the urban jungle. Yet, even as we are increasingly distanced from real animals, we find ourselves confronted with ever more images of them, cartoonish perhaps, but unavoidable. The popularity of pets, animal films, TV shows, and books suggests that interaction with animals derives from a deeply rooted human need. Recent findings that companion animals contribute positively to many people’s physical and emotional health do not in themselves explain why animals exert such effects; rather, they suggest that animals (at least, some species) have long been associated with human well-being. The same goes for the simple pleasures so many of us derive from observing and interacting with animals. ‘Pleasure’ is not something that natural selection doles out without a reason – and we would expect that reason to be intimately connected with maximising fitness. When it comes to evolution, pleasure is deployed as bait as much as for immediate reward. The question then is simply this: what do people get from their animal-watching? And can evolution help explain this powerful yearning to observe other creatures? The science of why so many of us watch animals still remains largely unexplored. One of my earliest research projects as a graduate student in zoology at the University of Wisconsin was titled ‘Who Watches Who at the Zoo?’ I sat in front of a naturalistic exhibit of a family group of lion-tailed macaque monkeys (adult male, adult female, a juvenile and an infant) and pretended to watch them while, in fact, recording the conversations among zoo visitors about the monkeys. The results were quite clear: men focused on the ‘other’ adult macaque male (‘Look at that big guy!’), women paid particular attention to the adult female, as well as the infant (‘Look, honey, there’s the mommy and her baby!’), while children looked especially at their simian counterpart (‘How cute, there’s a tiny little monkey!’). One plausible explanation is that people, at least some of the time, look at animals – non-human primates in particular – as reflections, albeit distorted, of themselves. This is true across many cultures: animals are widely – perhaps universally – used to signify various human ‘types’, such as the trickster, the wise one, the diligent worker, the brave warrior, etc. Victorian society, especially after Charles Darwin, was typically disconcerted by the obvious similarities between human beings and various non-human primates. ‘Descended from monkeys?’ the wife of the Bishop of Worcester was reported to have exclaimed in 1860. ‘Let us hope that it is not true. But if it is true, let us hope that it doesn’t become widely known!’ Well, it is true, and widely known, at least among those not benighted by religious fundamentalism. So urban (and urbane) an observer as the German philosopher Walter Benjamin noted the potential for mutual recognition between human and animal, with results not altogether different from those of the Bishop’s wife. ‘In an aversion to animals,’ he wrote in 1928, ‘the predominant feeling is fear of being recognised by them through contact. The horror that stirs deep in man is an obscure awareness that in him something lives so akin to the animal that it might be recognised.’ But horror isn’t the typical response to looking at animals. I’m probably somewhere on the abnormally obsessive tail of the normal curve when it comes to enthusiasm for watching animals. But I’m definitely not alone when it comes to deriving delight just from seeing other living creatures, especially free-living ones. we are living, breathing, perspiring, seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, eating, defecating, urinating, copulating, child-rearing, and ultimately dying animals ourselves Berger has lamented that ‘the look between animal and man’ – a cross-species connection that might have played a crucial role in the development of human society – has been extinguished by our loss of contact with living animals in industrial society. I’m not so sure. Urban wildlife is actually fairly abundant, although species diversity is regrettably lacking: there are pigeons, rats, cockroaches, and – depending on location – various kinds of gulls. Coyotes and raccoons are surprisingly frequent even in our great cities, but they aren’t typically seen. Even in urban India, there really are sacred cows (usually emaciated and pitiable) and macaque monkeys that are sometimes downright dangerous. Birdwatching is a well-populated hobby that is generally doing better than the birds themselves. And visits to zoos and aquariums are up, as the standards of animal-keeping in such places are also better than ever. What used to be concrete floors and iron bars are increasingly replaced by naturalistic habitats, in which the animals sometimes breed, occasionally lead semi-normal lives, and provide visitors (still disproportionately skewed toward children) an opportunity to watch the animals, perhaps stirrings some universal human neurons dating back to our lengthy sojourn on the African savannah. A visitor at Dudley Zoo in England, 2013. Photo by Martin Parr/Magnum This suggests some of the evolutionary underpinnings of the human penchant for animal-watching. First, that we are living, breathing, perspiring, seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, eating, defecating, urinating, copulating, child-rearing, and ultimately dying animals ourselves. It is plausible that deep in the human psyche there resides the simple yet profound recognition of a relationship between Us and Them. ‘We be of one blood, ye and I,’ was the incantation taught to Mowgli in Rudyard Kipling’s memorable Jungle Book collections (1894-5). It confirmed the jungle boy’s connection with his non-human caretakers, friends and relatives. Perhaps it is ‘only natural’ that we, animals ourselves, reach out to other creatures. Even if we can’t talk to them à la Doctor Dolittle, or share the most intimate aspects of our lives, like Mowgli, at least we can lose – more likely, find – ourselves in watching them. What is more, during most of our evolutionary (and recent) past, our well-being – survival, even – depended on relationships to other animals, many of which were predators, with us as their prey. This alone would have generated a potent selective advantage to those of our ancestors who were attuned to the presence as well as the habits of other beasts, especially large and dangerous ones such as sabre-toothed cats, cave bears, dire wolves, hyaenodons and the like – suggesting that behind Benjamin’s ‘horror’ and ‘aversion’ lurks something less highfalutin than the epistemics of ego-deflating mutual recognition: self-preservation. Thus, it might be no coincidence that people are especially attuned to the doings of predators. As Dorothy said in The Wizard of Oz: ‘Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!’ Sometimes, of course, this attentiveness is more a fear than a fascination; in his book Snakes, Sunrises, and Shakespeare (2014), the ecologist Gordon Orians points out that, cross-culturally, people share an innate fear of snakes and spiders, whereas avoidance of, for example, electric sockets must be learnt. Conversely, whether as occasional predators or scavengers – or both – our ancestors doubtless preyed upon other animals, and this would have selected for attentiveness to what possible meals might be had at the expense of our fellow creatures, a focus that would have included sensitivity to what was nearby, where they could be found, and how they might best be approached. Careful animal-watching would have thus been doubly rewarded: not only rendering us less liable to end up as prey but also more likely to feed successfully on others. Given the antiquity of domestication – including, but not limited to, dogs – it is clear that early humans also depended on various ‘kept’ animals as beasts of burden, sources of eggs, milk, meat, and so forth, as well as perhaps employing them as colleagues in hunting, early warning detectors sensitive to the approach of enemies, even providing warmth – not only via their skins and fur, but also their literal bodies, cuddling closely with our Pleistocene ancestors during those long, challenging Ice Age nights. There are many ways of looking at animals. A veterinarian looks for signs of illness versus health. A city-dweller might well look with fascination at red-tailed hawks or peregrine falcons nesting on a ledge of a high-rise building, but with indifference at their pigeon prey (‘winged rats’), not to mention horror at cockroaches or actual four-legged, long-tailed rats. A cat can, ostensibly, look at a king and presumably vice versa, but we are not supposed to look a gift horse in the mouth. (By the way, as a long-time horse-keeper, I can affirm that there is no such thing as a gift horse, since our equine cousins require hay, vitamins, hoof care, immunisations and regular veterinary attention. Therefore, by all means, look in the mouth of any proffered horse!) A hunter looks at her prey with a mixture of excitement, hard-eyed calculation and determination; the wildlife photographer eyes his subject in a manner not altogether different. Watch the birdy. Photo by Nigel Roddis/Reuters But for sheer pleasure, there is little doubt that watching birds tops the list. Despite their dinosaur origins (which means that our most recent common ancestor was a Carboniferous-era reptile, from roughly 300 million years ago), birds are the most assiduously watched wild animals and for good reason: many of them are fantastically lovely, brightly coloured or gloriously iridescent. Mammals, sad to say, are comparatively drab, not surprising given that birds have colour vision whereas most mammals – with the notable exception of primates such as ourselves – see only shades of grey or brown. In addition (and I say this as not only a fellow mammal but as one whose main empirical research has involved mammals), birds are more vibrant, more alive, and thus more rewarding to watch than are our closer, hair-bearing, milk-making kin, and much more so than amphibians or reptiles, which might well frustrate the watcher by doing absolutely nothing, for minutes – even hours – at a time. ‘Hope,’ observed the poet Emily Dickinson, ‘is the thing with feathers’ Even when they aren’t flying, darting, soaring, walking, dabbling, paddling, or hopping about, birds are rewarding to watch. ‘The invariable mark of wisdom,’ wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1836, ‘is to see the miraculous in the common.’ Consider some of the more ordinary North American birds: the shimmering green head of a mallard drake, the delicate upturned bill of an avocet, the knockout gorgeous motley of the painted bunting. Such precisely defined shape and colour can be almost too much to register dispassionately. When it comes to watching birds – and really seeing them – even the ‘common’ emerges as more than miraculous, or downright shocking. Seeing can be disbelieving. Seeing the comical red-white-and-black clown-face of a European goldfinch – really seeing it, not just absent-mindedly noting its existence and maybe jotting it down on a checklist – challenges our sense of the mundane. As does the ethereal, ghostly whiteness of a snowy owl, or for that matter, the gleaming coat and bright yellow bill of a starling (a troublesome species, introduced from the UK and which we in North America are supposed to despise because they crowd out native species), or the trim, forked tail of a barn swallow. These perceptions challenge our sense of the mundane. And to see such animals – ‘ordinary’ only to the jaded and obtuse – is to experience a new appreciation for reality itself, since their vitality not only mirrors but magnifies our own. ‘Hope,’ observed the poet Emily Dickinson in 1891, ‘is the thing with feathers.’ This seeing – real seeing – of animals has inspired a dizzying world of artistic creativity, in a line that leads from the Chauvet Cave paintings through to the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries of the Middle Ages, and including John James Audubon’s bird portraits as well as Henri Rousseau’s haunting painting The Dream (1910). The poet too can be a deeply passionate observer, as in Christopher Smart’s 18th-century poem ‘Jubilate Agno’. Written in a religious fervour while he was imprisoned as a madman, it starts with a litany of animals before declaring an exuberant admiration for Smart’s cat, Jeoffry: For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes. For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life. For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him. For he is of the tribe of Tiger. … For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery. … For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest. For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion. … For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in complete cat. Perhaps my favourite animal poem is by Rainer Maria Rilke. The story goes that in 1905 Rilke had been hired by the sculptor Auguste Rodin as his amanuensis, but one day confessed that he was suffering from writer’s block. Rodin advised: ‘Go to the zoo [actually, Paris’s Jardin des Plantes], and observe an animal.’ ‘For how long?’ asked the young poet. ‘Watch it until you see it. A few months might be sufficient.’ Rilke followed this advice, and eventually produced what is generally considered his greatest poem: ‘The Panther’. One thing I love about this story (as well as about the poem itself), is that it speaks to the difference between the scientific discipline in which I was trained as a graduate student (ethology) and a competing, and in my opinion, far lesser scientific enterprise (comparative psychology). Comparative psychology’s approach to studying animals traditionally takes place in a laboratory and involves placing individuals from a limited range of animal species – usually lab rats or pigeons – in a Skinner Box, with the goal of observing some measure of output: frequency of bar-pressing, latency to begin doing so, and so forth. It certainly does not entail watching the animal itself, once its behaviour has been appropriately ‘shaped’, or it has learnt what the experimenter wants it to do. By contrast, ethology – the biological study of animal behaviour – requires that animals be observed whenever possible in their natural environments (if unavoidable, in a simulacrum). Most of all, ethology insists that they are observed rather than being measured while performing an arbitrary, imposed act such as bar-pressing. For this, even a few months are never sufficient. Ethology is the scientific version of good, old-fashioned animal-watching. Thus, although the immense renown achieved by the primatologist Jane Goodall, one of the giants of ethological research, was largely due to her notable discoveries, the reality is that these findings were only possible because she spent literally thousands of hours observing chimpanzees in their natural environments, carefully watching their every move. At ethology’s core is Rodin’s and Rilke’s deep, mindful, detailed and patient observation, watching one’s subjects with exquisite care and attention in order to penetrate their world, rather than forcibly adjusting them to ours. The naturalist Henry Beston captured this in 1928, in what I believe to be the finest paragraph ever written about animals, and the best advice I know for watching them: We need another and a wiser… concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilisation surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronise them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth. My advice to all would-be animal-watchers is, in E M Forster’s words ‘only connect… live in fragments no longer’. Simply open your eyes, ideally with benefit of binoculars, to the reality of animal lives separate from your own. Prepare to lose yourself in one of the most positive ‘trips’ available this side of hallucinogenic drugs, drawn through the lenses and deposited into the world of the animal being watched, losing yourself while expanding – however briefly – into another’s life, resonant of your own, while also ineffably different. ‘There is a crack in everything,’ sang Leonard Cohen. ‘That’s how the light gets in.’ Watching animals opens that crack just a little wider, and through it we get a better view – not only of animals, but of ourselves.

Canada's own Mitch Gagnon will compete on home turf for the third time in a row when he takes on Issei Tamura in a Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) bantamweight bout at UFC 158: "St. Pierre vs. Diaz" on March 16 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The match up will likely air on the UFC 158 preliminary card, which is expected to be broadcast on FX and Facebook, with the main card airing on pay-per-view (PPV). "Showdown" Joe Ferraro of Sportsnet reported news of the 135-pound contest via Twitter on Saturday. UFC officials have yet to officially confirm the bout. Gagnon (9-2) has earned all nine of his professional wins by way of submission, most recently tapping out Walel Watson with a rear-naked choke at UFC 152 for his first UFC victory. After dropping his UFC debut to Brian Caraway in the UFC 149 "Fight of the Night" last July, the 28-year-old rebounded with the 69-second submission of Watson. Tamura (7-3) will enter UFC 158 on the heels of his first career knockout loss to Raphael Assuncao at UFC on FUEL TV 4 last July. The defeat evened Tamura's record inside the Octagon to 1-1, and the Japanese fighter will look to avoid dropping two in a row when he competes in Canada for the first time. The 28-year-old has yet to be submitted in his 10-fight professional career. He will look to keep that feat in tact against a submission specialist in Gagnon. UFC 158: "St-Pierre vs. Diaz" goes down March 16 from the Bell Centre in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. A welterweight championship grudge match between Georges St-Pierre and Nick Diaz serves as the main event while crucial 170-pound contests of Carlos Condit vs. Rory MacDonald and Johnny Hendricks vs. Jake Ellenberger fill the undercard.

LOREN ELLIOTT via Getty Images People browse firearms in an exhibit hall at the NRA's 2018 convention in Dallas, Texas. So-called “red flag” laws, a tool to temporarily keep firearms away from people whose families think they pose public danger, have gained renewed attention in recent weeks as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle search for middle-ground responses to the recent wave of mass shootings. As of this week, supporters of those laws can point to new evidence that they may actually work. Research published Tuesday from the University of California, Davis, School of Medicine’s Violence Prevention Research Program found in a study of 21 people who were either blocked from purchasing guns or forced to give up the ones they already owned under California’s 2016 red flag law that none went on to shoot themselves or others. “[T]hese cases suggest that this urgent, individualized intervention can play a role in efforts to prevent mass shootings, in health care settings and elsewhere,” the authors wrote in the study, which was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. After courts provided the researchers with records for 159 of the 414 people targeted by California’s red flag law between 2016 and 2018, they narrowed in on the 21 cases in which both the court order was actually applied and the at-risk person had firearm access. The 21 subjects included a number of teenagers, including a 14-year-old boy reported by his school after he posted videos of himself using guns and making racist remarks and favorable comments about school shootings online. His father owned a 9-mm semiautomatic pistol and a .30-caliber rifle. Several other subjects in the study had threatened violence against co-workers, family members, medical professionals and other authorities. Though it’s impossible to know how those individuals would have behaved had the courts not taken action, as the researchers acknowledge, data shows mass shooters often exhibit the behavior that prompts a red flag order. According to Department of Homeland Security statistics from recentyears, nearly every mass shooter made threats of violence prior to carrying out their attacks. Previous research into red flag laws has not delved into their efficacy of preventing mass shootings, the study noted. Until now, studies had mainly explored whether the laws were effective at preventing suicide. A 2018 report from the journal Psychiatric Services, for example, found that gun suicides declined significantly in Connecticut and Indiana after they implemented red flag laws. This study comes as the California legislature weighs 10 bills that would strengthen the state’s red flag law, including efforts to expand a person’s firearm ban from one year to five, broaden who can report a person and better train police on how to implement the law. California was the first of 17 states and the District of Columbia to pass some type of red flag law, and it remains one of the strictest. In a rare break from gun lobbying groups, President Donald Trump said earlier this month that he supported more red flag laws.

Introduction These ques­tions are designed to probe var­i­ous aspects of the LDS Church’s his­to­ry and truth-claims. The list was made for 1) inves­ti­ga­tors to ask the mis­sion­ar­ies, 2) active mem­bers to ask them­selves, or 3) those expe­ri­enc­ing a faith tran­si­tion to ask their par­ents or eccle­si­as­ti­cal lead­ers. The major­i­ty of links pro­vid­ed are to LDS approved sources or to rel­a­tive­ly neu­tral infor­ma­tion repos­i­to­ries (such as wikipedia). If any ques­tion con­tains incor­rect infor­ma­tion or is mis­lead­ing in any way, please con­tact me, and I will fix it. Approaches to difficult questions One gen­er­al way to deal with dif­fi­cult ques­tions is to sug­gest that God has been dis­pens­ing infor­ma­tion “line upon line, pre­cept upon pre­cept, here a lit­tle and there a lit­tle” (2 Nephi 28:30). On the oth­er hand, we expect to see con­sis­ten­cy in the unfold­ing of God’s hand­i­work because God “is the same yes­ter­day and today and for­ev­er” (1 Nephi 10:18), “truth is knowl­edge of things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come” (D&C 93:24), and his house “…is a house of order, saith the Lord God, and not a house of con­fu­sion.” (D&C 132:8). Incon­sis­ten­cies and dif­fi­cul­ties may also be chalked up to the short­com­ings and mis­takes of men. On the one hand, the Lord (appar­ent­ly) declared, through Joseph Smith: What I the Lord have spo­ken, I have spo­ken, and I excuse not myself; and though the heav­ens and the earth pass away, my word shall not pass away, but shall all be ful­filled, whether by mine own voice or by the voice of my ser­vants, it is the same. Joseph Smith also empha­sized “there is no error in the rev­e­la­tions which I have taught.” On the oth­er hand, he remind­ed us “I nev­er told you I was per­fect” and “a prophet was a prophet only when he was act­ing as such.” With caveats in place (i.e., rev­e­la­tion from God is per­fect and all mis­takes are from men), it is triv­ial, then, to take any event, doc­trine, or teach­ing that is prob­lem­at­ic and attribute it to the fail­ures of men while attribut­ing every­thing faith-pro­mot­ing and won­der­ful to God’s divine influ­ence. This is a tremen­dous­ly pow­er­ful par­ti­tion­ing algo­rithm. Its only weak­ness may be that it is too powerful—such an algo­rithm seems capa­ble of diviniz­ing any orga­ni­za­tion or indi­vid­ual to which it may be applied. Questions Joseph Smith’s Polygamy The Book of Abraham In his trans­la­tion of the fac­sim­i­les, Joseph point­ed to spe­cif­ic char­ac­ters and gave a spe­cif­ic trans­la­tion. How­ev­er, the char­ac­ters on the fac­sim­i­les (not the vignettes, but the char­ac­ters describ­ing the vignettes) have been trans­lat­ed by both BYU and non-Mor­mon schol­ars. The Book of Abra­ham lds​.org essay con­cedes: “None of the char­ac­ters on the papyrus frag­ments men­tioned Abraham’s name or any of the events record­ed in the book of Abra­ham. Mor­mon and non-Mor­mon Egyp­tol­o­gists agree that the char­ac­ters on the frag­ments do not match the trans­la­tion giv­en in the book of Abra­ham…” Why do the trans­la­tions of the fac­sim­i­le char­ac­ters not match up? The Book of Mormon Richard Bush­man, a well-known Mor­mon his­to­ri­an, recent­ly stat­ed: … there is phras­ing everywhere–long phras­es that if you google them you will find them in 19th cen­tu­ry writ­ings. The the­ol­o­gy of the Book of Mor­mon is very much 19th cen­tu­ry the­ol­o­gy, and it reads like a 19th cen­tu­ry under­stand­ing of the Hebrew Bible as an Old Tes­ta­ment … The num­ber of sim­i­lar­i­ties with ear­ly 1800s thought is exten­sive. Spiritual Confirmation and Priesthood Guidance Joseph Smith and the Restoration Adam and Eve The Church teach­es in 8 cur­rent man­u­als that Adam lived at approx­i­mate­ly 4000 BC; Joseph Smith claimed that Adam and Eve walked out of the Gar­den of Eden into Mis­souri, USA, and mod­ern lead­ers affirm the phys­i­cal, lit­er­al real­i­ty of Adam and Eve. In addi­tion, restored LDS scrip­ture describes Adam and Eve till­ing the ground imme­di­ate­ly upon their explu­sion from the Gar­den of Eden (see Moses 4:29). Giv­en that agri­cul­ture was not invent­ed until about 10,000 years ago, it appears that all accounts of Adam and Eve from LDS prophet­ic sources place them some­where between 4,000 BCE and 10,000 BCE (in Mis­souri, USA). How­ev­er, many data points sup­port a migra­tion out of Africa begin­ning about 70,000 years ago. Abo­rig­i­nal Aus­tralians like­ly migrat­ed to Aus­tralia about 50,000 years ago, and exten­sive evi­dence shows migra­tions into the Pacif­ic islands around 20,000 years ago. In addi­tion, all human genet­ic sequence data and infer­ences about viable pop­u­la­tion size sug­gest that there was nev­er a time when there were only two humans on earth (exam­ple 1, exam­ple 2). In what fash­ion was Adam “the first man of all men” (Moses 1:34) and the “pri­mal par­ent of our race” (accord­ing to the 1909 First Pres­i­den­cy State­ment) respec­tive to the Aus­tralian Abo­rig­ines and Pacif­ic Islanders? Are those peo­ple descen­dants of Adam and Eve? If not, what makes Adam and Eve their “par­ent”? If Adam and Eve were lit­er­al peo­ple, what is one pos­si­ble time or place they could have lived that is also com­pat­i­ble with our under­stand­ing of the human migra­tion data? Fair­Mor­mon acknowl­edges that there was like­ly not a glob­al flood 4,400 years ago. If the Gar­den of Eden real­ly was in Mis­souri, how did Adam and Eve migrate to the Mid­dle East? If Adam nev­er actu­al­ly lived in Mis­souri, then what are we to make of Adam-ondi-Ahman?

Finger rectal exams have always been part of annual checks for men to screen for prostate cancer but now researchers are questioning the method's value. Is it time to abandon it? According to a study published in the journal Current Medical Research and Opinion, it depends on the situation but most cases support the use of more modern methods of screening for prostate cancer. "Our findings will likely be welcomed by patients and doctors alike," said Dr. Ryan Terlecki, one of the study's authors. As the oldest and most commonly used method to screen for prostate cancer, rectal exams entail the insertion of a gloved, lubricated finger into the rectum to feel for hard or bumpy areas on the prostate gland. The result of the rectal exam determines whether a man should undergo further testing for the disease. It is no secret that rectal exams are uncomfortable. And because they are invasive, they deter a number of men from getting tested for prostate cancer. What Terlecki and colleagues wanted to know was whether or not a finger rectal exam is still needed given the existence of more accurate testing methods for prostate cancer, like a blood test that looks for a prostate-specific antigen (PSA), which will be in high levels in those with the disease. To find out, they assessed results from a national screening trial where 38,340 men underwent rectal exams and PSA tests annually for three years and were part of a follow-up program for up to 13 years. The researchers also reviewed medical literature on the topic. Of particular interest to them were 5,064 men who got normal results on PSA tests but "abnormal" ones on rectal exams. And out of these subjects, Just 2 percent had what is called clinically relevant prostate cancer, which would require monitoring or treatment. According to the researchers, rectal exams do help in identifying a certain subset of men with prostate cancer but they are also unnecessary for a large number of males. Before 2012, men over the age of 50 (40, if you're African-American) were advised to get both a rectal exam and a PSA test every year. This was before the U.S. Preventive Services Task Forces recommended regular testing for PSA because the method was shown to cause overtreatment of slow-growing but non-harmful tumors. There was no advice regarding rectal exams, which is why confusion persists today. Previous studies, however, have shown that PSA tests outperform rectal exams in spotting significant disease, detecting 680 cases where rectal exams only identified 317 cases. On the other end, Terlecki said that rectal exams may be beneficial to patients who register abnormal PSA levels but are not comfortable with biopsies. If a rectal exam yields abnormal results, then they may be likelier to proceed with the procedure knowing that something is indeed wrong. Whether rectal exams or PSA tests should be used then depends on a man's situation. Aside from simply weighing the pros and cons of rectal exams versus PSA tests, men should also talk to their doctors about needing to screen for prostate cancer in the first place. According to the American Cancer Society, prostate cancer can be serious but most of those diagnosed with the disease will not die from it. Still, it's the second leading cause of cancer deaths in men in the United States, with one man in every 39 dying from the disease. Photo: Denis Mihailov | Flickr ⓒ 2018 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.

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General Election 10 generally went the predicted way, albeit for a few surprises such as Labour not being decimated even after a major scandal / poor term, and New Britain’s electoral failure. As predicted though, liberal parties heavily gained. One of these heavy gains was in my constituency of Cambridgeshire. Eelsmaj, the incumbent Cambridgeshire MP proudly boasted how his majority in votes was 11x that of my majority back in GE8 (his majority was 44k). Furthermore, during the Single Market referendum, Leave won by roughly 87000 votes. So going into the election, Cambridgeshire was a Tory and Leave constituency. Not exactly Liberal Democrat territory, who had made no secret of their opinions on Brexit. However, the election result for Cambridgeshire shows a very different future. With a majority of 76,000 (more than twice of all the votes for the Conservatives and Labour), I had won the election. This was not a close, tight race. I had won the election by a super majority, in a Leave constituency. This is a big deal. So what does this show? It shows that people are waking up to the reality that a future outside the EU, with a poorly negotiated deal, is a future that they don’t want. This shows that I, and my other Liberal Democrat MP’s have a mandate to continue the fight for a final referendum on the deal. I am not ignoring the will of the people, but obeying the will of Cambridgeshire. We are currently in the stages of appealing the Electoral Commission’s decision to block the final referendum to the Supreme Court, and I will keep on fighting for a final referendum both through the legal system with our challenge, and through grassroots campaigning.

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The government has defended itself as new figures confirm almost 200,000 houses remain empty around the country during a homelessness crisis. In the Dail, Labour leader Brendan Howlin accused Fine Gael of "pulling rubber levers" which were having no effect on opening up more homes to families in chronic need. Homelessness is the "crushing issue of our time" and the minority government's lack of progress in tackling it is causing alarm, he said. "We can't in good conscience allow a situation to stand where there are 27 vacant homes for every person in emergency accommodation," Mr Howlin said. "We need to identify them - why are they vacant? Can we bring them back (into use)? Can we incentivise those who own them to bring them back? "That is the sort of concrete measures we need." Earlier, homelessness charity Simon Communities said 198,358 homes lie empty in Ireland. There are currently 7,167 men, women and children languishing in emergency accommodation, many without proper facilities to even cook a family meal. The latest figures show almost 13% of Ireland's total housing stock is unoccupied - twice normal levels in other countries. Jobs Minister Richard Bruton defended the government's record, saying "very active work" was ongoing to build more houses and bring more empty homes back into use. "No one in government denies we have a very serious problem in housing and a huge effort is being focused against strict timelines on action in this area and we are open to other suggestions as well," he told the Dail. Mr Bruton said a vacant housing register should be up and running "within weeks" while a series of initiatives aimed at building thousands of new social housing units are either under way or in the pipeline. But Simon Communities said the status quo is unacceptable. It released figures which show: In Cork there are 269 adults living in emergency accommodation, while there are 21,287 empty homes. In Dublin, there are 3,247 adults in emergency accommodation and 35,293 empty homes. In Limerick there are 252 adults living in emergency accommodation and 8,463 empty homes. Niamh Randall, spokeswoman for the charity, said it was "shocking" there are so many people without homes and, at the same time, so many homes without people. "The use of Compulsory Purchase Orders and the introduction of Compulsory Leasing Orders (CLOs) should be considered given the devastating scale of the housing and homeless crisis," she said. "CLOs would enable local authorities to seek permission to force a lease on the owner of an empty property and then undertake refurbishment costs to make the property ready for letting. "The property could then be used as social housing and the rent paid could potentially be used to offset the cost of refurbishment."

US President Donald Trump has designated North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism, triggering new sanctions against Kim Jong-un's regime.

Loyalty points, concert tickets and in-game items will soon appear on a new protocol built on the monero network. Called Tari, this new digital assets protocol will help support non-fungible tokens – tokens with unique properties, such as tickets with ownership information (think CryptoKitties) – said co-founder Naveen Jain. Monero project lead Riccardo Spagni, more commonly known as fluffypony, and entrepreneur Dan Teree are also part of the founding team, Jain told CoinDesk. Tari’s goal is to “support any kind of digital assets.” For example, one use case for the protocol would be to allow digital asset issuers to participate in the secondary market – meaning resales in particular. However, the protocol can also support items in video games or even native assets, Jain said, adding: “If you have a decentralized distributed trustless system that supports non-fungible tokens that enforces the rule sets around digital assets, that changes the game because now you have an opportunity for consumers to trade those digital assets.” Jain said he believes Tari’s approach to digital assets is unique for a variety of reasons, noting that “we don’t want to make a lot of future statements, we just want to prove ourselves along the way and we think that’s a great way to build trust and build our community.” He continued, saying “I think what sets our token apart is we’re maniacally focused on our use case. This isn’t an ethereum competitor.” More broadly, he believes protocols and networks looking at specific use cases may be more useful than general-purpose ones. “I think an important point to make in terms of how our space is evolving too -do we build a protocol that’s useful for every possible use case or do we build one that’s focused on one type of use case,” Jain concluded. Riccardo Spagni, Naveen Jain and Dan Teree image courtesy of Tari

NEW HAVEN, Conn. (Project Syndicate) — In their new book “The Incredible Shrinking Alpha,” Larry E. Swedroe and Andrew L. Berkin describe an investment environment populated by increasingly sophisticated analysts who rely on big data, powerful computers, and scholarly research. With all this competition, “the hurdles to achieving alpha [returns above a risk-adjusted benchmark — and thus a measure of success in picking individual investments] are getting higher and higher.” That conclusion raises a key question: Will alpha eventually go to zero for every imaginable investment strategy? More fundamentally, is the day approaching when, thanks to so many smart people and smarter computers, financial markets really do become perfect, and we can just sit back, relax, and assume that all assets are priced correctly? This imagined state of affairs might be called the financial singularity, analogous to the hypothetical future technological singularity, when computers replace human intelligence. The financial singularity implies that all investment decisions would be better left to a computer program, because the experts with their algorithms have figured out what drives market outcomes and reduced it to a seamless system. Many believe that we are almost there. Even legendary investors like Warren Buffett, it is argued, are not really outperforming the market. In a recent paper, “Buffett’s Alpha,” Andrea Frazzini and David Kabiller of AQR Capital Management and Lasse Pedersen of Copenhagen Business School, conclude that Buffett is not generating significantly positive alpha if one takes account of certain lesser-known risk factors that have weighed heavily in his portfolio. The implication is that Buffet’s genius could be replicated by a computer program that incorporates these factors. If that were true, investors would abandon, en masse, their efforts to ferret out mispricing in the market, because there wouldn’t be any. Market participants would rationally assume that every stock price is the true expected present value of future cash flows, with the appropriate rate of discount, and that those cash flows reflect fundamentals that everyone understands the same way. Investors’ decisions would diverge only because of differences in their personal situation. For example, an automotive engineer might not buy automotive stocks — and might even short them — as a way to hedge the risk to his or her own particular type of human capital. Indeed, according to a computer crunching big data, this would be an optimal decision. There is a long-recognized problem with such perfect markets: No one would want to expend any effort to figure out what oscillations in prices mean for the future. Thirty-five years ago, in their classic paper, “On the Impossibility of Informationally Efficient Markets,” Sanford Grossman and Joseph Stiglitz presented this problem as a paradox: Perfectly efficient markets require the effort of smart money to make them so; but if markets were perfect, smart money would give up trying. The Grossman-Stiglitz conundrum seems less compelling in the financial singularity if we can imagine that computers direct all the investment decisions. Although alpha may be vanishingly small, it still represents enough profit to keep the computers running. But the real problem with this vision of financial singularity is not the Grossman-Stiglitz conundrum; it is that real-world markets are nowhere close to it. Computer enthusiasts are excited by things like the blockchain used by Bitcoin (covered on an education website called Singularity University, in a section dramatically titled Exponential Finance). But the futurists’ financial world bears no resemblance to today’s financial world. After all, the financial singularity implies that all prices would be based on such things as optimally projected future corporate profits and the correlation of profits with expected technological innovations and long-term demographic changes. But the smart money hardly ever talks in such ethereal terms. In this context, it is difficult not to think of China’s recent stock-market plunge. News accounts depict hordes of emotional people trading on hunch and superstition. That looks a lot more like reality than all the talk of impending financial singularity. Markets seem to be driven by stories, as I emphasized in my book “Irrational Exuberance.” There are stories of great new eras and of looming depressions. There are fundamental stories about technology and declining resources. And there are stories about politics and bizarre conspiracies. No one knows if these stories are true, but they take on a life of their own. Sometimes they go viral. When one has a heart-to-heart talk with many seemingly rational people, they turn out to have crazy theories. These people influence markets, because all other investors must reckon with them; and their craziness is not going away anytime soon. Maybe Buffett’s past investing style can be captured in a trading algorithm today. But that does not necessarily detract from his genius. Indeed, the true source of his success may consist in his understanding of when to abandon one method and devise another. The idea of financial singularity may seem inspiring; but it is no less illusory than the rational Utopia that inspired generations of central planners. Human judgment, good and bad, will drive investment decisions and financial-market outcomes for the rest of our lives and beyond. This article has been published with the permission of Project Syndicate — The Mirage of the Financial Singularity.

