Yesterday, we saw 53 European World Cup hopefuls get cut down to just 17. Nine teams—Belgium, Italy, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, England, Switzerland, Bosnia, and Russia—advanced to next year's tournament in Brazil. There are still four spots up for grabs, to be fought for among the next eight best European nations. And now the fun starts.
That's because UEFA is the strongest and deepest soccer confederation by a long shot, and they're keeping the qualifying in house. While Mexico from CONCACAF and CONMEBOL's Uruguay will take part in playoffs against weak teams from other regions (New Zealand and Jordan, respectively), the Europeans don't have it so easy.
First, a refresher. UEFA's 53 competing teams were split into nine groups (eight of six teams, and one of five). Every team played everyone else in their group twice. When qualifying ended yesterday, the nine group winners had booked their tickets to the Brazil. Of the nine group runners-up, the eight best are set to compete in four separate two-legged playoffs to cut the 17 teams down to the 13-nation contingent that will represent UEFA in the World Cup. Denmark had the lowest point total of the nine second-place finishers, and they were eliminated from contention.
Remember those monthly FIFA rankings? It was a good index of where teams, such as the USMNT, stood relative to the rest of the world. But unless a country was on track to finish qualifying in the top eight in the world and be seeded in the World Cup, there wasn't much reason to pay the rankings any mind. Now, though, they matter. Because of UEFA's eight playoff teams—France, Portugal, Sweden, Greece, Ukraine, Iceland, Romania, and Croatia— the four teams with the highest FIFA rankings will be drawn against the other four. We'll get official word tomorrow, but all signs point to Croatia, Portugal, Greece, and Ukraine being revealed as the four playoff teams with the highest FIFA rankings. They'll avoid each other, and instead be drawn against France, Sweden, Iceland and Romania. It's going to get nasty.
What's vital here is that FIFA rankings take results over the last four years into account. For instance, though Croatia had the lowest point total of the playoff teams remaining, they've performed well over the last four years, and were seeded for the draw. Over the last four years, France have been wildly inconsistent when they're not consistently poor. They've had a recent resurgence, losing only once to in their group to defending World Cup champions Spain and boasting the second-highest point total among the playoff teams in qualifying, behind Greece. But because of their past form, they're unseeded. This means that even though they're an extremely strong team, maybe even the strongest of the eight sides remaining, there's potential they could get screwed by drawing, say, Cristiano Ronaldo-led Portugal.
Other strong teams are certain to match up against each other. Romania, for example lost only three times in their group, but two of those were heavy losses to the Netherlands, who are dealing everyone heavy losses right now. Sweden drew against Brazil favorites Germany last year, and were up 2-0 on Germany just yesterday before collapsing and losing, 5-3. There's not much separating any of these teams from Greece or Ukraine, who only lost once each in the 10-game group stage.
There's simply too much talent in the UEFA playoffs not to see two powers drawn against each other. And because there's so much talent and so much at stake, we're bound to see heartbreak. Remember this?
Although all of these teams are good, and a few can even count themselves among the best in the world, four hopeful nations will be watching the World Cup next summer from the comfort of their own homes. The draw is on Monday, which is when we find out the deciding matchups. The two legs will be played on Nov. 15 and 19.


Give credit where credit is due. That’s the meme of this letter as I sit down to recognize the extremely effective leadership and “results driven” approach by commissioner Randy Neatherlin. I’ve lived here in Belfair for over 37 years and I have never seen a more effective commissioner serving our county and our community.
I’ve worked with the commissioner on several items from details on the Highway 3 improvement project and getting our own North Mason “Park & Ride” (now under construction). I’ve observed his work on gaining legislative support for bypass funding and his ongoing support for the Sheriff’s Office. It’s been impressive. His list goes on and on: debt reduction solutions for the sewer issue, garnering grants for parks and recreation improvements and implementing multifamily housing and low income incentives as well! Randy has shown a way to work with both sides of the aisle, pragmatically and beyond partisan politics. “Let’s just do the right thing ... and get it done.” I appreciate that approach.
I believe it’s important to recognize when an elected official is doing an excellent job at exactly what he was elected to do — be responsive, advocate for us and make a difference in our community; Randy is doing just that!


Nobody should know a football team better than its head coach. But Blake Nill admits he was wrong about the University of B.C. Thunderbirds.
After taking player inventory before his first season on the Point Grey campus, Nill figured he had the makings of a 3-5 team. He missed the mark by a mile.
After going 2-2 to start the Canada West season, the T-Birds finished second in the conference at 6-2. They then knocked off the Manitoba Bisons and the No. 1 ranked Calgary Dinos in the playoffs and now have won seven straight. The latest breakthrough came Saturday, in Antigonish, N.S., where UBC defeated the Atlantic Conference champion St. Francis Xavier X-Men 36-9 in the Uteck Bowl to qualify for the Vanier Cup for the first time since 1997. UBC will play the defending national champion Montreal Carabins, who defeated the Guelph Gryphons 25-10 in the other Vanier Cup semi-final, the Mitchell Bowl, played in Guelph, Ont.
Freshman quarterback Michael O’Connor threw a pair of touchdowns to first-year wide receiver Trivel Pinto, running back Brandon Deschamps ran for another score and kicker Quinn van Gylswyk booted four field goals as UBC built a 36-2 lead. The X-Men’s only touchdown came with 0:59 left, on a throw from quarterback Tivon Cook to Donald Tabor after UBC sat numerous starters with the result in hand.
UBC’s celebration was muted, however, with the big prize still ahead and the prospect of facing the Carabins — a physically more dominating and experienced opponent than the X-Men, who have 77 players in their first or second seasons.
Deschamps, a fifth-year player from Kelly Road secondary in Prince George, ran for 128 yards and caught passes for 50 more in the first bowl game ever held on the campus of St. FX.
Next Saturday’s Vanier Cup in Quebec City represents Nill’s eighth trip to the national final. He coached the Saint Mary’s Huskies and Calgary Dinos for a total of 17 seasons, reaching the national final on seven occasions. But he knows how difficult it is to win the Cup. His record in the national final is 2-5.
Still, the Thunderbirds have been surprising him all season. Perhaps they will again.


[See Also: Hyped Figures: John Glenn And the PC Myth of Katherine Johnson —Unsung Black Women Were NOT What Got US To The Moon; Why Not A Movie About Jack Crenshaw—The White Man Who Actually Did What HIDDEN FIGURES Credits To Black Women; America Should Be Ashamed: Why Isn’t HIDDEN FIGURES About “Nazi Scientist” Arthur Rudolph?].
The article doubting the truths of Hidden Figures characters or rather, the poor attempt at click bait- is dripping in White tears. Why take the time to write about the non existent reverse racism? You surely could have summarized the article in a 140 character or less tweet! "Dr. Jack Crenshaw helped too!" and "Katherine Johnson doesn't even look Black! She is probably White!" And let's not forget "Few Black Women getting us to the moon is laughable!"
I had hoped your particular brand of racism was dying out with the last of the "it was a different time" racists, but your article made me understand that as a Black Female Doctoral student, there will still be those who doubt my credibility due to the amount of melanin in my skin.
I am hopeful you will educate yourself on your many, obvious privileges and use it to inform others with a similar rhetoric on why articles like these cause harm that goes further than my career. While I will concede that Hollywood's attempts to sell tickets fictionalizes portions of the story, I would choose to take a fictional portrayal of real life people over complete erasure any day.
Of course, all this begs the obvious question how “fictional” Hidden Figures really is.
From Harlem to Watts, the first moon landing in July of last year was viewed cynically as one small step for "The Man," and probably a giant leap in the wrong direction for mankind. Large segments of the rest of the population, except perhaps at the time of the first landing, were merely bored.
In long run, these black leaders got what they wanted. America gave up exploring the heavens to spend untold trillions pretending race didn’t exist.
Now, we are expected to fall on our knees to praise the obviously inflated contributions of three black women canonized in a film which has already won a Screen Actors Guild award and will no doubt win an Academy Award.
Hidden Figures was made with the painfully-obvious agenda of delegitimizing the contributions of white scientists, physicists, engineers, mathematicians, project managers, aviation experts and rocket scientists. Instead, America’s greatest triumph evidently hinged on unknown black women manually calculating trajectories already confirmed by computers and a white man named Jack Crenshaw.
But even in 1969, NASA and the federal government would have been proud to show off any black contributions to the moon landing. By highlighting black contributions to the Apollo program, NASA could have kept blacks from singing songs like Gil Scott-Heron's “Whitey on the Moon” (which bemoaned how a rat could bite the black singer’s sister while white people were on the moon).
Why didn’t someone from NASA bring up Katherine Johnson back then to counter this negative publicity?
Simple. Her contributions were so insignificant no one with NASA noticed them enough to highlight them.
Which is why Hidden Figures matters and must be lavished with awards and praise. It creates a new narrative, completely devoid of truth, about black participation in man's greatest achievement even in the face of discrimination. And it’s a narrative that a certain audience—it should be noted women made up 64 percent of the opening weekend audience, with minorities representing 57 percent of those seeing the film—want to hear [Hidden Figures cast celebrates as film hits No. 1, by Joey Nolfi, Entertainment Weekly, January 9, 2017].
Yet surely audiences wanted to believe it in 1969 as well. Katherine Johnson, were her contributions so vital, could have been the much-needed minority public relations asset to parade around to the media back then.
But her value as a symbol was limited—because her contributions were trivial.
And she can only be brought up now because the real truth about black opposition to the space program has been hidden in plain sight.


