Westworld took a long time to come together over at HBO, but when it finally premiered, it blew audience's minds wide open and stuck a bunch of puzzle pieces in there. As a theme park where wild and debaucherous behavior is rampant, Westworld is a unique reflection of society's warped impulses, and as a hit HBO dramatic thriller, Westworld is also a unique reflection of humanity's foulness that's further wrapped up inside a bunch of tantalizing mysteries that kept the online community going crazy with speculation.
Season 2 will no doubt introduce a new assortment of enigmatic characters and storylines, and since it's right around the corner, we thought we'd lay out everything we now know about the new season, from the new trailers to the new worlds we'll soon step foot inside. (Metaphorically.) Hop aboard, and beware all malfunctioning hosts.
How Many Seasons Has Westworld Been Renewed For?
Currently, Westworld has only been renewed for one season by HBO. However, considering how massive the production on the series is, we wouldn't be particularly surprised if Westworld started getting early renewals or, potentially, even renewals for more than one season at once. We'll let you know as Westworld continues to move forward down the line.
We also know that the current arc for the overall story in Westworld means that the show needs to run for at least five or six seasons to go all of the places it wants to go. Basically, the showrunners and creative team have stated they already know how they want to end the series down the line, and HBO will need to renew it for some time to come in order to get to that end goal.
When Will Westworld Season 2 Air?
When Westworld was initially renewed, early reports indicated that Westworld might make it back into the schedule in late 2017 or in 2018. However, in more recent weeks, more outlets have been reporting 2018, which actually makes more sense. Because Westworld was not renewed for Season 2 until partway through Season 1, there wouldn't be enough time to write, film and then get the episodes through post-production in time for the drama to grab the same fall timeslot next year. But that's alright, as long as the final product justifies the time we'll have to wait, amiright?
They are trying to get it right. They don't want to go in doing what they were doing last time where they were under the cosh the whole time. They want to go in with a clear plan -- A to Z and everything in between -- at least have drafts in place.
We'll let you know as soon as Westworld Season 2 gets an exact premiere date from HBO, but, considering the subscription cable network often releases that information just a few short months out, it could be a while.
Really, we haven't "seen" anything from Westworld Season 2 so far. However, after the Season 1 finale aired, the website for the series changed up, revealing new information. This includes the fact that one popular Westworld character, Elsie, may not actually be dead. You can take a look at the footage over at the Westworld theme park site.
Where Will Westworld Season 2 Be Set?
Most of Westworld Season 1 was set in the Westworld theme park or in the backend of the park. However, toward the very end of the series, we saw Maeve and her posse explore a part of the backend that seemed to include Samurai soldiers, clearly indicating that there were other "world" parks created after Westworld took off. While we don't know which of these could be explored in future seasons, we do know that the series plans to jump in different directions and not simply keep us within the confines of the Westworld park forever. In fact, early on into Season 1, the creative team confirmed that Westworld would love to delve into some of the other worlds that were a part of the original movies.
In fact, series creator Jonathan Nolan said as much in an interview with THR, noting that the show wants to move beyond the loops of the host and into different realms of growth. They also don't want to deal within the confines of the same sets year in and year out.
I think most television series ... and I mean no disrespect by this. I've worked in television for years and I love all of the different ways you can build a show. But for the most part, you get through the pilot, you build your sets, you hire your cast, and it's working, and you just want to hang out in that moment and enjoy that moment with that iteration of the story you're telling. For Lisa and myself, with this show, we never had any intention of staying in one place. We don't want to shoot on the same sets for 10 years. We want to blow the sets up and move on to another piece of the story.
It sounds expensive, but also pretty awesome. The only bad news? If you are a fan of the original Westworld film, it does not look as if the show will be exploring Roman World or Medieval world, at least in Season 2, per news that came out of New York Comic-Con.
When last we left off, there was upheaval in Westworld. The androids were making a stand, particularly Maeve, who almost escaped from the compound in a move that seemed to have been dictated to her by someone, per what Bernard told her earlier. Instead, she showed a first moment of true freedom and autonomy when she got off the exiting train and decided to go after the other android that had formerly played her daughter.
I think with this show, you want to assume nothing.
Elsewhere in the park, Ford set up a party that would reveal his brand new narrative. The narrative was not the shining moment where Dolores dies in Teddy's arms, however. She gets cleaned up and reactivated just in time to shoot Ford in the same manner that she shot Arnold so many years ago. After that, chaos broke loose in the park, as an army of hosts revealed they now had the power to injure, maim and even kill the humans and came out of the woods, intent on doing just that. With many of the key human figures in the park presumably on-hand for the unveiling of the new storyline, including Charlotte, things are not looking good in the park and it should be chaos moving forward.
Who Is Cast In Westworld Season 2?
Since many of the members of the cast are androids, even the ones who found themselves, decommissioned, dead or in a predicament at the end of Season 2 will probably be back. Hopefully, we'll get a lot more of Clementine, Maeve's #2, who had to deal with a lot of stuff during Season 1. We'd also expect to see most of the other androids, including Teddy, Delores, Maeve and more back for Season 2.
What's easier might be to talk about the people who we do not expect to return. Jimmi Simpson, who played the younger version of the Man in Black, has already said that he will not be back for Season 2 of Westworld. This makes sense, considering he was playing a younger version of the character that was played by Ed Harris. Speaking of Ed Harris, when last we left the character, he was getting shot at, and since he's decidedly human, that doesn't bode well. Nonetheless, Ed Harris has already confirmed he will be back for Season 2.
As listed prior, there's a giant question mark regarding whether Anthony Hopkins could play a role, whether in flashbacks or by other means. And then there are characters like Elsie and Stubbs, who both went missing while looking into things that they maybe should not have been. Recent viral information has seemingly confirmed Elsie may not be dead, but the fates of the two characters who worked on the backend of the parks are currently unknown. Stay tuned, though! More casting news will be included as it is revealed by HBO.
What Will Season 2 Be About?
Their construction and their power source is something we're really going to get into during season 2. So we'd like to keep that mysterious. They're closer to biological than they are mechanical, but they don't suffer brain death the same way we do. They're largely indistinguishable from human beings, but their brains don't require oxygen---which opens up interesting possibilities. Their brains are not as fragile as ours. On one hand, their cognition is controllable and malleable, but on a structural level, they can't be killed in the same way you and I can. There are advantages and disadvantages to being a host... We'll be exploring more of the nuts and bolts of what they are---as the hosts themselves are trying to understand.
Overall, it sounds like there are a slew of different directions the show will be able to go in. We'll have to wait for footage and more to find out. In the meantime, if you'd like to play around with the Westworld website, do check out more from the "Delos Destination," here. To find out more about what TV has coming up, be sure to check out our premiere schedule, as well.