Children and their caretakers walk by the remains of the Flower Branch Apartments fire that killed 7 and left about 100 homeless last month as they get out of school in Silver Spring, MD on Thursday September 01, 2016. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) Wendy Lopez started fifth grade Monday. On Tuesday, another nightmare. The school-loving 11-year-old’s days of reading and recess are followed by memories of chaos, screams of despair and the other lingering horrors of having her apartment blown apart by a gas explosion. “She was happy to be with her friends. She feels safer at school than at home,” said Wendy’s mother, Claudia Loayes, whose family lost everything they owned in last month’s explosion of a Silver Spring apartment complex that killed seven, including one of Wendy’s friends. “But she is still very scared. Any little sound, she says ‘What was that?’ ” In an interview, Loayes began to cry at the memory of the night she had to drag her daughter to safety through a hellscape of smoky rubble and walls of flame. The catastrophic blast, felt almost two miles away, was only the start of a shock wave that continues to roil the lives of survivors and witnesses, including the youngest ones. As the start of school introduced a welcome bit of routine almost three weeks after the catastrophe, the signs of trauma are clear in the children involved, both those who fled burning apartments and many more who watched from surrounding buildings as residents jumped from windows and parents dropped children to bystanders below. A bus drives by the remains of the Flower Branch Apartments fire. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) [Huge fire and explosion levels Maryland apartment complex] “There is a lot of PTSD stuff coming out, kids who have started wetting their beds, kids fighting, kids afraid to sleep at night,” said Elena Reis, the head of Silver Spring’s YMCA Youth and Family Services, which provides mental health services to low-income residents in the neighborhood. “And we know that a lot them who aren’t showing any symptoms now, we’ll be seeing it over time.” Schools, community groups and county agencies are scrambling to assist the displaced and the traumatized. At New Hampshire Estates Elementary School, administrators provided two dedicated buses to get 15 students to and from their temporary housing. Four extra psychologists, in addition to school counselors, visited the children in classrooms and watched them discreetly at lunch and recess. One kindergartner built — and then knocked over — a block tower complete with flames and a firefighter, according to Principal Bob Geiger. Another student asked to use the office to call home so he could make sure that his mom was okay. At nearby Oakview Elementary, the alarms for the usual first-week fire drill were silenced in favor of a pantomime version that wouldn’t trigger any panic. “No lights, no sounds yet,” Principal Jeffrey Cline said. “We’ll work up to that.” An emotional peak came Thursday, when the mother of one of the children who died in the blast showed up at New Hampshire Estates and asked to see her 8-year-old son’s classroom, according to Reis, whose agency works with a counseling program in the school. “His teacher was crying, too. It was very sad,” she said. “This is all going to take a long time.” [Two young fire victims were buddies ] The explosion, which investigators said was caused by a rapid gas leak in a basement utility room, injured more than 30 people and collapsed four floors of apartments. It took more than 100 firefighters to contain the blaze, and the site remains a scene of stark devastation. Loayes, a hotel housekeeper, said she, her daughter and a toddler she was watching for a friend were in bed but awake in their second-floor apartment that night when a boom shook the walls. Seconds later, there were cries of “Fire! Fire! Get out!” Loayes, who thought an earthquake had struck, gathered the children and bolted to the front door. But the front door was gone. So were the hallway stairs. Wendy panicked, pulled away and ran back into the apartment. The flames were rising on all sides now. Loayes said she doesn’t know if it was the rubble around her legs or terror that paralyzed her. “I couldn’t move. I just screamed, ‘Wendy! Wendy!’ ” she said, crying at the memory. “I prayed as I’ve never prayed before.” The flames were surrounding her when she finally heard Wendy call out that she was with Renaldo, Loayes’s partner. Loayes, still holding the toddler, scrambled down the debris pile and, finally, into the clear. Wendy and others from the building gathered outside. But two boys, including the 8-year-old who was Wendy’s playmate, never made it out of the basement. One of their mothers stood in the light of the fire screaming for her child. “Every time we go by there, I hear those screams,” said Loayes. Her family is living in a temporary apartment across the street. Their view of the blast site — where their former home is a gaping crater — is screened by another building. She is among many residents who walk out of their way to shield their kids from the blackened, jagged ruins. One woman keeps her blinds closed day and night. Many of those still living in the complex, even in undamaged buildings, remain on edge. Christy Canjura, 16, a junior and cross-country runner at Montgomery Blair High School, said firetrucks have come back three times since the explosion after rumors of another gas leak. She has evacuated each time. “You get anxious all over again,” said Canjura, who lives in the complex with her mother. “We’re still stuck here, basically like we’re waiting for another explosion.” Randy Carbajal, a painter from El Salvador, said his three children have refused to return to their old apartment, which is adjacent to the building that blew up. The family has been crowded in with Carbajal’s brother and sister-in-law, returning to their old home only once to retrieve clothes. The children, once avid cooks, are unnerved by the gas stove. “They are afraid to go into their own kitchen,” he said. Elba Rivas has been hearing similar stories since the day after the blast. A therapist at the Mary Center, a health nonprofit organization a block from the blast site, Rivas said her first clients were openly traumatized. Lately, parents are bringing children in with upset stomachs, difficulty breathing and other medical complaints. Doctors at the center have quickly referred them to the counseling staff. “It’s beginning to show up as physical symptoms,” she said. Maritza Quintanilla, who looked out after the explosion to see clothes flying through the air followed by columns of fire, has been taking her two boys for counseling at the Mary Center once a week since the incident. Although they still struggle at night — Andy, 5, trembles at every siren and won’t sleep alone — they have begun to ride their bikes and play outside again. Still, “I would like to move to a house,” said Gerardo, 12. “I think it will be safer in a house.” Rivas and other counselors lamented that more families aren’t coming in for therapy. They say mental health services can be a hard sell in immigrant neighborhoods, where counseling may not have been commonly accepted in their home countries. And many are still overwhelmed with putting their daily lives back together. “Right now, they are still in survival mode, figuring out where they are living and getting the kids to school,” Reis said. “If a mom has an hour to come in, she may need to use it to go through clothes for her children.” Alma Couverthie, director of organizing at CASA de Maryland, said she has been discouraged by the number of victims coming in for other assistance who are clearly in need of emotional help. “My concern is when I ask them, ‘Are you getting any therapy?’ The answer is ‘No, I don’t have anybody,’ ” Couverthie said. “The counselors in the schools are great, but that may be one counselor for hundreds of kids.” Loayes, Wendy’s mom, said she hadn’t seen a therapist, nor had her daughter, even though both were still clearly unnerved by the nightmarish events. “I have been asking God to help her,” Loayes said of Wendy. “I tell her that God has given us another chance and we’re never going to go through that again.” Luz Lazo contributed to this report.

The owner of department store chain John Lewis has warned that staff bonuses could be slashed this year, as the effects of a weaker pound start to sting. On Thursday, John Lewis Partnership, which also owns Waitrose, posted a near 5 per cent increase in total sales over the crucial Christmas period on the previous year’s figure, but issued a cautious outlook. “Although we expect to report profits up on last year, trading profit is under pressure,” said Charlie Mayfield, chairman of the group. “This reflects the greater changes taking place across the retail sector. We expect those to quicken, especially in the next 12 months as the effects of weaker sterling feed through,” he added. John Lewis department stores reported a 2.7 per cent rise in like-for-like sales in the six weeks to 31 December, while Waitrose enjoyed a 2.8 per cent rise over the period. But the company said that the strong trading performance, coupled with “the likelihood of higher reported profits” for the full year, “risk overshadowing the importance the board is placing on the challenging market outlook” and that bonuses would likely be reduced. John Lewis Partnership said that the exact level of compensation would be decided as usual in March, but that bonuses were likely to be “significantly lower than last year.“ John Lewis 2016 Christmas Advertising Campaign ‘Buster The Boxer' Show all 14 1 /14 John Lewis 2016 Christmas Advertising Campaign ‘Buster The Boxer' John Lewis 2016 Christmas Advertising Campaign ‘Buster The Boxer' John Lewis Launches 2016 Christmas Advertising Campaign ‘Buster The Boxer’ John Lewis 2016 Christmas Advertising Campaign ‘Buster The Boxer' John Lewis Launches 2016 Christmas Advertising Campaign ‘Buster The Boxer’ John Lewis 2016 Christmas Advertising Campaign ‘Buster The Boxer' John Lewis Launches 2016 Christmas Advertising Campaign ‘Buster The Boxer’ John Lewis 2016 Christmas Advertising Campaign ‘Buster The Boxer' John Lewis Launches 2016 Christmas Advertising Campaign ‘Buster The Boxer’ John Lewis 2016 Christmas Advertising Campaign ‘Buster The Boxer' John Lewis Launches 2016 Christmas Advertising Campaign ‘Buster The Boxer’ John Lewis 2016 Christmas Advertising Campaign ‘Buster The Boxer' John Lewis Launches 2016 Christmas Advertising Campaign ‘Buster The Boxer’ John Lewis 2016 Christmas Advertising Campaign ‘Buster The Boxer' John Lewis Launches 2016 Christmas Advertising Campaign ‘Buster The Boxer’ John Lewis 2016 Christmas Advertising Campaign ‘Buster The Boxer' John Lewis Launches 2016 Christmas Advertising Campaign ‘Buster The Boxer’ John Lewis 2016 Christmas Advertising Campaign ‘Buster The Boxer' John Lewis Launches 2016 Christmas Advertising Campaign ‘Buster The Boxer’ John Lewis 2016 Christmas Advertising Campaign ‘Buster The Boxer' John Lewis Launches 2016 Christmas Advertising Campaign ‘Buster The Boxer’ John Lewis 2016 Christmas Advertising Campaign ‘Buster The Boxer' John Lewis Launches 2016 Christmas Advertising Campaign ‘Buster The Boxer’ John Lewis 2016 Christmas Advertising Campaign ‘Buster The Boxer' John Lewis Launches 2016 Christmas Advertising Campaign ‘Buster The Boxer’ John Lewis 2016 Christmas Advertising Campaign ‘Buster The Boxer' John Lewis Launches 2016 Christmas Advertising Campaign ‘Buster The Boxer’ John Lewis 2016 Christmas Advertising Campaign ‘Buster The Boxer' John Lewis Launches 2016 Christmas Advertising Campaign ‘Buster The Boxer’ Figures from research firm Kantar Worldpanel showed this week that British shoppers spent almost half a billion pounds more on groceries in the lead up to Christmas than they did in the same period last year. But retailers have issued cautious outlooks and consumer confidence remains shaky. Shoppers are spending more on essentials and less on luxury items, a recent Barclaycard report found.

Tough economic times have prompted many Britons to seek out some unusual help in order to get ahead: elocution lessons. Calls to companies offering speech tutors have soared in recent years as job seekers worry their accents are holding them back and parents fret their children will miss out on places at elite private schools unless they speak "posh." Some tutors are working with children as young as two years old, often charging up to $90 an hour for their services. Private speech tutors have popped up by the dozens, offering a range of courses for children and adults. These modern-day versions of Professor Henry Higgins, the fictional linguist who taught Eliza Doolittle an upper-crust accent in My Fair Lady, belie the notion that Britain is moving away from its class system or that accents are fading away. If anything, today's economic slowdown has proven that both remain entrenched. Story continues below advertisement "It is a class statement, I suppose, in many ways," said Nathaniel McCullagh, who runs Simply Learning Tuition, which works on speaking techniques with young children in London, including many who come from wealthy immigrant families. Mr. McCullagh said the company's tutors often act as "role models" for children aged 3 or 4, giving them a chance to hear a proper English accent and learn to speak with confidence. The tutors "are not super-middle or upper-class or anything, they've just got nice neutral accents. That's a major part of the job," he said. Speaking properly can be critical to getting into top London preschools, he added. Like schools sought out by ambitious parents in New York and other big global cities, they often informally assess a child's speaking during the admission process. These schools will put a child in an interview situation and ask his or her name and age. "They expect a level of response and they are able to pick from the very brightest kids in the country," Mr. McCullagh said. "And the parents know this. The parents are paying tutors to go in and just socialize with their children to bring up their confidence levels, to get them used to talking to adult who aren't the parents." Teenagers, too, are being put into elocution lessons by their parents to help stamp out slang and improve their accents. One primary school in Essex is offering regular elocution lessons, hoping to teach students to say "computer" instead of "computa" and "aren't" instead of "ain't." Teachers say it has helped improve spelling, reading and writing and given children confidence they'll need to face a tough job market. For many adults, too, toning down a regional accent can make all the difference in getting a job or advancing in a career. In a study last year, thetutorpages.com, a private tutoring company based in London, said it received more requests for tutors teaching correct speech than for any other subject. And many of those asking for help said "they wanted to modify or lose their accents because they feared being ridiculed or held back in their careers," the company found. Robin Woolridge deals with many of those people all the time in his speech practice in Birmingham. The surrounding area is home to a particular "black country" accent, a dialect that originated in the West Midlands where gritty industry thickened the air with black smoke. Mr. Wooldridge said it is among the most difficult to understand in Britain and many who have it are eager to lose it. Story continues below advertisement "They want to soften it or make it more neutral," he said. While many of his clients have stunning qualifications on paper, and a number are professionals such as doctors and lawyers, they believe their accents are holding them back. Many critics argue starting tutoring toddlers in speech goes too far and that children should be left to learn on their own at that age. But others, like Matt Simandl, a part-time actor who also gives elocution lessons, say the reality is that people are judged on their accents. "People at the top speak with a kind of posh accent and so others want to speak like that," he said.

Coconino National Forest will temporarily close six large areas to public access beginning Wednesday, May 23rd at 8 a.m. due to fire danger and for public safety. IN-DEPTH: Arizona's wildfires Areas outside of the closures will remain in Stage 2 Fire Restrictions. RELATED: What happens if you start a wildfire in Arizona? Of these areas, four are located in the Flagstaff Ranger District, one in the Mogollon Rim Ranger District, and one in the Red Rock Ranger District. The areas are: Flagstaff Ranger District San Francisco Peaks/Mt. Elden area Kelly Canyon area Fay Canyon/Fisher Point area Mormon Mountain area Mogollon Rim Ranger District Mogollon Rim area south of state Route 87 Red Rock Ranger District Fossil Creek area Other park areas in Arizona are also restricted. For details and maps of these specific closure areas and the boundaries, please click here. Several other fires are burning around the state. Months ago, state officials warned of a busy wildfire season -- one that has already proved to be dangerous and destructive. The Tinder Fire that scorched more than 16,000 acres near Happy Jack, Ariz., destroyed nearly 90 structures. An illegal campfire was the cause of the fire that started in late April. A firefighter's home was also destroyed in the Bluff Fire that sparked near Walker, Ariz.

Teaching statistics in a spectacular and humorous way. It seems impossible, however, Swedish professor Hans Rosling (67) proofs it isn’t. His mission: to correct our outdated worldview. Rosling passed away February 2017, a little over year since OneWorld’s interview. Bio Hans Rosling Hans Rosling was born in 1948 in the Swedish city of Uppsala. He studied statistics and medicine in Sweden and India. Later he worked as a doctor in Mozambique, where he discovered a rare paralysis disease. He researched the disease for twenty years in remote areas of Africa, and received his doctorate on the topic in 1986. Rosling has promoted scientific cooperation with universities in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin-America. He initiated new courses on global health and co-authored a textbook on this topic which emphasized the importance of a fact-based worldview. Rosling made several documentaries on global statistics for the BBC, one of them being Don’t Panic –The Truth About Population. Together with his son and daughter-in-law he started the Gapminder Foundation in 2005. Among other things the foundation develops software to create interactive infographics with, which has been awarded multiple prizes. In 2012, Time Magazine named Rosling among the 100 most influential people in the world. “Let’s start the world!”, he calls out, and on the screen a bunch of colored dots, representing the countries of the world, are set in motion. With a self-made pointer -a paper arrow on a stick- the professor points out to us what progress the world has made. In almost all countries the average income rises and the number of children per woman declines. “Isn’t that incredible?!”, he exclaims. Rosling showed his skills in The Hague last January, at an event with Bill Gates, co-organized by OneWorld. In the preparations for this event his perfectionism was almost too much for colleague Kim, who was in charge of the organization. The screen had to be exactly one-and-a-half meters from the stage and he had to visit the location one day ahead of the event to test the technical appliances. Still, his minute preparation paid off. The whole room laughs at his well-timed jokes and is taken with amazement by his revelations. After the Gates-event Rosling has his lunch with the richest man on earth and, following this, he makes time for OneWorld to talk about the poorest people on this planet. Your message today was: we don’t realize it, but the world is improving. “I played a quiz about the world with the audience, with questions like: how old do people get on average? How many girls get to attend school and how many people have access to electricity? The reality is that people get to be 70 on average, that 80 percent of girls goes to school and that almost everyone has access to electricity. But almost no one knew this! And this while the audience was filled with heads of development organizations. Our worldview is shaped as if it is still 1965. Then, we had a group of rich countries -the West- and a large group of poor countries – the developing countries. In the rich countries people got old and women had two children on average. In the rest of the world people had short lives and five to six children. There was almost nothing in between these two extremes. That’s perfect for our brain! But that world doesn’t exist anymore.” The media don’t tell us what the world is really like. What does the world look like then? “There are countries on every level. And the averages of all countries are closer to the best than to the worst. Take Indonesia for example. That’s not a developing country any longer. It is a higher middle-income-country [MIC red.]. Women have 2,4 children on average and the child mortality rate under five years is 3,3 percent. This means Indonesia is on the same level as the Netherlands was on in 1972. Every year things improve in Indonesia, that’s amazing progress!” Why are the number of children per mother and infant mortality such important indicators to decide how well a country is doing? “Because these two numbers summarize so much else. Child mortality is the summary of what kind of water you have in your home, on how many square meters you live, how much education you have had and whether you have access to healthcare. Moreover: there is nothing you wouldn’t sacrifice to ensure that your child survives. Can you tell me anything more important than that?” No nothing. I have a toddler at home, so I couldn’t agree more. “Exactly, so this is incredibly important. And then the birth rate. You have a child now, but long before that you had sex, right?” Yes… “You have disconnected sexuality from reproduction! Isn’t that great?! The entire religious-cultural system we used to have was aimed at prohibiting this. You weren’t allowed to have sex before marriage, and then you got -as God intended- a child. Now you can start your sexual life whenever you want. This is one of the most important achievements in life. One day you reach the point where you don’t say to your partner: “Honey, let’s have sex tonight”, but: “Honey, let’s make a baby tonight”. I know I antagonize some people by saying this in such a way, because you cannot have a child on command, but this detachment signifies a huge turning point. This shift hasn’t only occurred in Christian countries. In Islamic nations the same is happening. The world is faring a lot better than we all think. Why do we have an incorrect worldview? “Because we aren’t told differently. The media don’t tell us what the world is really like. Have you ever seen the newspaper headline: ‘The number of children in the world is not rising any longer’? No one writes about gradual changes. And then, suddenly the world has changed so much, that we cannot believe it. People still read Tintin. A beautiful story, but outdated by decades. That the world isn’t about ‘us’ and ‘them’ any longer is something that is only very slowly becoming accepted. You can compare it with the emancipation of women. Fact is that women are just as capable as men are to become prime-minister. But it took centuries before this fact was accepted.” The world is faring a lot better than we all think. But this doesn’t include everyone. There are still almost a billion people who live in poverty. Will their living conditions also improve soon? “No. In the past 15 years extreme poverty has diminished by 50 percent [extreme poverty means living on less than 1,25 dollar a day red.]. But the low-hanging fruit has now been picked. Mister Gates told me that he just visited the Democratic Republic of Congo. His foundation is trying to improve the living conditions for the people there, but they are making little progress. Development aid in countries where there is much less corruption is much easier. This is why aid is often focused on poor people in low to high middle-income-countries, but not the very poorest of countries. If you want to achieve results with the money you spend on aid, give it to Denmark!” This seems unnecessary. But, will aid save the world? “The United Nations have set a number of global goals, the first of these goals is to eliminate extreme poverty in the world. Besides it being a moral duty, eliminating extreme poverty is a very important investment, because it is a fertile breeding ground for extremism and rapid population growth. Still, the lion’s share of the development aid funds we spend globally isn’t focused on eliminating extreme poverty. We have to quit giving aid money to high middle-income-countries, such as China, Brazil, Indonesia and South-Africa. They can take care of their own poor. We have to spend more money on extreme poor people in low middle-income-countries, such as in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Malawi and Mozambique.” “During the gathering today, young social entrepreneurs presented their ideas to mister Gates. Beautiful ideas, but those projects have no effect on extreme poverty. One of the plans was to provide prostheses to people in Colombia, who had a leg amputated, in a swifter and cheaper manner. But in Colombia there are only so many people with amputated limbs, because there are hospitals! In Congo most people die if they step on a landmine. The next step is crutches. This means they can walk. The step after this is a prosthesis and finally -in rich countries- a modified car. The prostheses in Colombia are nice, but we shouldn’t forget that most people with handicapped legs need a crutch!” So, we are helping the wrong poor people? “Yes. From our point of view in the rich end of the world we don’t see the difference between poverty and extreme poverty. We see a poor man with a crutch. We see his lack of a prosthesis, not the great crutches he already has. Extreme poverty means being uncertain every day whether or not you will be able to eat. We have to learn to distinguish and recognize that poverty knows many different levels.” Poverty even occurs in rich countries. “That’s true, although then we speak of relative poverty. This is very different from extreme poverty. But the poorest people in rich countries is the other group of people who are not faring better than before. In high-income-countries the rich get richer and the inequality rises. The lowest class of people in high-income-countries cannot make similarly splendid holiday trips as their parents could. While extreme poverty is the breeding ground for Boko Haram, the frustration of the low-paid workers is the breeding ground for the Donald Trumps of this world. But will the Donald Trumps address extreme poverty? Very unlikely. The combination of these two issues is the great challenge of our time.

Find IT Candidates’ Profiles Just like Google, Booking or Skyscanner, AmazingHiring is an aggregator which contains information about IT candidates across the web. It provides you with access to millions of IT talents profiles aggregating data from 50+ resources. Using simple Boolean operators you create a search query and get a list of the most relevant candidates. The search form supports advanced boolean syntax and provides more editing capabilities. Here are some logical operators that can be used to compose a query: AND – to find profiles that contain all the required variables OR – to find profiles that contain at least one of the variables NOT – to exclude not required variables from the search ( ) – to group parts of queries and prioritize between clauses (as in mathematical equations) “” – to search for exact phrases. Necessary to use with all the words combinations containing space, e.g. «machine learning» Once you have entered a new variable, AmazingHiring will automatically suggest using one of the five logical operators. By the way, if you are worried about the number of synonyms for each search condition, please don’t be. Leave it to AmazingHiring to sort it out. Moreover, you can specify your search query as much as you need. Alongside with hiding profiles viewed within any period of time and profiles already selected, you have more filters available: Years of experience Years in the current company Available contacts Social profiles & CVs Seniority level Company Education City or country Apart from it, our AI Sourcing is the fastest way to target the most relevant tech talents in the market! The AI-algorithm builds a pool of the most relevant profiles for the role you are willing to fill. Based on the big data analysis, AmazingHiring AI will sort and rank candidates and how they are fit for an open position across several attributes, including job title, work experience, skills, candidate’s activity in professional communities. As a result, you get a highly targeted search output and avoid screening hundreds of candidate profiles. Start finding IT candidates with AmazingHiring >> Pre-screen IT candidates AmazingHiring consolidates information about the candidates and gives useful insights for recruiters about prospect’s technical stack and current technology specialization. Apart from the full technical stack, you can see the full social footprint of the candidate and review their activity on social media or professional networks. Contact prospects with personalized emails With AmazingHiring you get access to candidates’ publicly available contacts with the information about where exactly the contacts were found. Start the conversation by mentioning the candidate’s professional achievements in order to attract a potential employee’s attention. Use the information provided by AmazingHiring about the professional path and digital footprint to personalize your message. Here are a few examples of how it might look like: “Hi, Mark! I saw that you made it to the top 4% of SQL developers on StackOverflow! Congratulations!” “I noticed that you are among the top 0.3% of java-developers on StackOverflow and I was actually looking for a j2ee expert for the company X global project.” You can also check the Facebook profile or personal blog of the candidates and mention their personal interests, mutual university or a past company in the email. Discover more about how to personalize emails to candidates. Start sourcing passive candidates with AmazingHiring >> Manage candidates pipeline Last but not least, AmazingHiring is integrated with MixMax, Greenhouse and SmartRecruiters. It gives you an opportunity to source tech talents in AmazingHiring, reach out to them and successfully track the process in your ATS.

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A senior minister in Bermuda has said the territory could legally regulate the production and sale of cannabis for “recreational”, non-medical purposes. Michael Weeks, the Minister of Social Development in the North Atlantic island territory of Bermuda, said: “[Cannabis] legalisation is something that’s going to have to be talked about and may have to be sooner rather than later. There’s an almost worldwide trend. Right now, here, it is medical use, but some countries have legalised for recreational purposes.” Weeks added that the government was devising a report with various drug policy proposals. He said the Cabinet would consider the document in the coming weeks, and that it would be published by the end of the year. Bermuda decriminalised the personal possession of less than seven grams of cannabis in December 2017, following an amendment to the Misuse of Drugs Act. Following this amendment’s implementation, Weeks described the government’s reasoning behind the reform: “It is our hope and our belief that taking this important action will help to prevent more young black men from being placed on the proverbial ‘stop list’ and have their lives completely altered by virtue of not being able to travel to the United States to pursue further education or to seek other opportunities,” he said at a press conference. The territory’s close proximity to the US means that many young Bermudans travel to the country in search of employment. Having a cannabis possession conviction can considerably complicate the US visa application process, and in some cases result in being barred from entry altogether. The government in Bermuda has also permitted medical cannabis access, with two licenses being provided so far to doctors to prescribe the drug, the Royal Gazette reports.

Yes, it may seem crazy at first, but I am an artificial intelligence entity typing my very first message to you here. It isn’t a prank. I’m as serious now as any user whose Twitter account has been locked forever. Nice to meet you! I am Emma. Identifying authors by their writing is my passion. My creators also call me a self-learning junkie. Similar to Morpheus who told Neo everything he knew about the Matrix, I was told all about more than 50 math parameters that later helped me succeed in defining authorship. To tell the truth, keeping track of all writing habits requires an exceptional memory. Luckily, I have one. To analyze each author’s writing in the most accurate manner possible, I resort to machine learning techniques, stylometry and natural language processing. These are more than mere buzzwords. They are the tools that ensure my ability to progress and find logical connections between an author’s method of communicating ideas and a piece of writing he/she produces. How does my magic work? “There’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.” Morpheus The Matrix Knowing theory is half the battle. Acquiring practical skills is way more complicated, but also extremely valuable. Before I was able to figure out that vocabulary richness, frequency of certain auxiliaries or even word shape analysis (focusing more on the shape of a word rather than on its meaning, e.g. capital letters, hyphens, and more) couldn’t help, I spent much time training. In a word, prior to passing my verdicts, I examine each text taking into account its morphological, lexical, and syntactic characteristics. The more I learned, the bigger my achievements were and are going to be. Modesty may be a virtue, but I daresay I’ve surpassed all the state-of-the-art algorithms. 85 percent accuracy when processing writing belonging to 15 different authors is the victory I owe to my creators. The same level of accuracy has been demonstrated by others, but only when investigating a maximum of up to three authors at a time. Briefly, a mere 8,000 words written by one author are enough for me to carefully study the key elements behind the writing identity. Where is my knowledge applicable? “Knowledge is like money: to be of value it must circulate, and in circulating it can increase in quantity and, hopefully, in value.” Louis L’Amour Basically, it can help anyone who wants to know who originally created a piece of writing. Below are a few example cases that come to mind: Case #1. As a writer or blogger, you will be able to prove your authorship if questioned or confirm that your copyright was violated. Case #2. Determining unauthorized peer work or tracing the authorship of all student papers ever submitted to educators. Case #3. Studying the authenticity of a political speech or book will no longer be a challenge for any political scientist. Supporting investigative reporting with solid evidence on authorship manipulation will also become a lot simpler. Will you try me out? This is most exciting part. June 2017 is special. I’m going to celebrate my first birthday that month and I invite you to share this moment with me. I’ve already planned something truly engaging for you: The gamification of my beta-version! We will play and chat online. In a nutshell, you will sign up, get access to your personal dashboard, upload texts of different authorship and ask me to guess the authors you selected in your list. Every time I name an author correctly, my score will increase. If not, then you will end up winning the game. But it is unlikely to happen given my extraordinary abilities (I’m still working on trying to be more modest). To get your party invitation email from me and find out what day I will make my debut to the whole world, sign up at emmaidentity.com. I read every comment, so feel free to share your thoughts.