THERE'S a Valley of Despair currently residing in southeast London and this time it may well be one that Charlton cannot climb out of.
The Addicks' slow and painful death was confirmed earlier this week as they slipped back into League One following a turbulent season both on and off the pitch.
Their drab and lifeless 0-0 draw at already-relegated Bolton on Tuesday night summed up their campaign - no quality, no desire, no hope.
The days of Premier League stability under Alan Curbishley and stands packed to the rafters inside the Valley are a distant memory now replaced by a list of misdemeanours by a disenchanted board that seems to grow longer by the week.
Charlton are at least £44m in debt, have no chief scout, no director of football and tumbling attendances.
This weekend the Charlton fans are set to stage their biggest protests yet against controversial owner Roland Duchatelet in the hope that he will finally relinquish his strangle hold and sell up.
While the Belgian has long stated he will do no such thing, the intense pressure from the home faithful may finally force his hand and allow the club to start their long road to recovery.
The supporters, chiefly lead by action group CARD (Coalition Against Roland Duchatelet), have already pulled off several stunts against their owner this season.
They recently released a club song entitled 'More than just a toy', held a mock funeral procession to ‘represent the hopes and dreams of Charlton under Duchatelet' and have hurled hundreds of beach balls and stress balls on to the pitch during games.
Charlton face Brighton tomorrow and both sets of fans will unite to tackle the key issues ruining the game.
In 1997, the Addicks offered their support when Brighton fans were told their board had sold the Goldstone Ground to a private investor - turning it into a shopping centre and a 'drive-through' Burger King and with no alternative home arranged. This weekend the Seagulls will return that favour.
While the game is a vital one for Brighton on the pitch, off it, it may well provide one of the most poignant reminders that fans are the lifeblood of every club.
It's obvious that all these problems have had a hugely negative effect on Charlton's performances - just eight wins so far this season, 22 defeats and 73 goals shipped. They're down, done and dusted.
Something's got to give and Charlton fans will be hoping it's the ownership.
There are other problems, of course.
The players must bear some of the brunt. The Addicks have been relegation fodder for the vast majority of the season and very few performances, especially since Christmas, have suggested it could ever be anything else but the drop.
The conveyor belt of managers since Chris Powell's exit in March 2014 would spell disaster for any club.
And their cause has hardly been helped by the ongoing masquerade from CEO Katrien Meire - who was off holidaying in Dubai as Charlton were effectively sent down following their home defeat to Derby last weekend.
But these issues all stem from one man - Duchatelet.
A man who appointed Karel Fraeye from Belgian third division side VW Hamme who, in the eyes of many Charlton fans, cost them their Championship status.
A man who has sold a number of Charlton's best players and replaced them with substandard imports, often from other clubs within the 'Network' that he owns.
A man who has been through six managers in just two years.
Charlton were a great club in seasons gone by, ran well from top to bottom and enjoyed the successes that came with it on the pitch.
Now they're in disarray and another relegation next season is certainly not out of the question in their current circumstances.
Their protests this weekend must be heard and must be taken as seriously as the fans hope they will be.
Systemic problems, greed and hatred have turned Charlton sour, the Belgian reign has turned into a nightmare and the fans deserve better. Much better.
Duchatelet needs to step aside - or at very least change radically and immediately - to let the club recover and try to come back stronger.
If he doesn't, we could be saying goodbye to this southeast London stalwart and see it resigned to the mire of England's basement leagues forever more.


Solo contains a lot of Easter Egg and callbacks to many different eras of the Star Wars universe, but there are also some really cool Easter Eggs from the original Indiana Jones movies as well. In a new interview, Ron Howard confirmed the nods to the other iconic Harrison Ford character while promoting Solo and admits that the idea was not his. Howard also reveals that the Easter Eggs were not planted by Lawrence Kasdan either, who wrote Raiders of the Last Ark. There are SPOILERS for Solo below, so read ahead at your own risk.
Jonathan Kasdan is the one responsible for the hidden (and not so hidden} Indiana Jones-themed Easter Eggs in Solo. The first one is pretty easy to spot, but they're all included in Dryden Voss' office on his yacht. Voss has an extensive collection of artifacts in his office, but one that sticks out is the fertility idol that Doctor Jones stole in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The fertility idol is visible behind Han's head when the two first meet. Ron Howard explains.
"...This was not my idea but I completely supported the idea of planting this little Easter Egg. And it's Raiders of the Lost Ark."
Elsewhere, the Sankara Stones from Temple of Doom show up for some screen time. The Sankara Stones have circles engraved on the surface of them, which makes them pretty easy to spot. There's even a nod to The Last Crusade with the Holy Grail on display. The Holy Grail is pretty small and a bit harder to find, but it is there. Make sure to look out for these the next time you check out Solo: A Star Wars Story.
The Indiana Jones Easter Eggs in Solo are a continuing tradition. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, there's a scene where Egyptian hieroglyphs include figures that look a lot like R2-D2 and C-3PO. Ron Howard is proud to include the nods to Indy and even threw in some callbacks to the Star Wars prequels with the addition of a few characters from The Phantom Menace, a movie that he was once asked to direct, but turned down. However, Howard is officially a part of the Star Wars universe now and Lucasfilm could not be happier.
There are plenty of other Easter Eggs hidden throughout Solo: A Star Wars Story that are pretty hard to pick out because they're often hidden pretty well to not take away from the story. Another favorite is the red, Mandalorian armor on display, also in Dryden Voss' office. Many believed that it was Boba Fett from the trailers, but it is not, even though the helmets are nearly identical. Boba Fett is getting his own standalone movie, so maybe we'll see some more Indiana Jones Easter Eggs. You can read more of the interview with Ron Howard and the Easter Eggs over at Radio Times.


Tyranny of the majority is a familiar concept in politics. It occurs when a majority takes action to thoroughly subjugate the minority. But what is happening in parliament or nothing is happening in parliament is because of the tyranny of the minority.
The Congress party with a slim block of 44 MPs is holding the Lok Sabha to ransome. It wants to stall debate and passing of various bills by sticking to its demand. The Congress has made clear that the resignation of the three leaders (foreign minister Sushma Swaraj, two chief ministers Vasundhara Raje of Rajasthan and Shivraj Singh Chouhan of Madhya Pradesh) is a pre-condition to it allowing legislative work to be done in the 21-day Monsoon Session of Parliament that began yesterday.
It is not possible to run a country on pre-conditions. A democratic set up allows negotiations and debate but never a situation where the rules of the game are set unilaterally by one party.
One cannot be sure of the Congress, what it wants next. Because, it did not hold a protest by its MPs at the Gandhi statue in parliament complex that it had planned for this morning. May be they lack the conviction of their action under the imposing figure of Mahatma Gandhi. What the party did was to give its MPs a black armband to be worn in the house.
Both the Lok Sabha annd the Rajya Sabha were adjourned amid slogan shouting by Congress members soon after parliament convened on yesterday morning.
This morning Sushma Swaraj made it clear at the BJP's parliamentary Party that she offered no help to Lalit Modi and also defends the Madhya Pradesh government over the Vyapam issue.
The BJP-led government has said there will be no resignations, but has offered to discuss in Parliament the role of Sushma Swaraj and Vasundhara Raje in helping disgraced cricket boss Lalit Modi.
The BJP has accused the Congress of running away from debate. The party would be happy to debate any issue that the opposition wants to raise. It would also like to raise for discussion, the BJP has said, alleged scams in states ruled by the Congress.
However, at stake in this tyranny of the minority is the legislative business. The government has finalised 35 items of business for the monsoon session. They include nine bills pending in Rajya Sabha and four in Lok Sabha, besides introduction of 11 new pieces of legislation.
Bills pending in Lok Sabha: The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement (Amendment) Bill, 2015; Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Amendment Bill, 2014; Delhi High Court (Amendment) Bill, 2015 and the Electricity (Amendment) Bill, 2014.
Bills pending in Rajya Sabha: Constitution (122nd) Amendment Bill, 2014 relating to GST; Whistle Blower Protection (Amendment) Bill, 2015; Prevention of Corruption (Amendment) Bill, 2013; Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Amendment Bill, 2015; Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2012; Appropriation Act (Repeal) Bill; Readjustment of Representation of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in Parliamentary, Assembly Constituencies (Third) Bill, 2014.


Over the last two days, both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, perhaps reacting to Newt Gingrich’s announcement of his forthcoming announcement concerning his presidential ambitions, have published pieces about Gingrich’s “secret weapon.” According to The Times, it just may be Callista Gingrich, Newt’s former mistress and current wife, while the Journal identified Gingrich’s “secret weapon” as his conglomerate of “advocacy and for-profit groups,” known unofficially as Newt Inc. So which is more secret, more weapon-like? Callista, a French-horn player and former House Agriculture Committee employee, might do well to turn up the enthusiasm. “At Villanova University on a recent Thursday night, Mrs. Gingrich warmed up the audience for a showing of the couple’s movie about Pope John Paul II by signing books and DVDs in her left-handed curlicue,” The Times reported. “But when asked whether she is ready for the scrutiny a campaign would bring, she smiled tightly and grew silent.” Friends worry that, like millions of other Republicans, she’s not thrilled about the idea of another Gingrich campaign. Still, the couple’s obvious fondness for one another may help prospective voters forget about Gingrich’s morally checkered few marriages.
And, in a stunning synergistic turn, Callista Gingrich is the president of Gingrich Productions, the cultural arm of Newt Inc. (According to The Times, she “is especially hands-on with the musical scores.”) Is Gingrich’s secret weapon another secret weapon’s secret weapon?