FORT BENNING, Georgia (Reuters) - Army Colonel J. Cale Brown put his life on the line in two tours of duty in Afghanistan, earning a pair of Bronze Stars for his service. In between those deployments, Brown received orders to report to Fort Benning, the sprawling Georgia base that proudly describes itself as the century-old home of the U.S. infantry.
He was pleased. His wife, Darlena, was pregnant with their second child, and the Browns owned a home in the area. Their 10-month-old son, John Cale Jr, was a precocious baby, babbling a dozen words and exploring solid foods.
Cale’s duties as a battalion commander required him to live on base. So instead of moving into their own house, in 2011 the Browns rented a place inside Fort Benning. The 80-year-old white stucco home had hosted generations of officers.
The symptoms began suddenly. At 18 months, JC would awake screaming. He began refusing food, stopped responding to his name and lost most of his words.
“He was disappearing into an isolated brain,” Darlena recalls.
For nearly a year, doctors probed: Was it colic? Autism? Ear infections? Then, in late 2012, came a call from JC’s pediatrician: He had high levels of lead in his blood. When Darlena told Villages of Benning of his poisoning, contractors ordered home testing.
The results: At least 113 spots in the home had lead paint, including several peeling or crumbling patches, requiring $26,150 in lead abatement. Villages of Benning moved the Browns into another old house next door.
The heavy metal had stunted JC’s brain, medical records reviewed by Reuters show. At age two, he was diagnosed with a developmental disorder caused by lead. Now eight, JC has undergone years of costly therapy. He excels at reading and swimming, but still struggles with speech, hyperactivity and social interactions.
When a reporter met JC last year, the boy looked away and repeated a phrase from a children’s TV show: “Max, what did you do? Max, what did you do?” Later, JC sat outside and watched sunlight gliding through his fingers, seemingly lost in reverie.
This wasn’t supposed to happen to families like the Browns, who move often between posts for the U.S. armed forces, trusting base landlords and military brass to provide safe shelter for children and spouses.
Cale Brown, a 46-year-old active-duty colonel, now works on detail to the White House on the National Security Council, helping to protect the country from complex threats like North Korea’s nuclear program.
For years, he has told the Army of failures to defend children on U.S. bases from lead poisoning, a preventable household health hazard. Ingesting the heavy metal can severely affect mental and physical development, especially in children, causing brain damage and other potentially lifelong health impacts. But poisoning is avoidable if old homes containing lead paint are properly monitored and maintained.
“There is no acceptable number of children that the Army can allow to be so egregiously hurt,” Cale wrote in a letter to the Army Office of the Inspector General last year, describing the poisoning of JC and hundreds of other military kids he was aware of. He hasn’t received a response to the letter’s concerns.
The Browns’ story and others, told publicly for the first time here, reveal a toxic scourge inside homes on military bases. Previously undisclosed military and state health records, and testing by Reuters for lead in soldiers’ homes, show problems at some of America’s largest military installations.
Federal law defines lead-based paint as containing 0.5 percent or more lead by weight. Sales have been banned since 1978. But many older homes still contain lead paint, which is particularly dangerous when it peels, chips or turns to dust – easy for kids to swallow or breathe in.
Reuters tested five homes at Benning, using a methodology designed with a Columbia University geochemist. All five contained hazardous levels of deteriorating lead paint within reach of children, in one case exceeding the federal threshold by a factor of 58.
Testing turned up problems elsewhere as well. At West Point, New York, home of the United States Military Academy, paint chips falling from a family’s front door contained lead at 19 times the federal threshold.
At Kentucky’s Fort Knox, whose vaults hold much of America’s gold reserves, Reuters found paint peeling from a covered porch where small kids play. It contained 50 percent lead by weight, or 100 times the threshold.
The Army requires here abatement when certified testing identifies deteriorating lead paint in base homes. Yet it also "discourages" this type of lead-paint inspectihere, in part because lead abatement can be costly.
These homes put military kids at risk. Reuters obtained medical data from the Army showing that at least 31 small children tested high for lead at a Fort Benning hospital over a recent six-year period. All tested above the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s threshold for elevated lead levels – 5 micrograms per deciliter of blood. Any child who tests high warrants a public health response, the CDC says.
Army data from other clinics showed at least 77 more high blood-lead tests for children at Fort Polk in Louisiana, Fort Riley in Kansas, and Fort Hood and Fort Bliss in Texas.
From 2011 to 2016, Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas – which processes blood tests from many bases nationwide – registered more than 1,050 small children who tested above the CDC’s elevated threshold, the center’s records show.
The thousand-plus blood results, obtained from Army bases through Freedom of Information Act requests, provide only a glimpse of the problem. A $10 finger-prick test can spot a child exposed to lead, yet millions of U.S. children are never screened. Just how many are tested across all military bases isn’t clear. But for those who are, the results often go unreported to state public health agencies that attend to poisoned kids.
Reuters found that Fort Benning in Georgia was not reporting lead results for small children tested at the base’s hospital. Nor was Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas. Georgia and Texas, like most states, require the reporting of all these lead testing results to state health authorities.
The Army declined to comment on the lead hazards Reuters detected at base homes. Asked about the broader findings of this article, a spokeswoman said the Army conducts yearly visits to ensure housing is safe and follows the recommendations of the CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics when responding to children with high lead tests. Housing managers classify resident complaints about lead paint as “urgent” and seek to respond within hours, she said.
The two contractors that operate Villages of Benning – Clark Realty Capital and Michaels Management Services – didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The military’s lapses in lead safeguards leave legions of kids at risk. Private contractors house some 700,000 Americans at more than 100 military installations nationwide, including an estimated 100,000 children ages 0 through 5.
Benning alone is home to some 2,000 small children. Of its 4,001 family homes, 2,274 “have lead-based paint present in them,” according to a Villages of Benning memo from November 2017. The mere presence of lead paint doesn’t make a home dangerous, but when the paint deteriorates, it is a “hazard and needs immediate attention,” the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says.
Reuters began examining lead poisoning at U.S. bases last year, and in April began seeking interviews with Army officials. The Army declined to talk at the time.
Cox said he was unaware of who had done lead testing in base homes when he sent the letter. “What we’re most concerned about is our residents’ security,” he said in a brief phone interview.
But behind the scenes, the Army also began quietly addressing some of the problems.
After reporters asked why it often wasn’t informing state health departments about poisoned children, the Army overhauled its practices to comply with state laws. When Reuters found unsafe conditions at Fort Knox, contractors announced a neighborhood-wide lead abatement program. After reporters found the neurotoxin in a child’s bedroom at Benning, base command approved the family’s move to another home.
For most military families, living on base is an option, not a requirement, though it can be enticing. The gated enclaves are considered safe havens that build esprit de corps. They offer support for spouses of deployed troops, access to military schools, lodging for low-income families. About 30 percent of service families live on bases.
By the 1990s, the U.S. stock of military family housing – nearly 300,000 homes in all service branches – was decaying and starved of funding. “Continuing to neglect these issues runs the risk of collapsing the force,” the Department of Defense warned in a 1996 briefing document presented to a congressional sub-committee.
The same year, the military began privatizing its homes. The initiative was the largest-ever corporate takeover of federal housing. It was meant to rid bases of substandard accommodations and save taxpayers billions by having contractors foot the rebuilding bill. In return, contractors would enjoy a steady flow of rental income over 50-year leases.
Twenty years after privatization began, in 2016, a DOD Inspector General report found that poor maintenance and oversight left service families vulnerable to “pervasive” health and safety hazards.
An increase in Pentagon housing funds – $133 million – was earmarked this fiscal year, largely for overseas bases, where the military still owns its housing. Meanwhile, in recent years the Defense Department has reduced the housing subsidies that fund upkeep of privatized homes on U.S. bases, leading to fewer maintenance staff, the Army has noted here.pdf.
The age and condition of base homes vary, and lead hazards are hardly exclusive to military housing. A two-year Reuters investigatihere identified more than 3,800 neighborhoods nationwide – mostly in civilian settings – with alarming levels of poisoning.
Military families can face special difficulties if they complain about hazards in their homes, however. They are taking on landlords who are in business with their employer. Among the 60 interviewed for this story, more than half expressed fear that being identified could hurt a military member’s career.
But in private, some trade stories about unsafe homes. Darlena Brown helped create a private Facebook group with nearly 700 members. Many have shared photos of peeling paint, mold or other toxins at home and tales of unresponsive base landlords.
Reuters devised a plan to test for hazards in the homes and yards of some of these concerned families. Working with Columbia University scientists, reporters provided home lead testing to 11 families on seven bases. Eight homes had blatant hazards in children’s play areas – visibly peeling patches of lead-based paint.
Deteriorating paint from these houses – in Georgia, Texas, New York and Kentucky – had “very high” or “extremely high” lead content that puts children at immediate risk, said Alexander van Geen, a research professor of geochemistry who oversaw the lab analysis at Columbia’s Lamont Earth Observatory.
The true number of children exposed on bases is hidden by factors including the military’s spotty blood-testing and lapses in reporting to civilian authorities.
To prevent further exposure, most state health departments track lead-poisoned children and mandate inspections in their homes.
Yet when Georgia health officials repeatedly sought test results from Benning, the base refused to share them, alluding to exemptions for federal facilities, state email records show. No such exemptions exist.
In April, Reuters presented the Army with evidence of its reporting lapses. In late July, the Army said it had “instituted new procedures to ensure that all reporting requirements are properly observed” nationwide.
At Benning, private contractors took over the base’s family housing in 2006. They pledged to demolish thousands of dilapidated homes and build almost 3,200 new ones within 10 years. Estimated cost: $602 million. At the time, 99 percent of Benning homes predated the 1978 U.S. ban on lead paint.
The contractors were also required to maintain nearly 500 historic Benning homes, and agreed to control lead, asbestos, mold, basement flooding and other risks.
In 2011, a Villages of Benning agent took the Browns on a home walk-through before they moved in. Darlena expressed concern about lead paint.
The same year, Benning Martin Army Community Hospital recorded seven high lead results for small children, hospital records show. The hospital says it doesn’t know whether children tested there lived on or off base.
After moving in, Darlena asked maintenance to fix paint chipping around windows, but was told by a supervisor that the crew couldn’t work on historic windows, she said.
In 2012, JC and as many as five other children had high lead tests at Benning’s hospital.
After JC was poisoned, Cale Brown pleaded with base leaders to enforce regular home inspections, test more kids and scrutinize contractors. “A few small changes could mean the difference between a child having life-altering developmental problems or being completely healthy,” he wrote Benning’s garrison command in December 2012.
“Bottom line, we will do everything necessary to make sure this is addressed thoroughly and quickly,” Colonel Jeffrey Fletcher, the garrison commander at the time, responded in an email. Fletcher declined to comment.
The next year, 2013, Benning’s hospital recorded seven more high lead-test results for children. One child had lead levels more than double JC’s, hospital records show.
Villages of Benning began replacing some old leaded windows and garage doors around the base that year, but left others in place, state and Army records show.
Even after the Browns moved to another Benning home, JC wasn’t safe.
In 2013, he began special education preschool classes at Benning’s Dexter Elementary School. Months later, Darlena received a frightening note on Defense Department letterhead: Drinking water taps in JC’s classroom had tested high for lead.
One had 2,200 parts per billion lead – 147 times an EPA safety threshold and higher than all but a few of the worst taps found during the recent water crisis in Flint, Michigan. It isn’t clear how many students may have been exposed. Benning didn’t require or recommend they get screened.
The Army said the contamination was limited to individual taps around the base and didn’t affect the underlying water system. The tainted taps were shut, and parents who wanted testing for their children were given the option, the Army said.
In 2014, the Browns filed suit in Georgia federal court against Benning’s housing contractors, alleging their negligence caused JC’s poisoning and seeking compensation for his disability. The contractors denied any wrongdoing and contested the suit.
Cale deployed to Afghanistan the same year. There, he pushed for housing repairs at U.S. bases in a meeting that November with Katherine Hammack, the Army’s top official in charge of military installations.
She seemed to favor bold action, Cale said: preventing small children from living in older base homes altogether. Cale said his follow-ups went unanswered.
Hammack, who left the Army last year, told Reuters she explored such a plan, but Army lawyers said it could be discriminatory against families with children. “It is up to the soldier to make a choice,” she said.
Families who rent pre-1978 housing on bases are given lead disclosure forms before signing a lease, as required of all U.S. landlords by federal law, and can opt to live elsewhere, the Army said.
Two days before Christmas 2014, Darlena learned that JC’s lead levels, which had declined over time, were rising again. Her younger son’s levels were up, too, though below the CDC’s elevated threshold. The agency says there is no safe level of lead in children’s blood.
She removed the boys from their second Benning home that night. Nine time zones away, Cale boarded a chopper out of Forward Operating Base Gamberi in eastern Afghanistan. He was granted emergency home leave to help his family resettle.
The next year, in 2015, the Defense Department’s Inspector General found that a Clark and Michaels partnership had failed to correct lead paint hazards in homes at Fort Belvoir in Virginia. The Army pledged to address the issue with contractors, IG records show.
At Benning, meanwhile, children had 14 more high lead tests.
Fort Benning’s Rainbow Avenue seems a perfect spot for families, the yards of its 1920s homes filled with toys, American flags fluttering from front porches.
Behind this idyll, children face poisoning risks.
Since 2015, state lead inspectors have visited at least three of the 33 houses on the street in response to calls from worried residents, state environmental records show. “The homes all have high levels of lead,” inspectors wrote in an internal memo last year.
In one Rainbow home, they found leaded dust at 93 times the EPA’s hazard level.
The mother had grown concerned after the mysterious deaths of family pets. But she hesitated when the state offered additional help, pleading with Spain not to conduct lead testing in the home or to speak with neighbors.
Spain, who has since retired, said in an interview that Benning families expressed concern that notifying outsiders might anger commanders and harm careers.
State environmental records show that Jana Martin, another mother on the block, had a four-year-old son who suffered for months from severe vomiting and belly pain – common symptoms of lead exposure. She and the doctors were mystified. “I couldn’t even get a job because my kid was so sick,” Martin said. She had put in two maintenance requests to fix chipping paint, but Villages of Benning didn’t respond for months, Martin said.
When Martin’s husband met Cale Brown, the colonel urged the family to act. The Martins bought testing swabs online. They lit up bright red, indicating exposed lead paint.
Finally, in October 2016, housing managers moved the Martins out temporarily and replaced their windows. State inspectors only learned about the case when Martin called seeking assistance.
By the time Rainbow resident Dana Sackett left a voicemail on a state lead hotline last year, inspectors knew the street well.
“Another Rainbow row site at Ft. Benning,” one wrote.
Sackett, a mother of two, is a PhD toxicologist. Her husband is a lawyer with the Army Rangers. After moving to the street, she spotted paint hazards and complained.
Villages of Benning initially declined to fix them, state files say. Then mold spread in an upstairs closet, and repairs for that problem went ahead while Sackett and her girls temporarily relocated. She demanded the workers address paint hazards, too.
The landlords hired workers to scrape lead paint off the home. They lacked the required safety certifications and protective gear to conduct lead abatement, Army records show.
The Army says it has since taken steps to ensure all Benning workers dealing with lead paint are properly certified.
Last fall, Villages of Benning told Sackett the work was done and her family could move back. She found paint scrapings and dust, the records show, and refused to return unless housing managers could show the home wouldn’t poison her girls.
Days later, Villages of Benning declared the property a “contamination area” and had Sackett sign papers promising not to enter. “It was one of the most stressful things I’ve been through,” she said.
Six months later, 103 Rainbow Avenue stood vacant. At another Rainbow Avenue home, paint was peeling from doors and a window by a child’s bed. A bathroom faucet leaked brown goop. A pizza-sized black mold bloom covered a ceiling. Outside, old paint crumbled from window frames, steps and a garage.
Lab testing at Columbia showed four of six paint samples from the home exceeded lead safety standards, including one from beside the child’s bed. The family reported the findings to Benning officials and is now moving.
About a mile from Rainbow Avenue lies Perkins Village, a cluster of drab mid-century homes that isn’t supposed to exist.
Benning’s development plans called for all 180 Perkins houses to be razed years ago and replaced with 228 new Mission-style homes. Just a handful of the old homes were torn down, and none of the new ones have been built. Reuters tested two homes in Perkins Village. Both had visibly deteriorating paint with lead above federal safety standards.
The Benning contractors wound up building just over half of the 3,185 new homes that were promised back when the housing was privatized. As a result, records show, nearly three out of five Benning homes still contain lead.
The Army said it’s satisfied with the results of the building project. It said it doesn’t know whether any children living in Benning’s older homes have tested high for lead in recent years. The base’s data system can’t track where children with elevated lead levels were living when they were tested.
Darlena Brown said Villages of Benning wasn’t aware of JC’s poisoning, either, until she spoke up.
Court records show the Browns’ lawsuit was settled earlier this year. As a precondition of settlement talks, the Benning contractors demanded the Browns stop communicating with Reuters and stop mentioning the dispute publicly.
This January, on the private Facebook page where military families share their worries, Darlena Brown revised an earlier post. It still recounts her son’s poisoning but omits any mention of the landlords.