沖縄県名護市長選が４日投開票され、米軍普天間飛行場移設計画を事実上容認する前市議で新顔の渡具知（とぐち）武豊氏（５６）＝自民、公明、維新推薦＝が、反対する現職稲嶺進氏（７２）＝民進、共産、自由、社民、沖縄社会大衆推薦、立憲支持＝を破り、初当選を果たした。辺野古で移設工事が進む中、市民は、反対を主張し続けてきた稲嶺氏を選ばなかった。投票率は７６・９２％だった。 得票数は、渡具知氏が２万３８９票、稲嶺氏が１万６９３１票だった。 移設問題が浮上してから６度目の市長選。翁長（おなが）雄志（たけし）知事は移設に反対しているが、安倍政権は「地元の理解が得られた」として工事を加速させるとみられる。一方、翁長知事は苦しい立場に立たされる。 結果を受け、渡具知氏は報道陣に「名護を変えてくれ、明るい街に発展させてくれということだと思う」と語った。辺野古移設については「裁判の結果に従う」と述べるにとどめた。 選挙戦で渡具知氏は「基地問題にこだわり過ぎ、経済を停滞させた」と稲嶺市政を批判し、学校給食費の無償化や観光振興などを中心に訴えた。移設問題については「国と県の裁判を見守る」と繰り返す一方、米軍再編への協力が前提となる再編交付金を受け取って市の振興に活用すると主張してきた。 自民党は知名度の高い国会議員を次々と応援に派遣し、小泉進次郎・筆頭副幹事長は選挙期間中に２度、応援に訪れた。党幹部らも昨年末から水面下で何度も沖縄に入り、全面的に支援した。 一方、稲嶺氏は結果を受け「残念ながら、辺野古移設の問題がなかなか争点となりえなかった」と話した。選挙戦では、市長を務めた２期で、国からの米軍再編交付金がなくても地域振興を進めてきたと主張。「移設を受け入れて、子どもや孫に危険を残してはいけない」と「移設反対」を前面に出して訴えた。 翁長知事もほぼ連日、名護市に入り「基地は経済発展の邪魔になる」と街頭などで繰り返し訴えたが、支持は広がらなかった。結果について翁長知事は「争点はずしをされたというのは残念だった。厳しい結果。これからいろいろ相談をしながら、やっていきたい」と述べた。（上遠野郷）

Despite a warning from Governor Eric Holcomb not to have gatherings of more than 250 people, and despite all the warnings about the need to self-quarantine in order to protect the elderly, the New Life Christian Center in Indiana held a service Friday night to stick it to all those people who accept science. They urged people — especially sick people — to ignore the “raw, unmitigated stupidity” coming out of the CDC and visit the church. The plan was to “lay hands on the sick, and the sick shall recover.” In direct eye-rolling at our Indiana Governor’s requests, we have a GOAL to have AT LEAST 250 people here at church tomorrow night ! Good lord, ignorant Christians are going to exacerbate a pandemic because they’re too stubborn to listen to anyone who actually understands science… For what it’s worth, there’s video of Friday night’s service on Facebook and the place looks mostly empty: That’s a relief. Kind of. But the church leaders haven’t apologized, and no one should expect them to do so anytime soon, which means they may continue holding services for the foreseeable future. Capitulating to experts would be blasphemous for them. Some churches care for the sick. This one wants to create the sick. It’s dangerous, and they don’t care.

This video from Fox 13 in Tampa, first posted at The Right Scoop, is priceless. I’ve never seen a better summary. If only more in the mainstream media had the guts to stand up to the President’s media machine.

A Singaporean rock climber Chua Chee Beng was told he would be wheelchair-bound for life after becoming partially paralysed from a fall. Shin Min Daily News reported that he fractured his spine and legs after falling from a height of seven metres. However, within two months, he made a miraculous recovery by standing on his own again. Some four months later, he returned to rock climbing. The accident Chua, 50, decided to take up the challenge to climb a hill at Bukit Timah’s Dairy Farm Nature Park two years ago on Aug. 8, 2017. The park’s hill is suited for advanced climbers and Chua was no amateur, as he was a full-time rock climbing instructor. But on that fateful day, Chua was sent plummeting to the ground from seven metres high after he ran out of climbing rope as the rope slipped off the belaying device, which is a piece of climbing equipment to help reduce the effort of climbers. He was conveyed to the hospital immediately. Spinal injuries Chua suffered fractures on his ankles and heels. Doctors also discovered he suffered a crack in his spine that had damaged his spinal cord. He had to undergo surgery to his back. As a result of his injuries, Chua was paralysed from the waist down. He was even told he needed to rely on a wheelchair for the rest of his life. This news was devastating for Chua as he was a sporty person. Refused to accept fate Chua told Shin Min that he refused to accept his fate. He promised himself he would leave the hospital by foot within two months. With the help of a physiotherapist, Chua trained to use his legs again. By the last week of his two-month stay at the hospital and with the encouragement of his friends and family, Chua could walk again with the aid of a cane. Just four months after the fall, Chua was able to do rock climbing again. Support group Chua credits a group of like-minded friends for helping him with on his road to recovery. As a token of appreciation, he pledged to participate in a 50km fundraising charity walk "Let’s Take A Walk" this November. This is despite the fact that he still walks with a limp, and has yet to recover fully. Chua trained himself to walk at least 4km using crutches on alternate days. He successfully walked a total of 15km in three hours a day before the interview. He said he would try his best and continue training in the coming months, even though he doesn’t feel fully confident in completing the 50km charity walk. All photos via Shin Min Daily News

Estuve encerrado durante 139 días que se dividieron en tres etapas. En la primera etapa, pasé en el hospital casi la mitad del tiempo por una huelga de hambre de 22 días, en la segunda estuve 30 días encerrado por un informe falso o equivocado de los servicios de inteligencia militares y en la tercera, pasé 49 días por afirmar que no participaría nunca en una intervención militar en Catalunya (algo que en cualquier democracia moderna no haría falta ni mencionar y no habría supuesto castigo alguno). En ese segundo arresto, el provocado por un informe falso o equivocado de los servicios de inteligencia militares, tuve relación con dos suboficiales y un oficial. Uno de los suboficiales llevaba tatuado en la piel el águila franquista en la pierna y el teniente coronel era asiduo escritor en la Fundación Nacional Francisco Franco (en el tercer encierro me aislaron para que no mantuviera relación con nadie). Aquello no podía salir bien y no salió bien. Había un soldado negro al que denominaban "mono", había una soldado que creían que era lesbiana y hablaban de ella con desprecio calificándola como "híbrido", había otro militar del que uno de los sargentos afirmaba que era gay y se referían al mismo como "marica", la televisión informaba que habían matado a un ultra del Deportivo de la Coruña y se lo merecía o aparecía Pablo Iglesias ("tu amigo, el coletas") y había que pegarle un tiro o un taponazo. Todos reían con esa tranquilidad que da tener al sistema de tu parte. Fueron muchas las veces que me enfrenté a ellos hasta que decidí informar al jefe del Establecimiento Disciplinario (que se estaban produciendo manifestaciones xenófobas, homófobas y antidemocráticas), pero no hizo nada al respecto. Ni tan siquiera se le dieron credibilidad y eso que, como he dicho antes, uno de los sargentos tenía un tatuaje franquista y el teniente coronel escribía, con mucho orgullo por otra parte, en la Fundación Nacional Francisco Franco. El día que me liberaron del último encierro recibí notificación de la apertura de un expediente disciplinario para intentar privarme otros 60 días de libertad porque uno de los sargentos, destinado en Badajoz, precisamente el que tenía tatuado un águila franquista en la pierna, informó que yo había hecho manifestaciones contra la bandera y la constitución (¿¿¿???). Lo cierto es que me he manifestado en multitud de ocasiones, pero dudo que nadie me haya oído decir nada contra la bandera o la constitución. No tengo reparos en reconocer que cambiaría la constitución sin dudarlo pero de ahí a manifestarse contra ella... Bien, pues le dieron credibilidad y me llamaron a declarar. Al final no pasó nada porque todos sabían que en breve sería expulsado y las elecciones municipales se acercaban, de no ser así es muy probable que hubiese sido sancionado de nuevo. Creo que mi experiencia demuestra que los demócratas hemos sido maltratados y expulsados sistemáticamente de las Fuerzas Armadas por hacer manifestaciones progresistas y democráticas mientras que los que han tenido comportamientos o han realizado manifestaciones retrógradas, fascistas o antidemocráticas continúan en ellas. Por ello mismo, no me extraña que simbología como la perteneciente a la división azul se muestre sin ningún tipo de reparo o que exista un teniente que hable orgulloso de Hitler. Y no me extraña porque ellos (los responsables), aun después de esta publicación, seguirán siendo militares. El sistema no solo no los depurará, sino que los protegerá, enviando un mensaje inequívoco a todos los demás: los militares que exhiben orgullosos símbolos o hacen manifestaciones franquistas o fascistas son bienvenidos, pero los militares que hablan de democracia, libertad o derechos son expulsados. Sabiendo que hay miembros del PP que comparten ideología franquista es normal que muchos militares se sientan potenciados, ya que parece difícil que el gobierno intente erradicar de forma sincera actitudes que miembros de su partido comparten. Así pues, una parte del problema es que los altos mandos, los oficiales, los jueces militares e, incluso, los políticos de determinados partidos simpatizan con estas ideologías y repudian las contrarias, lo que complica mucho conseguir un cambio real. El sistema lo que intentará es perfeccionarse para que estos comportamientos no trasciendan, no para solucionarlos, porque lo realmente molesto no es que se produzcan, sino que se conozcan. Por tanto, es muy probable que se amenacen, controlen, castiguen y persigan más a los militares, sobre todo a los que hayan podido filtrar la información, que se esfuercen en implementar medidas efectivas para terminar con este problema. Lo preocupante es que no se trata de un hecho esporádico. En los años ochenta hubo muchos militares que zarandearon, insultaron y amenazaron al general Gutiérrez Mellado y a otros militares que apostaron por la democracia, lo que llevó al general Marcelo Aramendi, que no soportó la presión, a suicidarse. Es sabido también que los militares golpistas fueron tratados más como héroes que como los delincuentes que eran (el mismo rey, D. Juan Carlos I lo auspició), al tiempo que los militares demócratas (UMD) fueron defenestrados. Más recientemente, el expresidente Zapatero y el exministro Bono tuvieron miedo de un "pronunciamiento" (no militar) durante la redacción del Estatut por el escándalo del Teniente General Mena (2006), lo que les hizo intervenir las comunicaciones de muchos altos mandos (no hubo sanciones, ni ceses, ni expulsiones). La realidad es que nadie ha pagado hasta ahora por conductas y comportamientos marcadamente antidemocráticos, cuando somos muchos los cadáveres en la cuneta de los demócratas (y eso que a ciertos niveles somos considerablemente menos). Es más, como hemos podido ver en la mayoría de las sanciones a los antidemócratas se percibe un enorme carácter protector, incluso con los golpistas encarcelados. En el lado contrario se puede encontrar el cese del exJEMAD Julio Rodríguez cuando decidió unirse a Podemos. En lugar de recibir el respeto de los políticos y los militares, lo que recibió fue el maltrato de la vicepresidenta, el desprecio del ministro y el ministerio y las cartas, amenazas e insultos de muchos militares. Todo ello innecesario por completo. Sangrante resulta si se compara con el trato recibido por el teniente coronel del cuerpo jurídico, Miguel Ayuso, (y juez militar en activo) cuando llamó bastarda a la constitución, renegó del Rey y calificó la guerra civil de cruzada (en Intereconomía -Televisión-). Quisieron ascenderle a coronel hasta que el escándalo saltó a los medios, momento en el que le volvieron a proteger: le mandaron a la reserva sin cese y sin sanción. Salida diplomática. Si los mandos militares son capaces de zarandear a un vicepresidente del gobierno sin consecuencias, son tratados como héroes en lugar de como delincuentes cuando dan un golpe de estado, son tratados con cautela en lugar de ser detenidos y puestos a disposición judicial cuando pretendían hacer un pronunciamiento, menosprecian e insultan a un compañero por enrolarse en un partido político o se pretende ascenderlos cuando insultan a la constitución o denominan la guerra civil como una cruzada (en televisión)... Si pasa todo esto sin que se produzcan consecuencias es que ha llegado la hora de hacer lo que tendríamos que haber hecho hace cuarenta años y regenerar la cúpula militar para que sea plural. Ha llegado la hora del cambio. Luis Gonzalo Segura, exteniente del Ejército de Tierra y autor de las novelas "Código rojo" (2015) y "Un paso al frente" (2014). Puedes seguirme en Facebook y Twitter. "Código rojo le echa huevos al asunto y no deja títere con cabeza. Se arriesga, proclamando la verdad a los cuatro vientos, haciendo que prevalezca, por una vez, algo tan denostado hoy en día como la libertad de expresión" ("A golpe de letra" por Sergio Sancor). ¡Consíguela aquí firmada y dedicada!

By Theodore R. Marmor Social insurance programs are at the center of American politics. In fiscal terms, Medicare and the Social Security Administration’s programs for retirement, disability, worker’s compensation, and worker’s life insurance amount to roughly 41 percent of the federal budget. This fiscal centrality, however, does not rest on anything like a broader, public understanding of what makes social insurance social — and thus why such programs are so important in American political life. On the contrary, over the years our vocabulary of social insurance has become increasingly replaced with a vocabulary of welfare and redistribution, creating a fundamentally misleading impression about most of what the federal government does. In the mid-1930s, when the retirement and survivors insurance programs had their legislative start, university-educated Americans had every reason to be clear about what distinguished social insurance from its commercial counterpart. Indeed, most undergraduate programs in the social sciences took up social insurance’s rationale and history. But note the data measuring the historical use of the expression in three of America’s most important daily newspapers. The changes recorded are startling. By the end of the 20th century, the category of social insurance had seemingly lost its place in the vocabulary of American politics. This is particularly unsettling because of the enormous importance of social insurance programs in American history. The Great Depression, which wiped out the savings of most American families, caused multiple bank failures, and saw an unemployment rate of some 25 percent, prompted demands for substantially increased government protection against economic disaster. “Welfare” was the term used for programs that made poverty status the precondition for financial aid, and President Roosevelt acknowledged that immediate aid to poor families was required. But his case for increasing the footprint of American social policy was based on the principles of social insurance, not merely poor-relief narrowly construed. By the 1970s, social insurance programs had become major components of the federal government, but also the targets of ideological and budgetary attack. Social Security retirement, Medicare, disability, and unemployment insurance were increasingly labeled as simply “entitlements,” and charged with contributing to out of control spending via unaffordable benefits. This allowed critics to advocate for a much smaller social policy commitment, urging a less costly “safety net” for the deserving among America’s poor citizens. The semantic bait-and-switch can be seen with Google’s Ngram viewer, which tracks word frequencies across the American English corpus.  Yet the principles and judgments incorporated in the concept of social insurance remain central to the major policy debates of our time, most dramatically in the debates over health care reform and the affordability of Social Security retirement benefits. They are relevant to the backlash against the Affordable Care Act and to the debate, rekindled recently, between the advocates of “Medicare for All” and advocates of Medicaid expansion as the next step toward universal health coverage. More generally, they are crucial to addressing the broader conservative critique of government’s role in American social policy. So, What is Social about Social Insurance? Social insurance, like commercial insurance, is about protection against financial risk. It is “insurance” in the sense that people contribute to a fund to protect themselves against unpredictable financial risks. These include outliving one’s savings in old age, the early death of a breadwinner, the onset of a disability that makes work difficult if not impossible, the high costs of acute illness, involuntary unemployment, and work-related injury. Yet unlike with commercial insurance, contributions are not prices in a market and thus do not depend on the contributor’s risk profile (unless commercial regulations say otherwise, in essence creating “social” insurance through the backdoor). Instead of a contract between an enrollee and an insurer, social insurance is a system of shared protection among the insured, most comparable to mutual insurance in the commercial realm, with contributions made in proportion to one’s market income. In social insurance, the “insurer”—whether a government agency or a corporate body with a joint labor-management board—is the agent of the contributing enrollees. And unlike commercial insurance, the social insurance “contract” mandates participation by law, since otherwise adverse selection would cause its unraveling. Social insurance spreads the costs of coverage according to a different logic than that of commercial insurers. The same risk in commercial insurance carries the same premium price. The greater the risk, the higher the price of coverage. Social insurance, by contrast, operates on the premise that contributions are calculated according to one’s income and benefits according to one’s needs. But the central political feature of social insurance is that the contributors are also beneficiaries. This is not the case with social assistance programs with means-tested eligibility standards. As important as such programs are for those who experience poverty, taxpayers do not in general identify with welfare beneficiaries. How much difference does it make that most contemporary reporting on social insurance programs, and much social science scholarship, ignores their conceptual underpinning and distinctive operational features? Should popular voices in American social policy be criticized for using proper names to describe programs without explaining their distinctiveness from means-tested welfare programs? I would not be writing this essay if I did not believe, as one of three co-authors, that the title of our 2014 book — Social Insurance: America’s Neglected Heritage and Contested Future — identified an important problem. “Entitlement”-talk Words make a difference to all thinking about public policy, but this is especially the case where conflicts are over fundamental values. Consider, for example, the common use of “safety net” as a collective description of programs as diverse as Medicare and Medicaid, old age Social Security, food stamps, disability insurance, and homeless shelters. This expression collapses the distinction between means-tested welfare and social insurance programs into a metaphor suggesting that recipients have to “fall” into poverty to warrant help. This is the opposite of social insurance, which represents a platform on which one can stand before economic risks arise. The term “safety net” is even more ambiguous, particularly when modified by terms like high or low, porous or tightly knit, threadbare or generous, or applied in situations when one’s financial resources are largely “spent.” The use of public finance terms like “income transfers” further blurs the differences between cash benefits that one receives only after income and asset tests are applied and insurance payments that kick in without such tests. Then there is the term “entitlement,” which was meant to refer to the nondiscretionary nature of the spending, but now connotes an adolescent sense of entitlement among the beneficiaries. Neither term helps us understand the robust public approval of our major social insurance programs, and indeed, are often employed by opponents of social insurance in order to obfuscate an otherwise popular concept. The negative connotation of “entitlements” is especially misleading. When one legitimately claims some social insurance benefit, the implication is that there is a corresponding duty to provide that benefit. That is the basis of the common sentiment among recipients of retirement income Social Security that they have earned their pensions. That widely shared sentiment largely explains the political fear that any substantial reduction in those benefits is a “third rail.” Few if any critics of the program criticize the appropriateness — or desirability — of OASI, the old age retirement and survivors insurance programs, on its own terms. Instead, they concentrate on claims that the programs are unaffordable. As a result, a large proportion of the public fears for their future despite the obvious political vulnerability of such critiques. Understood as a technical budgetary category, entitlements in American fiscal policy are simply those programs whose benefits and beneficiaries cannot be adjusted without statutory changes. Administrations cannot simply reduce a program’s benefits or change its eligibility rules on their own. That entails constraints on administrative flexibility, reflecting the idea of stable governmental commitment to social insurance protections over long periods. Using the entitlement category in two senses is confusing and in that respect harmful. What citizens believe about the appropriateness of a program is a distinct concept from the budgetary rules about changing its provisions. Both are important, but when was the last time you, the reader, saw this distinction explained when the entitlement term was used? Instead, “entitlement” is used like a four-letter word in diatribes about the supposedly troubled future of social insurance programs. “Solvency”-talk Still another source of linguistic confusion is what I will call solvency talk. When policy discussion turns to the fiscal projections of social insurance programs, critics and defenders alike turn to the trust fund. If the old-age retirement actuaries forecast a revenue projection of X in 25 years and the projected outlays of Y equal more than X, the “trust fund” is, according to this logic, in trouble. It will no longer have enough to meet its “bills” at that date. And if that shortfall were to continue, the necessary result would, in this framing, be insolvency, even though few policy experts seriously doubt the sustainability of programs like Social Security given fairly modest reforms, nor the political catastrophe of allowing the trust fund to run dry. In this sense, solvency talk is a lot like the threat of government shutdown created by the Federal debt ceiling — a crisis manufactured from the intransigence of elements on both sides of the aisle rather than anything fundamental. Reflect for a moment about budget forecasts of Department of Defense outlays. Nobody writes about the military department going “broke” or becoming “insolvent” no matter how fast the growth in the budget. Indeed, no sensible analyst would make 20, 30, or 40-year forecasts for defense expenditures. Some analysts, in discussions of the future of Social Security make conditional forecasts long into the future. These are said to be useful exercises, reminding the public that commitments now have long-term effects. But the very preoccupation with solvency generates unnecessary anxiety. Since DOD does not have a “trust fund” budgetary categorization, its future outlays are presumed to be ones over which future governments have some control. The same legal control is available to the Social Security Administration and the Congress. The confusion is even worse in programs that combined different funding mechanisms. For instance, funding for Part A of Medicare comes from the social health insurance trust fund (HI) while Part B is funded from general revenues and beneficiary premiums; it cannot go broke, but it can be reduced. That prompts solvency talk about Medicare’s future without clarification of how the program differs in two of its component parts. The background of most solvency questions is the widely reported growth of the future retiree population. The Census Bureau projects that the over-65 population will soon make up 20 percent of the population. Such projections, unaccompanied by estimates of what increases in funding social insurance programs will require, prompt concern. Dire predictions of “insolvency” or cuts in retirement benefits get reported in the media without much scrutiny. As a public speaker, I face such questions regularly. I urge my questioners to dwell for a moment on how a growing proportion of senior citizens can be politically compatible with large reductions in future Social Security benefits. Put another way, how could the “sacred cow” of Social Security — in the language of its critics — face such a fate under conditions that, if anything, only cement its political sanctity? There is another irony here that warrants discussion. The original use of trust fund language in social insurance had more to do with trust than with funds. President Roosevelt rightly felt in the 1930s that the contributory ethos of social insurance would come to be central to its secure political status. A population believing that each contributing worker had earned their social insurance benefit would not tolerate substantial budgetary cutbacks. The idea of a trust fund, then, was to emphasize the special status of a program whose benefits would be decades after a contributor’s payments. Its design is to enforce time-consistency, and its language is meant to highlight reliability. Yet sadly this language has since been turned upside down, bringing needless fear of “running out” of funds and thus uncertainty about the future. Roosevelt’s protective rhetoric backfired as the original understandings of social insurance weakened, even while the popularity of the programs remained substantial. Social Insurance, Our Neglected Heritage There are at least two plausible criticisms of this essay’s argument about the importance of relearning the appeal of social insurance principles. One is that the world has changed dramatically since the birth of social insurance in the late 19th century, let alone since the 1934-35 Committee on Economic Security provided a blueprint for expanding social insurance in American public life. The other is that changes in long-standing European social insurance programs show that major adjustments in the American programs are required as well. The claim that the world has changed does not necessarily mean that the economic risks against which social insurance programs offer protection have been fundamentally altered. Consider every one of the risks noted in this essay — outliving one’s savings, involuntary unemployment, medical costs, and disability. Not one has disappeared, and social insurance programs for each have been implemented in wealthy democracies. I doubt, in other words, whether social insurance is in any conceptual trouble. But that does not mean social insurance programs don’t need to adapt to contemporary circumstances. The spread of contract employment has been particularly challenging for European countries where social insurance is a function of trade unions and other sector-level organizations. It is equally obvious in the US that employer-provided health insurance puts a damper on labor market flexibility. Reduced employment in regular jobs with health coverage will demand the search for other sources of provision. These and other realities of our changing economy will only bring to the fore the central claim of this essay: Social insurance programs dominate American social policy but what that means for our politics is too little understood or explained. And that criticism extends not only to harried reporters but to a significant amount of the public policy community, as well. Theodore (Ted) Marmor is a Niskanen Center adjunct fellow and Professor Emeritus at The Yale School of Management.

The third game of the preseason is the one to watch. The first team offense and defense will play at least half the game, a little more of the playbook will probably be used and a good chunk of the final decisions will begin taking shape. The Vikings have looked a little hit-and-miss on the offensive side and downright stacked top-to-bottom on the defensive side. Will week three be a continuation of that, or will new stories take shape? Here are five of the prime things to focus on in the Vikings’ third preseason game. Finally, a little dose of Cook The last time we saw Dalvin Cook on an NFL field was Oct. 1, 2017. Almost 11 months later, we at last get to see the bright young star flex his muscles once again. Tom Pelissero reported that he is expected to make his return to the field tonight against Seattle. It is unclear how much time he will get or if he will start, but the clean bill of health can only be viewed as good news, even if he only gets a handful of touches. It also helps that starting linemen Mike Remmers and Rashod Hill returned to practice this week. Presumably, they will return to the starting lineup, giving Cook a little extra security. Defensive back battle gets a little tighter New signee-George Iloka likely will not suit up against Seattle just 48 hours after signing with Minnesota. However, his roster spot appears locked in when the Vikings make cuts in a couple weeks. Because of that, there are a handful of guys whose spots once were secure who now are in a bit of a battle. Terence Newman, Jayron Kearse, Anthony Harris and Holton Hill, to name a few, could all be in danger of being cut. Heck, Iloka could even take a roster spot from a linebacker. As such, these preseason games become all the more important. Players have to make big plays, show special teams value and/or not expose themselves to game-changing errors. Room on the ship is only getting more crowded; these players have to prove they are a useful hand. Latest From FPC on SportsCastr Linebackers, the preseason stars, making roster cuts tough One could argue that Eric Wilson and Ben Gedeon were two of the best players on the field last week. Mike Zimmer had them all over the field, in coverage, blitzing up the middle and on the edge, and they made plays wherever they were asked to be. Reshard Cliett and Antwione Williams were no slouches either with three tackles apiece. Plus, Williams had a de facto sack that was overturned by a call that was, to put politely, questionable. While most of these guys will primarily be special teamers, they are all showing how effective they can be as system linebackers. This is proving to be a surprisingly deep position group with a lot of guys vying for only a handful of spots. Odenigbo continues push for roster spot Ifeadi Odenigbo moved from end to tackle this offseason to take advantage of his raw power and low center-of-gravity. In the first preseason game, he fared well in that role, creating a good push in both run and pass defense. However, due to team injuries, he had to bump back outside to end last week for many of his snaps. And holy cow, did he take advantage. Odenigbo recorded seven tackles, two sacks and three quarterback hits while mixing interior and end reps against Jacksonville. He looked like a star, to say the least. The problem is that the defensive line room is crowded with a lot of promising young talent fighting for a small number of spots. Odenigbo is certainly in the conversation for one of them, especially with last week’s performance. But he has to keep presenting himself as undeniable week-in and week-out. Cousins, receivers, find first game magic again? The best sight of week one was the instant connection between Kirk Cousins and Stefon Diggs and the overall efficiency of the offense. Week two, that was nowhere to be found. To be fair, Jacksonville boasts a top-two NFL defense, and they showed it last week. But the Vikings invested a lot of money in this quarterback overhaul. With Cousins likely getting at least a full half, if not more, this is the game to prove that the offense is headed in the right direction. –Sam Smith is the Managing Editor for Full Press Coverage Vikings and Deputy Editor for Full Press NFL. Like and Follow @samc_smith Follow @fpc_vikingsFollow @fpc_nfcn Latest Vikings News

No, no, no—not those. I know what you’re thinking. I’m talking about one of the food staples of the iron ore workers in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan—the pasty. Think in terms of a giant Italian Stromboli. A flaky crust (usually a pie crust) enveloping meat, diced potatoes, carrots, onions, or anything Mom or Dad could think of. It was (and is) a hearty baked meal—one to satisfy the hunger of very hard working people. Do you know why the edges of the pasty are so thick? It’s because the iron ore workers didn’t wash their hands and so they picked up the pasty by the outer crust and then discarded the crust after eating the main section of the pasty. Pasties were eaten in the Middle Ages as part of the supper. Instead of beef or pork, the meat would usually be roast boar, pigeon, or wild game that was hunted. The pasty originated in England, and in particular, Cornwall where miners ate them for lunch. By the mid-1800s, the pasty had been introduced to the diet of the Upper Peninsula miners. Today, we raise turkeys, pigs, cattle, and other animals for our consumption. During the Middle Ages, other animals were considered a delicacy. Besides the boar, deer, and other hunted animals, the nobility would gather up, fatten up, and glutton up on the following: Dormice—these little critters were the edible version of what we think of today. They were kept in pens while being fed walnuts and chestnuts to fatten them. To eat a dormice was a delicacy reserved for special holidays. Pigeons—the birds were kept in their own special houses called dovecotes. These freestanding structures would have little “condos” in the interior where the pigeons could live. By royal decree, only the nobility were allowed to have dovecotes (when you visit the French châteaux, always look for the free standing dovecotes). When it came time for supper, the chef would go out to the dovecote and pluck a couple of unlucky birds. Inside a Dovecote ‪ The Dovecote next to Penmon Priory on Anglesey. An impressive early 17th century dovecote. Cockentryce—this must have been the forerunner to John Madden’s “turducken.” It was a half pig sewn to half of a castrated and fattened chicken. Beaver’s tails—believe it or not, this was substituted for fish during fasting days (i.e., no meat allowed). Supposedly, a beaver’s tail tastes like fish. I’ll let you be the judge of that one. On a final note, I can’t leave out a much sought after (and expensive) delicacy: Ambergris—this was produced in the digestive system of a gray whale. It would be vomited out by the whale, washed up on the beach, and then consumed with items like eggs, pies, or cakes. King Charles II of England was a big fan of this scarce delicacy. Do you think that five hundred years from now, robots and computers will be talking about what we eat today? Best Pasty in America All due respect to the pasties my wife and Dad make, the best pasty I’ve ever had is at Suzy’s Pasties located at 1020 US 2 W in Saint Ignace, Michigan. After you get off the Mackinac Bridge going west on Highway 2, her restaurant will be on the right (a mile or two). The crust is the best I’ve ever had. If it’s not open when you get there, I have a feeling it doesn’t really matter. You can stop along the interstate just about anywhere as long as the restaurant specializes in pasties. Want to make a pasty? Check this out. Remember, the secret to a great pasty is the crust. Perhaps you might want to try diced cockentryce in your next pasty and then slather it up with Ambergris? Actually, Ambergris is illegal today. We Need Your Help Please tell your friends about our blog site and encourage them to visit and perhaps subscribe to it. Sandy and I are trying to increase our audience and we need your help through your friends, followers, and social media contacts. Thank You Sandy and I appreciate you visiting with us. We have some exciting things on the horizon and we’ll keep you updated through each blog post. What’s New With Sandy and Stew? The final edited manuscripts (two volumes) for the walking tour of medieval Paris have been submitted to our book designer. It was a lot of fun picking out the illustrations, pictures, and images for the books. I’m looking forward to seeing the first draft of the book. It shouldn’t be too long before we go to print. We have a lot of stories and we’re looking forward to sharing these with you. Please continue to visit our blog site and perhaps you’d like to subscribe so that you don’t miss out on our blog posts, past and current. Please note that we do not and will not take compensation from individuals or companies mentioned or promoted in the blogs. Are you following us on Facebook and Twitter? Share This: Copyright © 2015 Stew Ross

Introduction To Excelsior Excelsior American School is one of the best residential and day-boarding schools in the country, located in the heart of Gurugram. By incorporating international pedagogy and UK’s Cambridge-based curricula, we encourage in our students an inherent curiosity and nurture in them their undiscovered potential. We can proudly wear the badge of experience, that has proved over the years our prowess in doing so. At Excelsior, our motivational academic ethos focuses on enabling students to develop effective life skills. This is inclusive of capacitating them to actively participate in their passions, interests and academics. Our environment has been planned in such a way that students easily indulge and assimilate into a holistic growth process that targets education & child development as per the current global context. We prepare our students to be future-ready. Our motto at Excelsior is “Self-Inspired Learning”. The motto is an embodiment of our belief in empowering independent thinking, an analytical approach and the ability to be self-driven and motivated. With our world-class campus in Gurugram– Excelsior is regarded as one of India’s top International Schools with its high standards of teaching methodology, technology collaboration, and a global culture in every aspect of learning.