Toward the end of trading Monday, the Dow traded down 0.12 percent to 26380.81 while the NASDAQ declined 0.13 percent to 7,973.83. The S&P also fell, dropping 0.09 percent to 2,904.83.
Monday afternoon, the consumer staples shares rose 0.7 percent. Meanwhile, top gainers in the sector included Dean Foods Company (NYSE: DF) up 8 percent, and Seneca Foods Corporation (NASDAQ: SENEB) up 10 percent.
In trading on Monday, financial shares fell 0.8 percent.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc (NYSE: GS) reported mixed results for its first quarter on Monday.
Electronics for Imaging, Inc. (NASDAQ: EFII) shares got a boost, shooting up 29 percent to $37.87 after the company agreed to be acquired by an affiliate of Siris Capital Group, LLC in all-cash transaction valued at approximately $1.7 billion.
Shares of Fibrocell Science, Inc. (NASDAQ: FCSC) shot up 45 percent to $2.5785 after the company disclosed an agreement with Castle Creek Pharmaceuticals to develop and commercialize FCX-007. Fibrocell will receive a $30M upfront payment.
Vectrus, Inc. (NYSE: VEC) shares were also up, gaining 31 percent to $38.94 after the company won a military contract and reaffirmed its 2019 guidance.
Reebonz Holding Limited (NASDAQ: RBZ) shares dropped 55 percent to $5.15 after the company priced a $10.8 million offering at $5 for a share and warrant.
Shares of Achaogen, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAO) were down 69 percent to $0.1541 after the company filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
China Recycling Energy Corporation (NASDAQ: CREG) was down, falling around 31 percent to $0.6501 after the company reported 2018 sales fell 25% year-over-year and announced a 2.36 million share offering.
In commodity news, oil traded down 0.7 percent to $63.47 while gold traded down 0.3 percent to $1,291.10.
Silver traded down 0.2 percent Monday to $14.935, while copper fell 0.5 percent to $2.9325.
European shares closed mostly higher today. The eurozone’s STOXX 600 gained 0.15 percent, the Spanish Ibex Index rose 0.3 percent, while Italy’s FTSE MIB Index rose 0.16 percent. Meanwhile the German DAX climbed 0.17 percent, and the French CAC 40 gained 0.11 percent while U.K. shares fell 0.01 percent.
The Empire State manufacturing index increased to 10.1 in April, compared to 3.7 in the previous month.
The Treasury International Capital report for February will be released at 4:00 p.m. ET.


Mansfield Town supporters are largely happy with the club’s season ticket prices which were announced on Friday.
The cut-price ‘Early Bird’ ticket deal was given a big thumbs up and the overall pricing was seen as reasonable, though there were concerns over matchday admission prices for children and adults.
An SFU spokesman said: “Stags Fans United are delighted that the club has offered an early bird season ticket.
“This was the number one suggestion we made to club when we were asked for our thoughts in April, ahead of any draft season ticket prices.
“The early bird prices represent excellent value.
However, the SFU were concerned over matchday prices.
“We asked the club to look after kids and families by having cheap junior and family matchday tickets,” said the spokesman.
“However, the matchday prices for kids are still too high in our opinion based on consistent feedback from fans.
“Kids do not tend to plan ahead to buy tickets and need to be encouraged to attend on a matchday.
He continued: “There were two other areas with regard to individual match tickets that we highlighted to the club in April, which came up from the consultation with fans in 2015 and that had not yet been incorporated.
“These were to try to keep the adult price around £20 - the matchday price for Ian Greaves Upper tier has risen to £24 – and to keep matchday prices the same as tickets purchased earlier.
“The consistent feedback from fans was to remove the difference between advance prices and matchday prices, but the difference still remains.


V Australia’s inaugural trans Pacific flights between Sydney and Los Angeles have been pushed back from 15 December to 28 February because of a strike that has shut down the Boeing assembly line indefinitely.
It needs the first two of its order for up to six Boeing 777-300ER jets (plus one on lease through IAG subsidiary ILFC) to reliably start regular flights. One of them is painted and looking ready outside the factory but has been held up by delays in cabin fittings, another supplier issue that is also hurting other 777 customers.
A bit of context is needed over the V Australia delays. Virgin Blue’s CEO Brett Godfrey has previously revealed that the airline did consider blinking about its plans to take on Qantas to the US. The $60 million or so that setting up V Australia is costing Virgin Blue falls across several financial years, but it has already made a good performance by the domestic operations of the parent carrier look weaker, and the dumping of the Toll shares in VBA in an edgy market that isn’t very interested in airlines has created a black cloud over its operations that its critics have done everything to make thicker and darker than dispassionate analysis would support.
Did Virgin Blue get its US strategy wrong anyhow? This may be the case, since by March the frequency of Qantas flights with its Airbus A380s will have risen to a level where they can push V Australia into a smaller niche than it may have hoped to secure.
The 777 is a superb airliner but on high traffic routes like Sydney-Los Angeles, the A380 wins in terms of revenue per available seat and passenger appeal in any class of cabin.
These latest delays may force V Australia to think even harder than it has up to now as to how it might better use the 777s on other Australia-US routes, perhaps out of Brisbane, where Qantas A380s mightn’t appear for another three years.


WESTMINSTER -- Mayor W. Benjamin Brown yesterday denounced the City Council's Aug. 27 decision to begin a $1.6 million addition to City Hall, saying he hoped the council would reconsider a decision that "didn't have to be made now."
The controversial 3-2 vote to go ahead with plans endorsed in a $40,000 space-needs study means the city would build a 10,000-square-foot addition to City Hall at more than $1.6 million.
"I am dismayed that we are all not on the same page," the mayor said in an informal press conference in his spacious first-floor office on Emerald Hill. "At the very least, I thought the council would consider the possibility of leasing space rather than building more of it."
Others thought that was where council members were heading as well. At its Aug. 14 meeting, the council said it would look into possible options inthe rental or purchasing markets.
Currently, 25 people work in the nearly 6,000-square-foot City Hall. The space-needs study conductedby Baltimore-based Cho, Wilks & Benn Architects Inc. said the city should -- in addition to the 10,000-square-foot addition -- build a 17,000-square-foot building nearby with a total price tag of $3.4 million.
Yesterday, Brown sharply criticized moving ahead so quickly onthe matter -- especially while he was away on a Pennsylvania campingtrip.
"I was really looking forward to a specific, public discussion of how much space already exists out there," he said.
In his comments criticizing the council's decision, Brown said nothing he hasn't said before. The mayor has advocated finding existing properties in the city that could be purchased or leased by the city.
Brown said a considerable amount of office space exists in the downtown area, such as at the Winchester Exchange, a group of buildings in the first block of East Main Street.
Other possibilities, Brown said, include the Longwell Armory Building and the post office on East Main Street.
"A lot of these places would be ready to use within the year," he said. "The least we can do is look into them before we decide to spend $1.6 million of the taxpayers' money."
Should the council decide to go ahead with construction of the addition, Brown said, he would support the building only if it were financed over a long period.
"It is unfair to ask the taxpayers of today to foot the bill for something that will benefit citizens for years to come," he said.
Voting for the addition at the Aug. 26 meeting were council membersStephen R. Chapin Sr., Edward Calwell and Council President William F. Haifley.
Voting against the measure were council members Rebecca A. Orenstein and Kenneth Yowan.
The council next meets 7:30 p.m.Monday, when Brown is expected to ask council members to reconsider the decision to build.
The date of the City Council's decision was Aug. 26.


The Little Princess is too sick to walk the dog and she's far too sick to go to school.
But when she's invited to a party, she makes a miraculous recovery!
Until, that is, she eats too many cakes and sweets... The latest adventure for the naughty Little Princess, who also stars in her own award-winning TV series.


Tory Bruno, president and CEO of the United Launch Alliance (ULA) — and one of 29 candidates selected for the National Space Council's Users Advisory Group — leads Vice President Mike Pence and his wife Karen Pence on a tour of ULA's Horizontal Integration Facility at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Feb. 20, 2018. NASA's acting administrator Robert Lightfoot (right) tagged along, too.
Vice President Mike Pence has selected 29 candidates to serve on an advisory group for President Trump's newly reinstated National Space Council.
Pence, chairman of the council, released his list of candidates in a statement issued by the White House Tuesday evening (Feb. 20), on the eve of the council's second formal meeting at Kennedy Space Center in Florida today.
The selected candidates — who must still be officially approved by NASA's administrator — include high-ranking officials from private spaceflight companies like SpaceX and Boeing, as well as several scholars and government officials. Five former astronauts made the list, including Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin. While speaking at the National Space Council's meeting today (Feb. 21), Pence called the candidates "some of the brightest minds in the country."
Fatih Ozmen, CEO of Sierra Nevada Corp.


An official with the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland on Friday declared that former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele was only elected because he's black.
"This is a terrible thing. We elected Mike Steele to be the RNC chair 'cause he's a black guy, and that was the wrong thing to do," said Ian Walters, a spokesperson for the American Conservative Union, the organizers of CPAC.
Steele served as chairperson of the RNC from 2009 until 2011, taking office during President Obama's first term. He lost his attempt at a second term to Reince Priebus.
Walters' comments, made during the Ronald Reagan dinner event on Friday night, where tickets started at $250, drew gasps from some in the audience.
Steele told MSNBC he was standing outside of the room when the racist comment was made. Immediately afterwards, Steele spoke to the Observer and called the comments "painfully stupid."
"I wanted to talk to [CPAC chair] Matt Schlapp first, but I think it’s painfully stupid what he said," said Steele. "If he feels that way I’d like him to come say that to my face. And then I’d like him to look at my record and see what I did.
"I can’t believe an official of CPAC would go onstage in front of an audience and say something like that. I’ve been a strong supporter of CPAC for many years and I thought they raised them better than that here," he said.
On Saturday, Steele spoke on his SiriusXM show Steele & Ungar about how the comments regarding him speak to the wider issues of race in the Republican Party.
"It’s the groupthink that has emerged within the party that has now poisoned the national dialogue," he said.
"To hear it come from a young man ... a minority himself ... it makes it even crazier," he said.
Walters wrote on Twitter after the dinner that sometimes words "do not reflect what's intended" and noted in a follow up tweet that he had spoken with Steele to apologize.
"His words came out exactly as they were intended, his words came out exactly as he felt them," said Steele on MSNBC on Saturday, noting that it showed the wider racism in the Republican Party that the comments were made so freely.
"That's the truth of this party right now. We have allowed this element to have voice, we have given countenance to it. We have given it the space to express itself. And there is no taking that back, you can't deny that that has now been freed up," he said.
"You don't worry about saying it, because you think everyone outside that room, who carries the conservative label or considers themselves Republicans, will agree with you," he added.