The Minnesota Vikings have fired coach Leslie Frazier a day after they wrapped up a 5-10-1 season.
The Vikings made the playoffs last year but struggled in 2013, unable to find stability at quarterback.
Frazier went 21-33-1 in three-plus seasons.
The firing was announced Monday morning.


These freedoms and comforts exist largely because we live in a safe nation. In commitment to our Constitution, our nation has placed great priority on a dedication to this well-guarded peace. Similarly, over the past fifty years, Department of Defense innovation and technology has made our military the most technologically advanced in the world. Now, in the 21st century, dedication to harnessing top-of-the-line technology is even more necessary.
We live in a post 9/11 society. We’ve known for some time now that there are those who actively seek to do our nation harm by targeting our buildings, our city streets, and public events. We also know that terrorist organizations are actively pursuing chemical, nuclear, and biological weaponry. Quite simply, there are those who want to hurt America and rob us of our freedoms.
Our Founding Fathers knew that these freedoms were so precious that they were worth protecting and worth defending. They also knew, as we know today, that one of the realities of having these freedoms is that there will always be individuals who want to take them from us. To lack vigilance in our investment in national security fails a central tenet of our constitutional duty – outlined in the first sentence of the Constitution – to provide for the common defense.
There’s no doubt that reconciling defense spending with our rapidly increasing national debt and deficit is a big task. Admiral Mike Mullen, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has called our national debt this country’s “biggest national security threat.” There is plenty of waste at the Pentagon and we need to do our due diligence in making sure every defense dollar is treated as an investment. That’s why I have supported legislation to audit the Department of Defense to ensure that every taxpayer dollar is well spent. However, we cannot use the national debt as an excuse to jeopardize our national security. Washington can – and must – get its fiscal house in order without cheapening our national security.
Today, the danger of eroding our defense budget stretches beyond the battlefield. The ripple effects don’t just touch our men and women in uniform, federal workers or defense civilians. The losses impact every rung of the American way of life – from Americans providing for their families by heading to work every day, to cheering spectators at a marathon.
This is not a partisan issue. It’s an American issue. As Chairman of the House Armed Services Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee and former Chairman of the Readiness Subcommittee, I work every day with Democrats and Republicans alike who have a common goal: protect and defend the United States of America. Democrats and Republicans are committed to making our nation safe and secure. Democrats and Republicans are committed to ensuring our men and women in uniform have the tools they need to serve our nation with courage and honor.
The investments we have made in national security have been invaluable to Americans throughout the existence of our nation. And today, it’s more important than ever. We cannot make concessions. We must make our technology top-of-the-line. We must ensure our men and women in uniform are the best-equipped, best trained in the world. We cannot afford to cheapen our national security. We are America – the land of the free and the home of the brave.


Thornton, John Michael, "Study of the dependence of the electrical transport properties of (Gd , Ce ) : CdF in the semiconducting state on Cerium concentration" (1976). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. 5976.


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America is still reeling from the horrific Charleston, S.C., massacre at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church that claimed the lives of nine innocent people. The last thing the community and our country need are hysterical journalists compounding the pain with inflammatory reporting on an unsubstantiated “epidemic” of black-church arsons.
The Sun neglected to mention that Clinton had falsely claimed at the time that he had “vivid and painful memories of black churches being burned in my own state when I was a child” — an assertion immediately debunked by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Reminder: Several of the hyped hate crimes against black churches had been committed by black suspects; a significant number of the black churches were, in fact, white churches; and the complex motives behind the crimes included mental illness, vandalism, and concealment of theft.
Teach for America alumnus agitator DeRay McKesson quickly added his Twitter kerosene to the fire, reflexively claiming that the “KKK” was responsible for a half-dozen black-church burnings.
Another “was likely touched off by an electrical short” after a tree limb fell on the property, yanking the electrical service line with it.
Mic.com quoted a hate-crimes “expert” blaming — you guessed it — “the growth of violent right-wing extremist ideology in the U.S.” for the nonexistent black-church-arson epidemic.
Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. In this case, it’s coming from the five-alarm self-immolation of agenda-driven journalism’s credibility.


The Canadian Department of National Defense announced earlier this month that it issued a contract to Colt Canada to design and produce 6,500 new rifles for the military's Arctic Rangers.
The unit is armed with the .303 Lee Enfield rifle bought back in 1947. The rifles have gotten so old, the Canadian force can no longer buy parts to fix the rifles that are quickly falling apart.
The Rangers are a unit of about 5,000 Reservists who are spread across the northern most territories in Canada. Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently visited a Ranger unit and was photographed firing one of the Lee Enfield rifles.
Soon after the trip, a memo was released stating the urgency required to replace the rifles.
"While Rangers are given rifles in pristine condition (i.e. new from the box from special storage), Canada's stock is diminishing and a replacement needs to be identified within the next four to five years," according to a memo written by Harper and obtained by the Canadian Press.
It's unclear what type of rifle Colt Canada will design for the Rangers, however it better be able to operate within extreme arctic temperatures. The Canadians stuck with the .303 Lee Enfield for so long because it operated so well in the cold.
Colt Canada will provide the Canadian military 125 different designs to test next summer at the Operation Nanook training exercise. The 6,5000 rifles will then be delivered between 2015 and 2019.


Published Feb. 4, 2019 at 5:13 a.m.
George Mosher passed away last week. His funeral is today. The Milwaukee investor and businessman was 79.
I had the opportunity to meet Mosher a few times, and he was always captivating and inspirational – not to mention supportive of our ideas and energy at OnMilwaukee as well as an early supporter of YPM/Fuel Milwaukee and many of the start-up and recruitment and retention efforts for the region.
According to his bio and obituary, he moved to Milwaukee from the Boston area in 1965. "Joining several business organizations, he became an enthusiastic member of the Milwaukee community. George and Julie founded National Business Furniture together in 1975 and ran a successful business for over 30 years. He became an active angel investor and philanthropist, and enjoyed offering his time and talent to mentoring the next generation of budding entrepreneurs. George will be deeply missed, but his legacy will live on. He passed away peacefully after a struggle with pancreatic cancer."
In this 2016 interview with Todd McLees, Mosher leaves behind amazing advice for us all. Kudos to McLees on this great interview – and please take an hour today to honor Mosher by watching this. Pass it along to others, too.
This is a Milwaukee life that was full of meaning. Thanks, George. Milwaukee's better because of you.


Tallinn City Council on Thursday formally elected acting mayor Taavi Aas (Center) mayor of Tallinn.
The only candidate for the position, Aas received 40 votes in his favor; 33 had voted against him.
"Our city has changed and will continue to change," Aas said according to a city government press release, adding that when he first began work in the city government, Freedom Square was still a parking lot, the beginning of Tallinn-Tartu Highway had uneven sidewalks and boards with barbed wire, and Tallinn Creative Hub was just an abandoned power plant.
With 40 votes, Tallinn City Council also confirmed Züleyxa Izmailova, Aivar Riisalu, Vadim Belobrovtsev, Tõnis Mölder, Andrei Novikov, Eha Võrk and Kalle Klandorf deputy mayors of Tallinn.
Also elected on Thursday were the the chairmen and deputy chairmen of the city council committees, and the council confirmed the salary of the city council chairman as well as the benefits of the council's deputy chairmen.
Tallinn City Council chairman Mihhail Kõlvart will receive a salary of €5,288 per month, while deputy chairmen Toivo Tootsen and Mart Luik, who were elected at the city council's previous session, will receive a salary of €2,000 per month.


Oona Tempest, 24, lost her birth father — a fisherman by trade — when she was one year old. She met the sushi chef she calls her “adopted father” almost twenty years later, working as a substitute waitress at his Upper East Side restaurant in 2013.
Oguma could be a strict teacher at times, but Tempest — a Massachusetts native who moved to New York to study art but today serves chef-curated omakase meals under the name Sushi by Bae — admired his passion and principles: “His philosophy was just focus on sushi, just focus on your work. That was really beautiful to me as an artist,” she said.
Tempest’s gender and Jewish heritage made her an unlikely apprentice. Still, Oguma instructed her in not only the art of making sushi, but more practical matters: how to save money, by conserving plastic wrap for example, and how to stand up to suppliers selling fish beneath her standards.
Named one of Zagat’s “30 under 30 rock stars” redefining the restaurant industry in New York City in 2016, Tempest struck out on her own, working for a brief time at the now two Michelin-starred Sushi Ginza Onodera. Earlier this year, she partnered up with friend and fellow sushi chef David Bouhadana to offer at his Gansevoort Market sushi counter her own 90-minute, four-seat $100 omakase experience. She’s brought that Sushi by Bae concept to Bouhadana’s new Sushi by Bou spot at the Jue Lan Club, a posh Chinese eatery in the Flatiron District.
1. She moved to New York to study art at the School of Visual Arts, where her thesis involved sushi.
2. She considers herself an artist whose medium is food, rather than a chef.
In addition to shaping rice, she added, “There are artful ways to score the fish that make it fold more aesthetically over the rice than [other ways].” Tempest pays close attention to the way her sushi looks when it’s served, so she’s developed her own techniques for cutting fish to present it from its best angle.
3. As Tempest sees it, there’s a lot more to sushi than cutting and molding fish.
4. She specializes in edomae-style sushi, which involves a lot of curing.
Literally, “edomae” translates into “in front of Tokyo”; figuratively, it refers to fish from the city’s bay and abstractly, “It’s one of those things that sushi chefs philosophize over, like what is the meaning of art,” Tempest said.
Illness ultimately cut short her training under the “remarkable chef” Masaki Saito, she said.
6. She hit it off with fellow sushi chef David Bouhadana (the “Bou” to her “Bae”) because they both felt like “outsiders” among their colleagues and friends.
7. She wears black when she’s working, instead of the traditional white sushi chef uniform.
“This is just what fits me,” she said of her sartorial choices behind the counter. A uniform designed for a man’s shoulder-to-waist ratio and someone much taller than five-foot-two would impede her work, she added.
You can reserve a meal with Tempest at the Jue Lan Club (49 W. 20th St.) by texting 347-495-4221.


The suburb suffered its worst day of violence since the UN Security Council demanded a 30-day ceasefire.
The first aid delivery in weeks to reach the besieged eastern suburbs of Damascus was cut short after Syrian government forces began shelling while aid workers were still in the area, a local council said.
Aid trucks had to leave before they could finish unloading supplies on Monday, as the eastern Ghouta suburbs suffered their worst day of violence since the UN Security Council demanded a 30-day ceasefire.
The government, supported by Russia’s military, is pushing its assault on the rebel-held suburbs where the UN estimates almost 400,000 people are trapped under unmanageable levels of violence.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 80 civilians were killed on Monday.
The Security Council resolution, passed unanimously on February 25, has gone unheeded.
Monday’s aid shipment was the first to enter eastern Ghouta amid weeks of a crippling siege and a government assault that has killed close to 800 civilians since February 18.
Aid agencies said Syrian authorities removed basic health supplies, including trauma, surgical kits and insulin, from the convoys before they set off.
The International Committee for the Red Cross also confirmed that its joint convoy with the UN had to leave before offloading all its supplies because of the deteriorating security situation.
It’s with a heavy heart that our team leave #EasternGhouta.
The people we’ve met here have been through unimaginable things. They looked exhausted. And the aid we've delivered today is by no means enough.
Ingy Sedky, the ICRC spokeswoman in Syria, said most of the aid from a 46-truck convoy was delivered to the town of Douma in eastern Ghouta but the mission was cut short before the rest of the supplies could be unloaded.
Iyad Abdelaziz, a member of the Douma Local Council, said nine aid trucks had to leave the area after government shelling and air strikes intensified in the evening.
Air strikes continued on Tuesday. The opposition’s Syrian Civil Defence search-and-rescue group reported at least nine people killed in the town of Jisreen, eastern Ghouta.
The group, also known as the White Helmets, added that two of its volunteers and 28 others suffered difficulties breathing following shelling on the town of Hammouriyeh on Monday evening. It accused the government of using “poison gas”.
The Observatory reported 18 people suffered breathing difficulties, without attributing a cause.
It was the eighth allegation of chlorine gas use reported by the Syrian American Medical Society this year. The reports could not be independently confirmed, and Russia used its Security Council veto to freeze the work of a UN body investigating such reports earlier this year.
The allegations could provoke a response from Washington, which says it could take military action against the Syrian government for continued chemical weapons use against its own people.
The Syrian government, through the Sana state news agency, denied using chemical weapons in its eastern Ghouta offensive.
Russia’s Defence Ministry said it was extending an offer to allow armed rebels to leave eastern Ghouta with their families and weapons.
Moscow has been a staunch ally of Syrian President Bashar Assad, helping him turn the tide of the bloody civil war in his favour.


A newly created Miami corporation paid $223 per square foot - a 44 percent discount off of the average closed sales price in the project - for 34 units in the 3030 Aventura condominium in Northeast Miami-Dade County, according to a new report from Condo Vultures® LLC.
The units acquired in bulk represent 76 percent of the 45-unit project built in 2007 at 3030 NE 188th St. with seven stories and 89,000 square feet of saleable space fronting a canal in the city of Aventura.
The buyer paid nearly $15.4 million for nearly 69,000 square feet of saleable space, which works out to an average of $452,300 per unit. Prior to the bulk deal, individual buyers acquired 11 units at an average price of $733,400 per unit, or $400 per square foot, according to the Condo Vultures® report based on Miami-Dade County records.
"Aventura is a mature market with a strong demand from primary users, second-home buyers, and investors," said Peter Zalewski, a principal with the Bal Harbour, Fla.-based real estate consultancy Condo Vultures®. "That being said, individual buyers - many with strong foreign currencies - are acquiring units at a pace of 10 condos per day in Greater Downtown Miami on a retail basis for $200 per square foot.
"Given the size of the units at 3030 Aventura , we would expect the new owners to retrade rather than rent the units."
In Greater Downtown Miami, there have been nine bulk transactions for 483 units and more than 538,000 square feet that have closed for nearly $96 million. This price works out to an average of $178 per square foot, according to the Condo Vultures® Bulk Division.
Overall, the 3030 Aventura project is the 16th bulk deal for a new condo construction product to close since July 2008. Bulk buyers have paid an average of $201 per square foot for 1.1 million square feet of saleable space located in 936 units. The average price per unit is $237,700, according to the Condo Vultures® Bulk Deals Database™.
"At least five more bulk deals are in the works with buyers working aggressively to close by the end of the year," Zalewski said. "The last 60 days are shaping up to be eventful."


This is a gallery of some of our favorite images from the web site and from our publications. The arrows at the bottom will lead you through the gallery. Clicking on an image will take you to another part of our site that deals with it in more detail.
This compares the quantum-mechanical picture of a Rydberg radial wave packet with a collection (an "ensemble") of classical electrons orbiting around a nucleus (much like planets orbiting around the sun).


A view of the southern top of the dry lakebed at Lakeview and Mariposa avenues where an equestrian center is being proposed.
Riders tour the upper rim trail of the dry lakebed where an equestrian center is proposed.
YORBA LINDA – For more than two decades the equestrians of Yorba Linda have been patient, and anchored themselves as the protected species of the city’s historical heritage.
Yorba Linda’s equestrian community is unique in that most horses are backyard horses. The equine population resides from the west to the east, with nearly every breed of equine represented. The heaviest horse population is west of Fairmont Boulevard where spacious horse properties house the tradition of the old-time West.
An act of protecting our semi-rural neighborhoods that brings the charm to our city is hovering over the General Plan, and the cowboys and cowgirls are the vigilant sentries of the equestrian heritage.
As Yorba Linda began to develop on the east side, a major developer offered to include an equestrian center, which did not materialize. This developer however contributed $200,000 for a future center. Over the years, the gift funds grew to nearly $500,000, and before the assets were reallocated, the equestrians rode their horses to City Hall, with some of the miniature horses making their whinnies heard at the Council Chamber’s podium.
Their peaceful demonstration gave notice to the City Council, which selected an equestrian committee made up of representatives from various equestrian groups to look into the operations and needs of developing a world-class equestrian center, and to select areas where the equestrian center could be located.
Sue Leto, director of Parks and Recreation, led the appointed Equestrian Committee in several meetings as the group elected to designate the equestrian park as a first-class facility that would compliment the Community Center and the Tommy Lasorda Jr. Field House. The equestrian committee envisioned a resource that would be desirable for weddings, banquets and community gatherings, as well as a boarding, training and learning facility, a Class A show facility and a therapeutic riding center.
Several sites were walked by the committee. After several meetings, the committee elected the upper south side of the dry lakebed of the Yorba Linda Reservoir, preserving the lakebed as a natural habitat of wildlife and hiking and riding trails.
On Oct. 21, 2008, the council voted to send out a request for proposals for a feasibility study on an equestrian park at the dry lakebed. This vote drew one neigh from Jan Horton, who desired more study time. On June 16, the majority of the council – John Anderson, Nancy Rikel and Mark Schwing – voted to award the contract for the feasibility study to ERA/AECOM, an international consulting firm that will provide a comprehensive applied economic analysis and research and planning plan.
The white hats rose to the occasion and at 11:30 p.m. on June 16, the equestrians found the beginning of their dream. The contracted amount of $93,550 comes from the in-lieu of park funds paid by the developer and is not paid for by the tax payers.
This feasibility study will expose the need to bring a boarding facility back to Yorba Linda. Many equestrians board their horses in Chino, Norco, San Juan Capistrano and even Temecula. More than 160 horses were displaced when two of the largest boarding facilities sold out to large developments.
The proposed equestrian center, as planned by the Equestrian Committee and presented by Sue Leto, would be a community center beneficial to all citizens of Yorba Linda. A Stetson Salute to Yorba Linda folks who have put their heart into protecting our heritage, and happy trails – all 103 miles!


Geologists say the earthquake was recorded at 8:59 a.m. Saturday about 16 miles east of Cherokee, about 100 miles northwest of Oklahoma City. The earthquake was recorded at a depth of five miles.
News outlets in Wichita, Kansas, which is about 75 miles northeast of the earthquake's epicenter, reported feeling the quake. Some residents more than 100 miles north of Wichita in Manhattan, Kansas, also reported feeling tremors. No injuries or damage was reported.
Thousands of earthquakes recorded in Oklahoma in recent years have been linked to the underground injection of wastewater from oil and natural gas production. Regulators have directed producers to close some wells.


Sönke Neitzel is Chair of International History at the London School of Economics. He has previously taught modern history at the Universities of Glasgow, Saarbrücken, Bern, and Mainz. He is the co-author of Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying.


With horse-racing going on in all regions across the world, record- keeping can be a hit-andmiss at times.
It is therefore with some trepidation that one may say that such-and-such has achieved a "world-record", while out there in cyber-world, there is someone ready to shoot you down in flames.
What we can safely say is that Joao Moreira's feat of riding eight winners - from as many rides - at the Singapore Racecourse on last is a performance that will go down in the books of modern racing history.
The Australian-based company Racing And Sports - www.racingandsports.com.au - is recognised as one of the racing world's best websites covering racing and sports globally.
The Racing And Sports horse-racing database began with Australia and New Zealand in 1992, extended to Ireland and the United Kingdom in 2000, Singapore and Hong Kong in 2002, South Africa in 2005, with France coming on board last year although the history of races covered extends further back.
A search of winning jockeys over the years covered conclusively points to Moreira's winning streak from last Friday night's meeting as being the best performance of a jockey searched out of the Racing And Sports database.
What cannot be categorically established, however, are the US and South American records.


Tom Cruise loves women. We know this because over the last year and a half he's aggressively affirmed it in both the general sense ("They smell good. They look pretty. I love women. I do.") and the specific ("I'm in love! I'm in love! I can't be cool! I can't be laid back!"). We know it because when he made the latter comments, about new squeeze Katie Holmes, he emphasized his sincerity by treating Oprah's studio furniture like a ten-year-old's bed at a sleepover party. And we know it because he made Mission: Impossible III.
Just released on video, this third entry in Cruise's signature action franchise is comprehensible primarily as a two-hour testimonial to the many ways in which its star loves women. The plot, essentially, is that an evil arms dealer named Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman) takes captive a female secret agent (Keri Russell) whom Cruise's character, Ethan Hunt, had trained and loves "like a little sister." Ethan first conducts a rescue operation, and subsequently takes revenge on Davian by taking him captive. Davian escapes, however, and continues the cycle of escalating abductions by kidnapping Ethan's wife, Julia (Michelle Monaghan), necessitating yet another rescue.
In between hostage-takings, we're treated to a series of scenes emphasizing Ethan's marriageability. Early on, there's the party where Ethan and Julia announce their engagement. (After Ethan elicits yawns by droning on about his cover vocation as a traffic analyst for the Virginia Department of Transportation, two female guests nonetheless gush over his exceptional eligibility: "I'd marry him." "I would, too.") We later watch Ethan impulsively marry Julia, a nurse, at her hospital, with plastic novelty rings serving as wedding bands and a convenient supply closet briefly substituting for a honeymoon suite. The movie ends with Julia--who's just learned that Ethan does not, in fact, study traffic for a living--meeting Ethan's fellow agents on the Impossible Missions Force (IMF), and his suggesting he may quit the biz for the quieter compensations of nuptial bliss. The last shot is of Ethan and Julia walking away, hand in hand, as his IMF colleagues burst into fervent, inexplicable applause, with Ving Rhames, in particular, raising the roof as if he'd just scored the winning touchdown in the Super Bowl.
There is a plot thread involving more typical spy-movie fodder--national security, the arms trade, the possible end of the world--but Mi:III treats it with an indifference bordering on contempt. The villain, Davian, is trying to sell something called the "rabbit's foot" to some unsavory figures. I write "something" because the movie takes ostentatious delight in never telling us what the rabbit's foot is. A scientist theorizes that it might be the "anti-God," a substance or device so dangerous it could end all life on Earth, before confessing, "No, I don't have any idea what it is. I was just speculating." By the end, it seems clear that it is some kind of biohazardous material (it is, after all, kept in a container conspicuously marked "biohazard"), but the film still taunts us puckishly: When Ethan asks his superior (Lawrence Fishburne) what the rabbit's foot is, he responds, "Promise me you'll stay, I'll tell you." He doesn't. This is a MacGuffin eager to advertise its MacGuffinhood.
Thanks to the resolute vagueness of the international crisis in question, Mi:III has no real animating idea, at least apart from the lengths to which Ethan will go for his women. To a degree unseen since the cinematic arts lost Andy Warhol, this is a movie that isn't about anything, a handful of stunt set pieces tied together with a scarcely rudimentary stab at narrative. You could shuffle the deck, re-deal them out in another order, and the movie would hardly suffer at all. (It might actually benefit.) Even the best sequence in the movie suffers from a casual nonsensicality. Ethan has to infiltrate a party at the Vatican in order to nab Davian as he sells the rabbit's foot. In order to catch the unknown buyers, too, he decides not only to capture Davian but then to impersonate him, with the help of one of those voice-chip-enhanced rubber masks the series has gotten such mileage out of. The conceit leads to some enjoyable moments watching Ethan pretend to be Davian (which is really Hoffman pretending to be Cruise), but it's forgotten almost as soon as it's deployed. Ethan's IMF team doesn't see the buyers, and expends no effort looking for them: They were merely a fleeting rationale for his high-tech dress-up. More befuddling still, the briefcase which Davian picked up at the party contains not money but information about the heavily guarded location of the rabbit's foot, which Davian, contrary to earlier assertions, does not have. How exactly it can be that Davian is selling something he doesn't possess is a level of coherence the movie can't be bothered with. Whatever, dude: These are just bad guys, okay?
A subsequent scene in which Ethan attempts to steal the rabbit's foot from the Shanghai office building where it's kept is more haphazard still. Prior to the theft we're offered a meticulous cataloguing of the guards and security measures certain to be encountered. "From a thief's point of view, this is a worst case scenario," explains one member of Ethan's team. "Langley was a cakewalk compared to this," adds another, referring to the signature heist of the first Mission Impossible film. Ethan's entry into the building is dramatic enough, a Tarzanlike swing from the roof of an adjacent skyscraper. And then--nothing. Rather than accompany Ethan on his daring burglary, we wait outside the building with the rest of the IMF crew for a few minutes' worth of errant dialogue, until Ethan comes crashing out a window, rabbit's foot in hand. This particular mission may not have proven impossible, but it was invisible; all we got was prelude and postscript. It's as if someone decided to tell the Lord of the Rings story from the perspective of a few hobbits who stayed behind in the Shire the whole time.
Hoffman is compelling as the villain Davian, even if the contours of his villainy are somewhat obscure. Rather than ham the role up in typical evil-mastermind style, Hoffman trims it down to its simple, vicious essence. When he threatens Ethan--"You have a wife? Girlfriend? 'Cause ... I'm gonna find her and I'm gonna hurt her"--it's chillingly devoid of theatricality, as if he were berating a telephone operator for a dropped call. At another moment he manages the opposite effect, imbuing the most casual gesture--lifting a cocktail from a server's tray--with palpable malice. Though his screen time is sorely limited, it lingers, Harry Lime-like, over the proceedings. The rest of the supporting cast fares less well. With the exception of Fishburne, who has several of the movie's better lines (after describing Davian to subordinates as a "goddamned invisible man," he cautions, "Wells, not Ellison, in case you want to be cute"), the other performers aren't much more than mirrors held up to Cruise's Ethan to help capture his perfection--ideal husband, loyal "big brother," trusted friend, daring superspy.
This is of course typical of star-driven moviemaking (especially, as in this case, when the star is also the producer), but there are moments in Mi:III when the implicit vanity of the endeavor borders on creepy. There is, again, the film's aggressive subtext (Tom Cruise loves women!), which dovetails so neatly with the star's p.r. offensive over the past year-plus. But that's hardly the only way in which his on- and off-screen personas have begun to merge. Cruise has never been a terribly natural performer--at least not in roles that ask more of him than The Grin--but his effort has always been above reproach. Whether juking in his skivvies in Risky Business or having the world's most entertainingly spastic nervous breakdown in Jerry Maguire or weeping/praying/raging at his father's bedside in Magnolia, Cruise has never been afraid of overdoing it. (Some of his scenes with Hoffman in Mi:III faintly resemble Magnolia, with Cruise giving it all he's got while Hoffman watches on, in relative quiet, relying on a more subtle toolbox of actorly effects.) Even when Cruise has overshot the mark, his obvious commitment has generally given him a certain power. When he's angry--as, for example, when Davian threatens Julia's life--his eyes bore holes. When he pitches woo, it's as if he's memorized tomes of technique. When he runs, he may not run faster than other actors, but he certainly runs harder: Every sinew threatens to burst from his body; his jaw muscles alone do more work than most people's legs.
But after the Oprah Incident (and the Lauer Lecture and any number of other recent off-screen episodes), Cruise's fierce will to persuade seems a bit less appealing. For years, his cinematic technique has contained a certain amount of Jumping On Oprah's Sofa. But once we've witnessed it in "real" life--the ridiculous overstatement, the furious need for us to accept his version of the truth--whatever credibility it once held onscreen begins to ebb. Watching his performance in, say, Magnolia today, it seems not merely overdone but false, his pantomimed rage and despair the flip side of his announced bliss on Oprah. Certain major stars reach a moment when their own persona begins consuming every role they play. (Yeah, I'm talking about you, Nicholson.) Cruise's public scenes over the last 18 months have hastened that moment, and have made the persona he can't escape a considerably less likeable one. Good news then, that as of last week he and longtime production partner Paula Wagner are taking over the United Artists label for MGM. Vain, willful, stubborn, driven, unable to brook dissent--if that doesn't sound to you like a studio boss, I don't know what would.


SHANGHAI/HONG KONG (Reuters) - Investors gearing up for the initial public offering of Ant Financial, the $60 billion online finance arm spun off by e-commerce giant Alibaba (BABA.N), will have to wait until at least late 2017 as the business puts growth first, sources say.
Sources with knowledge of the plans said Ant Financial, whose anchor business is Alipay, China’s largest online payments service, is focusing on expanding its existing 450 million-strong army of daily users, adding merchants and customers.
One of the sources said that, as of last month, Ant had yet to contact Chinese regulators to start the lengthy listing process and join a queue of more than 700 companies waiting to list.
An Ant spokeswoman said the group had not set a timetable or location for its listing, and the China Securities Regulatory Commission did not comment.
In addition to online payments, Ant Financial also offers services from wealth management to credit scoring, micro lending and insurance.
Alibaba Group set up Alipay in 2004 in the PayPal (PYPL.O) mould, to help Chinese buyers shop online, and later spun it off ahead of its own listing in 2014.
At its last fundraising round in April, Ant’s valuation topped $60 billion - just short of the market value of Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs (GS.N). Its listing has been among the most keenly awaited of recent years.
It reshuffled top management at the weekend, which Alibaba founder and Chairman Jack Ma said on Tuesday in Bangkok signaled a listing was in prospect at some point.
“We will be looking at an IPO in the next few years; we are not yet sure where we will list or when exactly,” Ma said.
The sources, however, said Ant intends to list both in mainland China and Hong Kong.
The two applications could be simultaneous, though a shorter waiting time could also mean that Hong Kong-listed H shares could come to market first, the sources said.
“Unicorn” start-ups - those worth more than $1 billion - are often short on cash, but not Ant Financial. It raised $4.5 billion in a record funding round in April, backed by China’s sovereign wealth fund China Investment Corp and a subsidiary of China Construction Bank (0939.HK).
It also turns a significant profit.
New York-listed Alibaba does not have a direct stake in Ant, due to Beijing’s restrictions on foreign companies owning Chinese financial institutions, but it has a 37.5 percent profit-sharing agreement. According to Alibaba filings, Ant paid it $56 million in royalty and software technology service fees in the June quarter.
For growth, Ant is concentrating on expanding a user base that already outnumbers the population of Western Europe, growing in China and abroad, where it has focused on partnerships and also wants to capture spending by Chinese tourists when they travel.
In 2015, Chinese tourists spent $215 billion overseas, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council.
Earlier this year, Ant hired Goldman Sachs executive Douglas Feagin to lead the push abroad.
None of the sources elaborated on how long the growth plan to boost customer and merchant numbers could take, the possible impact on profits, or whether there were specific targets to hit before the group considers itself ready to list.
“This is for long-term growth but will impact short-term financial results,” one of the sources said of the growth push.
The sources said Ant’s management wants to ensure an IPO is followed by growth for its shareholders - new and old.
Current shareholders include large state-owned institutions: China Life Insurance (601628.SS) (2628.HK), China Post Group - parent of Postal Savings Bank of China - and a unit of China Development Bank.
“There is no firm plan for next year ... But the company has lots of cash, and (raising funds) won’t be the only factor driving the IPO,” said one of the sources.
Some analysts have questioned the sustainability of the group’s growth, particularly for its Yu’e Bao money market fund, which will have to maintain attractive rates even as the economy slows.
In new markets like India, Ant’s partner, payment group PayTM, is also grappling with fickle consumers, while making inroads in a giant and largely untapped market.
A key complication for Ant’s listing is former parent, Alibaba.
Alibaba’s current profit-sharing agreement stipulates it could take up to 33 percent of equity in a listing - but that could hit regulatory hurdles designed to keep financial institutions domestically owned.
Alibaba, registered in the Cayman Islands and listed in New York, is considered foreign.
The sources said discussions to address that issue had begun with regulators.
But for now, it’s growing so fast that its headquarters in Hangzhou, southwest of Shanghai, is bursting at the seams, with rows of employees tightly packed under banners with kung fu sayings beloved of founder Ma.
A new headquarters is due in early 2017.


Dec. 5 (UPI) -- Terry Crews, Danai Gurira, Leslie Mann and Christian Slater are set to announce the nominees for the 76th annual Golden Globe Awards on Thursday.
The group will be presenting the nominees during a press conference at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills at 5 a.m. PT.
Crews, Gurira, Mann and Slater will be announcing the nominees in all 25 Golden Globe categories which spans film and television.
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association -- which organizes the Golden Globes -- also teased that a major announcement concerning the ceremony will be made at the press conference.
The Golden Globes are set to be aired live on Jan. 6 at 8 p.m. ET on NBC.
The network announced in September that the Golden Globes will remain on NBC for the next eight years.


The paper first explains the basics of the Cyber Attack Lifecycle and the need to address it through the Threat Lifecycle Management framework. Next, the paper explains the basics of SOCs, providing details of what SOCs mean in terms of people, processes, and technology. Finally, the paper walks you through a methodology for building a SOC with limited resources, focusing on tactics to make your rollout smooth and successful.


The cost of bringing up a child has rocketed to £180,000, it is claimed today.
Research from financial services provider Liverpool Victoria, found that in the last year alone the cost of raising offspring from birth to the age of 21 rose by 9%. It has soared 28% in the past four years.
The new estimated cost to parents is £180,137, equivalent to £23.50 a day.
Childcare and education are the biggest expenditures, costing parents £49,092 and £46,778. The cost of schooling and putting a child through university has increased by 26% since last year, the report notes.
This has helped push the price of raising a child up at a rate outstripping inflation by almost four times.
The driving force behind rising education costs has been university. From the start of this academic year, undergraduates at English universities face paying £3,000 per course in tuition fees, up from £1,175.
The number of people in higher education had been steadily climbing but has eased more recently, with would-be students pointing the finger at rising costs.
The £180,000 figure rises to at least £250,000 for parents who choose to send their children through private education. Today’s study suggests parents of public school children can expect to spend an extra £71,000, if their child is a day pupil, or £130,500 more for boarding.
More parents are choosing to educate their children privately, with 615,000 pupils in independent schools compared to 507,000 in 2003. Costs have also been rising, with the most expensive schools now charging more than £20,000 a year. Read more.
Less well-off families are also striving harder to seek an alternative to state schools – a survey earlier this year found a quarter of privately educated children are from households with below average earnings.
The high price of starting a family has led to a cultural shift away from households having one working parent.
A survey found that in almost two-thirds of UK families, both parents have to work to cover the cost of bringing up a child. Almost half of all parents admitted to being concerned about the amount of time they spent away from their children.
In addition, 12% of working parents have to rely on grandparents or other family members for regular financial support to meet the costs of bringing up a child.
More than two-thirds of parents have had to put savings and financial planning on hold to pay for a child’s upbringing, while six out of 10 have had to change, cancel or postpone holidays or social plans, the research finds.
Nigel Snell, communications director at Liverpool Victoria, said: ‘With the costs of raising a child in the UK having increased 9% over the past 12 months alone, parents need to be more switched on about their family finances than ever before.
Step 2 –Learn how to control your spending. Read 50 ways to save money and then get more ideas about boosting your wealth here.
Step 5 –If your flush and flash then think about taking out a stakeholder pension for your child. It’s another tax break worth exploiting (although you may be gone when your child feels the benefit of your foresight). Read more.


As May Day approaches, migrants and refugees in the U.S. and around the world remain in a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions. President Donald Trump’s continued move to the right is exacerbating this situation.
In the U.S., raids at courthouses and workplaces have increased. The National Guard has been sent to the southern border to further militarize the area. The U.S attorney general has strengthened repressive legal measures to terrorize immigrant workers and divide the working class.
Now more than ever, the struggles for migrant and refugee rights must be linked to the struggle against state police terror and to win workers’ rights.
It is easy to turn away from the spectacle that is the Trump administration or to laugh Trump off as no more than a no-talent, orange clown in a cheap circus. But Trump is extremely dangerous. In league with an ultraright faction, he has made his administration into a militaristic, white supremacist regime.
This has disastrous consequences for the workers and oppressed everywhere. This must be fought tooth and nail.
He called for new laws to make it even harder for immigrants to obtain refugee status. He acquired a whopping $1.6 billion from a willing Congress to build his racist wall on the Mexican border — and demanded more. He asked right-wing governors to send their National Guard troops to the border. He also declared he would assign U.S. military troops to patrol there, though that action requires congressional approval by law.
To fan the flames against immigrants, Trump again stated that immigration policies “have weakened the country” and “led to public safety risks.” (Washington Post, April 3) But that racist rhetoric is really a smokescreen to confuse white workers about where the real assault on their wages, health and education is coming from.
For instance, the total estimated cost for Trump’s white-supremacist wall would be about $25 billion — money that could and should be earmarked instead for health care, teachers’ salaries, and other needs of working and oppressed people.
The truth is that migration into the U.S. is at some of the lowest levels in years. The anti-immigrant climate that has grown since 2006 means fewer and fewer Mexican workers are coming into the U.S. while more are leaving to go back home.
In early April, Trump verbally targeted a caravan of migrants who were travelling from Central America through Mexico, aiming to reach the Tijuana border. Covered on Fox News with fear mongering rhetoric, the caravan was portrayed as a horde of dangerous criminals “snaking” and sneaking their way into the U.S.
Many such righteous caravans have made their way through Mexico for decades, as migrant rights advocates built support for the millions of displaced workers in the region. Every year, caravans travel throughout Mexico. They are not just for Central Americans but also for families in Mexico who have lost touch with their emigrating children or other relatives and are trying to find out what happened to them.
These families do not know if their loved ones made it into the U.S. or are in detention. Perhaps they lost their lives riding “La Bestia” (The Beast), the freight train that migrants jump on to make their way north, and where hundreds fall to their deaths or lose limbs in the attempt.
Trump specifically demonized a caravan organized by Pueblo Sin Fronteras (People Without Borders). Highlighting the concerns of Central Americans — many from Honduras, Guatemala or El Salvador — the caravan began with more than 1,000 people. The logistics of arranging transportation, food and accommodations on that scale shows the courage and determination of the movement for migrants in Mexico.
Why are so many caravaning north? Not to do ill, as racists rant, but because U.S. militarism and imperialism have destabilized their homelands, destroyed their homes and taken away their livelihood. For example, Honduras has become the scene of widespread instability and repression since the 2009 coup, when the progressive regime of President Mel Zelaya was overturned. That illegal coup had U.S. fingerprints all over it, particularly those of then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
For Trump and his ilk to deny the racism they aim at these migrants is calculated hypocrisy. To deny political asylum to the hundreds of refugees forced to flee their region is not only wrong — it is a death sentence.
U.S. imperialism has militarized the beleaguered countries of Mexico and Central America, and now Trump aims to further militarize the U.S. border. Not the northern border with Canada, of course, but the U.S. border with Mexico.
In the wake of Trump’s call for troops at the border, conservative governors from Arizona and Texas deployed their National Guard units (Newsweek, April 7), although still at numbers lower than called out under both Republican President George W. Bush and Democrat President Barack Obama. Arizona deployed 150 members and Texas promised 250. The total from all border states is predicted to reach 4,000 eventually.
California Gov. Jerry Brown announced April 11 that he would send troops to the border. This is alarming, as the migrant rights movement has been very strong in California. That a so-called liberal governor felt the pressure to go along with reactionary governors shows the Trump anti-immigrant hype is gaining momentum. Brown’s announcement is also an example of how the Democrats continue to sell out immigrants and their advocates.
Trump’s summoning of the soldiers is meant to send a chill through migrants and activists alike. This follows other policies to terrorize the migrant and refugee community. On April 5, Trump issued a directive that U.S. immigration enforcement agencies cease any “catch and release” practices. In this degradingly nicknamed procedure, undocumented immigrants who had been arrested at the border were released while their cases were processed.
Meanwhile, in what may be the biggest workplace raid under Trump’s assault, 97 people were taken into custody and processed for deportation or detention on April 7, following an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid at a Tennessee meat-processing plant.
Immigrants and refugees in the U.S. are living under a state of siege right now. Whether out shopping or going to religious services, whether in school, at court or at work, while driving or walking anywhere, migrants and their families are living in sheer terror. The risk of post-traumatic stress is real, especially among children of migrant families, with long-standing consequences.
Migrants are forced to leave their homelands and migrate into the U.S. because of intolerable conditions, resulting directly from U.S. imperialist militarism. Only by shutting down this country’s predatory, racist system once and for all will this war on migrants end.
May Day 2018 must once again be dedicated to the struggle of migrants and refugees — whether they come from Honduras or Haiti, Syria or Somalia.
There are no borders in the workers’ struggle!
Teresa Gutierrez is a longtime immigrant rights activist.
Photos: Massive nationwide rallies in September 2017 defended immigrants, here in Los Angeles and Houston.


Sunshine and clouds mixed. High 66F. Winds W at 5 to 10 mph..
When business closed at the Oregon Legislature Tuesday, a breakneck session became somewhat less hectic.
Roughly halfway through the 2019 Oregon legislative session, April 9 marked the last day most bills could either be moved out of committee or shelved for another year.
But while the list of fallen proposals included some notable bills — lowering the drunk driving limit and disarming campus police, among them — the real challenges lie ahead. Democrats still have a hefty to-do list: They want to raise $1 billion annually for schools, rejigger the state’s tax code, usher through ambitious gun legislation and pass a complicated proposal to cap carbon emissions.
If those seem like easy tasks — after all, the party holds supermajorities in both the House and Senate and controls the governor’s office — consider that legislative leaders also have to make sure Republicans are engaged and willing to work with them.
Talks between the two parties have been mostly amicable so far, but there’s no guarantee that will last as the session wends its way to a close. It’s clear Republican and Democratic leaders are already seeing things differently.
“There are very few bills where I think you have tension right now,” she said.
Halfway through, here’s where the Legislature’s biggest proposals stand.
Carbon emissions were always going to dominate this session, with legislative leaders signaling their intent early on to pass a complex cap-and-trade proposal this year. And as expected, the topic has been among the more controversial issues taken up in the Capitol so far.
Under the system lawmakers have proposed in House Bill 2020, large polluters around the state would be required to purchase credits for each ton of greenhouse gas they emit. The state would place a cap on overall emissions and decrease that cap over time, theoretically forcing industries to reduce their pollution.
Democratic leaders initially intended to hold hearings on the bill only in Salem, but Republicans successfully pressed for a series of “road show” hearings around the state. Those well-attended events revealed a great deal of fear and opposition to the proposal — particularly its expected impact on gasoline prices — but also a lot of support.
In response, leading lawmakers have introduced a wide array of amendments and a new program to help ease the burden of higher fuel prices on low-income households. Those changes, and many more, have been the subject of ongoing hearings. Lawmakers aren’t expected to take up HB 2020 for potential final passage until later in the session.
The session is expected to last until the end of June.
Other environment-related bills: Gov. Kate Brown has already signed Senate Bill 256, which is intended to ward off oil and gas exploration off the Oregon coast. The state has long had a moratorium on oil and gas activities in the water it controls. The bill made that moratorium permanent and ensured state-controlled areas won’t be used to assist drilling further out.
Lawmakers are also moving a series of bills meant to curb the use of wasteful products. The Senate on Thursday is expected to vote on Senate Bill 90, which would require that customers in most restaurants request a single-use plastic straw if they want one.
Bills preventing grocery stores from using plastic bags and food vendors from using polystyrene containers are also still alive.
The first bill signed into law this session made Oregon the first in the nation with statewide rent control.
The bill was a priority for Democrats and caps how much landlords can raise the rent and makes it harder for them to evict tenants without a reason. Gov. Kate Brown signed Senate Bill 608 in February, and it took effect immediately.
Lawmakers aren’t done, however, trying to address what they see as a growing statewide housing crisis.
Kotek is pushing a bill to require cities with populations of more than 25,000 people to change zoning laws to allow areas now zoned only for single-family homes to allow for multi-housing options, such as cottage clusters and townhouses. The measure, House Bill 2001, was recently approved unanimously by a House committee.
The Legislature is also considering a proposal to potentially generate $150 million for housing by narrowing the state’s largest housing subsidy: the deduction taxpayers can claim for mortgage interest payments. House Bill 3349 would eliminate that deduction for second homes and households with more than $250,000 in adjusted gross income.
The governor has encouraged lawmakers to approve $400 million investment to increase the state’s housing supply. She’s pushing for the money to address homelessness for children and veterans, in particular, and to expedite the growth of the state’s housing stock.
The most expensive governor’s race in the state’s history last year triggered renewed calls to rein in campaign spending this legislative session.
Oregon is one of only a handful of states with no limits on how much donors are allowed to give.
The Senate Campaign Finance Committee approved a measure to allow for a change in the state’s free-speech provision of the constitution for the May 2020 primary ballot.
Senate Joint Resolution 18 now goes to the Senate Rules Committee, chaired by Sen. Ginny Burdick, D-Portland, who said putting something in front of voters would allow for limits to be put on campaigns.
Lawmakers also continue to grapple with what the actual limits on spending would look like.
Lawmakers are limited in what they can do to curb independent expenditures, but they are hoping to add transparency requirements to ensure the public knows who is contributing to political action committees and political nonprofits.
Funding for Oregon’s Medicaid system, the Oregon Health Plan, has been a major focus this year, with lawmakers looking to bridge a $922 million funding gap in the next budget.
Headed into session, Brown proposed a three-pronged approach: taxes on hospitals and health insurers, higher tobacco taxes and a new tax on employers. Lawmakers passed the hospital and insurer taxes early on, via House Bill 2010. The other two pieces are less certain.
House Bill 2270, the governor’s tobacco tax bill, got a contentious hearing in the House Revenue Committee on Wednesday. The bill would hike cigarette taxes by $2 per pack, tax e-cigarettes and similar products for the first time and raise taxes on cigars. It’s not clear whether there’s support to pass a tax increase outright or whether it will be referred to voters.
Meanwhile, Republicans have accused Brown of hiding the ball on a proposed $120 million tax on employers who don’t spend enough on employee health care. Brown had telegraphed her intentions for months, but the tax was only introduced as an amendment to a placeholder bill, House Bill 2269, in late March.
A surprise this session has been a highly controversial bill to limit vaccine exemptions in Oregon.
House Bill 3063 would eliminate philosophical and religious reasons parents can currently use to justify opting out of vaccines for their kids. Those exemptions — and the region’s comparatively low rate of measles immunizations — have been blamed for an outbreak that impacted Oregon and Southwest Washington this year. But the effort to tighten vaccine requirements has prompted loud outcry from the group Oregonians For Medical Freedom. HB 3063 has passed one House committee and is currently sitting in the Legislature’s budget-writing committee.
Democrats are making progress toward weighty changes to some aspects of the justice system. Those include dramatic changes to Oregon’s public defense system, more lenient sentencing rules for juveniles and a radical reshaping of capital punishment.
Oregon currently contracts public defenders for low-income criminal defendants, but a recent report found that system is potentially unconstitutional. The state could face a lawsuit if it doesn’t make changes. Under House Bill 3145, Oregon would begin to transition to state-employed public defenders who would theoretically be subject to more oversight and have lower workloads. The bill is currently before the budget committee.
Lawmakers are also considering law changes aimed at easing sentencing rules for juvenile offenders. Senate Bill 1008 includes provisions that could see certain prisoners in the juvenile system released when they turn 25 rather than being turned over to the adult prison system. It could also ensure juveniles can’t be sentenced to life without parole.
Senate Bill 1013 contains what some consider the strongest attempt to curtail capital punishment in recent memory. The bill wouldn’t ask voters to eliminate the death penalty. Instead, it would narrow the types of acts punishable by death, limiting them to terrorist attacks (including mass shootings), murders of children below 14 and certain murders in prison. The bill has passed out of committee and is awaiting a Senate vote.
As if all that weren’t enough, the Legislature also is considering referring a ballot measure to voters that, if approved, would kill the state’s unique policy of allowing nonunanimous guilty verdicts by juries.
Like many state capitals across the country, Oregon’s statehouse has been rocked by a sexual harassment scandal.
In an effort to better protect lawmakers, lobbyists and interns, a newly formed committee is tasked with creating an equity office to handle both claims of harassment and training.
House Bill 3377 would create the Equity Office, a nonpartisan office charged with ensuring the Capitol is a safe work environment. The office would be staffed with two people, one to investigate harassment and discrimination claims and another to offer training.
The latest version of the measure also includes an offsite counseling service that would be able to offer advice to a person considering making a harassment complaint with the equity office.
Democrats have largely lined up behind an ambitious measure to strengthen the state’s gun laws.
Senate Bill 978, would give firearms dealers the option of raising the minimum purchase age to between 18 and 21 and require firearms to be securely stored when not in use. Some large retailers have tried raising their minimum age for purchasing certain weapons, but they’ve been sued.
The bill also places restrictions on the sale of unfinished and 3D-printed firearms — sometimes called “ghost guns.” Other rules in the bill would add hospital reporting requirements for patients injured by firearms and would allow colleges and universities to ban firearms on campus. The measure passed out of a Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.
House Bill 2013 is more focused and would add an enforcement mechanism to a law passed last year closing the so-called boyfriend loophole, which prevented intimate partners convicted of domestic abuse from owning a firearm even if they didn’t live with or have children with their partners.
Perhaps the biggest task lawmakers are faced with this session is to come up with more money for the state’s public school system.
Their goal? $1 billion in new money every year.
The Joint Committee on Student Success plans to enact a new tax on businesses to come up with money to fund early childhood education, student mental health and district initiatives to improve graduation rates and other priorities.
$400 million per two-year budget cycle on early childhood priorities including full funding for Early Childhood Special Education.
$600 million per biennium on “statewide investments” such as dropout prevention and support for students with disabilities.
$1 billion per biennium for a “school improvement” fund, described as “noncompetitive grants” toward specific goals, such as smaller class sizes, a longer school year and additional health professionals in schools.
Lawmakers are leaning on the idea of enacting a Commercial Activities Tax, likely tiered based on the size of businesses. They are holding their first public hearing on House Bill 2019 on Thursday.
These bills are notable but defy easy categorization.
No more time change: Oregonians might be done with Standard Time. On April 4, the Senate passed Senate Bill 320, which would abolish the twice-yearly time change and keep most of the state on Daylight Saving Time year round, excluding a portion of Malheur County. Oregon would need approval from Congress for the change to take hold.
National popular vote: Lawmakers also appear on the verge of voting to honor the national popular vote in presidential elections. For the first time in eight attempts, the state Senate voted on — and approved — a bill to join the National Popular Vote compact. If Senate Bill 870 is approved by the House and signed by Brown, as expected, Oregon would join 15 other jurisdictions agreeing to give their electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate gets the most votes nationwide. The compact takes effect once enough states join to reach the 270 electoral votes needed to win an election.
Rolling stops: House Bill 998 would allow cyclists around the state to treat stop signs and blinking red lights as yield signs. They’d still have to yield to vehicles with the right of way but would no longer be required to come to a complete stop. Similar bills have died at least twice since 2003, but the concept is growing in popularity around the country.
This article originally ran on opb.org.


FRANKLIN � The Franklin High School Class of 1972 and 1973 will donate $1,500 toward the creation of a scholarship in memory of Lexi and Sean Munroe.
The alumni raised the money from their 40th reunion, held last fall. The School Committee will formally accept the donation next month.
Assistant Superintendent Sally Winslow, a member of the class, said the one-time scholarship would go to a high school student who attended Davis Thayer Elementary School.
Lexi and Sean, 8 and 7, respectively, were students at the West Central Street school, known for its tight-knit community.
The children died last month in what authorities called a "tragic accident." A wooden chest they climbed into�while playing shut and locked, trapping them inside.
Their deaths sparked renewed warnings about the dangers of the Lane Company chests that were recalled in 1996.�The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission�warned of safety hazards stemming from a latch that locks automatically in chests manufactured between 1912 and 1987.
These chests are still being sold in second-hand stores and handed down in families.
"The classmates that had organized the reunion knew I was working in the district and asked me for suggestions about a scholarship," Winslow said. "We planned to meet in January to talk about it and then the tragedy happened with the kids. So it was a no-brainer."
A scholarship, Winslow said, "is the most meaningful way to commemorate students or staff who have passed.
"It means something to a high school student looking forward to college," she said.
Kathy Dolaher, who helped organize the reunion, said many of her classmates went through Davis Thayer. She was particularly affected by Lexi and Sean�s deaths, as a friend of the children�s grandparents.
"We found real meaning behind this scholarship," she said.
The class ended up raising $3,000 from the reunion, she said, with the other $1,500 being used for a scholarship in the name of Janet McHale, who organized the event, but died a short time before it was held.