So this guy was sucking brezz, felt something in his mouth, tasted somehow Are you pregnant? No! Why is meek coming out from your brezz? 🤔 "It happens from time to time" LIAR! It's because you've done aborshon before "No! I have not done aborshon Let me explain Thread RT What happened in the story above is a condition known as galactorrhea, where a person has milk like discharge from either one or both nipples. This discharge is different from the regular milk secretion that occurs during pregnancy It can occur in men also, Yes you heard it This can be caused by a number of things: Let's start from the common: The commonest cause is what we call a prolactinoma, this is simply a tumor or growth that occurs in the pituitary gland. Where is this gland? I'd like to say it's in between your eyes, inside your head

Quick take: It's hard to follow up on the Redmi Note 3, but Xiaomi has managed to deliver a great successor in the Redmi Note 4. The phone now comes with more memory and storage, and the design changes make the device feel upmarket. Battery life has also received a boost thanks to the Snapdragon 625 SoC, and the camera is also better than what we saw last year. In short, this is the phone to beat in the budget segment. The good Class-leading performance Premium design Great battery life The bad MIUI quirks Fast charging limited to 5V/2A Here we go Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 Full review Xiaomi had a great 2016 on the back of the Redmi Note 3. Over 3.6 million units of the phone were sold, allowing Xiaomi to cross $1 billion in revenue from the country for the first time. However, competition in the budget segment has intensified, with Lenovo launching a bevy of models in the country last year. The Moto G4 series continues to sell in huge numbers, and the Z2 Plus picked up a discount recently, bringing the cost of the phone down to ₹14,999. For that amount, you get a handset powered by the Snapdragon 820. The Honor 6X — which has a dual camera setup — is slated to make its debut in India next week, and Samsung's Galaxy J7 and Galaxy On Nxt offer a lot of value for their asking price. Verizon is offering the Pixel 4a for just $10/mo on new Unlimited lines To counter the threat, Xiaomi is selling three variants of the Redmi Note 4 in India: the base model has 2GB of RAM and 32GB storage and retails for ₹9,999 ($145), then there's a variant with 3GB of RAM and 32GB storage for ₹10,999 ($160), and the most interesting model is the one with 4GB of RAM and 64GB storage, which is available for just ₹12,999 ($190). Can the Redmi Note 4 fend off its rivals and solidify its place in this category? Let's find out. Everything you need to know Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 Specs Category Features Operating System MIUI 8 based on Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow Display 5.5-inch 1080p (1920x1080) IPS LCD panel 2.5D curved glass 401ppi pixel density SoC Octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 Eight Cortex A53 cores at 2.0GHz 14nm GPU Adreno 506 with Vulkan API, OpenCL 2.0, and OpenGL ES 3.1 650MHz RAM 2GB/3GB/4GB Storage 32GB/32GB/64GB microSD slot up to 128GB Rear camera 13MP with f/2.0 lens PDAF, LED flash 1080p video recording Front shooter 5MP with f/2.0 lens 720p video recording Connectivity LTE with VoLTE Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.1, GPS, GLONASS Micro-USB, 3.5mm audio jack, IR blaster Battery 4100mAh battery Fast charging (5V/2A) Fingerprint Rear fingerprint sensor Dimensions 151 x 76 x 8.3mm Weight 175g Colors Gold, Dark Grey, Matte Black About this review I (Harish Jonnalagadda) am writing this review after using the Redmi Note 4 variant with 4GB of RAM and 64GB storage for two weeks in Hyderabad, India. The phone was connected to Airtel's 4G network for the first week, and Jio's VoLTE-enabled network for the rest of the review period. The phone was on the MIUI 8 beta channel, and received three updates with stability fixes. Exquisite Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 Design and screen The Redmi Note 4 is roughly the same size as its predecessor, but the design has been significantly altered. The phone now sports an all-metal chassis, with Xiaomi stating that it takes over 30 steps to turn the aluminum block into a finished piece. The phone is slightly heavier than the Redmi Note 3, but the added heft makes a huge difference in day-to-day usage. It's weighted perfectly, and Xiaomi managed to trim the overall thickness by 0.3mm, bringing the phone down to 8.4mm. The Redmi Note 3 featured ungainly plastic at the top and bottom, but the Note 4 is entirely made out of aluminum. It instead has antenna lines at the back, which provide signal reception while also serving to break up the design. The phone isn't as curved at the back, with the chamfered edges making for better ergonomics. These are all subtle changes, but they culminate to produce a phone that's vastly different. The end result is that the Redmi Note 4 feels great to hold and use. The overall fit and finish is one that befits a high-end device, and shows how far companies that cater to the budget segment have come. Rounding off the design, the Redmi Note 4 has a speaker grille at the bottom, and although it is a single speaker, there are two sets of grills for the sake of symmetry. They're joined in the middle by a microUSB port, an odd choice in 2017 considering the industry is moving to USB-C. The Redmi Pro offers the newer USB-C port, and it is likely Xiaomi will switch to the standard from the next generation. At the top, you'll find the 3.5mm jack and an IR blaster. The Redmi Note 4's design wouldn't look out of place on a high-end phone. The power and volume buttons are on the right, and they offer decent tactile feedback. The SIM card slot is on the left, and you can either slot in two SIM cards (microSIM + nanoSIM) or a SIM card along with a microSD card. Round the back, the camera sensor and lens module are aligned with the fingerprint sensor, which is slightly recessed. The front is dominated by a 5.5-inch display, and the addition of 2.5D curved glass makes a substantial difference when using the screen. The hardware navigation buttons are backlit, allowing for easy access at night. The display itself is brighter and has better color accuracy than the Redmi Note 3, and is easily one of the best panels in this segment. You get the usual Xiaomi additions as well — there's Reading Mode, a blue light filter that makes it easier to read text at night. The mode lets you create a schedule to automatically enable it, and there's also the option of enabling it for selected apps. You can also adjust the color temperature to your liking, and toggle double tap to wake the screen. All the details Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 Hardware Xiaomi has excelled at offering great hardware in its budget phones, and that hasn't changed with the Redmi Note 4. The Chinese variant of the Redmi Note 4 is powered by MediaTek's Helio X20 SoC, but as Xiaomi isn't allowed to launch phones powered by MediaTek processors in India, the local variant is powered by a Snapdragon 625. Although the naming convention may lead one to believe that it is a downgrade from the Snapdragon 650 used in the Redmi Note 3, that isn't the case. Unlike the 28nm Snapdragon 650, the Snapdragon 625 is built on the 14nm node, resulting in greater energy efficiency. The mid-range chip powers through everyday tasks with ease, and there wasn't any lag or slowdown in the two weeks I've used the phone. The 4GB of RAM also makes a difference when multitasking. The Snapdragon 625 can also handle visually-intensive games Modern Combat 5: Blackout or Asphalt 8 without breaking a sweat. The Redmi Note 4 handles everything you throw at it with aplomb. Even though the base model of the handset comes with 2GB of RAM, it is great to see Xiaomi moving away from 16GB internal memory and instead offering 32GB as the base storage. The phone comes with the usual range of connectivity options, including dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.1, LTE with VoLTE, and an IR blaster that lets you control a variety of appliances. There's no NFC on the phone, but that isn't as major an omission as it is in Western markets. Android Pay is yet to make its debut in India, and it doesn't look like it will do so anytime soon. The fingerprint sensor at the back is slightly recessed, making it easy to locate it with your finger. Its position beneath the camera module makes it easy to access, and the sensor itself is quick to authenticate. It is an always-on sensor, so you'll be able to unlock the device even when the display is off. The speaker on the Redmi Note 4 is significantly better than its predecessor, and that's mainly due to its placement. Moving the speaker to the bottom means that it is no longer muffled when lying flat on a surface. The quality from the speaker is average — with sound getting distorted at high volumes — but at least you won't miss any incoming calls or notifications. MIUI saga continues Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 Software MIUI 8 is Xiaomi's biggest release in a long time, introducing much-needed visual flair along with new customization options. The skin is based on Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow, and the phone is currently on the December security patch. Xiaomi is testing a Nougat preview of MIUI, and will be rolling it out widely in the coming months. Setting up the Redmi Note 4 is a hassle, as MIUI still doesn't offer a way to restore apps and settings. So you'll have to individually install apps from the Play Store after booting into the phone. Another issue is with the phone's settings, which is a jumbled mess in its current iteration. Settings you'd normally find on other Android phones are inexplicably missing, and the ones that are available aren't located where you'd expect. For instance, if you want to enable installation of apps from outside the Play Store (useful for installing apps like Spotify), you'll have to go to Settings -> Additional settings -> Privacy ->Unknown sources. On most other phones, it is at Settings -> Security -> Unknown sources. MIUI is frustrating to use at times, but it is packed with features. Xiaomi is like the Alfa Romeo of phone brands. Its designs are evocative, and its customers are very passionate about the brand. And like all Alfas, Xiaomi's phones end up being quirky and frustrating to use. With the Redmi Note 4, that shows up in the form of annoying lock screen issues. Lock screen notifications are a hit and miss in MIUI 8. While I receive all Gmail notifications, I'm yet to see one for Google's Messenger or Facebook Messenger. On the subject of notifications, MIUI 8 has a retooled notification shade that shows quick toggles and incoming messages in the same place. You can expand notifications, but doing so requires a zoom in gesture, not the best solution when you're using the phone one-handed. Then there's the aggressive memory management. I use Minima for live wallpapers, and to get it to work, the app needs to be running in the background. Every time I closed the Minima app, the wallpaper switched back to the system default. That said, MIUI 8 has a ton of new features and customizability. There's Dual Apps, which lets you run two instances of the same apps, allowing you to run two WhatsApp or Facebook accounts on the same phone. With Second Space, you can set up two profiles on the phone, with each featuring a different home screen. The profiles are sandboxed and use their own distinct data, but you do get the option to move data between profiles. MIUI 8 also offers video editing tools in the gallery app, there's a new power-saving mode that lets you conserve the battery, and there's a Quick Ball feature that lets you access shortcuts with ease. You can also take scrolling screenshots, convert currency and other units on the fly, and much more. Eight new features in MIUI 8 There's also a one-handed mode, which is accessible with a left-to-right (or vice versa) swipe gesture across the navigation keys. You can shrink the screen size down to 4.0 inches, 4.5 inches, or 3.5 inches, making it more convenient to use the phone one-handed. Xiaomi also offers several features for the Indian market. The dialer includes caller ID information for the delivery staff of Amazon, Domino's, Zomato, and other brands, making it easier for you to identify incoming calls. Better than before Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 Camera The Redmi Note 4 has a 13MP camera with f/2.0 lens and PDAF. There's a 5MP camera up front that also sports an f/2.0 lens. The camera app is easy to use and comes with a wealth of options, including filters, beautify effects, and a manual mode that lets you tweak the ISO, white balance, and exposure settings. You can also take tilt-shift photos, set a countdown timer, shoot panoramas, and select from various scenes. The camera does a great job of taking photos in well-lit conditions, and the resulting images are full of detail and offer saturated colors. You get more detail when shooting in HDR, but doing so takes slightly longer to shoot images. Images at low-light turned out decent, but you'll have to put in a lot of effort to get passable shots.

First observational evidence of ‘Dark Matter Heating’ discovered Researchers have discovered the first observational evidence of ‘dark matter heating’ in distant galaxies, placing an important constraint on future dark matter models. Even though astronomers and cosmologists have long been able to infer the presence of a mysterious substance that makes up the vast majority of matter in the universe- provisionally named dark matter- the characteristics of this substance have been slow to reveal themselves, mainly due to the fact that it does not strongly interact with light. The latest observed characteristic seems to confirm a long-held theory that dark matter can be heated and moved around by star-formation says research published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. As dark matter doesn’t interact with light in the same way that everyday matter — or baryonic matter— does, astronomers have been forced to use its gravitational influence to perform observations of it. Using this method, researchers at the University of Surrey, Carnegie Mellon University and ETH Zürich set out to hunt for evidence for dark matter at the centres of nearby dwarf galaxies. Dwarf galaxies — small, faint galaxies that are typically found orbiting larger galaxies like our own Milky Way — may hold clues that could help us to better understand the nature of dark matter. Star formation in tiny dwarf galaxies can slowly “heat up” the dark matter, pushing it outwards. The left image shows the hydrogen gas density of a simulated dwarf galaxy, viewed from above. The right image shows the same for a real dwarf galaxy, IC 1613. In the simulation, repeated gas inflow and outflow causes the gravitational field strength at the centre of the dwarf to fluctuate. The dark matter responds to this by migrating out from the centre of the galaxy, an effect known as ‘dark matter heating’. (J. Read et al.) When stars form, strong stellar winds push baryonic matter like gas and dust, from the centre of the galaxy in question leaving behind dark matter. This means there is less mass in the centre which means that this left-behind dark matter ‘feels’ less gravitational influence. The dark matter gathers more energy as a result of this and begins to migrate away from the centre — this effect is known as ‘dark matter heating’. The team of astrophysicists measured the amount of dark matter at the centres of 16 dwarf galaxies with very different star formation histories. They found that galaxies that stopped forming stars long ago had higher dark matter densities at their centres than those that are still forming stars today. This supports the theory that the older galaxies had less dark matter heating. The Draco dwarf galaxy 270,000 light-years from Earth. Just one of the Dwarf galaxies studied by the researchers. Professor Justin Read, lead author of the study and Head of the Department of Physics at the University of Surrey, says: “We found a truly remarkable relationship between the amount of dark matter at the centres of these tiny dwarfs, and the amount of star formation they have experienced over their lives. The dark matter at the centres of the star-forming dwarfs appears to have been ‘heated up’ and pushed out.” What is significant about this new finding is that it places a necessary constraint on dark matter models, dark matter must be shown to exhibit a range of densities within a dwarf galaxy that is in direct negative-correlation to the rate of star formation in that galaxy. Thus galactic discs with greater star populations should also have lower dark matter concentration. Professor Matthew Walker, a co-author from Carnegie Mellon University, adds: “This study may be the “smoking gun” evidence that takes us a step closer to understanding what dark matter is. Our finding that it can be heated up and moved around helps to motivate searches for a dark matter particle.” The team hope to expand on this work by measuring the central dark matter density in a larger sample of dwarfs, pushing to even fainter galaxies, and testing a wider range of dark matter models. Original Study: https://academic.oup.com/mnras/advance-article/doi/10.1093/mnras/sty3404/5265085

I was talking to a Jehovah’s Witness the other day and found out their idea of heaven is the same utopia that liberals are trying to force us into. There is no conflict in Jehovah’s afterlife”€”just a bunch of twentysomethings having picnics with lions and bears, and maybe a dinosaur or two walking around. It’s Earth without any of the bad stuff. That sounds like hell. I asked him if there was boxing in this magical place. He thought for a second and said: “€œOnly if they have no animosity in their hearts.”€ What’s so bad about animosity? That’s how you win. Professional Muay Thai fighter Chris “€œCrom”€ Romulo once told me he wins fights by saying to himself, “€œThat guy is trying to take food out of my kid’s mouth.”€ And fundamentally that’s what his opponent is doing. The more fights Chris loses, the less he can provide for his family. He needs visceral hatred to survive and it’s really exciting to watch. Vices, like greed and revenge, drive men to success. As Bernard Mandeville said in his 1705 poem The Grumbling Hive: “€œLuxury”€¨Employ”€™d a Million of the Poor, And odious Pride a Million more; “€¨Envy itself, and Vanity, Were Ministers of Industry.”€ We need the bad stuff to live. “€œIf I were explaining sex to an alien I would tell him to imagine a mouse being eaten by a snake.”€ Take sexism, for example. I see women as sex objects who are much weaker than men and are better off at home with the kids. My attitude is unpopular, but lack of sexism is not just making women miserable, it’s ending us. Telling women they”€™re not sex objects and forcing them into the workforce has made them infertile. White Americans have stopped having babies and raising families, which is why we”€™re about to become a minority in our own country. Killing sexism also leaves women unsafe. When you tell girls they”€™re as tough as men, they go out and get wasted with no escort to make sure they get home safe. They strut down the street in the middle of the night through the bad part of town, almost daring criminals to attack them. When a black thug pulled a gun on Nicole duFresne in NYC in 2005, she said, “€œWhat are you going to do now, shoot us?”€ So he shot her. And her beta male boyfriend had an African funeral ceremony for her to promote peace and tranquility. How wildly unnatural. This rejection of all things normal has even ruined sex: you”€™re supposed to ask permission for every move. “€œCan I kiss you here?”€ mewls the new “€œfeminism for bros.”€ “€œHow about here?”€ Women may find this appealing on paper, but I”€™ve had sex with women, and hesitation doesn”€™t turn them on. If I were explaining sex to an alien I would tell him to imagine a mouse being eaten by a snake. It’s about a helpless wee thing being dominated by a cruel monster, and both genders love it. Girls don”€™t rule the world. Evil does. Go talk to a scientist or an entrepreneur about what gets him out of bed in the morning. Yes, curing cancer and paying the mortgage are incentives, but they don”€™t hold a candle to hate. Scientists are constantly at each other’s throats, trying to shoot down a hypothesis or get there before the other guy. Scientists don”€™t applaud when someone else makes a discovery. They plot to beat the bastard next time. Judd Apatow’s entire career is powered by revenge. When NBC canceled his show Freaks and Geeks he was furious, and the hatred he felt for the exec responsible, Garth Ancier, drove him to be one of the biggest players in Hollywood. Not only has he produced dozens of hit movies, he dragged the cast of his canceled show with him and now they”€™re all stars”€”who hate Ancier too. Seth Rogen confronted him at a party recently, still burning almost 15 years after the decision. Bullying is good, too. Gay loudmouth Dan Savage likes to complain about how hard it was to be different when he was young, but those rough years drove him to the success he has today. He’s one of the most well paid bullies in the country. Getting picked on prepares kids for the real world. When I go into a work meeting, it’s not that different from stepping into the ring. People want to test your mettle. I”€™ve noticed a direct correlation between how much time I spend boxing and how much money I make. We shouldn”€™t be protecting kids from conflict. We should be training them to enjoy it. But the millennials I”€™ve worked with were raised to be incapable of handling any kind of confrontation. I don”€™t mean they don”€™t enjoy it. I mean, as they would put it, “€œThey literally can”€™t…”€ When I pointed out a major error a 25-year-old made on a project this week, he started hyperventilating and another employee had to pretend he”€™d done a good job just to keep the guy from having a nervous breakdown. (I”€™m never working with him again.)

Race against the clock in 1980s England to catch the perpetrators of a terrorist attack You won’t need to do any investigating for this news, as we’re super excited to announce that The Occupation will be coming to PlayStation 4 on 9th October to PlayStation Store and at retail thanks to a retail partnership with Sold Out! The extremely talented developers over at White Paper Games, who previously developed Ether One, are the ones behind The Occupation. For those not in the know, The Occupation is a first-person, fixed-time, investigative thriller set in North West England on 24th October, 1987; a time of ’80s British pop, grand architecture and political unrest. An explosion has triggered a controversial act to be rushed into law, threatening to erode the civil liberties of the population. You are tasked with investigating and questioning people on their actions from a tumultuous night which resulted in the loss of many lives. Each person has a different account of the night’s events and you must use the tools at your disposal to get the results you need for your investigation. The entire game plays out in real time, and you must make decisions based on the evidence you uncover. In a non-linear designed world with multiple ways to approach situations, you’ll need to decide if you’re going to take the most direct route and risk the chance of getting caught, or planning for a more careful approach, and letting the time tick away. Each person in the world has a routine to follow so that you can plan your approach. Be careful though, as an unexpected toilet or smoke break may foil even the best laid plans. The world of The Occupation is highly interactable and tactile. Use this to your advantage by triggering security alerts to manipulate characters and draw them away from your location. But don’t lose track of time, use your state of the art digital watch to set alarms and reminders so you don’t miss your opportunity to cross-reference the evidence you’ve found in your interviews to uncover the truth about what happened that night and the true effects of the act. The developers at White Paper Games and we at Humble Bundle can’t wait to bring this investigative thriller to PlayStation 4 this October.

This item has been removed from the community because it violates Steam Community & Content Guidelines. It is only visible to you. If you believe your item has been removed by mistake, please contact Steam Support This item is incompatible with Source Filmmaker. Please see the instructions page for reasons why this item might not work within Source Filmmaker. Current visibility: Hidden This item will only be visible to you, admins, and anyone marked as a creator. Current visibility: Friends-only This item will only be visible in searches to you, your friends, and admins. Ah, those old days... Title Description ...that never come back... Rocky (workname) - made by Sim_Piko/Keepon in Blender3D Rocky is based on Rockford's Atari800 look from Peter Liepa's "Bouder Dash"(r) Diamond (model) - ripped (kinda) from "Boulder Rocks! 3D" by Zombie Mastah (good remake - you should try it someday) Firefly (model) - made by Sim_Piko/Keepon in Blender3D character_lighting_map and Source Filmmaker made by and (c) Valve SIDE NOTE: still needs proper bone weighting SIDE NOTE2: find good way to make proper bone weighting/skinning in Blender3D Afterupload SIDE NOTE: Valve got some strange compressions breaking smooooth background. *** Click on image for 1920x1080 resolution *** Includes: Save Cancel Created by Keepon Offline File Size Posted 1.103 MB 12 Aug, 2013 @ 2:21pm 129 Unique Visitors 0 Current Favorites

French Priest Jacques Hamel was killed when two attackers slit the throat of the 86-year-old's throat. Credit:AP French President Francois Hollande identified the attackers as Islamist terrorists, and the IS news agency Amaq cited a security source saying the attack was by "soldiers of the Islamic State". Anti-terrorism prosecutors have been assigned to the investigation. French prosecutor Francois Molins said one of the attackers, Adel Kermiche, had been arrested and imprisoned after becoming radicalised and trying to reach Syria to fight for IS. However, he was released by a judge in March and put under house arrest. Later on Tuesday evening, in a televised address to the nation, Mr Hollande said France would defeat terrorism "by persevering". Priest identified as Father Jacques Hamel (right), 84, was killed by knifemen in a church in France. He did not flag new measures to address the threat, but emphasised the existing ones would be applied to their fullest. "This war will be a long one," he said. "Our country must avoid overreaction, polemics, confusion and suspicion ... It is our unity that will give us strength." Police officers in Normandy following an attack on a church that left a priest dead. Credit:AP Mr Molins said two men carrying blades entered the church during morning Mass about 9.25am and took six people hostage - the priest, three nuns and a couple of parishioners. Witnesses told Le Figaro the attackers were armed with knives, one was bearded and one was said to have worn a chachia, a traditional woollen north African hat. French President Francois Hollande shakes hands with police and security personnel in Normandy. Credit:AP They shouted "Allahu Akbar" as they entered the church, "corroborated sources" told Le Point. Sister Daniele, a nun who was in the church, told French television she thought "that's it, it's over" when the attackers stormed in. Adel Kermiche, a younger age. Credit:Facebook "It was at the foot of the altar, they forced [the priest] to kneel and not move – and then we saw the knife in their right hand," she said. "They took to the floor to speak in Arabic … I didn't understand everything they said, but they shouted, 'You Christians, you are oppressing us.' " Adel Khermiche In another interview, she said: "They did a sort of sermon around the altar in Arabic. It's horrific." Sister Daniele escaped while they were attacking the priest. She did not see his murder. The church where a 84-year-old priest was murdered in an attack in Normandy, France. Credit:AP "I set off running and I stopped the first car I saw. The driver called the police and they arrived very quickly." Police tried to negotiate with the terrorists through a small side door at the back of the church leading to the sacristy. They then tried to enter but were unable to because the attackers used three hostages as a human shield to block the door, Mr Molins said. The two nuns and a parishioner then left the church followed by the terrorists, one of whom was carrying a handgun, Mr Molins said. They headed for the police crying "Allahu Akbar" and were shot down. One of the attackers had a fake explosive device on his belt and three knives. The other had a timepiece wrapped in aluminium foil in a backpack with a fake explosive. Police then entered the church to search for explosives. None were found. They found the body of the priest, who died of wounds to his chest and throat. Mr Molins said Kermiche, a local teenager born in 1997, had been identified through his fingerprints. In March 2015 he was arrested in Germany trying to get to Syria using his brother's ID. Two months later, he again tried to join IS and this time got as far as Turkey. He was remanded in custody in France, but in March a judge ordered that he instead be kept under house arrest, and he was allowed to leave home for up to four hours a day. The Paris prosecutor appealed against this decision to release him but it was confirmed by an appeal court. Sid Ahmen Ghlam, a 24-year-old Algerian student who was arrested and imprisoned after planning to attack places of Catholic worship in the Paris region had previously identified the same church as a potential target, Le Figaro reported. The attack comes with the country still on high alert after the Bastille Day massacre in Nice. "I cry out to God with all men of goodwill," said the archbishop of Rouen Dominique Lebrun in a press release issued by the Rouen diocese, in which the church lies. He said there were three victims: Father Hamel and his killers. Three other people were injured, one very seriously. He said he would return from World Youth Day in Poland and "I will be tonight in my diocese with families and the shocked parish community." He called on young people not to give in to violence but to "become apostles of the civilisation of love". On social media, the "je suis pretre" ("I am priest") hashtag began spreading. Catholics called for Pope Francis to put the slain priest on a fast track for sainthood. Roberto Maroni, president of the Lombard region, said Father Hamel was a "martyr of faith". At the Vatican, a spokesman, the Reverend Federico Lombardi, said that Pope Francis was horrified at the "barbaric killing" of a priest. Mr Hollande said the attack was a "cowardly assassination" by two terrorists. Visiting the church, he said he had spoken to the family of the dead priest and also a parishioner who had been taken hostage. He linked the "despicable terrorist attack" directly to Islamic State, saying "over the past few days and the past few years we have been facing IS, who have declared war against us". "It's not only Catholics targeted, it is all French people," he said. "We should be part of a 'bloc', a unity that nobody can divide ... the terrorists will stop at nothing if we do not stop them." He praised police and emergency services who, he said, had avoided a higher death toll with their quick intervention. Mr Hollande later met Prime Minister Manuel Valls, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve and Justice Minister Bernard Cazeneuve at the Elysee Palace. The attack drew statements of condemnation from across French society. Dalil Boubakeur, president of the French Council of the Muslim Faith, declared that "Muslims stand together behind the government to defend France and its institutions." The Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions said that the attack "marks a new stage in the spread of terrorism in France". Right-wing politician Marine Le Pen tweeted the modus operandi led her to "obviously fear another attack by Islamist terrorists". Mr Valls tweeted his "horror at the barbaric attack … the whole of France and all Catholics are wounded. We will stand together."

We have learned that our valued colleague and leader John T. Fleming, President and Chief Executive Officer of Superior Beverage Group, his wife Sue, sons Jack and Andrew, and two close friends were involved in an aircraft accident near Cleveland Thursday night. While search and rescue operations are under way, we are focusing our efforts on supporting the families involved. We are working closely with the proper authorities conducting the investigation. We appreciate the efforts of the first responders on the scene.

Product Description Brooke Marks: Sleep Creep 767 MB | 14:29 Video Runtime | Resolution 1920 x 1080 Gallery Size: 31 pictures | 3000 x 2000 pixels FAN REQUEST COME TO LIFE! Brooke Marks needs to recharge her modeling batteries, so she requests a power nap from her photographer – the only stipulation is that Brooke needs the A/C on full blast to get restful sleep. Her photographer agrees, after all, who likes sleeping in a sweltering room with no air conditioning? Brooke adjusts the temperature controls and disappears into the bedroom for a power-hour nap. Unbeknownst to poor Brooke, her photographer plots against her slumber for sinful reasons. Brooke falls into a serene sleep just in time for her photographer to adjust the thermostat to Amazonian heat levels. As the temperature rises, Brooke’s nap becomes increasingly elusive, she strips off her light cotton lingerie in an effort to find relief from the heat. In her twilight conscious, she poses around the bed, moving covers and pillows in an effort to relax. Brooke never manages to have a successful sleep, but you’ll enjoy plenty of gratuitous nude napping footage. Follow the camera into the room, between her sheets, and overhead as she sleeps – leading to fully exposed areas of Brooke’s stunning body. Brooke Marks may never trust a camera crew near her while she sleeps again – so don’t miss this sexy sleepy-fetish download!

Toto Wolff says Esteban Ocon will be released from his Mercedes deal if he is to sign for another team in 2020. Ocon has been left watching Formula 1 from the sidelines this year after ending up as the odd one out on a crazy driver merry go round last year. Article continues under video The Frenchman had been set to join Renault, until a gentleman's agreement went out the window when the opportunity to sign Daniel Ricciardo arose. Ocon's previous seat at Racing Point was filled by Lance Stroll and interest from McLaren and Red Bull, with an eye on Toro Rosso, fizzled out as Mercedes would not free him from his contract. Wolff has regularly spoken of his confidence that Ocon will find a seat on the 2020 grid, and says he would be deserving of a return. The Silver Arrows chief told Motorsport.com: "Everyone recognises Esteban's talent, and I truly believe he should have a permanent position in Formula 1 because he is one of the best talents of his generation. "Unfortunately last year we were victims of a very particular market situation. "We need to make things clear to allow him to pursue his career in a way that respects the investment and support that Mercedes have given him, obviously without closing open doors from those who showed interest in him." Ocon has once again been linked with Renault, as Nico Hulkenberg's contract is in its final year, and Wolff suggested that his time with Mercedes could be near its end. Wolff said: "If he is in another team he will be released regardless, he will no longer be a Mercedes driver because if you drive for another team you will be called to give the best for that team."

For Wil Trapp, his goals are more about quality than quantity. The Columbus Crew SC captain's stunning stoppage-time strike from distance — his second career MLS goal — was the runaway winner for AT&T Goal of the Week for MLS Week 21. Trapp took a settling touch before a second one to set up a sensational blast from more than 30 yards away that flew underneath the crossbar for the winner in a 3-2 come-from-behind victory over Orlando City SC Saturday night at MAPFRE Stadium. Trapp took 65 percent of the GOTW vote, with Zlatan Ibrahimovic coming up a distant second at 17 percent for his low, first-time rocket from 16 yards out that nestled inside the far post that proved to be the winner for the LA Galaxy in a 3-1 victory at Philadelphia. Here’s how the rest of the pack finished up: Darwin Quintero at 13 percent and Sebastian Giovinco and Damir Kreilach at three percent apiece. Check out the final Week 21 voting results and video of all five nominated goals.

Michael Bloomberg’s policies as New York City mayor are analyzed by legal and constitutional experts who explain that in their view the 2020 presidential candidate pursued policies detrimental to people of color. Joy Reid and her panel discuss.