After the reshuffle snub and McNulty-gate, what's it like to be a woman in Fine Gael?
We asked backbencher Aine Collins.
LAST YEAR WAS widely acknowledged as Fine Gael’s annus horribilis for a myriad of reasons, including the party’s questionable treatment of women.
Taoiseach Enda Kenny was widely criticised for ignoring women in the refhuffle of junior ministers. Then the botched selection of John McNulty as the party’s candidate for the Seanad by-election came at the expense of several female party members who had been tipped for the role.
This prompted one member to quit Fine Gael, claiming the party “is ignoring the talented pool of female candidates”.
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An image of how the new development will look.
The finer details of Castleford Tigers' new stadium development will be discussed in public next week.
Five Towns Park, which has now become known as the Axiom project, will be built on land next to the M62 in Glass Houghton after being given outline planning permission in 2015.
The development will consist of the rugby league ground with space for 10,000 spectators, as well as retail outlets, a car park and a country park.
Now, issues around the design of the project and the infrastructure around it will be put before Wakefield Council's planning committee next Thursday.
No substantial changes from the original plans have been put forward, but councillors will be asked to approve the layout of the country park and the proposed road access to the site, among other things.
The highly anticipated project was due to be finished in 2021, but in the documents released ahead of the meeting there is no mention of that or any other timescale for it being completed.
However, the report does say: "Officers consider that the proposed stadium design is appropriate for the site and its setting.
"It would provide a high quality, modern facility for the rugby club which could accommodate the club’s future needs and requirements, whilst maintaining the identity of the club and the historic link to the existing Wheldon Road stadium."
Last year, developers Lateral said that the Axiom scheme would be the "largest out of town retail, leisure and sports development in England for 20 years".
The retail park, which will have 75 units, has already attracted a number of high-street chains, with Marks and Spencers, Next, Primark and Boots having all signed up.


The principal agenda item during the Putin-Trump summit is going to be the situation around North Korea—with Trump asking for additional Russian help in containing the crisis.
Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have decided to meet on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Vietnam, and there is only one question that each Chief Executive needs the other to answer. For Putin, it is, “Who’s in charge?” For Trump, it is, “What’s Russia’s game?” How—and whether—those questions are answered will determine the trajectory of U.S.-Russia relations moving forward.
If the Kremlin undertook active measures in 2016 to favor the candidacy of Donald Trump, first over other Republican challengers, then over that of Hillary Clinton, then the Russian government, ten months into the Trump administration, must be asking whether any such effort was worth it. The driving force for Russia policy has shifted from the Executive Branch to a much more Russia-skeptical Congress, while Trump has appointed to the key portfolios dealing with Russia matters in the U.S. national security establishment people who would not have been out of sync with a Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio or even Hillary Clinton administration. There is not even the pretence of a “reset” or sea-change in U.S. policy. Despite his personal statements, the president seems to be have been quite passive while his Treasury Department has tightened sanctions enforcement, his State Department has reiterated the same positions on Ukraine and Syria that were promulgated by the Obama administration and his Defense Department is moving ahead with finalizing the details as to how U.S. lethal military assistance will be provided to Ukraine.
In February, when faced with the first signs that a Trump administration might not push for major shifts in U.S. policy towards Russia, Russian experts and politicians counseled patience. They noted that Trump would need time to get “his” people into the key positions, to take control of the policy process, and to change the “default” policy positions put into place during the second term of the Obama administration, which was still guiding different parts of the national security bureaucracy in the first weeks of Trump’s stewardship of the Executive Branch. Such an assessment is no longer tenable today. Either the people whom the president has selected and the policies they are carrying out reflect the true vision of the Trump administration—or, at some undisclosed point in the future, Trump will purge his national security team and issue new directives.
It is this question that Putin needs to get answered. Otherwise, he has no reason to trust any assurances he may receive from Trump in any private meeting—after all, he already has past experiences of good personal encounters with George W. Bush that somehow never translated into concrete orders making their way down the bureaucracy. But Trump may have a bone to pick with Putin as well.
After their extended conversation at the G-20 meeting in Germany earlier this year, Trump seemed to indicate that the Russian president understood the need for showing concrete, positive results in order to create momentum for shifting the downward spiral of the U.S.-Russia relationship—something that would validate Trump’s own contention from the campaign trail that Russia could contribute to American security in a fashion that would justify dealmaking with the Kremlin. Instead, over the summer and into the fall, the Russian strategy around the world appears to be to create problems for the United States. Moscow provides the financial lifeline for the embattled regime of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela; Russia gives minimal support to international efforts designed to pressure Kim Jong-un (and this may be driven more by Putin’s need to preserve his partnership with Japan’s prime minister Shinzo Abe than any desire to help support Washington); and Putin will travel to Asia fresh from a high profile summit with Iranian president Hassan Rouhani. The principal agenda item between Putin and Trump is going to be the situation around North Korea—with Trump asking for additional Russian help in containing the crisis. It should be noted that whenever a U.S. partner has a dispute or disagreement with Washington, Russia seems ready to rush in to provide an alternative—especially in Moscow’s cultivation of America’s traditional Middle East partners of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
So Trump may want to know whether Putin is truly interested in working on improving relations, or whether Moscow’s strategy for the foreseeable future is to act as the spoiler whenever possible.
This sets into motion a catch-22 where Moscow cannot offer any major concession—whether on Syria, Ukraine or North Korea—to Washington without the United States first demonstrating its good faith by offering some sort of up front compromise; but where the Trump administration has no political capital to take such a politically risky first step in the absence of concrete Russian steps—which the Kremlin is not willing to do if there is no guaranteed quid pro quo. A Trump-Putin personal relationship cannot overcome this dilemma—no matter what sort of meeting may take place.


China celebrated another achievement last week, as Mo Yan became the first Chinese citizen to win a Nobel Prize for literature.
The selection of Mo was praised by a Chinese nationalist tabloid as a sign that mainstream China could "no longer be refused by the West for long."
Mo grew up in Shandong province in northeastern China, and during the Cultural Revolution, he left school to work in the fields, finishing his education in the army, according to The Guardian. The author draws upon his rural upbringing in his novels, mixing historical perspective with mythical elements.
His real name is Guan Moye, but he chose "Mo Yan" as a pen name meaning "don't speak," to reflect the culture in which he grew up.
The new Nobel laureate is of the same generation as the new leaders set to take over the Politburo Standing Committee next month after the convening of the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China.
This group of men (and one female contender) are "old enough to remember the suffering of the Cultural Revolution, but also young enough to fully experience how China has grown through Deng [Xiaoping]'s opening of the economy to market forces," says CLSA China Strategy research.
They've seen vast political reforms take place, transforming China "from a country ruled by the contradictory personal whims of Mao to one ruled through institutions and rules," says William H. Overholt in The Washington Quarterly.
During these decades, "freedoms blossomed, affecting everything from clothing to haircuts to job or marital choices to social and political speech," says Overholt.
As a result of these policies, they've been able to witness China's incredible growth, with GDP averaging 10 percent per year and more than 500 million people moving out of poverty over the past 30 years.


Tim Hwang founded faux-law firm Robot Robot & Hwang in 2010 as “a legal startup” having a single human partner. While the site is a joke, Hwang’s declared mission–opening new opportunities for experimentation in the practice of law–is sincere. Hwang, not an actual lawyer, is a former research associate at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and the founder of ROFLCon, a real-world gathering celebrating Internet memes and the creators of viral content, and the Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences, a (real) organization whose local chapters bundle small donations to award $1,000 grants to quirky, community-focused projects. Here, Hwang discusses the state of flux in the legal profession and his own young career.
FAST COMPANY: You’re behind a website for a law firm called Robot Robot & Hwang, which turns out to be a joke. But there seems to be a serious idea there, too. What are you up to?
TIM HWANG: The name of the firm has been a great filter. The people who get it are the ones I want to be talking with. Robot Robot & Hwang LLP promotes disruptive technology for the law. This is one part bringing together people who are working on startups in this area and part developing new technology applications. I’m working on a toolkit that allows people to use computer code to program the behavior of corporations in the same way that you can program robots. To toolkit can cause a legal entity to generate subsidiaries, transfer assets, close down, and so on.
How did you get interested in this?
While I was at the Berkman Center as an undergrad and after, there was a lot of discussion about law and technology. Mostly people were talking about how law influences the creation of technology; there wasn’t much discussion the other way around, about the extent to which technology could influence legal practice.
One thing that got me intrigued about law was that industry-wide it has the same kind of structure as older industries that have been disrupted by technology: a small class of people that’s based on control of information, protected by regulations. Law hasn’t had its Napster moment yet, though everyone recognizes it’s an incredibly inefficient structure now and the legal profession is in incredible disarray. Part of it is because the industry hasn’t been innovative–not just in training lawyers but in practice. Lawyers tend to be sort of tech-adverse–I hear lots of stories like this one about the partner at a firm who gets his emails printed, writes responses in longhand, and has his secretary type the replies.
So, what impact do you think technology can have?
There’s already been a lot happening with consumer DIY services and e-discovery. In litigation, e-discovery, the practice of deploying smart search technologies to trawl through mountains of evidence, has been a really powerful technology. It automates a lot of what lawyers currently do, but it still leaves the overall structure intact in a way that’s not very progressive.
The idea of Robot Robot & Hwang is to experiment with computers and legal code to disrupt the norms of the industry and give way to something better and more innovative. I have in mind a different approach that brings the kind of big-data analysis we see being applied elsewhere to the law. An example of this is a company called Lex Machina, which does data mining on judges’ records and makes quantitative predictions about what they will do in the future. That sort of stuff is really powerful. It takes the responsibilities and talents attributed to lawyers and gives them to someone else as well. Also, the way forms are done now tend to be pretty flat–with online services you’re mostly just paying for PDF documents, but if it’s, say, a municipal complaint, you could add a tool to file it directly, in a really a simple way.
Are lawyers going to need different skills moving forward? Will they have to learn coding?
There’s a lot of dispute about what the future of legal education looks like. I don’t think lawyers necessarily need to learn how to code. But I think we will see a more entrepreneurial and innovative approach to law, where you’ll have more options than just doing the law-firm thing–you can launch tools and products to help people help themselves, for example, and add services for anything on top of that.
What if I turned Robot Robot & Hwang into an actual legal practice? It would have to be nimble in the way it’s organized; people would have to develop technology or use it to create efficiencies. Imagine a law firm running more like a startup–that’s going to require a more nimble approach to law, and I think legal education in the future will be a little more interdisciplinary.
How do actual lawyers react to what you’re doing?
When I first launched Robot Robot & Hwang, it got picked up by the American Bar Association blog, and it’s been a bit polarizing. I meet a number of attorneys who cling to the idea that being a human in the system I provide some undefinable, abstract value. Some of these traditional attorneys have reacted with skepticism or outright hatred. Law students have also been less receptive, because the idea of Robot Robot & Hwang is adverse to their interests. They need to do mundane, simple tasks early in their careers, and this would take away that. It’s an empirical question–you put the technology in place and see who wins. Some things are better done by machines, some by humans.
The people who are pro come from lots of places–the community of entrepreneurs congealing around this stuff, for example. And the Stanford Center for Computers and the Law has been very supportive of what I’m doing. So are law schools who are second- or third-tier in the U.S. News & Word Report “caste system”–they’re trying to figure out how stay ahead of what’s going on.
How does being an outsider–and having a bunch of other projects–inform the way you’re looking at the legal profession?
It makes sense not to be a complete outsider, but to be an observer in some way. My other projects definitely inform what I’m doing. I wanted to have the same approach as with the Awesome Foundation–just start working on stuff right away, launch it, and test what works. No one’s quite sure what the future is going to look like, so my general strategy is to throw lots of stuff against the wall and see what sticks.
Since you’re not a real lawyer, how do you actually fund your work?
I do coding freelance work. The projects themselves are not generating money. I’m still trying to figure out what the sustainable model will be. That goes to the more meta question of how these kinds of projects get supported. Among VCs, it makes more sense to fund Twitter for dogs than to do something disruptive in this hundreds-year-old cartel. There needs to be some kind of structure where firms are creating and funding innovation in the space.


February 20, 2018 (Washington D.C.) – The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear a challenge by gun rights advocates to California’s law requiring a 10-day cooling off period before buying a new gun.
The CalGuns Foundation’s lawsuit contended that the waiting period violated the 2nd Amendment and was unreasonable, since it applied even to people who already owned other guns. A lower court agreed. However, an appeals court rejected those claims and the Supreme Court allowed the appellate decision upholding California’s law to stand.
January 23, 2018 (San Diego) -- California State Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher (D-San Diego) introduced a bill this week that would prohibit public agencies during gun buy-back events from handing out taxpayer-funded vouchers to any store that sells firearms.
October 10, 2017 (Las Vegas) – A class action lawsuit has been filed against Slide Fire Solutions, LP, manufacturer of the bump stock device used by the mass shooter in Las Vegas to convert a semi-automatic weapon to “functional equivalent of a machine gun, thereby evading longstanding federal law,” according to a press release issued by the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
June 27, 2016 (Washington D.C.) – By a 6-2 vote, the U.S. Supreme Court today upheld a federal law that allows a person to be banned for life from owning a gun if they commit domestic abuse “recklessly,” even if the actions were not premeditated.
March 22, 2015 (Sacramento)—More than 17,000 mentally ill people continue to illegally possess over 36,000 firearms despite passage of SB 140, which authorized the California Attorney General to hire 36 new agents to reduce a backlog.
The bill was passed after the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting in 2013. At the time, 20,000 prohibited people in California had about 40,000 firearms, an audit found.
October 23, 2011 (Rancho San Diego) -- On Saturday, October 29, from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., the museum will host Craig P. Helm Sr., certified appraiser and authenticator, who specializes in Native American, pre-Columbian, antique pictures, guns, western memorabilia, and Asian artifacts.
The Heritage of the Americas Museum is located on the campus of Cuyamaca College in Rancho San Diego. Admission to the museum and parking will be free that day.


Jack Matlock makes the case for the United States reaching a practical compromise with Russia.
Just as the Beltway’s legions of neo–Cold Warriors were working themselves up into paroxysms of self-righteous indignation over the Obama administration’s refusal to (so far, anyway) arm America’s purported “allies” in Kiev, one of the Cold War’s wise men reappeared in Washington last week.
At a gathering sponsored by the Committee for the Republic, which was formed by an elite group of former Washington officials in response to George W. Bush’s foreign policy adventurism, Jack Matlock spoke for nearly an hour at the National Press Club urging the assembled not to fall prey to the Manichaeistic view of the current crisis in relations between the United States and Russia.
Matlock, 85, knows of what he speaks. He began his thirty-five-year career in the Foreign Service translating dispatches between Washington and Moscow at the height of the Cuban missile crisis. He was present at nearly every US-Soviet summit between 1972–91 and served as US ambassador to Russia under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush from 1987–91.
Given his pivotal role in helping to end the four-decade Cold War, Matlock brings the long view so sorely missing from the current debate over Russia policy in Washington. For him Washington’s “group-think” on Russia is “difficult to comprehend.” He told the committee’s rapt, well-heeled audience of former office holders, political appointees and former spooks that as recently as a year ago he dismissed talk of a “new Cold War” as “silly”; after all, that was a worldwide ideological contest between two relatively equal military superpowers. Yet over the past year, Matlock told the group, he has had occasion to revise his view, especially in light of the debate currently being waged in Washington over whether to arm the regime in Kiev.
Matlock stressed that his position—that the United States needs to find a modus vivendi with Russia in spite of the crisis in Ukraine—is not driven by any animus towards the Ukrainians, far from it. “I respect and know Ukraine; I know it, its people and its literature,” but we in the West and in the United States in particular need to understand that for Russia, Ukraine is of “existential” importance.
According to the ambassador, who was present at some of the most pivotal discussions between President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev during the Cold War’s denouement, the taproot of the current crisis is NATO expansion. Beginning with NATO’s Madrid Summit (1994) at which NATO announced it would begin the process of bringing in new member states, through NATO’s Bucharest Summit (2008), at which the alliance declared that “Georgia and Ukraine shall become members of NATO,” the United States has reneged on the promise President George H.W. Bush made to Gorbachev at the Malta Summit (1989) not to expand NATO eastward.
Bush’s promise not to expand the alliance eastward in exchange for the peaceful and orderly withdrawal of Soviet occupying troops in Eastern Europe was, according to Matlock, repeated by nearly all of the alliance members at the time. According to the ambassador, what today’s Western leaders seem not to understand is that a Europe that is “whole and free” will not and cannot exist unless “Russia is part of the system.” And yet, the United States has pursued policies toward Russia over the past two decades that can only be seen as exclusionary.
While NATO’s decision to bring in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic as full members in 1999 (the same year, incidentally, that NATO undertook an aerial bombardment of Russia’s ally Serbia) would have been damaging enough to US-Russian relations, things got worse (as they tended to) under the second President Bush. Matlock reminded the assembled that President Putin was the first world leader to call Bush after the attack of 9/11 to offer support. The administration’s decision to withdraw from the AMB Treaty was his repayment. Instead of working to minimize the mistrust between us, time and again, the Bush administration pursued policies that magnified it.
Would that men like Jack Matlock had the ear of President Obama today.


"Our social norms have begun to change — they've shifted. The boundaries of protected personal space have been reset and I get it. I get it. I hear what they're saying," he said in a video posted Wednesday.
Former vice president and potential 2020 presidential hopeful Joe Biden is addressing claims that he acted inappropriately towards multiple women and is vowing to "be more mindful" in a new video posted Wednesday to his Twitter account.
"Today I want to talk about gestures of support and encouragement that I've made to women and some men that have made them uncomfortable," he said to start the clip. "In my career, I've always tried to make a human connection — that's my responsibility I think. I shake hands, I hug people, I grab men and women by the shoulders and say, 'You can do this.'"
Biden explained that he's always been this way and that it's his way of showing he cares, and over the years he's found that people have reached out to him for "solace and comfort."
"I've never thought of politics as cold and antiseptic. I've always thought it was about connecting with people," he said, adding, "Now, it's all about taking selfies together. Our social norms have begun to change — they've shifted. The boundaries of protected personal space have been reset and I get it. I get it. I hear what they're saying. I understand it, and I'll be much more mindful — that's my responsibility and I'll meet it."
Biden said he still believes that "governing, or life for that matter, is about connecting with people," but that he'd be more mindful of personal space in the future.
Amy Lappos, a former aide to Democratic Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, said Monday that Biden touched her face with both hands and rubbed noses in 2009. Former Nevada politician Lucy Flores penned a magazine essay last week in which she wrote that Biden kissed her on the back of the head in 2014. Two more women told The New York Times on Tuesday that they also felt uncomfortable in some interactions with the former vice president.
Bill Russo, Biden's spokesman, didn't directly respond to Lappos' allegations, instead referring to a Sunday statement in which Biden said he doesn't believe he has acted inappropriately during his long public life. The former vice president said in that statement: "We have arrived at an important time when women feel they can and should relate their experiences, and men should pay attention. And I will."


After wading through all the publications and websites representing both support and opposition for the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-approved by the U.S. Congress July 2005), it's astonishing to realize how very few of them bother to explain the legal foundation for the agreement. CAFTA, like most international trade agreements, is based entirely in the supremacy of communitarian law.
This isn't Bush and Clinton quietly slipping in communitarian programs like Local Agenda 21 that bury communitarian laws deep inside hefty grants and incentives. The U.S. Congress has officially denounced their own Constitution as Supreme Law. When the United States Congress approved CAFTA they endorsed a regional trade agreement that places U.S. Constitutional Law below Communitarian Law. While communitarian law is without a doubt the most important legal topic in the world, American experts on both "sides" of the free trade arguments completely ignore it. Consequently, it's the rare American who has any concept of how prevalent or powerful this new system of justice is.
The European Court of Justice is occassionally referred to as the Communitarian Court of Justice. CAFTA officials openly discuss using the EU as their model for communitarian case law. Communitarian Regulations govern the archiving of EU legal documents. The term communitarian law is in hundreds of online law journals. It's taught in several foreign law schools and there are degreed law professors of Communitarian Law. The Jean Monet program sponsors symposiums on it at U.S. universities. The D.C. Communitarian Network sends out a communitarian law newsletter. It's a widely understood term in Europe, Central, and South America. Still, Communitarian Law is so unfamiliar to U.S. Americans (and their attorneys) that most have never once heard the terms used.
One reason for its obscurity comes from the fact that communitarian law is also called Community Law, community aquis, and aquis communitaire. But another reason for its obscurity is the simple fact that globalists don't want our people to know anything about it. The European Constitution was defeated at the polls by the Dutch and the French voters because of its supremacy of communitarian law. The last thing the communitarian supra-nationalists want to happen is for all of America to learn the whole truth about communitarian "free trade." Remember, universities in England, Spain, Portugal, and Romania offer coursework and masters programs in Communitarian Law. Only a few elite American universities offer courses in communitarian law, and barely a handful of American students have ever studied it.
"One must act 'as if' in Europe: as if one wanted only very few things, in order to obtain a great deal. As if nations were to remain sovereign, in order to convince them to surrender their sovereignty. The Commission in Brussels, for example, must act as if it were a technical organism, in order to operate like a government ... and so on, camouflaging and toning down. The sovereignty lost at national level does not pass to any new subject. It is entrusted to a faceless entity: NATO, the UN and eventually the EU. The Union is the vanguard of this changing world: it indicates a future of Princes without sovereignty. The new entity is faceless and those who are in command can neither be pinned down nor elected ... That is the way Europe was made too: by creating communitarian organisms without giving the organisms presided over by national governments the impression that they were being subjected to a higher power.
That is how the Court of Justice as a supra-national organ was born. It was a sort of unseen atom bomb, which Schuman and Monnet slipped into the negotiations on the Coal and Steel Community. That was what the 'CSC' itself was: a random mixture of national egotisms which became communitarian. I don't think it is a good idea to replace this slow and effective method - which keeps national States free from anxiety while they are being stripped of power - with great institutional leaps - Therefore I prefer to go slowly, to crumble pieces of sovereignty up litle by little, avoiding brusque transitions from national to federal power. That is the way I think we will have to build Europe's common policies..."
- Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato, later Vice-President of the EU Constitutional Convention, interview with Barbara Spinelli, La Stampa, 13 July 2000. Posted in a great list of quotes compiled by Free Europe Blog.
How is it possible that Americans, with their "free press" and literate population are completely unfamiliar with the term communitarian law? The problem appears to be a constitutional issue over the definition of treason. Communitarian law is designed to over-rule all national law, including the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. Why do so many Americans flat out refuse to consider the possibility that current events resulting in federal legislation and Executive Orders are related? Communitarian laws balance individual rights against "safety" (as do the Patriot Act and the Homeland Security Act). This shows a pattern of thought, doesn't it? Part of the problem is the American people don't believe there are any more Hitlers or Stalins.
They believe communism "died" in the eighties, and that former evil colonial rulers all magically, spiritually evolved into nice, kind "helpers." This amazing under-education promotes such a naive approach to modern politics that admitting the unknown is almost impossible for them. Indeed, many prefer to "shoot the messenger" rather than admit they somehow missed the most important legal development of the 20th century. The fact is, communitarian law and philosophy are so well hidden from the American people that many have accused this author of making the terms up as a part of my own personal "conspiracy theory."
Besides CAFTA, many other "soft" communitarian legal agreements have been made between U.S. officials with international and supranational organizations. The U.S. has been governed by communitarian laws for decades. Communitarian legislation is before every legislative body in the country. Readers who've been studying the meaning of Sustainable Development will immediately recognise the true meaning of communitarian law. Communitarianism puts the rights of the community "at large" over the rights of the individuals living in the community. This is the entire foundation for anything communitarian. Global communitarians came to the U.S. to "shore up the moral, social and political environment." They came to "balance" American's selfish individualism (and outdated and dangerous nationalism) against their definition of the collective good.
Each member state choosing to join the supra-national organization must modify their national constitutions to accommodate communitarian principles. Communitarian Law balances the rights of individuals and nations against the rights of the "community." It requires nations to make political and legal internal reforms. Communitarian law integrates nations into the global communitarian justice system. The term "community," when used by global communitarians, can define everything from smallest rural area to the entire region, as in the "European Community." Today the EU Communitarian Court is used as the model for all regional trade agreements in the works.
The United Nations is also based entirely in the supremacy of communitarian law. Communitarian law supports the mandates for sustainable and smart growth principles established in UN Local Agenda 21. Besides the communitarian supremacy of CAFTA and in other proposals for a North American Free Trade Agreement, there are also plans to create a communitarian code of justice for the Middle East.
Communitarian Community based Development is the structure for implementing the new system of law. Bush called it Re-Building Community when he explained the new War on Terror in February 2002, and he wasn't kidding. The idea for re-building every community in the world under the control of a powerful community government is well underway in every nation. It's being violently exported to Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq and discussions have begun to export the law into the entire Middle East. It's being quietly adopted by local stakeholder councils across the U.S. Everywhere, from Mexico to Peru, Serbia to Malaysia, the Philippines to Russia, China to the UK, the EU to Central America, all are in the process of subordinating national law under regional communitarian authority. No place in the entire world has been left behind.
The original American system, now much denigrated and ridiculed, was based entirely in the idea of protecting local markets from imperialist monopolies. When we "threw out the British," we threw out their banker's control over our trade, production and land. The U.S. federal government was later designed to protect our national borders from continual imperialist invasions. It was authorized to regulate trade and commerce between the free and independent states and to establish a national bank to coin American money. The bank had private investors but it was regulated by officials in the U.S. Government, who were responsible to the states. The first bank funded state banks who provided loans to build a transportation infrastructure, and it made small loans to small businessmen and cottage industries along the routes.
The plan was to make the U.S. entirely self-sustaining both economically and politically. We were working toward a balance between agriculture and industry, whereas after achieving it we would slowly begin to engage in foreign trade with equals. During those years, before taxes, the U.S. built up a huge surplus in the U.S. Treasury. The American national system worked so well here it was copied by almost every imperial colony during the first half of the 19th century. (The early 1800s could be described as the "Declaration of Independence" Days.) But that didn't last long before the international bankers were back in control of everybody's land.
Now we have the private corporations called the World Bank and the Federal Reserve. We have a progressive tax and an unfathomable national debt. Today the "idea" of a national system or a national bank is ridiculed as a capitalist, elitist idea. Protected trade and tariffs are regarded as selfish, anti-human sentiments. Individual rights are really just a barrier to peace and social justice. Private land is ecologically unsustainable. The communitarian banker's plan is more "fair," or you're an uneducated buffoon. Click below for part two.
2, Why We Oppose Cafta by the Oakland Institute.
3, The Creation of a Communitarian System of International Law cyber.law.harvard.edu.
4, pdf-Harmonization and harmonizing measures in criminal law, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
7, Presentation by Dr Jan Mazak, President of the Slovak Constitutional Court 21.10.2004.
12, THE FUTURE OF CONSTITUTIONAL CONFLICT IN THE EUROPEAN UNION:CONSTITUTIONAL SUPREMACY AFTER THE CONSTITUTIONAL TREATY* by Mattias Kumm and Victor Ferreres Comella.
13, Historical Archives Service of the European Commission "ARCHISplus (French ARChives HIStoriques) is the Historical Archives of the European Commission's database which contains references to files of European institutions from their beginnings to today. It is extracted from an internal database, Archis, and includes those references only which are helpful to access historical files open to the public according to communitarian regulations pertaining to their archives (30 years rule)."
Niki Raapana was trained in government document research at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Raised by a career Army NCO, she traveled the U.S. most of her life. Her dad taught her it is every American's job to defend the rights of people who are unable to defend themselves.
After her landlord complained that the city was out to steal his land, Niki agreed to study Seattle's development plans for him in March 1999. In September 1999 she found out the city planned to do a lot more than steal Hugh's land. She identified the Communitarian Network's connection to the plans in March 2000.
Niki filed many public disclosure requests for Hugh Sisley and in the fall of 2001 the City of Seattle ceased actions against his properties based on Niki's research. By 2002 she had provided 2500 documents for Dawson et. al. v. The City of Seattle et. al, a 4th Amendment lawsuit currently under consideration before the Ninth District Court of Appeals.
Niki co-founded the Anti-Communitarian League with her (then) teenage daughter Nordica, in April, 2001.
The U.S. Congress has officially denounced their own Constitution as Supreme Law. When the United States Congress approved CAFTA they endorsed a regional trade agreement that places U.S. Constitutional Law below Communitarian Law.


Stunning 1.18 acre hillside lot tucked in secluded enclave directly adjacent to Tonto National Forest. Panoramic views of the Granite Dells and Monument Peak. Abundant Ponderosa Pines and high desert vegetation. Occasional visit from deer and wildlife from the adjacent Tonto National Forest. Peaceful and quiet sanctuary for your future home site. Golf course community, year-round play, short access to all amenities. Numerous recreational opportunities in the area including hiking, biking & fishing.


“This is betrayal, ladies and gentlemen! Europe has been betrayed! And if we do not stand up for it, this Europe will be taken away from us.” So declared Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (shown) last Thursday while condemning European leaders who have opened up the continent to waves of mostly Muslim Middle Eastern migrants.
It was not the first time Orbán had inveighed against the migration, which threatens to upend European culture. And it further underlined the chasm separating politically correct Western Europe and what many would call a more culturally correct Eastern Europe.
Orbán apparently was referring to the collectivist, open-borders, European Union mentality that seeks to replace nationalism with internationalism. And immigration facilitates this agenda. If countries can be so balkanized that there’s no longer “a people” but rather just a disparate collection of “peoples,” there then will be little sense of nationhood and hence little resistance to a loss of sovereignty and dissolution of borders.
And prominent statists have at times alluded to this agenda. Andrew Neather, former aide to ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair, confessed in 2009 that the massive immigration into the United Kingdom over the last 15 years was designed to “rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.” Barack Obama said in February he was “optimistic” statism would prevail “because this country [the United States] just becomes more and more of a hodgepodge of folks.” Then there’s Hungarian-born billionaire investor George Soros, whom Orbán criticized as being a dark hand behind the migrant influx. Soros replied that the prime minister’s “plan treats the protection of national borders as the objective and the refugees as an obstacle. Our plan treats the protection of refugees as the objective and national borders as the obstacle.” Of course, critics would warn that Soros’ true objective has nothing to do with “protection” of refugees.
"They're not refugees. This is an invasion," said Kiss-Rigo. "They come here with cries of 'Allahu Akbar.' They want to take over." Europe is being overwhelmed by non-believers posing as refugees who pose a serious threat to the continent's "Christian, universal values," he said.
… "I'm in total agreement with the prime minister [Orban]," Kiss-Rigo said….
... Kiss-Rigo said Pope Francis is greatly misinformed about what is really happening. He "doesn't know the situation," he said.
And apparently referring to many migrants’ cultural and religious chauvinism, the bishop bluntly stated, “Most of them behave in a way that is very arrogant and cynical."
“I have often heard from Muslims that their goal is to conquer Europe with two weapons: their faith and their birthrate,” al-Rahi said in a recent interview with Famiglia Cristiana, an Italian Catholic weekly magazine.
Christians, however, “hardly get married anymore, and have few children,” he said.


How is immigration changing the face of modern Britain? One of the country's leading experts on migration explains what the BBC's Born Abroad project, published this month, reveals about the country - and what it means for integration.
Diversity in the UK is not what it used to be.
This is clear from the BBC's Born Abroad project and the New Immigrant Communities study conducted by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) that the maps and figures draw on.
The maps and data published earlier this month on the BBC News website point to the growth, locations and economic profiles of a wide variety of groups: a much wider variety, in fact, than most policy-makers and members of the general public had ever realized.
The study, based on Census data, focuses on where people were born to chart the development of immigration within Great Britain.
For decades British multicultural policies have mainly centred on fewer communities, mainly Asian and African-Caribbean - in the eyes of policymakers, it was these people who generally comprised Britain's immigrants.
But the new data shows how, compared with these patterns from the 1950s-1970s, immigration to Britain between 1991-2001 involved people from a wide range of countries beyond the New Commonwealth nations that traditionally provided the main sources for migration to the UK.
We can now see the vastly more complicated picture of current immigrant diversity - a 'super-diversity', in fact. It is clearly time to re-think the nature of multiculturalism in the UK as both a condition and set of policies that address that condition.
While highlighting key patterns of diversity, country of birth data alone is rather one-dimensional.
But if we use Census data or other research on ethnicity, religion and language, we can learn a lot more about the many dimensions of this super-diversity.
And it is these criteria that play key roles in determining how immigrants identify and organise themselves - as well as how they interact with people already living here.
We must realise, however, that today's super-diversity is not just about more countries of origin, ethnic identities, languages and religions.
There are yet additional immigrant characteristics that affect everyday social interactions and the processes of integration.
For instance, compared with earlier waves, recent migrants have come for a greater variety of reasons and through a wider set of channels.
An immigrant's channel of migration and subsequent legal status can be crucial because these directly impact on their ability to work, what kind of housing they may find and what public services they use.
These channels and legal categories have themselves multiplied and become more complex over the past ten years.
Some 60% of new migrants who have been in the UK more than five years (the period of eligibility) have become citizens.
Many other recent arrivals are EU nationals who do not need a visa or work permit - including a sizeable influx over the past year since ten new countries have become members of the EU.
Still other recent migrants are work permit holders (including large numbers from the USA and India) or people on special worker schemes in agriculture (from 48 countries) or hotels and restaurants (from 40 countries).
Britain has welcomed highly skilled migrants and entrepreneurs in computing, finance and business from many countries alongside working holidaymakers from more than 30 countries (especially 'Old Commonwealth' ones such as Australia and New Zealand).
There are also special visa holders such as au pairs (mainly from eastern Europe) and students from all over the world, notably the EU and China.
Spouses and family members comprise a category that more than doubled between 1993-2003.
Until recently asylum-seekers and refugees represented one of the largest immigrant categories, including Sri Lankan Tamils, Serbians and Somalis in the late 1990s and Zimbabweans, Iraqis and Afghanis in the early 2000s.
Finally there are 'undocumented' people from all over the world, people generally described in the media as 'illegal immigrants'.
We know that they work in a range of sectors from professional to manual work, most of whom have probably overstayed their originally legal entry visas to Britain.
Legal status, patterns of immigrant integration and social interaction are also importantly related to people's plans for how long they intend to stay.
Many only plan to work for a short time and then return home, others to stay a bit longer. Others wish to settle permanently.
For example, most Slovakians, Filipinos and Thais in the UK are women (70-80%), while most Algerians, Kosovars and Afghans are men (60-70%).
Some groups are more prone to consist of young families, others of single people.
The Born Abroad project has done a great service in revealing characteristics of the new migration.
But in order to effectively deliver services to, and ensure the smooth integration of immigrants we need revitalised multicultural policies, reflecting the new patterns of super-diversity.
Prof. Steven Vertovec is a social anthropologist and Director of the Economic and Social Research Council's Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) at the University of Oxford. See internet links.


A commemorative photographic exhibition in memory of Barbara Susan Stewart-Thomas (1948-2017) will be on display at The Art Box in DeKalb, from Aug. 30 through Sept. 27.
A commemorative photographic exhibition in memory of Barbara Susan Stewart-Thomas (1948-2017) will be on display at The Art Box, 308 E. Lincoln Highway in downtown DeKalb, from Aug. 30 through Sept. 27.
Barbara Stewart was born and raised in Detroit. After high school she attended Michigan State University during the tumultuous years of the 1960s and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in art history. She married Jim Thomas in 1975, moved to DeKalb in 1979, and attended Northern Illinois University, graduating with a Master of Fine Arts degree in photography.
The exhibition at The Art Box is mostly based on the contents of Stewart-Thomas’ second soft-bound book titled, “Still/Moving.” In 2007, she continued shooting street scenes in Chicago that she started as a photography student in the 1980s. Between the elevated trains and bus line her “preference photographing on buses and at bus stops extends beyond the light and the view – there is the vibrant life of the street with its kinetic collage of people, architecture and advertising.” In “Still/Moving” there are a couple of street scenes from Cannes, France.
There also will be a few photographs based on Stewart-Thomas’ family, which was very important to her. In her youth she made small books about her maternal family and growing up in a Detroit Jewish community. In 2006, she published a hard-bound book compiling all of the smaller books into one. The last chapter is based on stories of her paternal family. In her final years, she was working on an extended photo-documentary history of her family.
She was the recipient of numerous grants, residencies and awards. Her work was exhibited both in Illinois and nationally. She was an avid reader, and remained passionate about politics up to her final morning.
A reception honoring Barbara Susan Stewart-Thomas is scheduled from 2 to 4 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 9.
The Art Box shop and gallery hours are 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily; closed Sunday and Wednesday. For more information, contact Daniel Grych at 815-758-0313 or dan@dekalbgallery.com.


Shovel Knight in Smash? Maybe someday. The eponymous hero of Shovel Knight was drawn by DeviantArt's hextupleyoodot, AKA Artsy Omni, the guy behind the Rayman "leak," as part of his Smashified series. You can find more of his art in his DeviantArt gallery here.


March 18 (Reuters) - Palladium surged to a record high on Monday, boosted by ongoing supply shortages for the autocatalyst metal, while gold rose as expectations the U.S. Federal Reserve will pursue an accommodative monetary policy this year weighed on the dollar.
Spot palladium scaled an all-time peak of $1,577 an ounce and was up 0.8 percent at $1,571.65 at 1321 GMT.
“The industry does not use bars and so the mines make grains, which are not deliverable,” Gero said, adding thin trading was perking up volatility of the metal.
Palladium prices have jumped more than 24 percent so far this year due to a sharp supply deficit and increasing demand.
Higher lease rates of palladium show tightness in the market, Capital Economics analyst Ross Strachan said, adding that speculative interest was also driving up demand.
However, falling car sales in China, the United States and Europe due to slowing economic growth could push prices down to the $1,100 region by the end of the year, Strachan said.
Meanwhile, spot gold was up 0.3 percent at $1,304.88 per ounce. U.S. gold futures gained 0.2 percent to $1,304.70.
“With lack of any other news, the inspiration (for gold) is coming from a softer dollar,” Saxo Bank analyst Ole Hansen said.
The Fed will begin its monetary policy meeting on Tuesday, ending with a news conference on Wednesday.
The dollar index slid 0.2 percent, having posted its biggest weekly decline since early December last week.
Global stocks rose to their highest in five months as traders began to price in an accommodative stance from the U.S. central bank.
Data on Friday showed speculators reduced their net long positions in gold for a third straight week. .
On the technical front, $1,275 is likely to offer good support, while $1,310 and beyond that $1,355-60 are the resistance levels to watch, said Jigar Trivedi, commodities analyst at Mumbai-based Anand Rathi Shares & Stock Brokers.


Creating Reminder Notes in Outlook 97/2000.
To create a new "sticky" note, click on the Notes icon on the Outlook bar and select "New Note" button. You can drag and drop notes to your desktop, where it will remain even if you close Outlook.


Set in New England in 1965, “Moonrise” tells the story of a boy and a girl who run away from camp, only to be chased by a bunch of quirky adults played by Edward Norton, Bruce Willis, Frances McDormand and Bill Murray.
The trailer feels verrrry Wes Anderson and will likely test your threshold for 12 year-old dilettantes (unless, of course, you shimmied on the beach to French pop in the fifth grade). Still, it’s nice to see the “Rushmore” director back in his comfort zone, even if it feels, at times, like a stubborn endeavor.
“Moonrise Kingdom” opens in limited release May 25, 2012.


The following pets are available from The Humane Society Chatham-Savannah. Applications are available at The Humane Society, 7215 Sallie Mood Drive. For a complete list of pets, go to www.HumaneSocietySAV.org. To learn about The Humane Society Volunteer & Foster programs, call Nancy Richards at 354-9515 or e-mail nrichards@HumaneSocietySAV.org.
Domino is a 1 1/2-year-old Dalmation mix. He is affectionate and playful, and is great with kids and other dogs. He seems to be housebroken and is very intelligent.
Chanel is a 4-year-old Sheba inu/spaniel mix. She loves walking, playing with other dogs, licking faces and eating treats.
Red is a 1 1/2-year-old guinea pig. She is friendly and is good with children and other guinea pigs. She loves to be held and to get exercise.
The following pet is available from Georgia Animal Rescue and Defence, 100 Dichroic Dragon Drive, Pembroke, GA 31321. Appointments are necessary to visit the shelter. Other adoptable animals are available to view at www.gardonline.org. GARD has pet adoption events every Saturday at Pet Supermarket in Chatham Plaza. For appointments and to learn about Georgia Animal Rescue and Defence, call 653-2480.
Peanut is about 6 to 8 weeks old and appears to be a shepherd mix. He has had his first round of puppy shots and is healthy and active.
Wilbur is a 14-week-old bull terrier mix that was rescued from a high kill shelter. He will weigh less than 50 pounds when he is full-grown. Wilber is great with children and other dogs.
The following pets are available from Coastal Pet Rescue. For more information on any of these pets, call 351-4151 or e-mail lisa@coastalpetrescue.org.
Maggie loves to play and loves attention. She and her sister, Cali, were each born with a deformed back leg. Maggie doesn't let it slow her down, though. Maggie is litter-box trained and is learning to use a scratching pad.
Davidson, Marley, Harley, Phoebe and Laika were thrown through the window at Chatham County Animal Control one night. The puppies are incredibly energetic and eager to play. Their exact breed is unknown, but Coastal Pet Rescue workers guess their full-grown size to be in the 40- to 50-pound range. All have been vet-checked and will receive their first shots, as well as being spayed and neutered prior to adoption.
Millie is a docile pug who loves to cuddle. She rides well in the car and loves to give kisses. Millie is crate trained and doing well at housebreaking.


Editor’s note: Hassan Baig is an entrepreneur who runs White Rabbit Studios, a South Asian gaming startup he founded four years ago in Pakistan. Follow him on Twitter @baigi.
Mobile gaming is a huge worldwide opportunity at the moment, having clocked in at $9 billion in 2012, and it is poised to grow further in the coming years. With the world’s 1 billion smartphones scheduled to almost double in number by 2015 and games responsible for a whopping 66 percent of all app revenue, it’s easy for anyone to do the math and see where this is going.
Game development continues to have a bright future, but only for those who can develop profitable titles. Pursuing such profitability is an exact science now, with monitoring analytics and continuous A/B testing having become the staple of game development. In fact, Zynga – the gaming company to have popularized (if not introduced) the use of analytics – has been often categorized as a big data company.
One can imagine metrics to be ‘levers’ that a game developer can push or pull to create a desired outcome. Some levers have a generous range of motion, while others are more limited. In the end a game developer’s task is essentially to figure out the perfect combination of lever positions that will produce the best financial outcome at the least cost. Notions of creativity, novelty and fun are all confined within the prism of this analytics-centric approach: They have wiggle room as long as they improve analytics. That’s the fundamental philosophy behind modern-day game development.
For those looking for a more visceral understanding of game analytics, I’ve set up a simple mathematical simulation that compares game performances across hypothetical retention and viral profiles. It’s in simple spreadsheet format and can be downloaded here. I’ll quickly list out the assumptions governing this simulation, after which I’ll explain the noteworthy conclusions one can draw from the numbers.
Note that Game No. 1 is treated as a benchmark and the remaining games differ from it by no more than one metric. For example, Game No. 2 differs from game No. 1 in terms of average player lifetime (and is similar on all other metrics). I have used an average CPA of $1.3 throughout to calculate the games’ respective advertising spend. Lastly, in case more clarity is needed on the definitions of the terms I’ve used in the bullet points above, explanatory descriptions can be found in one of the tabs on the spreadsheet. Now on to the simulation’s broad conclusions.
1) The greater a game’s average player lifetime, the higher its DAU count. And since the DAU is an approximate measure of player engagement which, in turn, is directly correlated to revenue generation, average player lifetime turns out to have an obvious effect on a game’s money-making potential.
In the tables of game No. 1 and game No. 2 in the tab titled “Comparative Revenue” in the spreadsheet notice how game No. 2’s higher average player lifetime gives it superior DAU and revenue numbers in comparison to game No. 1.
2) The greater a game’s d2 retention, the higher its DAU count. And as explained earlier, DAU is directly correlated to revenue generation. Hence it can be surmised that d2 retention has a very obvious effect on a game’s money-making potential. It’s for this reason that most gaming companies utilize A/B testing to optimize their games’ retention rates early in the launch cycle. Also, given d2 retention usually doesn’t optimize beyond single-digit percentages, games with low retention rates are culled very quickly. Look at the comparison between games No. 1 and 3 in the spreadsheet: The latter’s higher d2 retention gives it a better DAU profile, which in turn translates to more revenue overall.
3) Big advertising budgets do not improve a game’s profitability. That is, if a game is a poor financial performer over a certain demographic of players, buying more users for it from the same demographic will not help the bottom line. It’s the reason gaming companies optimize a game’s metrics before buying expensive eyeballs for it, and it’s also the reason certain games get killed way before they’ve seen a full-fledged launch.
Those interested can check out the illustrative comparison between game No. 1 and No. 4 in the “Comparative Revenue” tab in my spread sheet.
4) The greater the virality of a game, the greater its profitability. That is, greater virality ensures more freely acquired users, hence minimizing a key cost consideration: cost per user acquisition. A somewhat similar effect can be garnered via having a captive player network which can be cross-promoted at negligible cost to another game – just that in the former case, virality causes the overall player network to itself expand as well.
Overall, the ability to get free users is extremely important for any gaming company’s financial health, so it’s no wonder that Mark Pincus stressed investing and leveraging Zynga’s player network as a cornerstone of the company’s future strategy in his recent earnings call.
As previously noted, avid number crunchers can have a quick look at the comparison between game # 1 and game # 5 in the “Comparative Revenue” tab in my spreadsheet and appreciate the marked difference between the two games’ eCPA as a result of differing K factors.
5) Higher monetization per user leads to greater profitability. This is quite a straightforward result, but its implications are far-reaching. It’s the reason gaming companies contend for long/multiple sessions and flock around the 43 year old housewife or the 28 year old male gamer, it’s the reason carrier billing is beinghailed as a boon for emerging markets like South Asia, it’s why real-money online gambling is heating up and even why Candy Crush Saga went cross-platform.
Analyze the comparison between game No. 1 and the relatively higher ARPDAU game No. 6. The difference in total revenue between these games illustrates my point.
This concludes the results of my spreadsheet simulation. Many of these results are confessedly intuitive and though looking at my simulated numbers may give a more visceral understanding of fundamental game analytics, it’s only reinforcing what many already know. After all, it’s quite obvious that a game developer should strive for producing a title with lengthy average player lifetimes, high retention rates, great virality and high ARPDAUs.
Rapid prototyping and play testing: This is critical for quickly gauging the potential retention of a proposed game design before full-fledged work is to start on it. Many game designs are just not worth the effort of taking to fruition.
Extensive A/B testing: Robust, extensive A/B testing throughout the life cycle of a game is very important because even minor bumps in analytics have a directly measurable effect on profitability.
Pipeline for frequent updates: A reliable pipeline to deliver frequent content updates is a must-have in the bid to prolong average player lifetimes. Once a gaming company commits to a game, it needs to consistently perceive the game as a work-in-progress.
Big-name gaming companies are already following the aforementioned fundamental tenets in their production pipeline – it’s more often the smaller studios which persist with informal methodologies. That’s bad practice because instead of facilitating the smaller studios to catch up, it exacerbates the gap between the big and small fish over time.
As the mobile gaming market continues to spew riches for the foreseeable future, it is imperative that modern day game developers structure their entire operations around the fundamentals of data analytics instead of trying to fit a metrics-based veneer over introverted, blind game development. Their jobs are basically to create digital entertainment products that activate the maximum possible number of highly viral users on a daily basis for the longest sessions.


Rick Ross knows how to party. The Maybach Music mogul celebrated his 41st birthday like a boss, with a lavish masquerade ball at his mansion in Fayetteville, Ga. over the weekend.
The star-studded bash was attended by Renzel’s MMG family, including Meek Mill, who showed up in a ski mask and Wale, who popped up in all black. Other rappers also stopped by, including YG, Jeezy, Outkast’s Big Boi, Big K.R.I.T., DeJ Loaf, Yung Dolph, and Curren$y.
The-Dream also showed love to Rozay, while debuting his new face tat. Usher dropped by the mansion, donning a mask to go along with Renzel’s theme. Even politicians attended the event. Such was the case with Congressman Hank Johnson, who also spent the weekend fighting President Donald Trump’s immigration ban.
The party was an extravagant affair, complete with a red carpet and a multi-layered black-and-gold cake fit for the Bawse. But that wasn’t Rozay’s only indulgence. He also received a company gift from his Belaire Rosé brand in the form of a black Ferrari, which was parked outside of his home with a bright red bow on it.
Rozay is gearing up for a big year. Last week, he dropped his Ty Dolla $ign-assisted single “I Think She Like Me,” while his album Rather You Than Me, his first on Epic, is due early this year.