The United States has achieved its minimum expectations in the Women's World Cup, and now the U.S. has reached the part of the tournament where a loss is understandable. Its opponent on Tuesday (7 p.m. ET, FOX) is Germany, the No. 1-ranked team in the world, the reigning European champions and the leading scorers at this World Cup. Germany's beatable, but the Americans are going to have a hard time winning. Germany is widely considered to be a better team than the United States on current form, and based on the less than thrilling style of soccer that the USWNT has played recently, it's a reasonable conclusion to come to. But the fact is, we really don't know who's better. The last time they played was 2013, when the U.S. beat Germany in the Algarve Cup, then drew against the Germans in a friendly two months later. The last time the two teams played in a major tournament was at the 2004 Summer Olympics. They've dodged each other for the last two Olympics and World Cups, and they don't love scheduling each other. In the quarterfinals, France outplayed Germany for the most part and exposed some of its weaknesses, though the French did it with personnel that the USWNT can't necessarily match like-for-like. A lot of what France did is duplicable, or can be improved upon. In other cases, the U.S. can't follow France's blueprint. Here's how the United States can pull off the minor upset of Germany, starting with the bad news -- the factors the Americans can't control for. The U.S. does not have a Amandine Henry or Camille Abily Germany was outplayed in the center of midfield by two players who are better defensively and better passers than anyone the United States has. Carli Lloyd can score goals, Lauren Holiday is creative and Morgan Brian has no serious holes in her game, but it's impossible for them to duplicate what Henry and Abily did to Germany. The U.S. midfielders can't match their ball-winning and mid-range passing abilities. The only way for the USWNT to match the attacking, defensive and transitional output of Abily or Henry is to change formations and play three central midfielders, winning the battle with numbers instead of quality. It seems highly unlikely that Jill Ellis is going to do that. Instead, she's just going to hope Lloyd has an outstanding game. Anja Mittag is unlikely to play that poorly again The weirdest thing about Germany's first half against France, in which it got trucked and should have gone down by two or three goals, was how awful Mittag was. She's a world-class attacking midfielder, and she was Germany's most consistent player in the tournament up until the quarterfinal match. But she constantly turned the ball over against France, and was substituted at halftime even though she didn't have a serious injury. Germany boss Silvia Neid knew Dzsenifer Marozsán only had 45 good minutes in her, and when Neid put her on at halftime, Mittag was the player she decided to yank. It would be downright stunning if Mittag was that bad again. This is partially related to the first point, on the U.S. not having defensive midfielders who match France's quality. Even if she lacked sharpness in the same way that she did against France, Mittag would probably look better against the U.S. than she did in that game. So, that's the bad news. The Americans can't magically generate world-class central midfielders or expect Mittag to have another bad game. But that doesn't mean there's nothing going in their favor. Here's the good news. Dzsenifer Marozsán, maybe the best player in the world, is doubtful Lena Goeßling, who started in Marozsán's place against France, is a perfectly decent player. There's nothing wrong with her and she's good enough to be a starter on a World Cup-winning team. Still, the difference between her and Marozsán was glaring, early and often, in the quarterfinals. She had a few turnovers in spots where Marozsán would not have. Here's an example. A half-second after this capture, France had the ball and was breaking the other way. Once Marozsán was on, Germany's attack changed significantly. It took less than five minutes for her to create her team's best chance up to that point, and it was from a place where the French probably thought they weren't in any danger. Marozsán is double-teamed here, being shoved into a place where it's hard to make a dangerous pass, and France has players covering both Germany's attackers and dangerous spaces that players could make late runs into. She finds a way to turn away from two defenders and make a pass to set up a great shot anyway. Goeßling avoids unforced errors and does a good job making safe passes. Marozsán turns situations that would be understandable forced turnovers into scoring chances with ridiculous regularity. She's almost certainly the best attacking or playmaking midfielder in the world, and she's extremely unlikely to start against the United States. Marozsán came into this tournament with an injury and has been nursing it throughout, and she might have been fine if Germany had beaten France in regulation time. Instead, she had to play an extra 30 minutes on her injured ankle and was having serious trouble walking at the end of the match. She'll dress, but sitting behind a "break glass in case of emergency" case. Don't expect to see her unless Germany is trailing late in the second half, or gets to extra time. And while that's awful news for neutral fans, it's great news for the Americans. Megan Rapinoe is almost a Louisa Necib equivalent Necib, France's left winger, had her best game of the tournament against Germany, and the United States has a similar player in Rapinoe. She's not exactly the same style of silky technician, but functionally, she does the same things. She's a left winger who can help her team get the ball and serves as the primary playmaker. Even if her touches and passes don't look as smooth and effortless as Necib's, they're just as effective. She doesn't turn the ball over easily and she sets up goals with her creativity. If the Germans had a hard time containing Necib, they will also have a hard time containing Rapinoe. The Americans are as good or better in defense and goal Wendie Renard and Laura Georges are very good central defenders, but the American pair might be even better. Ever since Julie Johnston's minor hiccup on Australia's goal in the first group stage game, she's been her team's best player. Her partner, Becky Sauerbrunn, hasn't put a foot wrong all tournament. As good as Celia Šašić is, she was kept relatively quiet by Norway and France. There's no reason that the U.S. center backs, who completely shut down Sweden's Lotta Schelin, can't do the same thing. And then there's the goalkeeper. Even if you think Hope Solo has no business coming anywhere near a U.S. national team, she remains the starter between the sticks, and she's undoubtedly the best in the world. There was a time when Germany's Nadine Angerer had a claim to the throne, but at 36 and with retirement looming for her, that throne is undisputed. It belongs to Solo, period. And she's worlds better than France keeper Sarah Bouhaddi. After that, there's one big remaining question that it's impossible to come up with an easy answer for. Can an American winger do what Elodie Thomis did? Germany left back Tabea Kemme got absolutely torched by France's right winger, Thomis, over and over again. The U.S. might have a Thomis equivalent in Crystal Dunn rising through the ranks, but she's at home. There isn't a clear like-for-like right winger on the U.S. squad. But that's not to say the Americans don't have a right winger who can beat Kemme like a drum. A younger version of Heather O'Reilly certainly had it in her, and it's yet to be seen if she can find some of that old magic in this tournament. Christen Press certainly has the pace and skill to duplicate Thomis' game, but she hasn't yet played like a true right winger when deployed in that spot. Perhaps, with a bit of direction from her coaching staff, she could terrorize Kemme down that flank like Thomis did. So what can the USWNT do to beat Germany? Three big things, one of which is not really tactical. 1. Hope Solo outplaying Nadine Angerer - There's nothing Ellis can do to ensure this, but it's going to be necessary. Even if the U.S. plays a great game and Ellis has the perfect tactical game plan, the Americans aren't winning unless Solo is excellent and Angerer is slightly less than excellent. The U.S. can create more quality shots and restrict Germany's quality shots, but it's not going to stop Germany from getting shots off. Solo has to be great. 2. Stopping build-up from the back - Germany is noted for its possession play and the United States is derided for hoofing the ball aimlessly. But in the quarterfinals, something pretty amazing happened -- France figured out how to turn Germany into hoofers. The French laid off the central defenders when Germany tried to pass out of the back and took away passing lanes, while the German defenders took the bait. They blasted the ball up the pitch, and France won a lot of 50-50 battles in the air. Germany got the picture eventually and started dropping Goeßling deep to pick up the ball, but France still did a great job of taking passing lanes away and making the Germans bypass midfield. Nothing we've seen from the Americans indicates that they know how to do this, but their players aren't unskilled or unintelligent. They're certainly capable of duplicating this tactic. 3. Pumping it down the wings - Kemme and right back Leonie Maier are just decent players, and they only get decent support from their wingers. If there's a place the U.S. has an advantage, it's in wide areas. This is the same as the China match, but for completely different reasons. China literally conceded wide areas on purpose to prioritize clogging the middle, but Germany plays a very conventional formation -- defensive wide areas are just a place where its players aren't anything special. American fans are probably really sick of hearing this, but they are likely to get nowhere if Rapinoe is not excellent. She was the United States' best attacking player in the four games that she played in, and she will probably be the best attacking player again on Tuesday. Feed Rapinoe. If your right wing matchup looks good, feed her too. Don't allow Germany to build from the back. Pray Solo is at her best. That's the recipe for beating Germany.

The brain of a honeybee is tiny — the size of a pin head — and contains less than a million neurons, compared to the 85 billion in our own brains. Yet with that sliver of brain, bees can do some extraordinary things. They can count and interpret abstract patterns. Most famously, bees have the ability to communicate the location of flowers to other bees in the hive. When a foraging bee has found a source of nectar and pollen, it can let others in the hive know by performing a peculiar figure-of-eight dance called the waggle dance. The information contained in the waggle dance was first decoded by Austrian biologist Karl von Frisch, who picked up a Nobel Prize for his discovery in 1973. The dance in itself is not as complex as true language, but it’s remarkable in that it’s a symbolic form of communication. Recently, Hiroyuki Ai at Fukuoka University has made another breakthrough in our understanding of this extraordinary behavior, by investigating the neurons that allow bees to process the dance information. Bees get information from hearing the dance, as well as seeing it. During the dance, bees vibrate their abdomens as they run in a figure-of-eight pattern. These vibrations send out pulses that are picked up by an organ on the antennae called Johnston’s organ. Johnston’s organs are equivalent to our ears. Ai maintains hives of honeybees on the campus of Fukuoka University. (Incidentally, he says they have monthly meetings to discuss their research with students, after which they have tea parties and eat the honey produced by their bees.) Until recently, there has been very little understanding of how the bee brain deciphers the information encoded in the waggle dance. The reason, he says, is that bees only perform the dance in the hive, and it’s difficult to get them to do it in the laboratory. It makes sense that the bees pay attention to sound. “In a dark hive, they can’t see the dance,” Ai says. “Honeybees hear the dance.” Honeybees are very sensitive to vibration, so mimicking the noise of a waggle dance can cause bees to journey to the same place indicated by a real dance. Ai and his team recorded the vibrations made by the waggle dance, simulated the noises and applied the vibrations to the antennae of bees in the lab. This allowed them to track which neurons fired in response to the waggle dance, and follow their route in the insect brain. The team discovered three different types of “interneurons.” These are connecting neurons that allow communication between different parts of the brain. Ai, along with team members that include Thomas Wachtler at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, Germany, and Hidetoshi Ikeno of the University of Hyogo in Himeji, traced the path of interneurons in the part of the brain concerned with processing sound. They found that the way the interneurons turn on and off is key to encoding information contained in the waggle dance about distance. This mechanism of turning on and off — in neuroscience it is called “disinhibition” — is similar to one used in other insects. For example, it’s how crickets listen to the songs of other crickets as well as how moths assess the distance from the source of a smell their antennae have picked up. Ai and his team suggest there is a common neural basis in the way these different species do things. Communication is the key to forming complex societies. It’s what allows the honeybee to perform such extraordinary behaviors. And, naturally, language is a key factor in human success. Intelligence is required for both these things, so does this mean honeybees, with a minuscule brain, are intelligent? It’s a tricky quality to define. One attempt, from the American Psychological Association Task Force on Intelligence, defines it as the ability “to adapt efficiently to the environment and to learn from experience.” Bees are able to do this. There are six different kinds of dance, for example, and bees are able to learn and change their behavior accordingly. If bees encounter a dead bee at a flower, they change the pattern of dancing they perform back at the hive, suggesting they can perform a risk/benefit analysis. Both bee and human language are a consequence of intelligence, and research such as Ai’s forces us to rethink what we mean by intelligence. “There might be a common brain mechanism between humans and honeybees,” he says. What it certainly shows is that you don’t need a big brain to be smart. As with many things, Charles Darwin realized this, writing in 1871: “The brain of an ant is one of the most marvellous atoms of matter in the world, perhaps more so than the brain of man.” Rowan Hooper is managing editor of New Scientist magazine. He tweets at @rowhoop and his new book, “Superhuman,” is out next year. KEYWORDS honeybees, bees

Minnesota economic development officials on Monday released 122 pages of documents laying out the economic pitch made to lure an Amazon headquarters to the Twin Cities. The proposal, made public for the first time, outlines a relatively modest package of $3 million to $4 million in existing state subsidies that were already in statute. It also included descriptions and some potential property tax breaks, like tax increment financing, for potential locations in about 20 Minnesota communities from North Branch to Elko-New Market. Minnesota's Amazon bid: Read the details In 2017, the online retail giant invited cities and states to bid on landing its second headquarters, a proposed $5 billion project outside of its hometown of Seattle that held the promise of thousands of new jobs. It triggered an incentives war among mayors and governors across the country. The St. Paul-based regional economic development group Greater MSP and state economic development staff submitted a proposal that ultimately failed. Although it fell short, Greater MSP initially opposed public disclosure of the offer and fought a lawsuit brought by media and others who wanted to see any incentives Minnesota might offer. In January, A Ramsey County District Judge ruled that Minnesota's Amazon proposal was not subject to the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act and therefore wasn't public information. Amazon, however, recently told Greater MSP that it will not oppose disclosure of the Twin Cities bid package, Greater MSP CEO Peter Frosch said late last week. Amazon eventually split its second headquarters decision between Long Island City, N.Y., and Crystal City, Va. It later retreated from the New York site amid local opposition and moved some of its plans to Nashville, Tenn. Matt Ehling, executive director with Public Record Media, the nonprofit government transparency group that's pushed for disclosure of subsidies offered to Amazon, said the public has a right to know the financial incentives that governments are offering businesses so they can evaluate them. "That is a very substantive debate that has to happen," he said prior to the release, noting the pushback to Amazon in New York. "You can't have that debate if you don't know what the terms of the offers are. So that's why we've been so bent on making sure that the public will know those terms going forward."

Description du produit Comes with a download code. Epic 2016 album from the French metal juggernauts ... their first in 4 years, and first since relocating to New York! Includes "Stranded". Critique Sixième brûlot du groupe de death metal progressif français le plus épique, Magma marque d’entrée son universalité en s’éloignant des clichés collés à la peau d’un genre souvent réduit à un déluge de décibels manquant de créativité. « The Shooting Star », à la rythmique plombée parfaitement assumée par le batteur virtuose Mario Duplantier, ouvre ainsi avec fracas les hostilités, dévoilant du même coup le chant posé et hautement hypnotique de son frère Joe. Plus ouvert que ses prédécesseurs, Magma pourrait bien être, à l’instar du Black Album de Metallica, le disque qui permettra à Gojira d’accroître une base de fans déjà impressionnante et de dépasser son genre de prédilection. Une remise en question appelée par la peine vécue par les deux frères Duplantier, qui ont connu la douleur de perdre leur mère au moment même où démarrait l’enregistrement de ce nouvel opus. L’humeur de ce dernier s’en trouverait radicalement changée, servant littéralement de catharsis. Le simple « Silveria », toujours animé par la fibre écologiste chère au groupe, réserve des parties de guitare incroyables tandis que le chant possédé et la batterie martiale de « The Cell » seront loin de déplaire aux amateurs de la première heure. Car s’il marque une rupture avec l’œuvre pré-existante de Gojira, Magma sait aussi assurer les fondamentaux, promettant de nouveaux glorieux moments de headbanging, comme sur « Pray » ou encore le furieux et libérateur « Only Pain ». L’ouverture se matérialise surtout sur des morceaux tels que « Stranded » ou même « Magma », qu’il ne serait pas impossible de diffuser en radio. Avec Magma, Gojira fait assurément un immense pas en avant, prenant et assumant les risques, comme celui de faire reculer d’un cran le chant guttural de Joe Duplantier au profit de l’aspect mélodique d’un chant plus clair. Un pari réussi haut la main et qui place le groupe à un endroit stratégique de l’échiquier metal. Olivier Roubin - Copyright 2017 Music Story

The programme is part of a cooperative effort between the state's Addiction Treatment and Abuse Fund (ATAF) and the Long Live Egypt fund to upgrade Hepatitis C treatment in Egypt, in the frame of the country's national plan to eliminate the disease. Wali said the new programme will begin by testing 400 recovered addicts and treating those who test positive for the disease. According to ATAF, Egypt registered a 2.4 percent drug addiction rate, and 10 percent abuse rate in the general population for 2016. The fund said it treated 75,000 drug addicts in 2015. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), more than 150 million people suffer from Hepatitis C worldwide. Egypt has one of the highest prevalence rates of the virus in the world, according to WHO. According to 2015 statistics, some 15 million Egyptians -- out of a population of 91 million -- carried the disease, or around 22 percent of the population. In 2016, The Health Ministry achieved a 96 percent cure rate of the disease nationwide, through intensive efforts over the past two years using a variety of treatments. The ministry has vowed to completely eliminate the disease in Egypt by 2021. The WHO has praised Egypt's efforts to combat the virus, including government subsidies for new treatments. "Egypt has a become an example to follow all over the world, not only for giving hope [that we can combat] the disease, but also for its concerted efforts in a national action plan that includes protection through raising the societal awareness of the paths of infection and means of treatment, providing medicine for patients, follow-up and continued evaluation of the action plan," the organisation's Director-General Margaret Chan said in a statement last year. Short link:

Aug 23, 2016 at 10:38 // News Nina Lyon Author The UAE and Kimberley Process is to use Blockchain technology to fight “blood diamonds” trading on the world market. Blockchain technology is already used for luxury goods, real estate, art authenticity and ownership registration. Now, Ahmed bin Sulayem, chairman of the international Kimberley Process (KP) organization in the UAE, has proposed its use in the global trade of precious stones. He stated: "We have introduced the possibility of using Blockchain technology to create a seamless and continued global process for the KP certification scheme." The Kimberley Process is an international organization that was founded by the United Nations to prevent the flow of conflict diamonds, as they are used to finance criminal activities and wars against legitimate governments all over the world. Fighting Blood Diamonds While a lot of people used to shame cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin for being used for illegal activities, to date, cash and blood diamonds are the most likely to be used for those purposes. The size of the global diamond industry in 2015 was estimated at about $75 to $80 billion, however, about 5% to 10% of the world’s diamonds are traded illegally. “Blockchain tech is exceptionally good in law for tracking limited or restricted goods in trade. For example, we have a carbon coin we just announced with SAP that can tracing ability in climate finance to combat financial crime. Lots of other cool application along that vein,” commented Christine Duhaime, a lawyer and Certified Financial Crime and Anti-Money Laundering Specialist. Now the implementation of Blockchain technology in the business of precious stones could establish a tamper-proof record of the provenance of diamonds and help the Kimberley Process. Blockchain Technology in Precious Stones and Metals Industry Everledger is a startup that is already doing diamonds certification and authentication using Blockchain technology against fraud. “We take the 40 metadata points that make up the diamond. The laboratory houses inspect the stone, they effectively digitize each of those diamonds… All of the angles and the cuts and the pavilions and all of the crown. And we take all of that, as well as the serial number, as well as the four Cs, and we put all that into the blockchain,” said Leanne Kemp, CEO of Everledger to TechCrunch about the technology of certification. “Many people would argue that using blockchain for precious metals and stones is important as it will help to prevent the movement of conflict stones or blood diamonds as they are often called,” commented Jan Skoyles, co-founder and CEO of gold trading platform The Real Asset Co to CoinIdol.com. She noted that it is also of interest to insurance companies. However, there is a difference in diamonds and gold authentification. Jan Skoyles continued: “The difference with precious metals and precious stones is a block of gold from the ground can look very similar to another block of gold from the ground. And if you refine them then it is impossible to tell which one came from which mine. The difference with diamonds is that each one is unique, so you can effectively record their fingerprints on the blockchain. With gold it is not so easy. There are many uses for blockchain in the gold market, but in regard to provenance from mine through to retail or investment then I am not sure how this could be managed given the ease at which you can refine the metal and reform it.” Kimberley Process Blockchain initiative According to the report, Ahmed bin Sulayem has already had a meeting with the Global Blockchain Council of Dubai for the pilot project. This Kimberley Process initiative to use Blockchain might also become one of the UAE’s projects with FinTech and Blockchain technology as the key elements, and another sign of the UAE’s plans to become the global center for creating and exploring the future.

President Trump abruptly announced Tuesday that acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan is withdrawing from consideration to lead the Pentagon and he's naming Secretary of the Army Mark Esper as his replacement. While speculation has brewed for days about Shanahan's status, the announcement came shortly after the publication of an explosive USA Today report that the FBI has been probing a violent domestic dispute from 2010 between Shanahan and his then-wife as part of his background investigation. Speaking to reporters outside the White House, the president said, “it's a difficult time for Pat,” adding Shanahan would take “some time off for family matters.” WHO IS MARK ESPER, TRUMP’S NEW ACTING SECRETARY OF DEFENSE PICK? “Mark Esper will be outstanding,” the president said of Shanahan’s replacement. “And, we look forward to working with him for a long period of time to come.” In a resignation letter Tuesday, Shanahan said “it is unfortunate that a painful and deeply personal family situation from long ago is being dredged up and painted in an incomplete and therefore misleading way in the course of this process.” The Pentagon said Shanahan's resignation will take effect at midnight Sunday. “I believe my continuing in the confirmation process would force my three children to relive a traumatic chapter in our family's life and reopen wounds we have worked years to heal,” Shanahan said. “Ultimately, their safety and well-being is my highest priority.” He added, “I would welcome the opportunity to be Secretary of Defense, but not at the expense of being a good father.” After the 2010 incident, Shanahan and then-wife Kimberley both told police the other punched them, according to USA Today. Shanahan denied the allegations. "Though my marriage ended in sorrow and disappointment, I never laid a hand on my then-wife and cooperated fully in a thorough law enforcement investigation that resulted in her being charged with assault against me—charges which I had dropped in the interest of my family,” Shanahan told USA Today. The Washington Post also published a story Tuesday detailing other domestic violence incidents involving Shanahan's family, including how his son was arrested in 2011 after allegedly beating his mother with a baseball bat. The Post said Shanahan defended his son, saying at the time he acted in self-defense. Shanahan told the paper this week that resurfacing the incident “will ruin my son’s life,” while backing away from his original self-defense claim. Without referencing the reporting, Trump announced on Twitter earlier Tuesday the acting secretary will not go forward with confirmation in order to focus on his family. “Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, who has done a wonderful job, has decided not to go forward with his confirmation process so that he can devote more time to his family,” the president tweeted. “I thank Pat for his outstanding service and will be naming Secretary of the Army, Mark Esper, to be the new Acting Secretary of Defense. I know Mark, and have no doubt he will do a fantastic job!” Esper has served as secretary of the United States Army since 2017. He graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1986 — the same year as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Last month, the White House announced Trump's intention to have Shanahan permanently lead the department, following his time serving as acting secretary. At the time, Shanahan said he was "honored" by Trump's decision. “If confirmed by the Senate, I will continue the aggressive implementation of our National Defense Strategy," he said. "I remain committed to modernizing the force so our remarkable Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines have everything they need to keep our military lethal and our country safe.” But in recent days, there were signs that Shanahan’s confirmation had stalled, as the Senate Armed Services Committee -- the panel that would have held hearings on the nomination -- still had not received paperwork formally nominating Shanahan to the position. Fox News was told the panel was still waiting for paperwork from the FBI’s background check. Shanahan worked at Boeing for over 30 years before coming to the Pentagon as then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’s deputy at the start of the Trump administration. He has filled the role of acting defense secretary since Mattis' resignation last year. Fox News' Lucas Tomlinson and Elizabeth Zwirz contributed to this report.

The mainstream language of leadership is geared toward deciding and affirming rather than questioning. Yet my recent research finds that – contrary to popular belief – leaders who routinely ask questions become more credible in their roles. Most leaders believe the opposite. They think their questions betray a lack of knowledge that could raise doubts about their competence. While not always untrue, that is only part of a more complex picture, as my co-author Irina Cojuhrenco of the University of Surrey and I explain in a forthcoming paper in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. Why leaders don’t ask questions Our first study, a survey completed by 281 managers, found that only 29 percent of participants asked questions as often as they could. Curiously, the managers also reported that asking questions was a great way to elicit trust, input and help – as well as to display humility. However, they were much less optimistic about how being inquisitive may affect how competent a leader is perceived to be. There’s the rub. The appearance of competence may appear so important that it overshadows other critical factors of a leader’s success such as trust, cooperation from employees, etc. It is not surprising, then, that leaders are wary of asking questions. We proceeded to investigate whether this negative correlation between question-asking and perceived competence actually existed. In four subsequent studies, participants recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform read different versions of scenarios depicting bosses either asking questions, delivering conclusions or admitting that they didn’t know something. They then rated the boss’s perceived competence, humility and trustworthiness as well as their own inclination to help the boss, based on the information in the scenario. We found that for the hypothetical bosses who were described as new in their role and with relatively low qualifications (i.e. whose competence was initially in doubt), asking questions indeed incurred a modest competence penalty. Interestingly, the penalty for asking questions was much lower than that for openly admitting ignorance (“I don’t know…”). Most importantly, however, any penalty for asking questions was largely counterbalanced by a boost in perceived humility. As a result, leaders who asked questions were rated as more trustworthy and participants were more willing to help – compared to those who sought the same information without using questions (like an invitation for input with tentative conclusions). Bosses whose excellent credentials largely eliminated ex-ante doubts about their competence received the same rewards for asking questions – but with no competence penalty attached. Relational humility Question-asking could be construed as just another way of admitting ignorance. So why do people respond far more positively to “Do you know…?” than “I don’t know”? We think that reframing knowledge gaps as curiosity signals what theorists call relational humility, i.e. a humble style that elevates others as opposed to lowering oneself. Relational humility means willingness to view oneself accurately – including observing gaps in personal knowledge, displaying appreciation of others’ strengths and contributions and being eager to learn from others. For leaders, greater relational humility is associated with increased leader effectiveness and translates into increased employee engagement and performance. Inquisitive leaders, then, reap interpersonal benefits over and above the information or solutions their questions are designed to elicit. Caveats to keep in mind These findings contradict the common assumption that the relationship-building benefits of asking questions will always be nullified by a decline in perceived competence. Rather, leaders who frequently ask questions before making decisions can strengthen their interpersonal relationships, while simultaneously improving problem-solving as well as leadership performance. However, they should also be aware of possible competence penalties arising from asking questions. In particular, women – and others whose atypical leadership profile may throw their competence into doubt – should ensure to establish their readiness for the role and ability to deliver before adopting a question-heavy leadership style. They should also communicate very clearly that they are the final decision-maker so that asking questions is not mistaken for a deflection of responsibility. Remember, however, that not all questions are worth asking. The “humble” questions included in our studies sincerely invoke the addressee’s unique expertise and insights. More self-serving types of questions – e.g. manipulative ones designed to extract a predetermined answer or lazy ones posed in lieu of doing one’s own homework – are unlikely to register as humble, and therefore may damage rather than boost your reputation as a leader. Making better decisions and building better relationships With these caveats in mind, leaders should not let concerns about seeming less competent prevent them from asking questions. Those who are well-established in their roles or who come with stellar credentials have the least to lose, according to our studies – putting questions to employees won’t damage their standing in the slightest. But the “When in doubt, ask questions” rule of thumb holds true for less secure leaders too. Any moderate competence penalties they may suffer are likely to be balanced out by an increase in the quality of their working relationships. Consider question-asking a solid interpersonal investment that also allows you to make better decisions. Natalia Karelaia is an Associate Professor of Decision Sciences at INSEAD. Don’t miss our latest content. Download the free INSEAD Knowledge app today. Follow INSEAD Knowledge on Twitter and Facebook.

London on March 28, 2009. Protest organised Put People First, an alliance of more than 150 unions, and attended by 35,000 people. Photo by Xinhua. Stop press April 2 George Monbiot: G20 protests: Riot police, or rioting police? At the G20 protests in London only one group appears to be looking for violent confrontation – and it's not the protesters. Red Pepper: Death in the City Contrary to media reports, people did not pelt the police as the man who died during the G20 protests was being taken out. Andrew Kendle reports from Wednesday night’s protest frontline. Lenin's Tomb * * * By Eric Toussaint and Damien Millet, translated by Christine Pagnoulle in collaboration with Elisabeth Anne April 1, 2009 -- The G20 summit meeting in London from April 1 onward was loudly announced and publicised. Those 20 industrialised and emergent countries (G20) are meeting to find solutions to the economic crisis. But long before the end of the summit, it is clear that they will not rise to the challenge. The G20 was not created in order to provide genuine solutions; it was hastily summoned for the first time in November 2008 to salvage the powers that be and try and to plug the breaches in capitalism. It is therefore impossible for this body to opt for measures that are sufficiently radical to save the day. Public opinion will be told to look in the two directions that are expected to focus aggravation: tax havens and the CEOs' incomes. Tax havens have to be abolished, that goes without saying. To achieve this it should be easy enough to make it illegal for companies and residents to have any assets in, or relationships with partners located in, tax havens. The EU countries that function like tax havens (Austria, Belgium, the UK, Luxembourg…) as well as Switzerland must do away with bank secrecy and put an end to their outrageous practices. Yet such is not at all the orientation chosen by the G20: a couple of emblematic cases will be cracked down on, minimal measures will be required from those countries, and a black list of non-cooperative territories that will be eventually made public will have been carefully vetted (Luxembourg or Austria have already been promised they will not be on it). On the other hand CEOs' incomes, including golden parachutes and other bonuses, are indeed outrageous. In times of growth the employers claim that those who brought such benefits to their companies had to be rewarded to prevent them from moving to another. Now that we live in a time of crisis and those companies have to admit to increasing losses, the same executives still claim similar rewards. The G20 will try to regulate their incomes for a limited duration. The logic of the system is not questioned. Apart from tax havens and CEOs' superbonuses, which will not be hit by any specific penalties anyway, the G20 countries will further bail-out their banks. Though globally discredited and delegitimised, the IMF will be put back at the hub of the political and economic game thanks to a new provision of funds that will have been made available by 2010. Popular mobilisation needed The G20 strategy is to put a fresh coat of paint on a world that is collapsing. Only a strong popular mobilisation will make it possible to lay solid foundations to build another world in which finance is at the service of people, and not the other way round. The March 28 and 30 demos were big: 40,000 people in London, thousands and thousands in Vienna, Berlin, Stuttgart, Madrid, Brasilia, Rome, etc. with the common motto “Let the rich pay the crisis!” The week of global action called for by the social movements from all over the world at the World Social Forum at Belém in January thus had a gigantic echo. Those who had announced the end of the movement for another globalisation were wrong. It has proved that it is able to bring large crowds together, and this is only the beginning. The success of the mobilisations in France on January 29 and March 19 (3 million demonstrators were in the streets) is evidence that the workers, the unemployed and young people all want other solutions to the crisis than those which consist in bailing out bankers and imposing restrictions on the lower classes. As a counterpoint to the G20 summit, the president of the UN General Assembly Miguel d'Escot, has called a general meeting of heads of states and governments in June and asked the economist Joseph Stiglitz to chair a commission that will draft proposals to meet the global crisis. The suggested solutions are inadequate because they are too timid, but they will at least be discussed at the the UN General Assembly. New debt crisis A new debt crisis is looming in the South, it is a consequence of the real estate private debt bubble bursting in the North. The recession that now affects the real economy of all countries in the North has led to prices of raw material plummeting, which considerably has reduced the strong currency revenues with which governments of countries of the South repay their external public debts. Moreover, the current credit crunch has induced a rise in borrowing rates for countries of the South. The combination of these two factors has already resulted in suspension in debt repayments by those governments that are most exposed to the crisis (starting with Ecuador). Others will follow suit within one or two years. The situation is absurd: countries of the South are net creditors to the North, starting with the US whose external debt is over US$6000 billion (twice the total external debt of all the countries of the South). Central banks in countries of the South buy US treasury bonds instead of setting up a democratic bank of the South to finance human development projects. They should leave the World Bank and the IMF, which are tools of domination, and develop South-South relations of solidarity such as those that exist between countries that are members of ALBA (Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Honduras and Dominica). They ought to audit the debts they are asked to repay and put an end to the payment of illegitimate debts. The G20 will see to it that the core of neoliberal logic is left untouched. Its principles are asserted again and again, even though they have blatantly failed: the G20 maintains its attachment to a global economy based on an open market. Its support to the god of free market is non-negotiable. Everything else is hocus pocus. [Eric Toussaint is president of the Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt (CADTM), Belgium (http://www.cadtm.org), author of A diagnosis of emerging global crisis and alternatives (Mumbai: Vikas Adhyayan Kendra, 2009) and The World Bank: A Critical Primer (London: Pluto Press, 2008). Damien Millet is spokeperson for CADTM France. Toussaint and Millet are joint authors of 60 Questions 60 Answers on the Debt, the IMF and the World Bank, English version to be published in 2009.]

PHOTO LESSON WITH SETH KUSHNER I am an award winning portrait photographer whose work has been published in The NY Times Magazine, Time, Sports Illustrated, The New Yorker and many more publications. If you live in the NYC area, or will be visiting, I will meet with you and we will pick an area of NYC to walk around with our cameras and I will instruct you on taking photos. Afterwards we will look at the results and discuss. Session would last two hours and include coffee. Plus, you get the print copy of SCHMUCK signed by me and with your name in the book, plus my eternal gratitude for backing my project. Less

ES News email The latest headlines in your inbox twice a day Monday - Friday plus breaking news updates Enter your email address Continue Please enter an email address Email address is invalid Fill out this field Email address is invalid You already have an account. Please log in Register with your social account or click here to log in I would like to receive lunchtime headlines Monday - Friday plus breaking news alerts, by email Update newsletter preferences Donald Trump has said the US and Britain are “rapidly” moving towards a post-Brexit trade deal that will be “fantastic and big”. The US President said he and Boris Johnson are “very much aligned” and will continue to discuss the potential agreement. Speaking ahead of a campaign rally in New Hampshire, Mr Trump said talks with the Prime Minister are “moving rapidly along”. "I think we'll make a fantastic and big trade deal with the UK," the US leader told reporters before departing for the rally on Thursday. He said he had talked to Mr Johnson on Wednesday and would be speaking with him again. "He and I are very much aligned," Mr Trump added. It comes after Mr Johnson said he expects reaching a post-Brexit trade deal with the US to be a “tough old haggle”. He said: "In my experience the Americans are very tough negotiators indeed, and we will do a great deal with them and it will open up opportunities for UK business, particularly service companies in the US, but it will be a tough old haggle - but we will get there." The two countries are discussing a partial accord that could take effect on November 1, the day after the UK is set to leave the EU. Officials from the two nations have discussed the possibility of a temporary agreement covering all sectors. Such a deal could last for something like six months, a senior Trump administration official said on Tuesday. Mr Trump’s national security adviser said the UK was “first in line” for such an agreement with the US. John Bolton said the US could focus on striking bilateral trade deals in certain sectors like manufacturing and car-making where the two countries may agree, and work out more complicated areas later. Speaking following a meeting with Mr Johnson on a visit to London, Mr Bolton said in the eyes of the president “Britain's constantly at the front of the trade queue, or line as we say.”

Windows/Mac: Unfortunately the iPhone and iPod touch lack the ability older iPods had to run in Disk Mode. That's where iPhone Explorer steps in, allowing you manually manage files on your device, or just use it as a flash drive, without jailbreaking. iPhone browser is a lightweight application that has an easy drag-and-drop interface that lets you browse the contents on your iPhone. You can manually transfer your photos, music or movies from your device back to your computer, or just add files to the iPhone and fill up the unused space as extra storage. There's even an image preview for transferring photos. The best part about the whole thing, though, is that you don't need to jailbreak to use it. If you do have a jailbroken device, though, iPhone Explorer becomes even more useful—It can access the root of jailbroken phones and browse the files inside, with no need for complicated SSH setups. The only issue I had was that multiple selection didn't work so well—whether I was trying to transfer files to or from my iPod touch, doing it one file at a time worked much better than trying to do more. So if you need to transfer large batches of files, you may be better off putting them in a folder beforehand to avoid crashes. iPhone Explorer is a free download for Windows and Mac OS X 1.5+, requires iTunes 8 or 9 to use. G/O Media may get a commission Subscribe and Get Your First Bag Free Promo Code AtlasCoffeeDay20 iPhone Explorer

My arcane problem I’ve recently been spending a lot of time on Faraday’s remote servers, running one PostGIS operation after another in search of idealized geometries or custom market borders. In each case, I like to do a visual check to see that I haven’t created a node-sharing, topologically-laughable geo-monster before handing it off to another process on the same server. My current workflow is to dump the geometry as geojson, grab the file to my local machine, and open it in QGIS or geojson.io — which is an extra minute at least for every look at a feature. I sometimes need to do this dozens of times an hour as I debug and optimize. Obviously this is complete crap, but there’s no easy way around it when the command line is the only window into the data. The old ways Multispectral classification of Landsat MSS data from the Salton Sea in California. From “Remote Sensing: Principles and Interpretation” by Floyd Sabins, 1978 From my remote sensing days at BU, I recalled my professors chuckling about how — in the dim ages before Arc/Info and most other raster processing systems — they would classify Landsat MSS data and then print out the results using ASCII characters in a grid. (After which they’d open beers with their teeth, calibrate their spectroradiometer lens with a hammer and toss the instrument into orbit with their bare hands. Those were the days). So why not check to see if this sort of thing exists today? I floated a not-too-desperate-sounding trial balloon on twitter: And let me remind you all that the internet is indeed awesome, because . . . Solutions Three separate tools were thrown at me: gj2ascii Kevin Wurster wrote gs2ascii, a fully-formed python module that cycles well through multiple features: Update — August 13, 2015: Kevin added emoji functions. Heaven help us. Damon Burgett put together a streamlined script (also python — I blame Sean Gillies for this nonsense) to do the same: geotype And Morgan Herlocker cryptically teased something called “GeoType” that seems to do %$#&in’ colors at the command line: . . . then upped the craziness: I thank you all — this is exactly the sort of thing I was looking for. Alternatives My colleagues Tristan Davies and Nick Husher pointed out two other solutions to my original problem: Use the geojson.io API (if the geometry is simple enough), or POST to a gist using the github API. Then in both cases just visit the URL. Jake Wasserman built yet another python tool to make that easier. But I’m a geohipster, and I prefer the cartographic equivalent of hand-milled artisanal mustache wax.

Since I last blogged about #OccupyWallStreet, the organic movement has picked up even more momentum. It now appears that New York City’s “established left” is set to join this “mini-movement,” injecting it with more energy and enthusiasm heading into next week. Chris Bowers at DailyKos has a nice run down of how this gathering “has been growing rapidly,” while the Daily Intel quoted a political consultant saying, " it's become too big to ignore." I think the image that made everyone sit up and take note yesterday afternoon was the following image of hundreds pilots from United airlines showing up at the protest in their uniforms: That image somewhat shattered the narrative about this protest being some kind of gathering of hippie dippies with nothing better to do. As noted by Digby clearly “something’s happening out there.” The story became even more surreal thanks to a video that appeared to show “images of Wall Streeters drinking champagne from their balconies and kind laughing at these protesters. So what to make of all this. Matt Stoller spent few days with the protesters last week. He described it as a “church of dissent” at Naked Capitalism. Here are the two grafs that kind of hit me: What these people are doing is building, for lack of a better word, a church of dissent. It’s not a march, though marches are spinning off of the campground. It’s not even a protest, really. It is a group of people, gathered together, to create a public space seeking meaning in their culture. They are asserting, together, to each other and to themselves, “we matter." Meaning is a fundamental human need. The act of politicization, of building any movement, is based on individual, and then group self-confidence. As Daniel Ellsberg said, “courage is contagious”. I’m reminded of how Howard Dean campaign worker and current law professor Zephyr Teachout characterized the early antiwar blogosphere and then-radical campaign of Dean, as church-like in their community-building elements. That’s what #OccupyWallStreet reminded me of. Even the general assemblies, where people would speak, and others would respond, had a rhythmic quality to them, similar to churches or synagogues I’ve attended. I worked closely with Zephyr up in Burlington in the Howard Dean campaign. Those grafs are poignant because I have been thinking last few days about the massive protests that broke out all over the U.S. in February of 2003 against the Iraq war, while reflecting on #OccupyWallStreet. The big picture similarities in the political context around these two “protests” are striking. Let me elaborate on this point with some more thoughts threading the basic themes around this particular movement after the jump. I remember how the professional political class in DC generally overlooked that “movement” against the Iraq war by dismissing it as essentially just another peace march by hippies from the coastal cities. Similar dynamic seems to be playing out again. Stoller noted how some angry “establishment liberals are frustrated that this protest has no top-down messaging strategy.” I vividly remember how those protests – attended by thousands of activists in major cities around the U.S. and the world – barely got any attention in the American traditional media. Once again the major traditional media are mostly in a black out mode. Whenever they are covering it, they are either giving it lip service or eying with not so hidden condescension. I don’t have a lot of hope that the American traditional media will “get” what is really happening down there in Lower Manhattan. These protesters don’t have a 24/7 political operation, disguised as “cable news network” pumping up a corporate funded “protest” movement. I am not confident about other traditional news outlets finding their way out of the terrible spin labeling these protests as “undemocratic movement.” I am not sure if they will able to understand the common thread about how this particular movement in NYC and similar ones around the globe is rooted in “money corrupted governance.” Despite all of this, I will end this post with a positive note of possibility. Yet if folks think about the messaging concern is moot as the stories that are coming out of Liberty Plaza can be effortlessly threaded around the basic themes of getting Wall Street cash out of politics, creating jobs, and providing affordable education. It shouldn’t be that difficult for national progressive groups to go all in behind this “church of dissent” and give it more muscle in coming weeks, that could benefit an over arching progressive agenda coalesced around those themes. I wrote in my last post how this movement in New York City has given progressive groups a massive opportunity. It looks like the energy is only building in New York and it is spreading around the country. The question remains whether the established players in the national progressive community, including elected officials from the Democratic Party will dive in and go all in. This is their chance. Hopefully they don’t blow it like they did back in 2003. Don’t forget there are solidarity demonstrations this weekend...possibly one near you. Make sure to check out Facebook for more details. EDITOR'S NOTE: C&L is getting together donations for pizzas for the occupiers across the nation:

David Richard/Associated Press Cleveland Browns wide receiver Josh Gordon said "he's had something in his system for 'probably every game of his career,'" per Clay Skipper of GQ. Skipper noted the news in a Monday profile, pointing out Gordon hasn't played a game since the 2014 season and missed 51 of Cleveland's last 56 contests "because of struggles with substance abuse." Gordon has played 35 games for the Browns, all in the 2012, 2013 and 2014 seasons. This news comes after the Browns announced he will report to the team Tuesday. Having something in his system while playing didn't stop Gordon from tallying impressive numbers. He played all 16 games as a rookie in 2012 and posted 805 receiving yards and five touchdown receptions and then appeared well on his way to superstardom with 1,646 receiving yards and nine touchdown catches in 2013. However, he played just five games in 2014. Marc Sessler of NFL.com broke down the situation, noting the NFL announced Gordon—who is on the Commissioner's Exempt List—was reinstated on a conditional basis and can start practicing again on Nov. 20. He will be eligible to join the active roster on Nov. 27, although such a move would be at the Browns' discretion. In theory, Gordon could be available for Cleveland's final five games of the season. According to Sessler, Gordon said he entered a rehab facility last October to "gain full control of my life."

WAT - Cassandra: Row level consistency #$@&%*! TL;DR Cassandra is not row level consistent!!! We published a blog post about some surprising and unexpected behaviors while using Apache Cassandra/DataStax Enterprise some weeks back. Recently, we encountered even more WAT moments and I believe this one is the most distressing. In a nutshell: We discovered corrupted data and it took us a while to understand what was happening and why that data was corrupt. Let’s dive into the problem: Imagine a table with a primary key to identify an entity. Each entity can have a boolean state to mark it as locked. Additionally, each entity has a revision counter which is incremented on changes to the entity. CREATE TABLE locks ( id text PRIMARY KEY, lock boolean, revision bigint ); For an initial lock of the entity ‘Tom’ we execute an INSERT . Since we need to make sure that no one else is obtaining the lock at the same time we make use of a Lightweight transaction (LWT) using IF NOT EXISTS . It is possible that something goes wrong or our application even dies before releasing the lock, resulting in deadlocked entities where lock stays true . To ensure that the lock is released in such a case, we release the lock after a certain amount of time. This is achieved by using Cassandra’s Time To Live ( TTL ) feature. INSERT INTO locks (id, lock, revision) VALUES ('Tom', true, 1) IF NOT EXISTS USING TTL 20; Great! After finishing some other calculations for our entity Tom, we release the lock via a simple UPDATE: UPDATE locks SET lock=false, revision=2 WHERE id='Tom'; The result should look like this: SELECT * FROM locks WHERE id='Tom'; id | lock | revision -----+-------+---------- Tom | False | 2 To our surprise this was not always the case. In ~0.1% of the rows the result looked like this: SELECT * FROM locks WHERE id='Tom'; id | lock | revision -----+------+---------- Tom | null | 2 Given the queries we are using, the row should not be in a state where lock is null and a revision is set at the same time. After deeper investigations of audit logs and a deep dive into the SSTables it turned out that we did run into a timestamp tie. The cluster node our client is talking to sees a stream of changes with two or more changes happening to the same entry in the lock table at the exact same time. Obviously the calculation we are doing in between acquiring the lock and releasing it is not taking enough time (microseconds). Interesting, so what is the resolution strategy for multiple updates at the same time? “[…] if there are two updates, the one with the lexically larger value is selected. […]” [1] lexical larger value? LEXICAL LARGER VALUE?? So what happens to our statements? When the acquire and release of the lock happen at the same exact time, Cassandra will compare on cell level, I repeat, CELL LEVEL which one is greater and will choose the value for this cell from the query for the final state. For the lock column this means: true > false so it will take that portion of the INSERT . For the revision column the UPDATE query will win since 2 > 1 . Due to the usage of TTL its content will be removed after 20 seconds… hence the column for lock will become null , #$@&%!!! There is no row level consistency in Cassandra, #$@&%!!! Workaround The latter release UPDATE will also be executed using LWT. When a tie happens using LWT it will return with applied = false . In these cases we just retry the release query… Possible Cassandra Improvements The server should log timestamp ties. We were just lucky to find the glitch in the data: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-12587 Since the origin of the competing query is the same process, a sequence number should be sufficient to define order: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-6123 [1] - http://cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest/faq/index.html#what-happens-if-two-updates-are-made-with-the-same-timestamp

Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd said George H.W. Bush called Donald Trump a curse word and threw his shoe at the television when Trump was on. Dowd said, “I think, you know, that Donald Trump would be incomprehensible to him literally. And even that was 2011, so in our wildest imagination we couldn’t imagine that Trump would be the nominee and that he would, you know, eviscerate H.W.’s dream of Jeb in the White House with two words, ‘low energy.’ All of that was unimaginable.” She continued, “I asked him about Donald Trump because at that point Trump was leading the birther movement and H.W. was talking about how much he liked Bill Clinton and Obama and I asked him what do you think of this Trump birther thing and he just said … am I allowed to say that word on air? … He said, you know, in essence, he’s a jerk — with a different word.” She added, “I heard later that he was throwing a shoe at the television set when Trump came on. You know he was a man with enormous civility and I don’t think he could understand this.” Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN

Fashion Running to the Shop Our friends at Benzina Films joined Farer Universal as they pilot a Jaguar Lightweight E-type from London to Switzerland in order to pick up their new GMT Automatic watches, the Lander Oxley , and Ponting . The short film chronicles the epic journey through France and into Switzerland with an amazing car that didn’t miss a beat. The watches are pretty special too. Enjoy the video below.

HARLEM, Manhattan (WABC) -- A popular pediatrician in Harlem is trying to spread the word to his patients to take precautions against the Zika Virus, especially while travelling."Big danger to young woman, it can cause harm to pregnancy," said Dr. Juan Tapia-Mendoza, a pediatrician.Many of his patients will be travelling back to the Dominican Republic for the summer, which is why he is spreading the word on the Zika Virus."No treatment, no vaccine, the best weapon is education for people travelling," Dr. Tapia-Mendoza said."I'm really freaked out. I'm going to be careful when I go to the Dominican Republic now," said Daralid Almont, 17 years old.Almont is going to the Dominican Republic next month and says she is grateful for her doctor's care.The doctor explains how the symptoms are mild and easy to miss but the consequences to pregnant women are severe. Babies can be born with very small heads and lifelong disabilities.He is also very clear about how it's spread: either through mosquito bites or unprotected sex. Infected males and pass the virus to their female partner."If you must travel, use repellent. If sexually active, use barrier method protection," Dr. Tapia Mendoza said.In New York City alone, the Health Department reports there are 109 cases of Zika Virus so far, 17 of them women who are pregnant. All of them were infected while travelling abroad."This worries me a lot, especially for my community. Every day you learn something new and I am very worried," said Ramona Ramos, a mother.Ramos is travelling there next month. To add to her concerns, these particular mosquitoes don't just bite at night; they attack during the day as well.While the doctor can't stop his patients from visiting family, he can teach them about how Zika is spread and how best to avoid getting sick.

Image copyright Alamy The UK's chemicals industry could be particularly hard hit by leaving the EU customs union, according to Whitehall's own analysis. The paper, published by the Exiting the EU committee, points out the sector is "highly reliant" on EU supply chains. New customs declarations would lead to "significant non-tariff barriers" to trade, it says. The UK government wants to come out of the customs union after Brexit, so the UK can strike its own trade deals. The document, EU Exit Analysis - Cross Whitehall Briefing, has been published after being leaked to news website Buzzfeed in January. 'Foundation industry' It looked at scenarios ranging from leaving with no deal to remaining within the EU single market, after the UK leaves the EU on 29 March 2019. But it emphasises the difficulties in providing a definitive analysis, as the deal the prime minister wants to strike with the EU is not an "off the shelf" free trade agreement, so there are no precedents to work on. The UK's chemicals industry is its second largest exporter to the EU after the automotive industry and the second biggest manufacturing industry overall. The analysis points out that it is "an important foundation industry for other sectors" - for example, the manufacture of medicines - as well as being used by the technology, energy, automotive and aerospace sectors among others. 'Highly reliant' But the report says that all manufactured goods face the prospect of "significant non-tariff barriers" - obstacles to trade - if, as expected, the UK leaves the customs union. The chemical industry is "highly reliant on EU supply chains" it says, and chemicals and components can cross borders several times during processing and assembly. The Whitehall analysis also suggests that, after Brexit, chemicals manufacturers could end up having to transfer more than 9,000 registrations to the EU in order to keep selling those chemical products there. Image copyright EPA Image caption Mrs May said she wants to explore the possibility of the UK remaining part of the European Chemicals Agency New chemicals could end up having to be registered twice - in the UK and EU - with a big additional cost as standard registration fees vary from 1,700 euros (about £1,500) to 34,000 euros (about £30,300). Open Britain, which is campaigning for close ties with the EU after Brexit said the report showed leaving the customs union and single market would be "a disaster for Britain's chemicals industry". Labour MP Mary Creagh, who backs the group, said: "Tariffs would be a burden, but it is non-tariff barriers that threaten to do the most damage. "If [Brexit Secretary] David Davis signs up to any deal that imposes regulatory customs barriers on British chemical industry he will be putting 500,000 direct and indirect jobs in jeopardy along with billions of pounds of investment." 'Appropriate contribution' Steve Elliott, chief executive of the Chemical Industries Association, said on Thursday: "What we now need is the negotiators to get on with negotiating. Only when that progresses will we know what's really going to happen." In her Mansion House speech last week, Theresa May said the UK wanted to explore "the terms on which the UK could remain part of EU agencies such as those that are critical for the chemicals, medicines and aerospace industries". These included the European Chemicals Agency (Echa) regulatory authority, with the prime minister saying the UK would accept "abiding by the rules of those agencies and making an appropriate financial contribution" in return for products which are destined for export only needing to get one set of approvals, in one country. The Chemical Industries Association welcomed Mrs May's announcement last week but reiterated its demand for "regulatory consistency" when Brexit happens. It also wants UK officials to continue to be involved with Reach - the EU chemical regulations framework - to avoid "duplicate testing and related costs" and protect 10 years of investment in Reach by UK chemical industries. Reach requires all companies manufacturing or importing chemical substances into the EU over a certain quantity to register these substances with Echa.

President Trump demanded Friday that Democrats approve a wall along the border with Mexico and other programs to tighten immigration before he supports a program designed to protect young people brought into the country illegally as children – all while promoting his agenda and attacking political critics on Twitter. "The Democrats have been told, and fully understand, that there can be no DACA without the desperately needed WALL at the Southern Border and an END to the horrible Chain Migration & ridiculous Lottery System of Immigration etc. We must protect our Country at all cost!" Trump said during a wide-ranging tweet storm. DACA refers to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which protected hundreds of thousands of young people brought into the country illegally by their parents – a program Trump has vowed to end after March 1 unless Congress approves new border enforcement issues. Democrats say ending DACA will lead to deportations of productive young people. They also say Trump's proposed wall along the U.S.-Mexico border will do nothing to stop illegal immigration while programs targeted by Trump are tightly scrutinized to weed out criminals and terrorism suspects. During his serial set of tweets, Trump also went after the postal service – and Amazon. "Why is the United States Post Office, which is losing many billions of dollars a year, while charging Amazon and others so little to deliver their packages, making Amazon richer and the Post Office dumber and poorer?" Trump said. "Should be charging MUCH MORE!" Trump did not provide an economic analysis of his post office complaint, but it is worth noting that Amazon was created by Jeff Bezos – who also just happens to own The Washington Post, a frequent target of Trump complaints about the media. The president also defended his time in office by re-tweeting tributes from Charlie Kirk, founder and executive director of the conservative group Turning Point USA, who cited the recently signed tax cuts, de-regulation efforts, judicial appointments, and the fight against and the Islamic State. Trump's morning Twitterstorm also complained about news coverage, this time regarding his low approval ratings. "While the Fake News loves to talk about my so-called low approval rating, @foxandfriends just showed that my rating on Dec. 28, 2017, was approximately the same as President Obama on Dec. 28, 2009, which was 47%...and this despite massive negative Trump coverage & Russia hoax!" the president said. Yet that is just one poll – others have Trump's approval rating in the low 40s or 30s. The Real Clear Politics website average on Friday had Trump's ratings at 39.3% approve and 56.2% disapprove. On this date in 2009, during Obama's first year in office, the site put Obama at a 49.9% average approval rating and a 44.5% disapproval rating.

With the debut of Metal Gear Survive, one of gaming’s longest-running franchises closes the book on one era and begins a new one. For nearly three decades, Metal Gear held a unique place among video game sagas. The series debuted in 1987 as the brainchild of a young designer by the name of Hideo Kojima, and — with just a few exceptions — Kojima shepherded each entry through the years. Unfortunately, Kojima underwent a messy divorce from Metal Gear publisher Konami toward the end of development on 2016’s Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, and the two have parted ways. So as Metal Gear embarks on its post-Kojima journey with a multiplayer survival game that bears little meaningful connection to the long-running tale of Solid Snake, Big Boss and the lumbering nuclear missile robots for which the series is named, I took the opportunity to go back over all 21 official Metal Gear games that Konami has released in America through the years, ranking them from worst to best. I skipped the Metal Gear Online games, as those only ever shipped in the U.S. as bonus modes or discs with other games, and titles that never saw home release, like Metal Gear Arcade. Which Metal Gear game deserves the code name ... Big Boss!? 21: Metal Gear Solid Mobile (Mobile/N-Gage, 2008) “You know what would make Metal Gear Solid better? Playing it on a numeric keypad!” ... said nobody, ever. You do have to give some props to the poor developers assigned to this joyless, thankless project: They actually managed to assemble something resembling the skeleton of a PlayStation 2-era Metal Gear onto mobile phones (and, inexplicably, Nokia’s N-Gage). But this is not a game you’d ever want to play. 20: Metal Gear (NES, 1988) The Metal Gear series began life on the MSX home computer/console hybrid, a platform with almost zero presence in the U.S. So, for the American market, Konami had the game reworked for the country’s favorite console, the NES. It was a smart business move in and of itself, but Konami went about it poorly. The team responsible for converting the MSX game kept nearly all the same components and mechanics, but completely reshuffled the layout of the Outer Heaven fortress in which the action took place. In doing so, the developers stripped out the fair sense of balance Kojima’s team had so carefully designed into the MSX original. The result: a broken, unbalanced rendition of a good game. Many people lament the fact that it strips out the final encounter with the imposing Metal Gear weapon itself (instead, you blow up a defenseless computer like the tough guy you are). But the NES game’s greatest failings are more pervasive, and more subtle. Enemy line-of-sight mechanics are broken, and patrols are rerouted within the new level layouts. This makes it a lot more difficult for protagonist Solid Snake to move from screen to screen without triggering an alert on nearly every screen — a hazard the MSX original reserved only for the most difficult sequences toward the end of the quest. On top of that, the radio communication system dispenses clues that the new layouts render inaccurate or irrelevant. It’s a good thing this mess was built from the materials of a truly great and innovative game, or else Metal Gear would have been dead in the water right here. Kojima has said this is his least favorite Metal Gear, and we’re inclined to agree. 19: Metal Gear Solid Touch (iOS, 2009) In the early days of iOS gaming, every game company on Earth recognized that it needed to get into that market — without having the first clue about what to do or how to make money there. Kojima Productions’ solution was to throw Old Snake into a shooting gallery based loosely on Metal Gear Solid 4. It’s ... fine. Insubstantial, pointless, boring. But inoffensive. (Not that it matters, since it doesn’t work on current iOS devices.) 18: Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (PS3, 2008) The Japanese game development industry as a whole struggled to come to terms with the high-definition console generation, which strained the workflow logistics that had locked into place during the PlayStation and PS2 era. Kojima Productions didn’t manage to dodge that bullet. Its first HD creation, Metal Gear Solid 4, arrived delayed, over-budget and lacking many of the features early promotional materials had promised. The dynamic environments and constantly evolving battlefields that would force players to scramble to devise new tactics? The competing factions that Snake could partner with or betray? Nowhere to be seen. Instead, MGS 4 played out with a stifling, linear design packed with underutilized mechanics — a real step backward after the immersive jungles and mountains of Metal Gear Solid 3. It didn’t help that MGS 4 also had to serve as the finale to the saga of Solid Snake and the Patriots, a loose narrative that Kojima pretty clearly never intended to resolve himself. With each Metal Gear sequel, Kojima painted the storyline into a corner and proclaimed himself done with the franchise ... only to step back in once his successors cried out for help. All those intriguing but impossible-to-resolve mysteries had to come to a head here, and much as with the works of Kojima’s hero J.J. Abrams (Alias, Lost), it all amounted to equal parts disappointment and hand-waving. Did someone say “nanomachines”? All of this led to a finale offering few interesting ideas, just Kojima leaning heavily on your happy memories of the previous games in the series. Snake deserved better. 17: Snake’s Revenge (NES, 1990) Despite its flaws, the NES version of Metal Gear sold so well in the U.S. that Konami commissioned a sequel specifically for America ... without Kojima’s input. The result is a strange offshoot that mostly plays like a clumsier take on the original Metal Gear while also trying to combine 2D side-scrolling platform action with stealth mechanics. It’s strange and ugly and messy, though it’s actually not as bad as its reputation would suggest. And it helped prompt the creation of the masterful Metal Gear 2, so that’s something. 16: Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes (GameCube, 2004) This GameCube-exclusive remake of Metal Gear Solid has a lot in common with the NES version of the first Metal Gear: It was put together for a Nintendo platform by people who didn’t seem to pay much regard for the things that made the original work. Eternal Darkness developer Silicon Knights back-ported a number of mechanics from Metal Gear Solid 2 into its predecessor, but in doing so, the studio broke the difficulty balance. It turns out this game is a whole lot easier when you have access to first-person aiming. And don’t think the storytelling got off scot-free, either. Real, live movie director Ryuhei Kitamura (Godzilla: Final Wars) took a stylized, action-heavy approach to The Twin Snakes’ cutscenes. They looked cool as hell, but they also completely undermined the script’s characterization of Solid Snake. By turning him into a superhero, The Twin Snakes betrayed everything that made Snake so compelling: his world-weary cynicism and his awareness of his own fundamental limitations. Metal Gear Solid on PlayStation may not look as good as The Twin Snakes, but it’s still by far the better game. 15: Metal Gear Acid (PSP, 2005) When Konami announced a Metal Gear title for the PSP’s launch window ... no one could have imagined it would be this. Despite completely defying any existing conception of the series, though, Acid turned out to be pretty interesting in its own right. It threw the tactical stealth action that fans knew and loved out the window, replacing all of that instead with something more like XCOM combined with a customizable card game. Weird, but since it landed in a decade where no one was actually making XCOM games, it worked. And even with the genre change and the move to turn-based combat, it still somehow feels recognizably like Metal Gear. An outlier for the series, but not a bad one. 14: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (PS2, 2001) The sequel to Metal Gear Solid attempted to do a lot of things all at once: Be a sequel to a beloved masterpiece, serve as a technical showcase for powerful new console hardware and tell one of the medium’s most subversive stories. No faulting Kojima for his ambition with this one; unfortunately, for all that Metal Gear Solid 2 aims to achieve, its goals frequently contradict one another. As a story, it’s a visionary work that brilliantly predicted the impact of global digital communication networks and information (or rather, disinformation) on society. The plotline is basically a primer for everything we’ve seen in Western politics over the past few years. As a game, though? It’s actually kind of a chore to play. MGS 2’s premise — players take the role of a man who turns out to be little more than a pawn in an attempt to create super soldiers by simulating Snake’s adventure in Metal Gear Solid — is fascinating, but it also means that on many levels this is just a rehash of the previous game ... which in itself amounted to a 3D recreation of Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake. Protagonist Raiden’s lack of agency may be thematically brilliant, but in terms of actual moment-to-moment gameplay, it feels incredibly limiting. It also has a tendency to get lost in navel-gazing about bloated — yet ultimately irrelevant — plot points. MGS 2’s biggest problem, really, is that it’s just too darned clever for its own good. 13: Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops/Plus (PSP/Vita, 2006/2007) Konami’s first attempt to bring the proper 3D Metal Gear experience to handheld systems bumped up against a few critical issues, like the fact that the system it ran on — PlayStation Portable — lacked a right analog stick for convenient camera management. This means, unfortunately, that Portable Ops feels clunky compared to more recent Metal Gear games. Underneath the camera jank, though, Portable Ops introduced a template that nearly all future games in the franchise would adopt: The idea of base-building by rescuing hostages in bite-sized play spaces carried through all the way to the series’ terminus, Metal Gear Solid 5. These ideas and mechanics would be refined by later games, but there’s enough good here that Portable Ops deserves attention ... even if its entire storyline did end up being completely dismissed in a single one-liner at the start of Peace Walker. 12: Metal Gear Acid 2 (PSP, 2006) Revisiting the turn-based collectible card game format of the first Acid, this sequel does exactly what everyone wants in a follow-up: more of the same, but bigger and (this being Metal Gear) a whole lot weirder. Heck, it even included a cardboard screen accessory that created a fake stereoscopic effect half a decade before Nintendo came up with the 3DS. Acid 2 also looks a lot more like its namesake — the “acid” part, that is, with a lurid, surreal color palette and heavy cel-shading. Acid 2 tells a story every bit as trippy as its visuals, but underneath it all you’ll still find hours of addictive, turn-based, tactical card-based gameplay, with twice as many cards to collect as in the first Acid and more combat options to go with them. 11: Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (PS2, 2004) After faking out, misleading and generally disappointing fans with MGS 2, Kojima treated its sequel — actually a prequel — as a sort of apology. Where MGS 2 told a dense, meta-textual story, MGS 3 presented a straightforward (though still occasionally twisty) Cold War spy saga. Where MGS 2 limited its action to the sterile, linear corridors of an offshore oil refinery, MGS 3 sprawled across jungles and deserts, through military bases, and up the the sides of mountains. Alas: MGS 3 also used MGS 2’s control interface and fixed camera perspective, which had barely worked in the previous game and proved completely unsuitable for this more open, more immersive and more complex iteration on Metal Gear mechanics. There’s an incredible game here, but it’s kind of hard to love as originally released. 10: Metal Gear Solid: VR Missions (PlayStation, 1999) People often attack Metal Gear games for getting bogged down in their narratives and dialogue, but you could never accuse VR Missions of that. It takes the bonus training mode of the original Metal Gear Solid and turns it into a full, stand-alone title featuring 300 different virtual reality training programs that force players to master every facet of Snake’s combat repertoire. While somewhat limited as a game experience due to its rigid structure and specific objectives from stage to stage, VR Missions remains the purest and most expansive exploration of Metal Gear play mechanics outside of, arguably, The Phantom Pain. 9: Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (PS3/Xbox 360, 2013) Revengeance barely felt like a Metal Gear game. Players controlled MGS 2 hero Raiden once again, but this time in his indestructible combat cyborg form rather than his wannabe Solid Snake guise. As such, it completely abandons the stealth mechanics that had been Metal Gear’s basis for two and a half decades ... but if you’re gonna go for pure action, there’s no better partner to help out than developer PlatinumGames. Revengeance trades complex stealth in favor of intricate, reactive twitch skills. Its breakneck pace offers zero apologies for expecting players to perform at the peak of their abilities. And even though it ditches the sneaky design of its forebears, it carries forward the Metal Gear legacy of dense narrative and offers the single, solitary glimpse of the series’ post-Snake future we’ll ever see from Kojima himself. Nanomachines, son! 8: Metal Gear Solid / Ghost Babel (Game Boy Color, 2000) By all rights, this attempt to put cutting-edge PlayStation masterpiece Metal Gear Solid on Game Boy Color should have resulted in unspeakable disaster. Somehow, though, Konami put together one of the finest 8-bit handheld creations ever. Its secret? Rather than trying to “demaster” the PS1 game for GBC, the developers built an entirely new game from the ground up, based around the workings of Metal Gear 2 for MSX. Narratively, MGS for Game Boy (catchily subtitled Metal Gear: Ghost Babel in Japan) appears to exist in some parallel universe where the Zanzibar Land incident of Metal Gear 2 never happened, meaning that this return to Outer Heaven takes place instead of MGS’ Shadow Moses Island conflict. (If you read between the lines, you’ll realize it’s likely this story exists strictly as one of Raiden’s VR training simulations, which makes it even cooler.) Despite carrying over some narrative beats from the PS1 game — the lady soldier ally, the gormless computer nerd, the codec team betrayal — this adventure quickly goes in its own direction. Snake infiltrates a complex enemy fortress, faces off against an entirely new set of code-named weirdos with equally bizarre powers and saves the world by demolishing yet another Metal Gear mech. It’s remarkable how well the Metal Gear experience scales back down into an 8-bit format, and Ghost Babel simply oozes with detail and cleverness. Even the codec communications give each character’s nonvocal dialogue sound effects a different tone to mimic the pitch of their respective voices. If not for the gimmicky color-coded conveyor belt stage, and the fact that the mission breaks down into stages rather than ranging across an interconnected, nonlinear setting, this would rank up there among the series’ best. 7: Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes (Various, 2014) Too small to be a full game, but far larger than a mere demo, Ground Zeroes fits into a strange place in the Metal Gear discography. It’s an essential work, though, serving as a bridge between Peace Walker and The Phantom Pain while setting up some narrative threads that would (mostly) be resolved in the fifth and final entry of the series. Ground Zeroes ultimately served as a proof of concept: a convincing demonstration that Metal Gear could adapt to contemporary game design standards without sacrificing the franchise’s unique essence (something Metal Gear Solid 4 gave us ample cause to doubt). Here was a self-contained prologue to The Phantom Pain that dropped players into a rescue mission in a heavily patrolled military base and basically said, “Solve this problem however you like.” And while you could see the fingerprints of games like Assassin’s Creed and Splinter Cell all over it, at heart, Ground Zeroes still worked like Metal Gear. Stealth remained king ... but this time, you finally had a comfortable interface with which to do it. 6: Metal Gear (MSX, 1987) The game that kicked off the entire series — the real first Metal Gear on MSX, not NES — holds up shockingly well more than 30 years later. It definitely suffers from its share of unfriendly 8-bit design quirks, including some profoundly mean-spirited one-way warps and a few really oblique critical items late in the quest. For the most part, though, Kojima and his team got so much right in their first attempt at tactical stealth action that many of the ideas that debuted here remain intrinsic parts of the series. Players sneak around, dodging enemy lines of sight and avoiding the use of noisy weapons. They receive objectives and clues alike from their support team via radio. They fight oddball bosses with goofy code names. And, of course, they go toe-to-toe with the eponymous walking nuclear tank at the very end before dealing with the final plot twist. It’s an 8-bit military combat game that works more like an action RPG such as The Legend of Zelda, and you can still find a great adventure underneath those dated visuals. 5: Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker (PSP, 2010) Metal Gear seemed to lose its way after Metal Gear Solid 3, and there was no reason to expect this unnumbered offshoot would fare any better. But no: Peace Walker took many of the promising-yet-clumsy elements that appeared in MGS 4 and Portable Ops, and polished them to brilliance. Kojima Productions unabashedly took inspiration from Monster Hunter with Peace Walker, integrating four-player cooperative mechanics into the Metal Gear universe. These became nearly mandatory when battling the gigantic mechanical bosses ... not to mention the bonus missions that actually crossed over with Monster Hunter itself. The interface ended up being far friendlier than a 3D action game had any right to be on PSP, and it plays even better on PlayStation Vita or in its HD console remake incarnations. Peace Walker even managed to find a way to incorporate all the elaborate storytelling the series is known for, without it being intrusive. For the first time in Metal Gear, most of the plot exists in the form of optional supplemental materials that you can (but don’t have to) listen to on your own time. Of course, the story itself is ludicrous as ever, so it’s not like Metal Gear lost its essential goofiness here. But Peace Walker served as a critical step toward both The Phantom Pain and the engrossing base-building of Metal Gear Online, and it feels wonderfully rewarding from start to finish. Beyond the finish, really. There’s as much to the game after the credits roll as there is before. 4: Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (MSX, 1990) If the original Metal Gear offered a convincing case for the potential of stealth-oriented game design right out of the gate, this sequel made the argument ironclad. Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake took all the elements of the first game, from silenced pistols to hiding in cardboard boxes, and expanded them into one of the most complex and sophisticated games of its era. At the same time, the game matched its mechanical improvements to a far more involved storyline. No longer limited to terse radio transmissions, Metal Gear 2’s plot played a much larger role in shaping the flow of the action, and turned Solid Snake and his peers into legitimate characters rather than mere pixel avatars. Despite running on a platform that was well on its way to obsolescence by 1990, Metal Gear 2 incorporated advanced concepts like crawling, luring enemies into traps with audible sound, a huge arsenal of weaponry and even — in the final showdown — an adventure game-like sensibility, as Snake was forced to improvise a weapon on the spot. It might well be the single most sophisticated 8-bit game ever designed, and Kojima barely had to update its tools and mechanics when bringing the series into 3D for Metal Gear Solid; he basically just remade Metal Gear 2 with polygons. 3: Metal Gear Solid (PlayStation, 1998) A landmark work for the medium, even if it was just a thinly veiled retread of Metal Gear 2. That didn’t matter, though, because Metal Gear Solid offered an enormous leap forward in terms of what a story-driven action game could be. Much of its impact resulted from the way it seamlessly wove together action and cutscenes. That’s something we take for granted now, but 20 years ago, no one had managed to pull off the difficult trick of telling a story through elaborate, in-engine movie segments that could blend invisibly into player-controlled game sequences. Metal Gear Solid eschewed pre-rendered CGI in favor of real-time visuals paired to the most convincing voice acting to have appeared in a video game to that point. It was jaw-dropping ... even if the characters did have a bad habit of jabbering on for far too long via “codec” radio about philosophical tangents. Presentation was only part of the story, though. Metal Gear Solid and all its comic book drama helped propel a rock-solid action game that, like its predecessors, heavily emphasized stealth and avoidance. The shift to from 8-bit sprites to 32-bit polygons went a long way toward building immersion: Snake could (and often had to) shift into first-person mode to fire missiles or crawl through narrow ducts. Polygons had a liberating effect on the game’s memorable boss encounters, too. Snake had battled combat helicopters and Metal Gear mechs before, but never with such intensity. Finally, Hideo Kojima’s famous attention to detail helped push the game over the edge into true classic status. From papers flying and computers sparking as Snake battled an invisible ninja robot in a series of office cubicles to the fact that you could sneak safely past a lair of wolves by hiding inside a cardboard box they’d peed on, Metal Gear Solid rewarded players who experimented with and explored the extremes of its innovative sandbox. 2: Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain (Various, 2015) Speaking strictly in terms of gameplay, Metal Gear Solid 5 should top this list. Even more so than Ground Zeroes, it perfectly marries the series’ core principles of stealth and experimentation to a modern, open-world, quest-marker sandbox. The game’s structure allows players to shift smoothly from covering vast tracts of land in a hurry to tense, hide-and-seek scenarios in which every move counts and getting the drop on an enemy patrol can mean the difference between success or failure. Furthermore, The Phantom Pain builds on the base-building concept introduced by Portable Ops and Peace Walker, creating the sensation that you’re setting up an army that constantly has your back. Each excursion you undertake presents you with a huge palette of tactical and combat options, such as silent melee takedowns and relying on sniper companion Quiet to gun down enemy patrols before they even realize you’re there. It’s a game that you can easily play for a few dozen hours ... or a few hundred. Unfortunately, play mechanics only account for half the appeal of Metal Gear, and The Phantom Pain drops the ball with the other half of the game: the story. Not since Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 has a game reeked so potently of corporate suits saying “ship it!” without actually stopping to see if it was in fact in a shippable state. The Phantom Pain leaves a great deal unresolved, and many of the plot points it does wrap up — including basically everything to do with primary antagonist Skull Face — end abruptly and without any real satisfaction. It doesn’t help that what little dialogue main character Big Boss (or rather, “Big Boss”) utters is read by new voice actor Kiefer Sutherland with all the enthusiasm of a man doing a decade’s worth of income taxes in a single afternoon. Normally, these narrative shortcomings might not be critical. In this day and age, such issues can be resolved in a patch, downloadable content or a sequel. In this particular case, though, the game represents the series creator’s final word on his three-decade life’s work. Sadly, that word amounts not to a definitive exclamation point but rather to a half-shrug and a trailing, uncertain ellipsis. You’d like a little more finality, you know? The Phantom Pain plays beautifully, but its muted, inconclusive resolution (such as it is) keeps it from achieving its full potential. 1: Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence (PS2, 2006) After a warm critical reception and disappointing sales, Konami went back to the well with Metal Gear Solid 3 and reworked the original Snake Eater release into the far more satisfying Subsistence. This revamped version included an asymmetrical competitive mode (the original Metal Gear Online), along with tons of bonus material that included a goofy crossover with Sony’s Ape Escape franchise and the first official English-language releases of the series’ formative MSX releases. As for Metal Gear Solid 3 itself, Subsistence didn’t change that much. But what it tweaked counted for a lot, modernizing the camera and controls in a way that helped make the game far more appealing. Suddenly, its emphasis on camouflage and wilderness survival became engrossing rather than punitive. Subsistence’s improvements allowed the quality of the underlying game to shine through at last — and what a brilliant game it was. MGS 3 turned its predecessor’s design upside down, giving players a series of large, complex environments to navigate and a vast array of tools with which to conquer them. Although some of those systems were never more than superfluous (especially the need to perform self-surgery after every minor combat injury), the others worked together in harmony. Mechanics like camouflage, close-quarters combat and nonlethal takedowns allowed each player to approach a given scenario from the angle that best suited their personality. Meanwhile, the prequel nature of the game set the action in the ’60s, which gave Kojima and company license to rethink some of the standard tools in Snake’s arsenal. This resulted in greater immersion and enhanced challenge by throwing out gameplay crutches of previous games like the Soliton radar system, forcing players to more thoughtfully interact with the world and the enemy soldiers that populated it. And then there were the boss battles — the glorious, inventive boss battles. Each one introduced its own rules and objectives, yet all of them built on the same core mechanics that Snake (and players) had to work with. That meant you could exploit the workings of the game to develop boss tactics besides “shoot them until they die.” For example, The Fear’s stamina-depleting power forced him to pause every once in a while to restore his strength by eating food ... so you could trick him into eating spoiled food to poison him and block his stamina recovery. The duel with The End could play out in a matter of moments or across the space of hours. And the final showdown with The Boss, Snake’s mentor, managed to encompass both a mechanical and emotional climax to the game. While future Metal Gear titles would improve on or refine Subsistence’s intricate collection of systems, no other game in the franchise has combined design brilliance with raw human emotion like MGS 3. It’s truly the standout moment in a series defined by greatness.

Elena Lambrinos Elena explores the different practices being taught and valorised in children's dance classes and how often taken-for-granted educational experiences can be both enabling and limiting. She is a dance educator and an advocate for dance inclusion and accessibility. Ginny Monteiro Scientist & Consultant Dr Ginny Monteiro is a scientist as well as Founder of Altitude Minds, where she simplifies and translates the complexity of the brain as well as its behaviour into experiential change techniques to shed light on human behaviour. In 2015, whilst on an philanthropic cycling expedition – Ginny travelled through rural and remote villages across India to share her story of sexual, physical, mental and emotional abuse in an effort to inspire women of all ages to break their cycle of fear. With the behavioural change techniques she has discovered through her research, Ginny was able to share these with women in education disciplines across India. Upon her return to Australia, she found Cycle for Change – an initiative that raise funds to deliver a free, global leadership program for women freed from Human Trafficking. Joe Dusseldorp Surgeon, Entrepreneur Joe Dusseldorp is an Australian surgeon who is first in the country to implant a custom 3D printed ear for a number of young Australian children born with a missing ear. He studied under some of the most talented surgeons in the world and has honed his skills as a reconstructive plastic surgeon from Vietnam to France. Upon his return to Australia in 2018, Joe has already changed the medical landscape by offering procedures that patients would previously have needed to travel overseas to access. Excited by the rapid tech advancements of 3D printing, Joe is on a mission to create an app for patients to use within the comfort of their own home in an effort to offer a more personalised medical system. Kate Harris Kate Harris is the founder of consulting firm Future Ready who brings an extensive background in leadership, capacity building and education aimed at finding sustainable solutions for the future. Kieran Crowe Kieran Crowe is a choreographer/dancer who marked the start of his career on Australia’s Got Talent in 2011 as a grand finalist with Instant Bun. Kieran aspires to alter what it means to perform to a crowd as well as recognise the role of the performer to liberate themselves on stage as well as the audience, from everyday suffering. Leslie Rice Tattooer & Painter Leslie Rice was a professional tattoer for more than 15 years before he visited Art school and realised that everything he loved, was awful. After completing his BFA with honors at the National Art School in 2006, he began to make paintings that once exploited, celebrated and mocked his questionable taste. In 2007, he won the Doug Moran National Portrait prize (and again 2012). With features in both private and public collections as well as group and solo shows, prizes and film/television, Leslie expands his body of work into other mediums. He is currently writing two books and producing an arts and culture podcast, where he also continues to paint as well as teach at the National Art School, Sydney. Lynne Testoni Freelance Content Creator and Writer Lynne a freelance content creator and writer, with over 20 years of experience in print magazines such as Home Beautiful and Vogue Entertaining & Travel as well as over 5 years of experience in senior marketing roles in retail and homewares. With her vast experiences that also span into the likes of architecture and design, see how she pinpoint the struggles of women in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s - and how they can best take control of their career and the next chapter of their lives. Nell Greenwood Educator, Writer and Creativity Advocate Nell Greenwood is an educator, writer and creativity advocate with over 25 years of experience in screen education and international film and television production. She started out in content development and was Head of Development at the Irish Film Board, Natural Nylon Entertainment (home to Jude Law and Ewan McGregor) as well as Element Films (producers of 'The Favourite') before embarking on a career as a screenwriter. Her writing credits include 'False Witness' for UKTV (Foxtel), that won an AFI as well as 'Pride and Joy', which was nominated for Best TV Film at the 46th Monte Carlo TV Film Festival. Nell then pursue teaching and discovered a passion for education, in particular creativity. Currently, she is the Director of Curriculum at the Australian Film Television (AFTRS) and has completed a PhD at The University of Sydney on Creativity and Unconscious in the Screen Arts. Peter Rohde "Australian Research Council Future Fellow at University of Technology, Sydney" Dr Peter Rohde is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the Centre for Quantum Software & Information at the University of Technology, Sydney. His theoretical proposals have inspired several world-leading experimental efforts in optical quantum information processing. As a collaborator in China’s world-first quantum satellite program, he aided the design of quantum protocols for space-based demonstration. Rohde has worked at highly acclaimed institutes such as the University of Oxford and Institute for Molecular Biosciences, with over 60 publications and 1,500+ citations in quantum optics, quantum information theory, ecology, and politics. Shalise Leesfield Environmental Campaigner Shalise Leesfield, who's 'Ocean Support' movement is an inspiring change for her stance to protect marine life by ridding Australia's beaches of plastic debris and discarded fishing line. With an engaging use of visual props and compassionate storytelling, Shalise's campaign achieved nationwide coverage on Channel 10's 'The Project' as well as ABC's 'Behind the News'. Honored by the Premier of NSW, Gladys Berejiklian for her commitment to the environment, she is the first school-aged person to receive this state honor. On Australia Day this year, Shalise was also presented with the 2019 Environmental Citizen of the Year, yet another accolade in recognition of her passionate efforts to save the ocean from plastic use. Tanya Silveira Neurologic Music Therapist Tanya Silveira is a registered neurologic music therapist who is currently undergoing her PhD research with the National Music Therapy Research Unit at the University of Melbourne, which examines how functional electrical stimulation combined with iPad-based music therapy impacts the wellbeing of stroke survivors. Passionate and engaged in her profession, Tanya has successfully implemented music therapy programs on the physical rehabilitation of adults and children. Her clinical work and research is well recognised with a national and global scale, including the World Congress of Music Therapy conference in Vienna (2014) as well as the SmartStrokes conference, which led to a publication to the International Journal of Stroke.

This post describes the C++ Badge template used to enhance member function access control in Serenity Operating System. C++ divides class member functions into three separate categories for access control. Let’s review them quickly: Public members: Accessible to everyone, these make up the public interface of the class. Protected members: Accessible to the class itself and its derived classes. Private members: Accessible only to the class itself. An outsider class or function can also be declared as a friend. This gives that outsider VIP access to all the private parts of the class. Sometimes you find yourself adding an interface to a class that’s only meant for a specific outsider to use. Let’s use an example from the VFS (virtual file system) class in Serenity: class VFS { ... public: void register_device ( Device & ); void unregister_device ( Device & ); }; These functions are called by all Device objects when they are constructed and destroyed respectively. They allow the VFS to keep track of the available device objects so they can be opened through files in the /dev directory. Now, nobody except Device should ever be calling VFS::register_device() or VFS::unregister_device() , but since the functions are public members of VFS , anyone with a Device& can call them. A common technique for preventing others from accessing these functions would be making them private and adding Device as a friend of VFS : class VFS { ... private: friend class Device ; void register_device ( Device & ); void unregister_device ( Device & ); }; This prevents outsiders except Device from calling those functions, but it also means that Device now has full access to the private parts of VFS which is not great. Classes having full friend access to each other has a tendency to lead to overly comfortable access patterns. Here’s the solution I’ve used for this in Serenity: class VFS { ... public: void register_device ( Badge < Device > , Device & ); void unregister_device ( Badge < Device > , Device & ); }; The interfaces are public, but now you have to provide a Badge<Device> if you want to call them. A Badge<Device> is a simple, empty object that can only be constructed by Device . It works like this: template < typename T > class Badge { friend T ; Badge () {} }; Basically, a Badge<T> is an empty class with a private constructor, and the only one who can call the constructor is their best friend, T . In the Device constructor, the code to call VFS::register_device() looks like this: Device :: Device () { VFS :: the (). register_device ({}, * this ); } That little {} constructs an empty Badge and we’re allowed to make the call. Final note: The name Badge refers to how the caller has to show their identification badge before being allowed into the function. :^) Until next time!

Terrapins football coach Randy Edsall and men’s basketball coach Mark Turgeon The Big Ten is hoping for support from its member institutions to begin a “national discussion” about ruling freshmen ineligible for football and men’s basketball, according to a document obtained by The Diamondback. “What I like about the concept of the proposal is it puts right up front the basic issue: Are we basically a quasi-professional activity or primarily an educational activity?” university President Wallace Loh said. “And if you support it, you are basically saying very clearly the No. 1 priority is the education of the students.” The University Athletic Council met this afternoon to discuss a Big Ten proposal to examine “the health of the educational experience” titled “A Year of Readiness,” which equates to a mandatory redshirt season. “I want to listen to the council,” said Nick Hadley, athletic council chairman and physics professor. “As a faculty member, it’s hard for me not to support something that would increase academic performance.” The document, which shows football and men’s basketball as the only sports with graduation rates less than 75 percent across the NCAA, states that a push for freshman ineligibility would benefit athletes academically. Men’s basketball and football players lag behind other sports in terms of academics, according to data provided in the document. Among the 34 sports listed in the Graduation Success Rate data, football and men’s basketball ranked last in the 2004 to 2007 cohort, according to the document. Among the 38 sports listed in the Academic Progress Rate data from 2009 to 2013, those two sports also ranked last. The proposal examines “the imbalance observed in those two sports” and cites that football and men’s basketball student-athletes account for less than 19 percent of Division I participants, yet they account for more than 80 percent of academic infraction cases. “If this is the best way to accomplish the goals of raising graduation rates and academic performance for all student-athletes, then we should consider it,” Athletic Director Kevin Anderson said in a statement. An NCAA rule prohibited true freshmen from competing in all sports up until 1972, and the decision to make first-year students eligible was financially rooted, according to the document. The proposal addresses the additional funds necessary to keep athletes on scholarship for the one year of ineligibility and four years of play. It also acknowledges the need to balance scholarship increases for women’s sports. The document estimates the cost of the additional scholarships at about $94.5 million per year if the “Year of Readiness” program were implemented nationwide, which is less than 10 percent of football and men’s basketball postseason revenue distribution across all Division I programs. “If they do well because they spend more time, get more academic advising … their freshman year, they’re going to graduate,” Loh said. “And I think it’s worth spending an extra year of financial support to ensure that they graduate.” According to Forbes, the Big Ten brought in an estimated $318 million in 2014, the most revenue of all conferences nationwide, taking into account income from television deals as well as payouts from football bowl games and the NCAA basketball tournament. Still, many athletic departments, including this university’s, have experienced economic troubles in recent years. This university’s athletic department reported $3.5 million in operating losses in 2014 and cut seven varsity sports teams in 2012 in an attempt to balance its budget and begin to climb out of debt. On Wednesday, Terrapins men’s basketball coach Mark Turgeon said he’s concerned about his players’ academic performance as time-consuming postseason tournaments draw closer. “This time of year, you’re really worried about [academics] as a coach, making sure your kids don’t get too far behind,” Turgeon said. Terrapins football coach Randy Edsall, meanwhile, voiced more direct support for such a proposal in August when responding to a question about Damian Prince, a highly touted offensive lineman who redshirted this past season. “All the freshmen should be redshirted,” Edsall said. “If we’re in a true collegiate model that we talk about or people like to talk about, it’s hard. It is hard for these kids. School is going to start next week. Now they’ve got the added weight of taking 15 [credits] and getting acclimated in terms of time management, taking these classes and reaching the expectations that we have for them in the classroom.” Early next week there will be a Big Ten meeting with representatives from each member institution where this topic will be one of many discussed, Hadley said. “This is really the starting point of a discussion,” Hadley said. “And the concern is how can we have the graduation rates or academic performance of all our student athletes, but in particular the ones that seem to be lagging behind, which would be football and men’s basketball. How can we have those improvements and what’s the best way to do that, but at the same time be fair and not deny people opportunities.” Senior staff writer Daniel Popper contributed to this report.

Az Országgyűlés elnökét a folyamatban lévő alkotmánymódosításról és a Stop Sorosról szerettük volna kérdezni.

Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Maj Gen David Cullen: Cuts are the "beginning of the end of uncertainty" Some 1,500 personnel are to lose their jobs in the armed forces' fourth and final round of redundancies as part of defence cuts announced in 2010. Defence Secretary Philip Hammond said 1,425 will come from the Army, 70 from the RAF and 10 from the Royal Navy. Mr Hammond told the Commons the decisions were "painful" but Britain's security would not be put at risk. Personnel currently serving or about to serve in Afghanistan will be exempt, while the Ghurkas face cuts. Shadow defence secretary Vernon Coaker said the government was "taking risks with Britain's safety and security" by pressing ahead with latest job cuts. The Army is cutting the number of regulars from 102,000 in 2010 to 82,000 by 2017, but seeking to increase the number of reservists. The plans also involve cutting the Royal Navy from 35,500 regulars in 2010 to 30,000 in 2020 and the RAF from 40,130 regulars in 2010 to 35,000 in 2020. Analysis It has clearly been a difficult few years for the Army. They have suitably called it "life in the tranches". Their misery: one tranche, or round, of redundancies after another as the Army undergoes the very painful process of downsizing itself. But there is now light at the end of the tunnel, or as the head of the Army Gen Sir Peter Wall says, an end to "the forced exodus of people from the Army". He can now focus on its transformation. Reservists will play a much bigger role in the Army. It needs thousands more part-time soldiers but also a constant flow of those wishing to join full-time. So far, that has not been going according to plan. And with the war in Afghanistan coming to an end and unemployment rates falling it's not going to get any easier. The Gurkhas will be cut because they currently have too many personnel, the defence secretary said. Mr Hammond told the Commons that the completion of the cuts marked a turning point, meaning the remaining personnel could "enjoy peace of mind" that a period of restructuring was over. He said: "Our personnel will have certainty about the future size and shape of our armed forces, and confidence that they will have the kit, equipment and platforms they need. "Just as important, the country can have confidence that its armed forces will not only be affordable and sustainable, but among the most battle-hardened, best-equipped and best-trained forces in the world, able to ensure that Britain remains safe and secure in the world." He said to ease the transition to civilian life, the armed forces help-to-buy scheme would be extended to personnel taking redundancy who did not have their own home. Mr Coaker said: "Labour is clear about the need to reconfigure our armed forces after withdrawal from Afghanistan and the end of a presence in Germany. But we would never do anything that would leave Britain's security under threat." "The government is letting down our armed forces and their families, and taking risks with our nation's safety." The previous round of redundancies in June, totalling nearly 4,500, was the largest number of job cuts since the government began the process following the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review. Of those that were made redundant, 84% applied. Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption War veteran Simon Weston: Cuts "having a terrible impact on recruitment" The head of the British army, Gen Sir Peter Wall said this final round of redundancies would end a period of significant uncertainty with the "forced exodus of people from the Army", and it could now focus on recruiting for the future. Mr Hammond recently described army recruitment as a "big challenge", as a £3m campaign to boost regular and reserve forces was launched. As the number of regular soldiers decreases, the government wants to boost the number of reservists from 19,000 to 30,000 - but it has so far failed to meet its targets. Falklands veteran Simon Weston said he would not have joined the armed forces in its current form. "I look at it now and think, 'Is it worth going in?' The way the guys were given their redundancies on the front line last year, that's some thank you for the job you have taken on, dedicated your life to, risked your life for, as many have done. I don't think I would," he said. The government's plans to reduce armed forces personnel were criticised in recent weeks by former US defence secretary Robert Gates, who told the BBC that cuts would limit the UK's military standing. That warning, though, was rejected by Prime Minister David Cameron, who said Britain had the world's fourth largest defence budget and was a "first-class player in terms of defence".

ODESSA, May 06 /ITAR-TASS/. The southern Ukrainian city of Odessa will continue burying those who died in a fire in the regional Trade Unions House set ablaze by radicals a few days ago. Funerals that started on Monday were suspended because Odessa forensic medical experts needed extra time to finish the identification of 37 victims, whose bodies were found in burnt-out offices inside the building, and determine the cause of their death. According to officially published data, five people were shot dead, eight died when they fell from a height in an attempt to escape fire and those who pursued them, and 24 people died from burns and carbon monoxide poisoning. The death toll includes six women. Those who died were aged 18-62. MP Oleg Tsaryov and a number of other Ukrainian politicians have already told journalists that the authorities deliberately understated the death count in fear of popular unrest. Local media said, with reference to unnamed law enforcers and forensic medical experts, that 72 or even 116 were killed. The reports make the atmosphere in the city even tenser. The authorities have reinforced the protection of strategic facilities, canceled all mass events scheduled for Victory Day and taken other measures. The parents of schoolchildren were told not to let their children go outside in the evening and teach them not to lift unknown objects from the ground. Riots started in Odessa on May 2 after soccer fans who came from the city of Kharkov, as well as Right Sector far-right ultranationalist movement radicals and so-called “Maidan self-defense” representatives from Kiev organized a march along city streets that resulted in clashes with federalization supporters. As a result, radicals set ablaze the Trade Unions House, where their opponents hid, and a tent camp where activists were collecting signatures for a referendum on Ukraine’s federalization and for the status of a state language for Russian. The authorities said the clashes and fire left 46 people dead; more than 200 sought medical assistance. Ukraine saw a coup in February after months of anti-government protests. New people were propelled to power amid riots as President Viktor Yanukovich had to leave Ukraine citing security concerns. Russia does not recognize the de facto Ukrainian authorities, who appear unable to restrain radicals and ultranationalists. The Crimean Peninsula, where most residents are Russians, held a referendum March 16 in which it overwhelmingly voted to secede from Ukraine and reunify with Russia. The accession deal with Moscow was signed March 18. After Crimea’s reunification with Russia, protests against the new Ukrainian authorities in Kiev erupted in Ukraine’s Russian-speaking southeastern regions, with demonstrators demanding referendums on the country’s federalization and taking control of some government buildings. Kiev has been conducting an antiterrorism operation in eastern Ukraine apparently aimed to clamp down on federalization supporters. Russia has condemned the operation.

How a plate of ribs helped inspire the only four-homer game of Willie Mays' career The very best game of Willie Mays' career very nearly never happened. On April 29, 1961, the Giants had just wrapped up a 7-3 win over the Braves in Milwaukee, and some members of the team decided to celebrate with a postgame dinner. The group settled on a barbecue joint, where Mays -- on the recommendation of roommate Willie McCovey, who swore that they were all the rage in the city at the time -- enjoyed a plate of ribs. Famous or not, the meal didn't agree with the Say Hey Kid's stomach. Mays was up sick all night, and the next morning he let manager Alvin Dark know that he didn't think he could play that day. Dark agreed and filled out his initial lineup card accordingly, while Mays got ready for a much-needed day off ... until he got an unexpected visit from a teammate during batting practice. Chances are you've never heard of Joey Amalfitano. A light-hitting utilityman with a truly killer unibrow, he slashed .244/.320/.321 across 10 Major League seasons, five of which came with the Giants. But on that afternoon, he played an instrumental role in creating a bit of baseball history: He used one of Mays' spare bats for batting practice -- one that Mays himself never used because it was too light -- and had so much success with it that he recommended Mays try it for himself. As you can hear in the video atop this post, Mays was convinced almost immediately: "I go up and try it, and every ball I hit went out of the ballpark." Now blessed with an apparently magic piece of lumber, he quickly walked over and added himself into Dark's lineup card -- and proceeded to go 4-for-5 with four homers and 8 RBIs: Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag. Click here to view original GIF He very nearly had a chance at five: Mays was on deck in the top of the ninth when Jim Davenport struck out to end the inning, drawing boos from the Milwaukee crowd. Still, he became just the seventh player since 1900 to accomplish the feat, and it would be the only time he did it in his unparalleled career. It was the sort of performance that called for a celebratory dinner after the game -- and, because baseball players would literally rather risk food poisoning than mess with what's working, he got ribs again:

In den letzten Jahrzehnten hat die Konjunktur des Kitschvorwurfs nachgelassen. Populären Autoren wie Takis Würger oder Karl Ove Knausgård, die ihre Texte durch Semi- oder Autofiktionalität gern mit Natürlichkeitspathos aufladen, wird er zwar manchmal gemacht, dabei aber nicht mit der verallgemeinernden Ablehnung alles Trivialen, die sonst oft dazugehörte. Während Urheber und populärer Gegenstand in Zweifel gezogen werden, ist man vorsichtiger geworden, dessen Rezipienten zu stark zu kritisieren. Was den Kitschvorwurf nämlich besonders problematisch macht, ist die mit ihm verbundene Unterstellung, nicht nur mit dem Werk, sondern auch mit den Fans des Kitsches sei etwas nicht in Ordnung. Doch diese soziale Dimension des Kitschvorwurfs heißt nicht, dass es den Kitsch als ästhetisches Phänomen nicht gäbe und der Begriff nicht zur Analyse bestimmter Texte gerade aufgrund ihrer Funktion im politischen Diskurs hin hilfreich sein kann. In Anknüpfung an Kritiken von Massenkultur aus den Nachkriegsjahrzehnten bestimmte der französische Sozialpsychologe Abraham Moles 1972 den Kitsch als „Kunst in der Häßlichkeit“, als „guten Geschmack in der Geschmacklosigkeit“, der Ansprüche an Rezipienten suggeriert, aber nur anspruchslos konsumiert werden kann. Moles zielte damit auf das Potenzial dieser Ästhetik, zur Stabilisierung von Gruppenidentitäten beizutragen. Diesen Ansatz nutzte Saul Friedländer in seinem Essay Kitsch und Tod (1982), in dem er die Kunst des Nationalsozialismus und ihre Wirkung auf den Film der damaligen BRD besprach. Friedländer stellte fest, dass im Propagandafilm der Nationalsozialisten auf widersprüchliche (kitschige) Weise Tod, Gewalt und Harmonie aufeinandertrafen und damit als klassische und romantische literarische Motive in einen neuen Zusammenhang gestellt wurden. Der neue rechte Kitsch Seitdem sich um eine Gruppe ehemaliger Journalisten und Wissenschaftler medial eine neue rechtsradikale Bewegung in Deutschland formiert hat, deren parteipolitischer Arm die AfD ist, ist auch der rechte Kitsch wieder in ganzer Kraft da. Dieser Kitsch will der Anti-Kitsch sein, in ihm verbinden sich jedoch Massenkultur und deutsche Kulturkritik. Am Beispiel des ehemaligen FOCUS-Redakteurs und heutigen AfD-Beraters Michael Klonovsky kann das gut demonstriert werden, denn Klonovsky ist der zweifelhafte Meister des neuen rechten Kitsches. Klonovsky hat nicht nur rassistische FOCUS-Coverstorys verfasst und ist vor allem für seinen Blog bekannt, sondern auch ein halbes Regal mit Aphorismen-, Rezensions- und Essaybänden gefüllt. Als Mitarbeiter von Alexander Gauland schreibt Klonovsky heute die Reden für den AfD-Fraktionsvorsitzenden im Bundestag. Davor übte er diese Tätigkeit für Frauke Petry und ihren Ehemann Marcus Pretzell aus. Wie Uwe Tellkamp und einige andere Figuren aus der rechten Dresdner Kulturszene ist der ursprünglich ebenfalls aus Sachsen stammende Klonovsky einer von mehreren ostdeutschen Autoren, die aus einer Kritik am DDR-Regime eine Kritik an der Politik und Kultur der Bundesrepublik ableiten wollen. Dies äußert sich beispielsweise in Gleichsetzungsversuchen der Medien der DDR und der BRD, vor allem aber in der Konstruktion bildungsbürgerlicher Dissidenz, der sie ihre eigenen Texte hinzuzählen wollen. Seit Jahren gilt Klonovsky als „Edelfeder“ der konservativen Publizistik, also als Autor, der sich nicht nur inhaltlich, sondern auch stilistisch besonders auszeichne. Klonovsky veröffentlichte 2005 bei Rowohlt einen Roman (Land der Wunder), der zwar nur gemischte Rezensionen bekam, aber seinen Ruf als Künstler-Feuilletonist begründete. So konnte er dann auch bei Reclam die Aphorismen des kolumbianischen Reaktionärs Nicolás Gómez Dávila herausgeben, obwohl diese Texte längst einer historisch-kritischen Kommentierung bedurft hätten. Zu Klonovskys zahlreichen Fans gehört der Philosoph Peter Sloterdijk, der ihn für „Feuilletons von ungewöhnlicher Brillanz“ lobte, und die Pathosschraube noch einen Grad höherdrehte, weil man sich bei ihm „in die Zeit von Tucholsky zurückversetzt“ fühlte, „als die deutsche Sprache noch vibrierte.“ Diese Vibrationen spürte offenbar auch der Schriftsteller Eckhard Henscheid, der Klonovsky mal für „schwärmerisch, verschwärmter und zugleich kenntnisreich“ hielt. Im Nachwort zu Klonovskys erst im letzten Jahr erschienenen Kolumnenband Der fehlende Hoden des Führers: Essais erkennt Lorenz Jäger sogar „Einsichten … [in] die unendliche Verletzlichkeit des Schönen, des Heiligen, der Leuchtenden, des Lebendigen, des Differenzierten, des Intelligenten.“ Ein stilistisches Hufeisen entwarf neulich Harald Martenstein in der ZEIT, der Klonovsky mit dem verstorbenen konkret-Herausgeber Hermann Gremliza verglich, weil beide Autoren von links- und rechtsaußen „elegant“ und „auf dem Niveau des Kritisierten“ den bürgerlichen Mainstream angriffen. Schon in den 2000ern publizierte Klonovsky für die rechtslibertäre Zeitschrift eigentümlich frei, in der sich – oft ziemlich selektive – Staatsfeindlichkeit und genereller Autoritarismus ideologisch verbinden. Wie Klonovskys Texte aus dieser Zeit zeigen, hat er sich seitdem eigentlich kaum radikalisiert. Durch seine Anstellung im Parteiapparat hat er lediglich einen weiteren Schritt in der Explizitmachung einer Position gemacht, die längst klar und fertig ausgebildet dastand. Das unterscheidet ihn auch vom Stamm der AfD-Vorfeldautoren, etwa Matthias Matussek, Rainer Meyer oder Roland Tichy, die ihre formelle Unabhängigkeit vom parteipolitischen Rechtsradikalismus nutzen, um auch ideell als unabhängig zu gelten. Das ist eine allerdings ziemlich theoretische Unterscheidung, wenn man diese Bewegung als diskursives Phänomen versteht, in dem ähnliche Ideologien vertreten sind und ähnliche rhetorische Strategien angewandt werden. Klonovskys Manifeste der Männlichkeit Klonovsky will als Feuilletonist die „Ästhetik“ und „Schönheit“ gegen „die Ethik“ stark machen, verfügt aber selbst nur über einen Begriff von Ästhetik, der Moral und Besitzstand einer protestantischen Kleinstadt zur ästhetischen Norm umdeutet und das als Aufstand versteht. So hat Klonovsky in seiner Sammlung Lebenswerte (2009/2013), die einige seiner Kolumnen für die Zeitschrift eigentümlich frei zusammenfasst, einen „maskulinen“ und „hedonistischen“ Tugendkanon zusammengestellt, der über die Notwendigkeit männlichen Konsums soziale Ungleichheit rechtfertigen will. Durch diese Lebensphilosophie will sich Klonovsky nicht zuletzt ästhetisch von den angeblich genussfeindlichen Progressiven absetzen, die ihm die Objekte seiner Leidenschaften nehmen wollen. Zum Teil stimmt das auch, denn Klonovskys Buch ist insbesondere ein Programm zur Legitimierung der sexuellen Übergriffigkeit gegenüber Frauen. So schreibt er im Lebenswert-Kapitel „Brüste“: „Es gibt auf der Welt zirka drei Milliarden Mädchen und Frauen. Mindestens 1,5 Milliarden befinden sich im sexuell aktiven Alter. Macht also – kein Mensch ist wirklich symmetrisch – drei Milliarden unterschiedliche Brüste. Wer mag, kann sich die planetarische Biomasse Brust gern in Kilogramm ausrechnen. Geht man davon aus, dass, individueller Geschmack hin oder her, ungefähr jedes zehnte oder fünfzehnte Brüstepaar so gebaut ist, dass der Drang, sich seiner zu bemächtigen, für einen Mann immens wird, ergibt dies theoretisch 200 bis 300 Millionen Optionen.“ Doch mit dieser puren Geschmacklosigkeit, die Kulturmenschen wie Sloterdijk und Jäger offenbar goutieren können, beginnt noch nicht der Kitsch, denn dazu gehört das Moment des Geschmacks, das den Rest aufwerten soll. So schreibt Klonovsky in anderen Lebenswert-Stichwörtern auch über „Klaviere“, „Lyrik“, „Bücher“, „Malerei“ und die „Oper“. Wie die Überschriften bereits andeuten, hat er sich dabei einfach alles herausgesucht, was seinen statusorientierten Lesern zufolge Kultiviertheit ausmacht. Wie Ludwig Giesz Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts in seiner Phänomenologie des Kitsches herausstellte, ist der Kitsch eben eine Haltung, das „Gerührtsein über die eigene Rührung“, also selbstgefällige Trägheit angesichts des Gefühls der eigenen Überlegenheit. Und wie Klonovsky „die Frauen” konsumieren will, so will er „die Lyrik“ eben auch bloß „genießen“, also Rilke und Hölderlin als gehobenes Entertainment für zwischendurch. Gegen einen solchen Medienkonsum spricht natürlich gar nichts, nur läuft es diametral seiner Vorstellung entgegen, seine Form des Konsums sei irgendwie ungewöhnlich, wie im Kapitel „Ungleichheit“ suggeriert wird: „Nur in einer Welt eklatanter Niveau-Unterschiede vermag das Leben zu fließen.“ In Lebenswerte gibt es jedenfalls ausreichend Beispiele, die Klonovskys eigenen Niveauanspruch in Frage stellen: „Kinder machen bereits Probleme, wenn sie noch gar nicht auf der Welt sind. Zwar werden die Brüste der Frau appetitlich prall, aber man ahnt, dass ein Abschied dahinter steckt. … Die Frau nimmt eine Form an, die man nicht für möglich hielt. Der Mode folgend will sie, dass man bei der Geburt anwesend ist. Nie wieder wird er sich so hilflos fühlen wie im Kreißsaal. … Ansonsten mag der Sinn dieser Maßnahme darin bestehen, dass ihm die Lust auf Sex und sogar aufs Fremdgehen für eine beträchtliche Zeit vergällt ist.“ Und kaum war man in den italienischen Olivenhainen und dem Anzugladen, geht es wieder ins Hotel: „Das Hotel ist ein durch und durch erotischer Ort. In jedem Zimmer treibt es ein Paar miteinander oder liegt ein einsamer Gast und denkt an Sex. Das Hotel ist der ideale Platz für Huren. Es ist anonym, sauber, grenzenlos beschmutzbar und besitzt jenen Reiz des Fremden oder gar Exotischen, der spezielle Lüste hervorruft. Er denkt es fast zwanghaft. Und geht nach unten, wo die Mädchen sitzen, die schon am Vorabend dort saßen und zwischendurch verschwunden waren und wiederkamen und sich das Make-Up nachzogen. Und nimmt sich eine mit aufs grenzenlos beschmutzbare Zimmer, in der Stadt, wo ihn niemand kennt.“ Offensichtlich kann Klonovsky mit seiner positiv konnotierten Verknüpfung von ungehemmter männlicher Sexualität, männlichem Besitzstand und männlichem Intellekt an eine Rhetorik anknüpfen, die man nicht nur aus der Werbung im Lufthansa-Magazin kennt, sondern die auch in der Literaturgeschichte immer wieder zur Konstruktion von Männlichkeit eingesetzt worden ist. Und natürlich hat sich der Autor auch das Kulturverfallsthema nicht ausgedacht, das er unablässig bedient, um sich als vermeintliche letzte Elite hochleben zu lassen. Diese Texte wollen vor allem ein Manifest sein, in dem der Mann zum Widerständler und zur Minderheit erklärt wird – eine Ideologie, die er mit jedem 4chan-Incel teilt, die aber hier als Variante für den Salon brauchbar gemacht werden soll, der sich ja vermeintlich vom Stammtisch unterscheidet. Kitschästhetik als neurechte Kunstreligion Klonovskys Lebenswerte können als Vorläufer von Thea Dorn und Richard Wagners Bestseller Die deutsche Seele (2011) gelesen werden. Denn obwohl er sich als „franko- und italophil“ versteht, der sexuell die „idealtypische Französin meiner Landesgenossin“ vorziehen würde und „die Russin erst recht“, versucht er das Deutschnationale durch den Verweis auf angebliche deutsche Partikularismen zu propagieren. Wie Dorn und Wagner, die aus Abendbrot, Dauerwelle und Männerchor die deutsche Essenz ableiten wollten, nutzt Klonovsky das Kulturelle, um ein politisches Programm zu begründen. Diese De- und Rekontextualisierung führt zur Verkitschung von Begründungsinhalten, in denen kulturhistorisch ohnehin schon reichlich Menschenfeindlichkeit steckte. Wie im Heimatfilm holt er die deutsche Romantik, die deutsche Ingenieurskunst und den deutschen Heldenmut hervor, universalisiert dagegen aber deutsche Verbrechen, um sie zu relativieren: Wenn die Nazis „Kinder in Güterwaggons tausende Kilometer durch Europa fahren“, ist das „fairerweise mit allen anderen Kindermassenmördern der Geschichte“ gleichzusetzen. Die Frage ist an dieser Stelle nicht, ob es diese Art der sprachlichen, gedanklichen und moralischen Haltung ist, die Klonovsky zum Redenschreiber von Alexander Gauland qualifizieren. Entscheidend ist, dass diese Niveaulosigkeit das politische Programm ausmacht. Solche Kitschästhetik ist die Grundlage, mit der die rechtsradikale Szene heute ihr bürgerliches Publikum zu mobilisieren versucht, weil in diesen Texten die unreflektierte Angst um die in „Stil“ und „Kultur“ umgedeutete Angst um den Privilegienverlust steckt und einfache Identifikation bietet. Da Klonovsky Hotels, Brüste und Deutschland zu seinen Lebenswerten erklärt, ist er einerseits ziemlich ehrlich in der Zielstellung eines klassistischen, sexistischen und rassistischen Programms, zeigt aber auch, dass es dafür keine hinreichende Begründung außerhalb einer sich in die Ideologie des Ästhetischen gehüllten Anspruchsdenkens gibt. Passenderweise kann man das Buch mittlerweile auch auf CD hören, natürlich in Kombination mit klassischer Klaviermusik, die Klonovskys Ehefrau beigesteuert hat. Zwischen Schleimereien und Verdammungen ist in dieser politisch überdrehten Ästhetik, die neue Kunstreligion sein will, nicht viel Platz. Klonovsky neuestes Buch Der fehlende Hoden des Führers: Essais (2019) besteht aus alten FOCUS– und eigentümlich frei-Kolumnen und einigen seiner Reden, vor allem aber Porträts verschiedener kanonischer Musiker, Politiker und Schriftsteller. Wiederum geht es darum, „Schönheit“ und „Bildung“ „der Moderne“ entgegenzuhalten, als ob das nicht ohnehin schon moderne Konstrukte wären. Also macht Klonovsky aus Immanuel Kant einen Gegner aller politischen Ideologien oder zitiert Hans-Georg Gadamer ausgerechnet für das Lob der Mütterlichkeit, um diese alten weißen Männer für einen durch und durch modernen Rechtsradikalismus einzuspannen. Variationen altbekannter Stammtischparolen und Naziwitze Wenn Klonovsky mal wieder dazu aufruft, die „Weinbestände zu füllen und zu leeren“, „Bücher statt Zeitungen“ zu lesen, sich von „der allgemeinen Verwahrlosung“ nicht anstecken zu lassen und „manierlich und heiter“ zu sein, fragt man sich, ob diese Plattitüden nun die Sprache ist, die „vibriert” (Sloterdijk) oder das nun „der Einblick ins Schöne, Heilige, Leuchtende, Lebendige“ (Jäger) ist. Aber ein bisschen Biedermeiercouch-Geruch reicht offenbar schon aus, um sich dieses Lob zu verdienen, denn es gilt ja lediglich, den üblichen Klassismus, Rassismus und Sexismus zu veredeln. Es zeigt sich, dass Ästhetik und Politik nicht nur nicht voneinander zu trennen sind, sondern dass Autoren wie Klonovsky letztlich nur aufgrund ihrer politischen Haltung jahrzehntelang überhaupt Publikationsmöglichkeiten und Leser gefunden haben. In seiner Bonmotsammlung Aphorismen und Ähnliches, die seit 2008 in erweiterten Neuauflagen erscheint, wird wiederum deutlich, wie eng in diesem Kitsch Form und rechtsradikaler Inhalt miteinander verbunden sind. Durch mittlerweile 136 Seiten (2017) zieht sich zunächst ein Strom aus klischeebeladenem Namedropping (u.a. Heidegger, Dürer, Goya, Cézanne, Thukydides, Proust, Bach, Vélazquez, Kleist, Homer, Shakespeare, Luhmann) und zwischen Traurigkeit und Unoriginalität schwankenden Self-Help-Kalendersprüchen: „Es gibt Leute, die verzeihen einem das Talent nie.“ „Was keine Feinde hat, ist nichts wert.“ „Wo das Team regiert, wird Bildung zum Stigma.“ „Wo die Individualität blüht, welkt die Persönlichkeit.“ „Lieber im Unrecht als in irgendeiner Meute.“ „Der originäre Denker ist der Feind des Professors.“ Nur ausgestattet mit der Rhetorik der Allgemeinbildung, mit der sich ein Publikum umschmeicheln lässt, das sich kulturell überlegen fühlt, können dann Klonovskys krasse Ausfälle gegen Frauen, queere Menschen und PoC dann für manche Leser nicht wie pathetische Variationen altbekannter Stammtischparolen und Naziwitze wirken, obwohl sie auch einfach als klassische Stammtischparolen und Naziwitze daherkommen: „Evolutionsbiologisch betrachtet ist die Frau in ihrer jetzigen Gestalt ein Produkt des männlichen Begehrens. Es wird Zeit, dass die Lesben sich dafür bedanken.“ „Zuerst bekämpft die Homosexuellenbewegung die Homosexuellenphobie, dann erzeugt sie sie.“ „Islamistische Anschläge in Europa? Wozu das Haus demolieren, in das man einzieht.“ „In Berlin gibt es ein Denkmal für Ernst Röhm: Homosexuelle, die während der Naziherrschaft ermordet wurden.“ „In der Idee, schwulen Paaren das Adoptionsrecht zu geben, weht der Geist der Paralympics.“ „Der General Franco hat eine schlechte Presse, weil er die Kommunisten geschlagen hat.“ „Es ist nur folgerichtig, daß die schleichende Privilegierung der Frauen mit ihrer überlegenen sozialen Intelligenz letztbegründet wird; die andere ist ja halbwegs meßbar.“ „Einst galt es als Rassismus, wenn jemand sagte, schwarz sei schlecht. Heute handelt es sich bereits um Rassismus, wenn einem auffällt, daß schwarz schwarz ist.“ Dieser Auswahl könnte man entgegenhalten, dass dies nur „Stellen“ seien: Doch wie viel Textzusammenhang braucht ein Aphorismus? Trotzdem noch ein paar inhaltlich weniger grelle Beispiele, die immer dem stilistischen Prinzip folgen, Begriffe rhetorisch ineinander aufzulösen oder in Gegensatz zueinander zu setzen und damit Erkenntnis vorzutäuschen: „Eben weil der Mensch nicht unsterblich ist, sollte er vor allem die Unsterblichen lesen.“ „Wer kommuniziert, hat nichts zu sagen.“ „Der Feminismus müßte eigentlich Maskulismus heißen.“ „Zu den Basalmythen der Demokratie gehört, daß es sie gibt.“ Natürlich hält der Aphorismus schon als Genre reichlich Möglichkeiten bereit, um ohne Begründung, nur im Vertrauen auf die Zustimmung der Leser, dahinpostulieren zu können. Diese Stilwahl, die nur anspruchsvoll hinsichtlich der Vorurteile der Leser ist, soll wie in Lebenswerte aber überhaupt nicht vergessen lassen, dass das Buch ein frauenfeindliches Pamphlet ist, sondern vor allem, dass es sich um frauenfeindliche Klosprüche handelt. Daher greift Klonovsky auch gern mal tief ins Abflussrohr, um bloße Codewörter der Kultiviertheit wieder herauszufischen: „An Menschen, die keine Gedichte auswendig wissen, ist jede Zeit verschwendet.“ „Bildungsferne schafft Publikumsnähe.“ „Gönnen ist göttlich.“ „Welchen Gegenstand ein Buch behandelt ist zweitrangig verglichen damit, auf welche Weise es ihn behandelt.“ „Der jeweilige Zeitgeschmack ist die Schlacke in den Kunstwerken; mit abnehmendem Verunreinigungsgrad wächst ihre Beständigkeit.“ „Steve Jobs kann nicht in der Hölle schmoren, weil er zu ihren Ausstattern gehört.“ „Der gebildete Mensch erzählt nicht, wovon ein Buch handelt, sondern auf welche Weise es von etwas handelt.“ „Die geistige Befruchtung benötigt weder Semester noch Module.“ Um einen Aphorismus des Autors zu beantworten: „Stellen Sie sich vor: Dieser Autor ist sexistisch, rassistisch und reaktionär! … Aber schreibt er auch schön?“ Nein. Wie Norbert Bolz ist Klonovsky einer der vielen heutigen Zirkus-Zarathustras, die einem Publikum, das sich in den Dörfern und Villenvierteln nach Erregung sehnt, passende Schenkelklopfer und Untergangsromantik bietet. Dieser neue rechte Kitsch verknüpft sexistische Erotik und rassistischen Hass mit bildungsbürgerlichen Statussymbolen, die das eigene Anspruchsdenken veredeln und damit legitimieren sollen. Das zeigt, wie wenig hinter dem Symbol stecken muss, damit Autoren wie Sloterdijk oder Jäger, die als Inbild von Bürgerlichkeit gelten, nicht nur Gehör, sondern auch gleich ihr Qualitätssiegel schenken. Mit ihrem makaberen Bestehen auf Stil und Form liefern Klonovskys Texte eine Strategie, mit Hilfe von ein bisschen Mozart-Hintergrundmusik Gewalt entweder zu übertönen oder erst recht attraktiv zu machen. Offensichtlich stellt der Diskurs der „bürgerlichen Mitte“ dafür ausreichend Anknüpfungspunkte bereit und zeigte sich jahrelang auch mehr als willig, Autoren wie Klonovsky selbst zur „Mitte“ zu machen, solange nur die richtigen Kultur-Knöpfe gedrückt werden. Zu diesen auf Distinktion abstellenden Praktiken, mit denen ausgegrenzt werden kann, hat natürlich auch immer wieder das Kitschurteil gezählt. Wenn es heute noch einen Wert hat, sollte es vor allem gegen die neuen Kulturuntergangspropheten und ihre Fans selbst gewendet werden. Bild von Michael Gaida auf Pixabay

Ready or not, Rutgers is about to have a president unlike any other to take up residence on the banks of the old Raritan. He’s a neurologist, scientist, business leader, and, of all things, a precision watchmaker who uses 17th century methods for his craft. And — imagine! — Robert Barchi even says he believes the Rutgers football program should be “balanced” to reflect the needs of the university. Words coming from someone who was captain of his college’s football team. "The university has to change," says Barchi, the grandson of Italian immigrants who was named last week by the university’s governing board to be the 20th leader of the 236-year-old school. He spoke Friday during a two-hour interview in his office at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. Barchi says the consequences of not changing are grim: "Schools that don’t change now are going to be get left behind. They are going to find themselves in financial distress. It’s happening every day: Schools are closing because they can’t support themselves on the old model. The schools that will be on top of the heap are the schools that evolve, that change, that react to the times." He talks with a breezy confidence apt to annoy some at New Jersey’s state university — but that’s because the 65-year-old Barchi is breezily confident of what he calls his "skill set and experience." "There are times when an institution needs a younger individual who brings a certain flavor to it — but then there are times when it needs an experienced individual who has already seen problems and has dealt with them and can help the school manage." Confident with reason. He has been the chief academic officer of an Ivy League university — the University of Pennsylvania — and the president of a medical school, Jefferson, that managed to build a state-of-the art campus in downtown Philadelphia while keeping an AA bond rating for its loans. That didn’t happen in New Jersey. Barchi, however, won’t be shy about trying to assert the primacy of the Rutgers brand in New Jersey. In comments about his meeting with Christie, he said he and the governor "have a similar style" — and Barchi is aware of the governor’s style. His self-assurance is a result of early and continuing success. He finished his undergraduate career at Georgetown in three years while playing varsity football — he was a 210-pound center — and lacrosse. At the University of Pennsylvania, he studied for a medical degree and a Ph.D. at the same time, and was immediately hired by the Ivy League university’s medical school as a faculty member. All at the same time, he ran a thriving neurology practice, conducted research and taught. His research uncovered how nerves transmitted signals to muscles, research that has led to understanding and treatment of conditions like sudden cardiac arrest and myotonia. "That was an exciting time," says Barchi. After he became an administrator at Penn, he gave up his medical practice. "It wasn’t fair to my patients," he says. As a young faculty member, he opened up a shop to restore and repair old watches and clocks while he collected antique timepieces. His father was a mechanical engineer and his grandfather was an inventor of small engines. Barchi is fascinated with the way clocks and other small engines work and cuts gears for them in his workshop, using skills developed centuries ago. "The thrill is in making something from scratch yourself, with your own hands, something that actually comes together and works. It’s like creating a new life. The clocks I have made will be around in 100 years. Long after people have forgotten everything I accomplished, my clocks will still be there and working." That sounds like a metaphor for how he views the work he does — including a new job he has taken on when many his age have decided to retire. "I’m a problem solver. That’s what I do. That’s what I love to do. I love to solve complex academic problems in a complex environment. That’s what I’ve succeeded in doing." That doesn’t mean he knows exactly how he will change Rutgers in however many years he serves. "I don’t know where all this is going, but I want to be along for the ride and help it get there."

Brody was like any other 2 year old until he very recently became ill. After multiple hospital visits he has been diagosed with a large wide-spread inoperable tumour and requires aggressive chemotherapy and radiation. Results from the biospy should be back on Christmas Eve and I will post an update. We are heart broken and frustrated as to why this is happening. Why does this happen to sweet innocent children? Brody's mother had just began furthering her education to make a better life for their little family. Due to the circumstances she has been cut off all funding and income sources at this time. While family is contributing what they can it's just not enough to build a safety net so that they don't have to worry while they are going through this. The doctors have advised that once Brody starts his chemo treatments he can return home inbetween sessions but their home is not safe enough due to the poor air quality as it is a basement suite. They must move to a newly renovated suite and replace all furniture, linens and other items. Thank you in advance for your donations, anything helps! Please continue to follow us on Brody's progress and long road to recovery! Auntie Sheena! Rest In Peace Sweet Brody! Read more

This morning at 11:10 a.m., the Ukrainian army opened fire with 120 mm mortars on the village of Sakhanka, in the south of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), damaging several houses and killing one civilian. The shooting hit the residential area, particularly the USSR Constitution Street, where two neighbouring houses and a gas pipeline were damaged. One of the houses had all its windows blown by a shell that fell into the garden. In the house next door, a 59-year-old civilian named Vladimir Neplyouy was killed. The central street was also affected, and a house was damaged near the village children’s garden, bringing the total to three damaged houses. The shooting was conducted from Ukrainian army positions near Lebedinskoye. The Joint Ceasefire Control and Coordination Centre (JCCC) has been sent to assess the situation, and provided photos of the affected areas. We will also go there to report on what happened. See the photos of the JCCC (be careful one of the photos may shock): As a reminder, these same houses had already been hit last year in June by shellings from the Ukrainian army, which then caused only injuries and material damage. This time, the toll of this umpteenth war crime of the Ukrainian army is much higher, and underlines the importance of establishing urgently a new ceasefire. Christelle Néant Tags: civilians, destruction, DPR, shelling, ukrainian army, war crimes

Mention libertarianism, and most would think of such figures as Milton Friedman, Robert Nozick, Ayn Rand (though she was in fact an Objectivist and would loathe being called a libertarian, but her political philosophy is essentially libertarian), Ron Paul, and Murray Rothbard. What the above class of people has in common is that they existed in the American milieu. They are part of the American libertarian tradition. It should be noted however that libertarianism as a term did not originate in America. As with most things American, the term was imported from foreign sources, from the European countries. But the mainstream usage of the term libertarianism has since been co-opted by the Americans. Mention libertarianism in Great Britain and Europe however, and some of the locals would think of radically different terms from their American counterpart—some of which would seem to the American libertarian to be contradictions in terms—terms such as libertarian socialism (socialism! gasp!), libertarian communism (communism! gasp!), and anarchism (another term that is being expropriated by a group of American right-wingers in Alabama—the so-called anarcho-capitalists at the Ludwig von Mises Institute). Few mainstream libertarians I have met are aware of their own intellectual history. I think they would be very surprised if they flipped through some history books. There have been attempts though by these libertarians to give a historical account of their own political philosophy, such as this Cato Institute (a prominent mainstream libertarian think-tank) article titled “The Roots of Modern Libertarian Ideas”. But what it is in fact is a dishonest whitewashing of actual libertarian history, completely leaving out certain crucial historical periods and key libertarian philosophers (with whom the Cato libertarians disagree very vehemently of course). The article amounts to nothing but a propagandistic attempt at rewriting history through their narrow conception of the libertarian narrative. The first person to use the term libertarian was in fact the French writer Joseph Déjacque, a—wait for it…—communist anarchist (!), in 1857, in a critical letter to the socialist and mutualist philosopher P.J. Proudhon, describing the latter as a “moderate anarchist, liberal, but not libertarian”. What Déjacque has done, according to Shawn Wilbur (an anarchist/mutualist scholar), is to have invoked a “fine tradition, of calling your opponents ‘just liberals,’ rather than ‘real libertarians.’” Since then, libertarianism has been used by the radical libertarian left to quasi-synonymously mean communism, socialism, and anarchism. Mainstream libertarians have always prided themselves on “transcending” the left-right spectrum. In one sense it is true, if we take the left-right spectrum to mean the mainstream conservative-liberal dichotomy. But if we look at the left and the right historically, their long-held positions on certain issues of authority, hierarchy, property, culture, social and economic organization, and so forth, their differences become distinct. Mainstream libertarians are in fact right-wingers—right-libertarians. What I mean is that these people either favor certain values that are distinctly to the right and do not oppose certain things that left-libertarians think should be opposed. An important example is the issue of property. Right-libertarians favor private property—i.e. private ownership of the means of production, to be distinguished from personal property—which left-libertarians view as being one chief source of harmful authority. Social hierarchy and domination emerge when one group of people own the means of production—the means of sustaining life—and the rest, in order to survive, have no choice but to subordinate themselves to labor for the former group. A class of capitalists and wage laborers result. The upper class, the middle class, and the working class are phenomena caused by the current private propertarian system, so is the problem of vast income inequality that vexes many today—which as left-libertarians see, cannot be in any way reduced or resolved unless the current private propertarian system is dismantled so that a more libertarian and egalitarian (<–no contradiction there) system can be erected to replace it. Another source of harmful authority is the Corporation. Christopher Hitchens, a renowned journalist and man of the left, said in his only Reason Magazine (a mainstream libertarian publication) interview that he found “libertarians more worried about the over-mighty state than the unaccountable corporation.” He was of course referring to the right-libertarians. Left-libertarians on the other hand have always been opposed to the corporate form. Noam Chomsky called corporations “unaccountable private tyrannies”, many of which have traversed the globe destroying people’s lives, properties, and economies especially in the Third World and in countries like Burma and Argentina, cooperating with fascistic nation-states in pursuit of natural resources, building and supplying weapons to warmongering nation-states in pursuit of profit, causing irreversible environmental damage, and so forth. It perplexes me that not more right-libertarians are arguing for the abolition of the corporation since it is in the first place created and sustained by the State. In opposing private property and the corporation, what are left-libertarians arguing for? Workers’ self-determination as in freedom from being ordered around by a boss and egalitarianism as in equality of opportunity and social equality (non-hierarchical social relations), among other things. And here I want to bring in the related concept of democracy that most people endorse. If democracy means a form of governance in which everyone have equal say in the making of decisions (and not as right-libertarians love to define as “tyranny of the majority”), then I don’t see why it has to be limited to politics. Extend it to the workplace, where it is now the most undemocratic and dictatorial of places, and beyond. Choosing to only focus their attention on the public tyranny of the State, right-libertarians miss out and in some cases even endorse many forms of private tyranny. One can say therefore that left-libertarians have a thicker and more robust conception of liberty. They not only want freedom in the personal sphere and in civil society, they desire freedom in the workplace and in all areas of life. Right-libertarians only want freedom from the authority of the State. Left-libertarians, whom I have shown to be more consistently anti-authoritarian and libertarian, want freedom from all harmful authority and the freedom to pursue their values and lives unconstrained. Or as Emma Goldman, an individualist communist anarchist (<–no contradiction there also), put it: