"Battleground," a political comedy about a Senate primary campaign, will debut on the video-streaming service next month.
Hulu is beefing up its effort to be an Internet video destination to challenge Netflix with plans to produce its first scripted series next month.
The video-steaming service has ordered 13 episodes of "Battleground," a political comedy about a primary campaign for a Wisconsin Senate seat, that will debut on February 14, Hulu announced today. Hulu will follow that up with 10 new episodes of "A Day in the Life," a documentary series about famous people that returns in March, and a six-part travelogue from Richard Linklater, director of "Dazed and Confused, the company said in a statement.
All three shows will be available to users of Hulu's free service and Hulu Plus, its premium subscription service, the company said.
Hulu, which Hulu's recently announced that its revenue rose 60 percent last year, is also considering its options for raising more capital, Andy Forssell, chief content officer, told Bloomberg in an interview.
"We have a very healthy business," Forssell said. "When you have a healthy business, capital is not a problem. There are plenty of people who want to help."
The new programming follows the announcement earlier this month that Netflix would soon launch its first original series, a crime drama called "Lilyhammer" starring Steven Van Zandt as a mafia boss who moves to Norway as part of a witness protection program.
It's also a substantive sign that Hulu's owners--Walt Disney, News Corp., Comcast, and equity firm Providence Equity Partners--might be serious about keeping the online video service. Talk of Hulu possibly being acquired began last summer when Yahoo reportedly approached the company and offered to pay up to $2 billion to acquire Hulu. A host of other suitors, including Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Dish, all reportedly kicked the tires on the service before its owners decided to take it off the auction block in October.
Complicating things for Hulu was the fact that Hulu's owners haven't always been the most willing to share content on the Web. Fox Network announced last July that it would begin delaying Web access to many of its popular TV shows to give cable and satellite TV providers greater exclusivity with programming.


Frank Cordero speaks about the World Food Prize.
Members of the Occupy Iowa movement are turning their attention to the Iowa-based World Food Prize.
Occupy’s Frank Cordaro spoke at a statehouse news conference today about the group’s opposition to the annual Food Prize festivities held in Des Moines.
“The World Food Prize is a sham,” Cordaro said. This October, the $250,000 World Food Prize will be awarded to Daniel Hillel, a scientist from Israel who developed new ways to irrigate crops in some of the driest regions of the planet.
The Occupy group isn’t taking issue with all of the people who’ve been awarded the World Food Prize, but rather what Cordaro calls the “corporate ownership” of the prize.
“The very same corporate financial elites that run Wall Street are the same corporate financial elites that own the World Food Prize and control the world food supply system,” Cordaro said. He cited several companies that back the event including Monsanto, Pioneer Hi-Bred and Syngenta.
Occupy’s Deborah Vanko admitted the initiatives of the green revolution did initially increase agricultural production around the world.
The World Food Prize was created by Iowa’s greatest hero, Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Norman Borlaug, to recognize and inspire breakthrough achievements in feeding hungry people and alleviating human suffering around the world. Currently, there are approximately 1 billion chronically hungry and undernourished people around the globe. The annual World Food Prize international symposium is one of the world’s premier forums for bringing together stakeholders in the food and agriculture world, from scientists and researchers to business and government officials to farmers and grassroots advocates. They are all part of a complex food system, and, along with our Iowa Hunger Summit, our dialogue brings people together to consider and discuss new ideas, projects and solutions.


New animal studies at Henry Ford Hospital found that sildenafil, a drug commonly used to treat erectile dysfunction, may be effective in relieving painful and potentially life-threatening nerve damage in men with long-term diabetes.
The research targeted diabetic peripheral neuropathy, the most common complication of diabetes, affecting as many as 70 percent of patients.
The study was recently published online in PLOS ONE.
Lei Wang, M.D., the Henry Ford neuroscientist who led the research, said that although numerous drugs have been shown to be effective in earlier animal experiments, most have not provided benefits in clinical trials.
"Generally, young diabetic animals with an early stage of peripheral neuropathy are used to investigate various drug treatments," Dr. Wang explains. "But patients with diabetes who are enrolled in clinical trials often are older and have advanced peripheral neuropathy.
"Failure to develop and properly evaluate treatments in the laboratory that properly reflect the target clinical population with diabetic peripheral neuropathy may contribute to the failure of clinical trials."
To mimic clinical trials in which diabetes patients have advanced peripheral neuropathy, the Henry Ford researchers chose male mice with type II diabetes that were 36 weeks old, roughly equivalent to middle age in humans.
Earlier animal experiments from the Henry Ford group showed that sildenafil, commonly known by the brand name Viagra, improved blood supply to the sciatic nerve.
In addition, it was noted that diabetes patients who took Viagra for erectile dysfunction had fewer symptoms of peripheral neuropathy.
However, it was not known if this therapeutic effect held true for long-term peripheral neuropathy because the diabetic mice used in the previous experiments were relatively young - 16 weeks old.
So the Henry Ford researchers chose diabetic mice that were more than twice as old. In one group, 15 such mice were treated with an oral dose of sildenafil/Viagra every day for eight weeks. A control group of 15 age-matched diabetic mice were treated daily with the same amount of saline.
After a battery of nerve and function tests were performed on both the drug-treated and control groups, results "revealed that sildenafil markedly improved sensory function starting at six weeks after treatment compared with saline-treated diabetic mice," Dr. Wang says.
"These data indicate that sildenafil improves neurological function even in middle-aged mice with long-term diabetic peripheral neuropathy."
While stressing that the findings remain experimental, Dr. Wang says they provide new insights into the underlying mechanisms of long-term diabetic nerve damage and may lead to the development of a sildenafil treatment for long-term diabetic peripheral neuropathy.
Diabetic peripheral neuropathy is particularly insidious because, as it progresses and damages nerves in extremities and other parts of the body, many patients are unaware of it because pain sensors are numbed.
As a result, a cut or sore on the bottom of a foot, for instance, may not be noticed until an infection sets in and spreads, possibly leading to amputation or even death.
Because diabetic neuropathy results from chronically high blood sugar levels, diabetes patients are strongly encouraged to closely monitor those levels and control them through diet.
Over-the-counter and prescription drugs - including antidepressants and opiates - are available to treat neuropathy pain, but often have undesirable side effects.
Henry Ford Health System. "Study: Erectile dysfunction drug relieves nerve damage in diabetic mice ." Medical News Today. MediLexicon, Intl., 19 Mar. 2015. Web.


We’ve tested nearly every over-the-air (OTA) TV DVR out there, and while some of them came close, none of them really hit the target for us. The TabletTV system, however, makes a ton of sense. It may not have a massive built-in audience waiting to pounce on it, but once word gets out about how cool it is, we have a feeling it’s going to be extremely popular.
If you got lost in that wash of acronyms just now, an OTA TV DVR is a device that can tune in free, over-the-air, HD TV signals from all your local broadcast stations and record them, just like your cable or satellite DVR does. The best one we’ve tested so far is the TiVo Roamio OTA, which does a great job of pairing free local broadcast TV with Internet apps like Netflix and YouTube. But it must live at your home, sitting with your home entertainment components, connected to the Internet. The TabletTV system, on the other hand, suffers none of those limitations.
The TabletTV comprises two parts: a portable, battery-powered device called a TPod, and the Tablet TV Plus app, available for iPad now and Android tablets soon. The TPod doesn’t need to be connected to your Wi-Fi router to work, though you can certainly set it up to use it if you want; rather, the TPod itself acts as a Wi-Fi access point your tablet connects to. A built-in battery allows you several hours of operation while on the go before you must charge it up, making it ideal for use in an airport or any other place you may be stuck at while the big game is going on.
Once you connect your tablet to the TPod, you instruct it to search for stations available in you area. Using that information, the Tablet TV app will create an on-screen guide showing you which channels are available, and what shows are airing up to 6 days out. Once setup is complete, you can tune into any station you want and watch live TV right on your tablet. TabletTV also makes several Internet streaming apps available inline with your live TV, so you can quickly switch to HBO, Showtime, Netflix, Hulu, Sling TV, and Amazon Prime services, provided you have a subscription and an Internet connection available.
Watching isn’t relegated to just a tablet. TabletTV is also compatible with Apple TV via AirPlay, and it’s Chromecast friendly, meaning there’s a $35 solution for getting all your OTA TV and recordings to your big screen, and it won’t use up your tablet’s battery to do it! If a wired approach is needed, an HDMI adapter cable is always an option.
So far, we’ve really enjoyed using the TabletTV. Initially, we had a hard time imagining exactly when we might use it, and by extension, how much appeal the product might have. But, once we started using it and realized just how portable and easy to use it was, we found ourselves using it all the time. So far, we’ve used it at the office, in waiting rooms, at church (shhhh!) and while stuck in an Uber in traffic.
In case you’re wondering whether that tiny antenna and little box are any good at pulling in stations, let us assuage any concerns: we’ve found the TPod is about as powerful as most built-in TV tuners combined with standard antennas. Of course, if you have trouble pulling in stations in your home, there is no guarantee the TPod is going to do any better, but the fact that you can place it nearly anywhere in your house a power outlet is nearby increases the odds that you’ll be able to maximize its reception potential.
So far, we have few complaints. When streaming from the TPod to the TabletTV, we noticed some fast-action moments (usually during sports) caused a bit of blurring or pixelation. This isn’t something you notice when playing back DVR recordings that are stored on the tablet itself, but be prepared for a little bit of blurring if watched live via streaming. Also, we wish the battery in the TPod lasted a bit longer, though at the same time we’ll acknowledge that we’re glad the TPod is so small, lending to its portability. Currently, you can expect to get four or five hours of performance in battery mode, depending on whether a recording is being made. Really, that’s perfect for making sure you catch that football game.
At $90, the TabletTV is an incredibly fun device, and far more useful than we had anticipated. If you’re looking for a gift for the tech enthusiast that has everything, the TabletTV will certainly come as a pleasant surprise. And for anyone who has recently cut the cord to their cable or satellite provider, TabletTV makes the perfect fill-in for Netflix and Amazon Prime subscriptions. We’re loving TabletTV, and we think you will to.
You can purchase TabletTV at Amazon, and more options can be purchased at TabletTV’s website.


A Queensland Indigenous woman sacked two days after filing an official complaint about racism is taking a government-funded domestic violence organisation to the workplace watchdog.
Case manager Samantha Cooper had worked for the Centre Against Domestic Abuse in the Moreton Bay region, north of Brisbane, since March, running a pilot program aimed at helping Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families.
After six months of alleged racial discrimination, and several stated attempts to deal with the issues more informally, she filed an official complaint on November 27 outlining a long list of alleged incidents.
The 25-year-old had been described as going “walkabout”, told she was “quite pretty for an Aboriginal” and asked if she had ever met a “real” Aboriginal person, she claimed.
Two days later she was fired, effective immediately, leaving her “gutted” and worried about what would happen to the 12 families she said she was working with.
Samantha Cooper was fired from the Centre for Domestic Abuse two days after filing a Grievance Report Form alleging discrimination.
“I’m really concerned that that was the reaction to raising a formal complaint,” the third-year law student said.
A little less than a month earlier, on November 2, a letter from the organisation’s manager, seen by Fairfax Media, confirmed Ms Cooper had been employed on a “fix term” contract until September 2018.
In Ms Cooper's termination letter, CADA blamed the state government reallocating funding.
“Whilst negotiations were ongoing with the funding body, we extended your contract,” CADA wrote.
A Department of Child Safety, Youth and Women spokesman denied funding had been cut to Ms Cooper’s Breaking Down the Barriers program, which he described as a 12-month project having started in March.
He said a new allocation of $120,000 had been granted in October for a full-time Indigenous worker starting January 1.
“Any decision around staffing is a matter for the organisation,” he said in a statement.
CADA is a registered charity, funded by the Department of Communities to the tune of $2.7 million in 2016-2017, an increase of $400,000 from the year before.
A CADA spokesman told Fairfax Media Breaking Down The Barriers was only a six-month project and the organisation had extended Ms Cooper’s employment by a month in the hope the funding would be extended.
He said Ms Cooper had asked for the letter confirming her employment to be written and that an independent investigator had looked into her complaints and found they were “without substance”.
Calling the claims a “beat-up”, he refused to share the results of the report or anything from the department relating to a funding cut.
“The bottom line is none of these allegations started until she started hearing rumours that the money wasn’t going to continue and all of a sudden there’s a claim that all this kind of stuff’s happened,” he said, labelling the complaints “quite disturbing slander”.
“The two things are totally separate as far as we’re concerned.
Caboolture Indigenous elder Aunty Lynne Matsen described the work Ms Cooper had been doing as “vital”.
Indigenous women are up to 35 times more likely to experience domestic and family violence than non-Indigenous women, according to the The National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children 2010 – 2022.
Aunty Lynne said the service provided “tokenism” rather than acceptance for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and she was yet to hear anything from the centre in regards to a new Indigenous worker.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women did not like going to the police and there was a “big hole” in support for those suffering domestic violence in the Caboolture area, she said.
Ms Cooper’s grievance report form alleged discrimination and breach of duty of care and called for an email to be sent addressing issues, a formal apology and supervision for her role.
She claimed to have spoken to her team leader following most incidents, recorded notes of them to ensure accuracy and had a meeting with her manager on November 20 and her team leader the following day.
In an email sent along with the form, she complained that a number of issues raised in that meeting had not been acted on.
Those included comments made in the past six months relating to her Aboriginality, including that she did not look like an Aboriginal person and was prevented from meeting with elders.
The matter is listed for a Fair Work Commission hearing on January 24.


Boykin leads the Big 12 and is fourth nationally in total offense at 361.9 yards per game. But he is coming off his worst game of the season, when he completed only 12 of 30 passes and threw for a season-low 166 yards at West Virginia.
Patterson said he practiced well last week and has practiced well again this week.
One of the things Patterson looks for from the Horned Frogs is poise. He said he could see that on the sideline in the West Virginia game when he watched the ABC broadcast of the game.
Receiver Kolby Listenbee said composure was key to coming back from a 27-14 deficit.
Patterson said a former West Virginia player complimented him after the game.
The quarterback scramble remains one of Patterson’s most pressing concerns for his defense, and Kansas State’s Jake Waters is not easing his mind.
The Horned Frogs have been hit-and-miss against elusive quarterbacks. Oklahoma’s Trevor Knight proved the toughest to contain, running for 61 yards.
Cornerback Kevin White felt good about his performance against West Virginia’s Kevin White, the conference’s leading receiver. But he said it would not have meant anything without Jaden Oberkrom’s game-winning kick.
The next challenge is Kansas State’s Tyler Lockett.
Oberkrom, whose 37-yard field goal won the game at West Virginia last week, was named a semifinalist for the Lou Groza Award, given to the country’s top place-kicker. Oberkrom was also a semifinalist in 2012.
The junior from Arlington Martin leads the nation with 11.3 points per game. He has made 14 of 18 kicks, including his last five in a row. He is 5-for-7 from 40-plus yards this year, and his 69 percent rate for his career from that distance ranks third in Big 12 history.


Hellas Verona held bottom club Catania to a goalless draw in the Serie A on Saturday, thanks to the heroics of goalkeeper Rafael.
Verona’s Brazilian shot-stopper pulled off several saves, notably to deny Sebastian-Leto from point-blank range in the 19th minute. Gino Peruzzi fired the rebound wide of the right upright.
Rafael made another close-range save to keep out Pablo Alvarez’s header from Pablo Barrientos’ free kick.
Verona’s only real chance came on the strike of halftime when Juanito Gomez collected a deft backheel from Luca Toni and rolled across for Romulo, who shot wide of an open goal.
Catania, which remains bottom, snapped a run of three successive defeats and is four points off safety ahead of the rest of the weekend fixtures. Verona remains sixth.


So begins a column by freelance sub and cultural writer Sid Langley on the Post’s lifestyle blog.
It’s normally very rare to see open criticism of or negativity about a newspaper on its print or digital pages but this is typical of Trinity Midlands’s remarkably open and honest treatment of the radical re-organisation of its Birmingham and Coventry newsrooms.
“Most people think they are doing their best to be fair and straight in a bloody difficult situation. And some of us are heartened by the untypical way it’s all being discussed (like this) online.
Langley is of the opinion that “no sensible person can deny that something needs to be done” to save the business, a popular view in America where public newspaper companies are busy making massive cuts.
Steve Dyson wrote about the difficulties of making the cuts on the Mail website and has received 94, mostly anonymous and mostly very angry comments from staff and readers. So far.


Cyber threats are reaching ever-higher levels of sophistication. A rapidly expanding arsenal of digital tactics and weapons can wreak havoc on corporate networks and databases. Recently disclosed vulnerabilities - Spectre, Meltdown, and Foreshadow - are now affecting computer hardware. The legacy approach to fighting software breaches - Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure, or CVD - will need a refresh if it is to adequately address this newest breed of threats.
To better protect against cyber criminals, companies can do plenty alone, from making sure they have the best intelligence about potential attacks to frequently testing the state of their cyber defenses. But the sheer volume of threats we now face means organizations can't battle alone. Even the fiercest of competitors must work more closely together. To foil criminals, unprecedented levels of cooperation and information sharing are essential.
A host of hurdles can frustrate collaboration efforts, from technical and organizational barriers to antitrust laws restricting data swapping. What should companies consider to tackle cyber crime? How radical do we need to be? Our experts' panel will debate this timely and important topic, and recommend ways to deal with some of the biggest barriers to radical collaboration.
Churchill Club Member $55 | Nonmember $80.


The first generation of bring your own device (BYOD) participants are likely to expose businesses to new security risks.
As the first wave of bring your own device (BYOD) initiatives gain traction in the workplace, the first generation of BYOD participants could pose a serious risk to corporate IT networks, according to a surveys from network security specialist Fortinet. The study, conducted in 15 territories during May/June 2012, asked more 3,800 active employees in their twenties about their perspectives on BYOD, its impact on their work environment and their approach to personal and corporate IT security, and found one in three respondents said they would contravene a company's security policy that forbids them to use their personal devices at work or for work purposes.
Survey results indicted the primary driver of the BYOD practice is that individuals can constantly access their preferred applications, especially social media and private communications, and this next generation of decision-makers and managers are increasingly viewing the use of personal devices in the workplace a right, rather than a privilege. Nearly three quarters (74 percent) of respondents across all territories already regularly engage in the practice, the study found.
While 42 percent of the survey sample believe potential data loss and exposure to malicious IT threats to be the dominant risk, suggesting the first generation of BYOD workers understand the risks posed by BYOD to their organization, this risk awareness does not prevent those workers from bypassing corporate policies. India had the highest number of respondents who were willing to contravene a corporate policy banning the use of personally-owned devices for work purposes, where 66 percent admitted they have or would do so.
When it comes to policies banning the use of non-approved applications, 30 percent said they would also contravene policy to use them, and 69 percent of respondents confirmed they are interested in Bring Your Own Application (BYOA), where users create and use their own custom applications at work. While this indicates other areas where organizations are at risk, the majority (66 percent) of respondents consider themselves -- not the company -- to be responsible for the security of the personal devices they use for work purposes.
"The survey clearly reveals the great challenge faced by organizations to reconcile security and BYOD," Patrice Perche, international vice president of international sales and support for Fortinet, said in a prepared statement. "While users want and expect to use their own devices for work, mostly for personal convenience, they do not want to hand over responsibility for security on their own devices to the organization. Within such an environment, organizations must regain control of their IT infrastructure by strongly securing both inbound and outbound access to the corporate network and not just implement mobile device management or MDM. Organizations cannot rely on a single technology to address the security challenges of BYOD. The most effective network security strategy requires granular control over users and applications, not just devices."


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A massive amount of cocaine was literally hiding right under the pilot's "nose."
Sheriff's deputies in Tulsa, Okla., found 30 pounds of cocaine stuffed inside the nose of an American Airlines plane that departed Bogota, Colombia.
The drugs were said to be worth upwards of $434,000.
Originally destined for Miami, the plane was rerouted to Tulsa Airport for a maintenance check.
According to Tulsa County police, a mechanic noticed the insulation around the nose appeared to be new. When he peeled it back, he found a brick of cocaine.
Six more bricks, all covered in wheel grease to mask the scent, were discovered later on.
Police said they suspect a cartel was involved in the cocaine's transportation.


Bryan Sheffield, a third-generation oil wildcatter in Texas’s Permian Basin, knows what he’ll do if crude drops to US$80 a barrel: shut down half his drilling rigs and go on a takeover hunt for weaker rivals.
Sheffield is among producers who’ve together invested US$150-billion in the Permian since 2010 seeking their piece of an oil trove estimated to be worth as much as US$5-trillion. As the money pours in, risks are mounting of a bust as analysts including Marshall Adkins of Raymond James & Associates Inc. forecast crude is heading down to US$70 a barrel next year, a price that would slow drilling in the most expensive U.S. shale formation.
While traditional wells have been drilled in the Permian since the 1920s, producers have become giddy over the potential of the region’s vast overlapping layers of oil-soaked shale rock. Pioneer Natural Resources Co. estimated the remaining yield at the equivalent of 50 billion barrels, more than any field on Earth except Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar. The varied geology, though, makes it more costly to explore and develop.
If oil drops another 18% to US$80 a barrel, wells in some parts of the Permian that sprawls beneath Texas and New Mexico will become money-losers, said Tim Rezvan, an analyst at Sterne Agee & Leach Inc. in New York.
Energy producers on average need oil prices around $96 a barrel to break even on wells drilled in Permian layers known as the Cline Shale and the Northern Mississippian Lime, according to Mike Kelly, an analyst at Global Hunter Securities LLC. That compares to average break-even prices of around $78 a barrel in the Eagle Ford Shale a few hundred miles east of the Permian, and $84 in the Bakken of North Dakota. Some areas of the Permian need a price of just $70-$74, Kelly said.
The benchmark U.S. crude, West Texas Intermediate, dipped 4.7 percent this month, touching a 4-month low of $95.95 a barrel yesterday as rising U.S. production bloated stockpiles. Brent crude, the benchmark for two-thirds of the world’s oil, is averaging $108.58 this year and probably will fall to the $70- to-$80 range, Fadel Gheit, an analyst at Oppenheimer & Co., said without providing a time line.
Sheffield started Parsley Energy LLC with drilling leases he bought during the last oil crash of 2008, and has been focused on traditional vertical wells in shallower Permian oilfields. He estimates he’ll spend about US$8-million on the company’s first horizontal well to tap one of the shale layers later this year.
Oil at $80 would mean Sheffield drills only the prospects most likely to deliver the biggest, fastest gushers. The most efficient operators can manage on lower prices, so if oil falls another US$20, it will quickly weed out the higher-cost producers.
Diamondback, whose biggest shareholder is US$5-billion hedge fund Wexford Capital LP, expects to double production next year to the equivalent of 15,000 to 16,000 barrels a day, Stice said during a conference call with investors and analysts yesterday. The company plans to drill 65 to 75 horizontal wells in 2014 at an average cost of US$6.9 million to US$7.4 million each, he said.
For now, Permian drillers are flying high, outperforming the rest of the North American oil industry. An index of Permian-focused prospectors that includes Pioneer, Diamondback and Concho Resources Inc. climbed 81 percent this year, more than double the 32 percent gain for the broader Standard & Poor’s Oil & Gas Exploration and Production Index of 72 companies.
Athlon Energy Inc., a Fort Worth, Texas-based Permian explorer backed by private-equity firm Apollo Management Holdings LP, has soared 62 percent since its shares debuted in August.
“The Permian is all the rage on Wall Street,” Global Hunter’s Kelly said about the region named for the geologic period that began 299 million years ago.
The attraction lies in an unusual geological feature known as “stacked plays,” horizontal bands of oil- and natural gas- bearing stones laid down tens of millions of years ago when much of the U.S. Southwest was an inland sea.
Apache Corp. has identified at least 35 potential zones in its Permian holdings, and it has tested about 20 so far, said John Polasek, exploration and new ventures manager for the Permian region. The Houston-based company’s employee count in the Permian is estimated to surge to 896 by year-end from 345 in 2010, according to an Apache presentation this month.
Pioneer is selling its Alaska oil and gas fields for $550 million and plans to use the proceeds to expand its Permian drilling, the company said in a statement today.
At current energy prices, Irving, Texas-based Pioneer is earning cash profit margins of $60 to $70 a barrel on some of its Permian wells, Timothy Dove, Pioneer’s president and chief operating officer, said during Hart Energy’s Executive Oil Conference in Midland on Oct. 15.
Still, oil prices need to stay high enough to support the current rate of exploratory drilling, Dove said. A drop in prices would compel explorers to concentrate on their lowest- risk drilling opportunities, said Diamondback’s Stice.
A horizontal well in the stacked play known as the Wolfcamp costs $7 million to $7.5 million if everything operates smoothly, Stice said. One “bad day,” though, can send that cost skyrocketing to $12 million or more, he said. Wildcatters squeezed by slumping oil prices may lose their nerve and look to get out, he said.


The vote, in which all FIFA associations were, for the first time, eligible to vote for the host, was cast at the 68th FIFA Congress on the eve of the 2018 edition of the tournament, which begins Thursday with the official opening ceremony.
In eight years, the US, Mexico and Canada will play host to the largest edition of the tournament to date — 48 teams playing 80 matches across 34 days.
After the controversial award of the 2018 and 2022 tournaments to Russia and Qatar, respectively, FIFA has promised a “more open and transparent” vote this time. The voting of the national associations will be published at the conclusion of Congress.


To open our second annualBest Month Ever — in which we'll be naming the best in a new category every weekday of August — Calum Marsh has a list of the 20 best movie sequels. They defy the law of diminishing returns (and Hollywood franchise fatigue). And some of the choices — from the silent era on up to Terminator 2 to Michael Bay to the new era of 3D — might surprise you. Go ahead and fight it out in the comments.


The programme notes for the Ardittis' recital would have driven campaigners for plain English to the brink. Here was Brian Ferneyhough describing his Fifth Quartet as a "claustrophobic and marginally chaotic renegotiation of mutual priorities", while Pascal Dusapin, writing about his quartet (also No 5), talked of "successive aporia that form so many episodes of affable prepossessing small talk that is at once destroyed by a strategy of ruination".
Ignore the verbiage and both works are impressive, sharply contrasted achievements. Ferneyhough's quartet, first performed by the Arditti in May last year and receiving its London premiere here, is a typically dense, ferociously complex single movement that weaves three kinds of material into a constantly developing fabric that pivots about the central coruscating cello solo. After all the sound and fury, though, the work ends quietly with gentle undulations and some glassy chords as beautiful as anything Ferneyhough has composed.
Dusapin's work (a UK premiere) was inspired by Beckett's early novel Mercier et Camier, and is as expansive and ruminative as the Ferneyhough is terse and tense. Starting out with a dreamy dialogue between top and bottom, the two violins against the viola and cello, it never really goes anywhere, but does so in a rewarding, pleasantly discursive way.
Luca Francesconi's fourth quartet I Voli di Niccolo (another UK premiere) buries fragments of Paganini in virtuoso writing that constantly seems about to break into rustic dance. In the context of this programme, Gyorgy Kurtag's Moments Musicaux, still less than two years old, took on the status of a classic. The Arditti played the six little pieces with fabulous concentration, making every silence speak volumes, but then their command of every challenge this programme threw at them was astonishing.


Monocrops: They’re a problem, but farmers aren’t the ones who can solve it.
There are two sides — active, vocal sides — to just about every food-supply issue on the planet. Are genetically modified organisms, organics, pesticides or conventional livestock good or bad? Depends whom you ask. There is one issue, however, that gets universally bad press. Nobody, but nobody, defends monocrops.
I’m not exactly going to step into the breach — this month, monocrops; next month, Stalin! — but I think any discussion of our food supply has to include a look at just what monocrops are, why farmers sometimes choose them, and the degree to which they’re risky.
A monocrop is exactly what it sounds like. A monogamist has one spouse, a monoglot speaks one language and a monocrop is one plant growing in the same place, year after year.
There are two problems with monocrops. The first is that they are not conducive to good soil health. The second is that, when all your eggs are in one basket, you’re vulnerable to a devastating loss; think Irish potato famine. Half of our 300 million farmed acres are planted with corn and soy, and that’s a very big basket.
Of the two issues, famine sounds scarier, but it’s actually less likely to be a problem. Tim Griffin, director of the Agriculture, Food and Environment program at Tufts University’s Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, says our vulnerability is limited, mostly because we don’t eat those crops directly. An event like the drought of 2012 affects meat and dairy (and ethanol) prices, but humans still have plenty to eat. He also points out that staple crops such as corn, soy, wheat and rice provide most of the world’s calories, so it makes sense that they take up a big slice of our farmland.
Soil health is another matter. Growing only one plant tends to deplete the soil’s nutrients over time, and leaving fields bare for the winter can hasten erosion. Monocrops also provide a friendly home for pests that happen to like that crop, since it shows up reliably, every spring.
“There’s a consensus that monocrops are bad,” says Griffin, but not all monocrops are the same, and a monocrop today isn’t necessarily an arid wasteland tomorrow. Take the mother of all monocrops: the wheat that has been grown continuously in English fields since the 1840s. In some areas, the wheat stalks were left in the fields. In others, they were removed. “They have data on characteristics of the soil that go back to 1840,” Griffin says, “and they show that growing wheat for 175 years is a bad idea, and removing the straw is worse, but it reaches an equilibrium.” That equilibrium isn’t as productive as well-managed cropland, but neither is it a dust bowl.
If monocropping is unequivocally bad for soil health, why would farmers choose to do it? Most of the time, here in the United States, they don’t. Steven Wallander, an economist with the United States Department of Agriculture, tracks which crops are grown on what land, and it turns out that the vast majority of land under cultivation supports a rotation of two or more crops. The most recent data indicate that 16 percent of corn, 14 percent of spring wheat and 6 percent of soybean acreage is continuously planted with one crop over a three-year period.
So why do it? Wallander and Griffin have the same answer: economics. Planting only one or two crops can make sense for some farmers in some situations. “There’s an economic advantage to specialization,” says Griffin. “One of the reasons for the duoculture is that the equipment for corn and soy is identical. If you add one more crop, and grow wheat, just that one change requires a specialized planter.” He adds that there are marketing concerns. The farmer who takes corn and soy to a local grain dealer might not have an outlet for potatoes.
It strikes me, though, that if you want to know why farmers do something, it makes sense to ask farmers. Garry Niemeyer grows corn and soy on 2,100 acres in Illinois, and he sometimes plants corn continuously because he can yield 230 bushels an acre, which makes corn more profitable for him than soy. He’s perfectly aware that continuous planting will degrade his soil, and he rotates in other crops before that happens. “Two years of corn and one year of soy works pretty well for us,” he says.
Richard Wilkins also grows corn and soy, as well as a variety of vegetables, on the Delmarva peninsula, and all of his 1,000 acres get rotated. Some of them are in a corn-soy rotation, for the simple reason that those acres aren’t irrigated and can’t support other crops. When irrigation isn’t a problem, says Wilkins, something else is. “There are parts of the country where farmers might grow other crops if the market provided for them to be able to do it,” he says. “And there some regions in the Midwestern states that do have some vegetable production, but there are different types of soil,” some of which don’t lend themselves to growing vegetables.
Maintaining soil health is the central tenet of organic farming, but I’ve never met a farmer, organic or conventional, who wasn’t concerned about it. Crop rotation, even if it’s just the two crops, is one way farmers of commodity crops are balancing the need to keep their farms healthy with the need to grow the plants they can sell. According to the USDA, no-till systems, which help prevent soil erosion and nutrient runoff, are on the rise, and about a quarter of corn acres, and almost half of soy acres, are farmed that way. Although the USDA doesn’t track cover cropping (planting an interim crop like rye grass or clover, specifically to enhance soil health), every source I spoke with says it appears to be on the rise.
Still, a system in which two crops dominate is distinctly sub-optimal, and it’s perfectly reasonable to point to monocropping as a problem. What isn’t reasonable is expecting farmers to lead the charge for change. “Farmers will produce what the market asks them to produce,” says Wilkins, and I think that’s the crux of the issue. A complex series of factors, from government subsidies to consumer preferences, has built a food supply with an almost insatiable appetite for corn and soy.
If farmers can’t change things, who can? I can think of two ways to start tackling our monocrop problem. The first is to re-jigger farm subsidies (and regulations on ethanol; 30 percent of the corn crop goes to fuel), which could change the economic reality for farmers. The second is to cut back on our consumption of the meat and processed foods that most of our corn and soy goes into. Worried about monocrops? Look in your pantry, and see if you can’t help solve the problem.
Haspel, a freelance writer, farms oysters on Cape Cod and writes about food and science. On Twitter: @TamarHaspel. She’ll join today’s Free Range chat at noon: live.washingtonpost.com.
Farm bill: Why don’t taxpayers subsidize food that’s better for us?
Is organic food really better for your health?


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Indonesian crash investigators say Lion Air, the country's biggest budget airline, should have grounded plane.
The pilots of a Lion Air plane that crashed into the sea shortly after take-off struggled to fly the jet because some of the aircraft's automated systems had not been working properly for days and the airline failed to ground the plane to repair the problem, according to a preliminary report by Indonesian investigators into last month's crash that killed 189 people.
In a statement, Indonesia's transport safety committee (KNKT) recommended that Lion Air improve its safety culture following the crash of the almost-new Boeing 737 MAX 8.
The MAX 8, the latest version of the 737, includes an automated system that pushes the nose down if a sensor detects it is pointed so high the plane is at risk of an aerodynamic stall.
Investigators are focusing on whether faulty information from sensors led the plane's system to force the nose down.
Speaking from Jakarta, Al Jazeera's Step Vaessen said the plane had been causing problems for pilots for four days previously.
"There were a lot of technical issues with the same plane," she said, adding that the main problem was that the so-called 'angle of attack' indicator did not appear to be working properly.
"The pilots (on the earlier flights) turned this off and flew manually. But on the fatal flight, the pilots made a different decision. They didn't fly manually."
Given the difficulties, Lion Air should not have been flying the plane, Nurcahyo Utomo, aviation head of the National Transport Safety Committee, told reporters.
"During the flight from Denpasar to Jakarta (the last flight before the crash), the plane was experiencing a technical problem, but the pilot decided to continue the flight," he said.
"In our opinion, the plane was no longer airworthy and it should not have continued flying."
The committee acknowledged actions to improve safety had been taken by Boeing, Lion Air, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and Indonesia's Directorate General of Civil Aviation.
The New York Times reported earlier that information from the Lion Air jet's flight data recorder was included in a briefing for the Indonesian parliament and reported by Indonesian media.
Peter Lemme, an expert in aviation and satellite communications and a former Boeing engineer, described "a deadly game of tag" in which the plane pointed down, the pilots countered by manually aiming the nose higher, only for the sequence to repeat about five seconds later.
That happened 26 times, but pilots failed to recognise what was happening and follow the known procedure for countering incorrect activation of the automated safety system, Lemme told The Associated Press.
He said he was also troubled that there weren't easy checks to see if sensor information was correct, that the crew of the fatal flight apparently wasn't warned that similar problems had occurred on previous flights, and the Lion Air plane wasn't fixed after those flights.
"Had they fixed the airplane, we would not have had the accident," he said. "Every accident is a combination of events so there is disappointment all around here."
Boeing did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The company said last week it remains confident in the safety of the 737 MAX and had given airlines around the world two updates to "re-emphasise existing procedures for these situations". The US regulator has also issued a directive on the MAX 8 and 9 models.
More than 200 MAX jets have been delivered to airlines around the world.
The investigation is continuing with help from US regulators and Boeing.
The plane's cockpit voice recorder, which would provide more information about what happened in the cockpit, has yet to be found.


The Air Force has laid out plans to welcome back retired pilots into active-duty staff positions.
The service, through the Voluntary Retired Return to Active Duty Program, or VRRAD, is encouraging pilots who held a job in the 11X career field to apply before Dec. 31, 2018, officials said in a release this week.
In an effort to address the increasing pilot shortage, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson last July signed off on the program, which aims to fill flight staff positions with those who have prior pilot experience and expertise, thus allowing active-duty pilots to focus on training and missions.
Returning retirees will not be eligible for aviation bonuses, the release said. They will deploy only if they volunteer.
Pilots under the age of 60 who retired within the last five years in the rank of captain, major or lieutenant colonel can apply for VRRAD, according to the service's criteria for the program.
While the Air Force select candidates on a first-come, first-served basis, officials said, applicants are required to be medically qualified for active duty with a flying class II physical; must have served in a rated staff position within the past 10 years; or have been qualified in an Air Force aircraft within five years of application.
Officers who retired following, or in lieu of, a Selective Early Retirement Board, and officers who retired for a physical disability are not eligible to apply, the release said.
"We will match VRRAD participants primarily to stateside rated staffs that don't require requalification in a weapon system, with emphasis on larger organizations like major command staffs," said VRRAD Rated Liaison Maj. Elizabeth Jarding.
"They'll fill critical billets that would otherwise remain vacant due to the shortage of active-duty officers available to move out of operational flying assignments," Jarding, who works at the Air Force Personnel Center, said in the release.
The Air Force is looking to fill 25 positions for an active-duty tour of one year.
"We have a number of positions around the Air Force that require the expertise of someone who has been a military pilot, and [we] would like to be able to keep our pilots who are current in the aircraft in the aircraft and try to fill some of these vital flight slots," Wilson said in August.
Should those positions remain unfilled through 2018, the Air Force will keep the program open for additional applicants, the release said.
Former airmen can apply for the program, which began Aug. 11, through the Air Force Personnel Center via the myPers website. Those without a myPers account must establish one via http://www.afpc.af.mil/myPers/.


WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has boldly declared that trade wars are easy to win. He’s about to find out.
And just like that, a high-risk trade war between the world’s two biggest economies will begin — one that could quickly escalate.
Here’s a look at what’s happening this week and its likely impact.
Starting Friday, the U.S. will tax 818 Chinese products, worth $34 billion a year, from the original list. It won’t target the 284 additions, worth $16 billion, until it gathers further public comments.
China has warned that it won’t yield to Trump’s pressure. If the U.S. starts taxing Chinese imports Friday, Beijing plans to impose 25 percent tariffs on 545 U.S. products worth $34 billion a year — from soybeans and lobsters to sport-utility vehicles and whiskey. China is considering a follow-up tariff on an additional 114 U.S. goods, worth $16 billion a year.
Beijing’s target list of U.S. goods to penalize is heavy on agriculture. That’s hardly a coincidence. Its tariffs are meant to deliver pain to American farmers, who overwhelmingly backed Trump in the 2016 election and whose interests are represented by powerful lobbyists and members of Congress.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE INVESTMENT RESTRICTIONS?The administration settled last week on a less draconian plan: It would back an effort in Congress to strengthen reviews of foreign investment under the existing Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS. This committee, led by the Treasury secretary, considers whether a foreign investment poses a risk to America’s national security. These reviews apply to all countries — not just China — and are conducted on a case-by-case basis.
Economists at Bank of America Merrill Lynch have warned that a full-fledged trade war, especially one that lasts more than a year, would slow the U.S. economy. By disrupting supply chains, eroding business confidence and heightening uncertainty, a trade war, they say, could “push the economy toward full-blown recession” and jeopardize America’s economic expansion — the second-longest on record.
What’s more, the U.S. tariffs on imported Chinese products could end up hurting American manufacturers. The Peterson Institute for International Economics calculates that 85 percent of the Chinese products to be hit by the initial Trump tariffs are machinery and components used in finished goods made in the United States. A result is that U.S. manufacturers will have to pay more for parts and equipment, thereby putting them at a competitive disadvantage to foreign rivals.
Yes. Trump is battling in just about every direction. He has slapped tariffs on imported steel and aluminum — action that has drawn retaliatory tariffs from U.S. allies like Canada, Mexico and the European Union. The president is also threatening to impose tariffs on imported vehicles and auto parts on the grounds that they pose a threat to America’s national security.
Maybe. For a time, it looked as though peace might be at hand. In May, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin declared the trade war “on hold.” The Trump administration suspended its tariffs after Beijing agreed to increase its purchases of U.S. goods, especially in agriculture and energy. The idea was that China’s additional purchases would shrink its trade surplus with the United States. Yet the cease-fire was short-lived. Critics dismissed Beijing’s commitments as vague, and Trump decided to proceed with the tariffs after all.


The transport minister said on the occasion that they would procure a fleet of 632 Jan Buses finally in the next few months.
Commercial vehicle-maker Ashok Leyland, flagship of the Hinduja Group, Wednesday handed over a fleet of 30 world’s first front-engined fully flat low-floor single-step-entry buses to the West Bengal government. The formal handover of the ‘Jan Bus’ (people’s bus) to state transport minister Madan Mitra by the company also constituted the global launch of the vehicle.
Ashok Leyland managing director Vinod K Dasari said that they were happy to have the global launch done in the ‘City of Joy’. Dasari said that the West Bengal government was the first to respond in booking the vehicle. “JanBus will revolutionise urban transport and we are delighted to present a world-class bus with four patents covering over 15 unique features to the City of Joy,” Dasari said.
“The government has placed order for a fleet of 449 Jan Buses under the JNNURM scheme. A total of 1600 buses would be delivered in phases to several states,” he said.
“We are looking for more innovative, comfortable and affordable urban transportation which would be faster, smarter, safer and operator-friendly,” he said.
Out of the 449 buses to be delivered to the state government, 140 will be air conditioned.
State’s transport secretary Alapan Bandyopadhyay said that the state government planned to procure 850 latest technology buses for the state, with 632 buses for the metropolis alone, within a year at a cost of Rs 500 crore.


Harvard University professor Stephen Greenblatt saw a sign. Or, more accurately, he didn’t.
As the 2016 presidential election was stumbling toward the finish line, the pollsters, number crunchers and media outlets that had so accurately predicted the 2012 presidential election, confidently forecasted a victory for Hillary Clinton.
So Greenblatt consulted one of his most trusted political analysts – William Shakespeare. In “Richard III,” Greenblatt found troubling parallels with that tyrant’s rise to power and the way the election was unfolding. Inspired by the modern-day relevance of Shakespeare’s insights, Greenblatt wrote an astonishing op-ed piece for the New York Times.
The play explores how Richard III, against all odds, attains the throne, “a position for which he had no reasonable expectation, no proper qualification and absolutely no aptitude,” wrote Greenblatt.
Election Day arrived, and the rest, as they say, is history.
That predictive column clearly served as the seed for Greenblatt’s new book, “Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics.” In it, Greenblatt digs deeper into Shakespeare’s views on tyrants – what motivates them, how they come to power, and the crucial role played by the mute or indifferent crowds that fail to stop the runaway train.
For his source material, Greenblatt draws from many of the plays, including “Macbeth,” “Coriolanus” and “Julius Caesar,” but “Richard III” remains at the heart of his argument.
In a particularly insightful section at the start of Chapter 4, Greenblatt credits Shakespeare with defining the characteristics of a would-be tyrant.
That may be how the story of a tyrant starts, but the question now is: How does it all end?
In his “Downfall and Resurgence” chapter, Greenblatt writes, “Shakespeare did not think that tyrants ever lasted for very long.” Does that apply to today?
Instead, Greenblatt is looking to the midterm elections and the possibility of “some serious erosion” of the president’s party.
As a Shakespeare scholar, Greenblatt lives with the writer on a daily basis. Shakespeare is not only Greenblatt’s political consultant, he’s also a life coach, a voice at the dinner table, a constant companion.
Greenblatt says, in fact, that Shakespeare is omnipresent for all of us, even if we don’t realize it.
Greenblatt also spends time thinking about Shakespeare, the man. In fact, that was the ambitious goal of his exquisite book, “Will in the World,” a must-read for any Shakespeare fan.
Shakespeare’s life is shrouded in mystery (we have no Shakespeare journal, no letters, no autobiography), so it’s hard to know for sure what he thought about, say, Elizabeth I, much less say Elizabeth II, or, more to the point, any one of the array of modern despots who currently strut (while we fret) upon the world stage.
Shakespeare may not only have predicted the 2016 election, he may also offer a way to get through the consequences of that election for people who are distressed by the result.


At least 28 people have been killed and 329 injured in a huge explosion in the centre of the Afghan capital Kabul, police and officials say.
A suicide attacker detonated a vehicle and a fierce gun battle followed. Officials say the attack is now over and the area has been cleared.
It comes a week after it said it was launching its "spring offensive", warning of large-scale attacks.
Tuesday's bombing happened during the morning rush hour in Pul-e-Mahmud, a busy neighbourhood where homes, mosques, schools and businesses nestle close to the Ministry of Defence, other ministries and military compounds.
Soldiers and security officers are reported to be among the casualties, but the majority are civilians.
The blast shattered windows up to 1.6km (one mile) away. The Associated Press quoted a police officer as saying it was one of the most powerful explosions he had ever heard, and he could not see or hear anything for 20 minutes after.
It appears the initial blast cleared the way for Taliban fighters to enter the area - a commonly used tactic.
"One of the suicide attackers blew up an explosives-laden truck in a public parking lot next to a government building," Kabul police chief Abdul Rahman Rahimi told AFP news agency.
"The second attacker engaged security forces in a gun battle before being gunned down," he added.
Hours after the assault was declared over, another blast rocked Kabul. Police told a BBC reporter in Kabul it was caused by an improvised explosive device (IED).
"It was as huge as in the morning," said Afghan MP Elay Ershad. "So everyone [is] scared of this situation."
Casualties are high because the assault happened in a densely packed neighbourhood during rush hour.
Usually the Taliban does not say it is behind such attacks, which cause large numbers of civilian deaths. But today they did because the target was high-profile and it appears that, for them, hitting the target was worth the civilians killed and wounded.
What we hear less of are similar planned attacks that are foiled by the Afghan security forces, and there are plenty. But preventing such attacks altogether is next to impossible.
The country has been at war for three decades, explosives are easily available and bomb-making skills are common.
The Taliban's "spring offensive" is part of a propaganda war. The group fights all year round and so do the Afghan security forces. It is the story of the past 37 years.
It is unclear precisely how many attackers were involved and the Taliban have been known to exaggerate details.
The presidential palace - only a few hundred metres from the blast - condemned the attack "in the strongest possible terms".
"Such cowardly terrorist attacks will not weaken the will and determination of Afghan security forces to fight against terrorism."
A tweet from President Ghani's office's official account suggested the attack "clearly shows the enemy's defeat in face-to-face battle with ANSDF" - the Afghan National Security and Defense Forces.
But correspondents say that in fact the Taliban has gained in strength since the bulk of British, American and other Nato forces left in 2014.
It has also been buoyed by a flood of foreign fighters joining its ranks, and now controls sizeable parts of Afghanistan.


Lavishing praise on Mahendra Singh Dhoni, who has shocked the cricket world by retiring from Tests, former Indian skipper Rahul Dravid said the stumper-batsman would go down as a captain who led "more by example than by rhetoric or by words".
"He was a captain I enjoyed playing under," Dravid told 'ESPNcricinfo'.
"One of the things I liked about MS was, what you saw was what you got. Very uncomplicated, always led by example. One of the things I really liked about playing under MS was that he never asked you to do anything that he himself didn't do," he explained.
Dhoni retired from Test cricket at the end of the third Test against Australia, which ended in a draw yesterday. The retirement was a bolt from the blue given that Dhoni had dropped no hint of such a big decision leading up to the match.
Dravid said Dhoni earned the respect of his teammates by setting an example with his own performance.
"The reality was he was having to transition a senior group of players and build a younger group who were coming through," Dravid said.
"In a sense he was not the most communicative of captains, but he tried to earn your respect by walking the talk. He never took a backward step, and led more by example than by rhetoric or by words. More by actions," he added.
Dravid said Dhoni deserves credit for inspiring a whole generation of small-town cricketers.
"For someone to come from a small town like Ranchi, to go on and captain India and play 90 Test matches, to do it the way he has, I think he brought a lot of dignity to the job of captaincy," Dravid said.
He (Dhoni) might not be everyone's cup of tea, but he was his own cup of tea and he led with a lot of success and that can never be taken away from him," Dravid further stated.
"And he's been an inspiration. If there are kids in small towns today dreaming and aspiring for great things, not only in cricket but in various fields, then MS Dhoni has a lot to do with it," he added.
Dravid said Dhoni's retirement was a shock to him as well. The former batsman said had the series, which India have already lost by conceding a 2-0 lead to Australia, still been alive Dhoni could have waited to take a call on his career.
"I guess it was unexpected that he would do it in the middle of the series. I expected him to review it at the end of the series, without India playing Test cricket for the next seven or eight months," Dravid said.
"Knowing MS, if the series was alive, I don't think he would have taken the decision in the middle of the series, but having seen that the series was already gone, maybe he felt that if he was going to go, then maybe this was the time to do it, and to give Virat Kohli a Test match in Australia to captain, Wriddhiman Saha another opportunity in a Test match, and to start the process of taking India's Test team forward."
Dravid lauded Dhoni's leadership style and called him an attacking captain.
"He was never defensive when captaining in India.
When he had spinners, he was always attacking, on turning tracks, he was willing to force the game.
It's just overseas, and over the last three or four years, that I just think he maybe felt he didn't have the bowling resources to be able to take 20 wickets, and he found himself, at many stages, always behind the four-ball," Dravid said.


HS2 Ltd are holding a community information event at Aylesbury Methodist Church and Centre in Buckingham Street between 2pm and 8pm on Tuesday February 23.
Staff from HS2 Ltd will be in attendance to talk about how the project is progressing.
They will be from a range of areas including engineering, the environment and property.


It should surprise no one to learn that Elon Musk, a master of promotion, is capturing worldwide media attention Friday for Tesla's selection as the winning bidder for a project to install "the world's largest grid-scale battery" in South Australia.
It also shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who pays attention to claims made by promoters that the details are not as exciting as the headlines and are substantially more difficult to discern.
Where Did The Story Begin?
Four months ago, during a crisis in which South Australia's wind-heavy power grid repeatedly failed to deliver, Lyndon Rive, the head of Tesla's energy products division, bragged that his company could provide a quick fix to the Australian state's power supply problems.
South Australian grid operators had indicated that their system woes could be alleviated by adding fast reacting electricity storage capable of providing 100 MW for somewhere between one and three hours. Supposedly, that amount of stored electricity would be sufficient to smooth out fluctuations produced by variations in wind speed.
Stating the obvious, there is a factor of 3 difference in size between a 100 MWhr battery and a 300 MWhr battery. However, Rive seemed to indicate during an interview with the Australian Financial Review that Tesla was interested in supplying the high end of the range.
"We don't have 300MWh sitting there ready to go but I'll make sure there are," Mr. Rive said.
Rive's confidence in his company's ability to deliver was supported by the recent opening of Tesla's famous battery production facility, the massive GigaFactory 1, near Sparks, Nevada. It was reinforced by the fact that Tesla had recently installed a 20 MW, 80 MWhr battery in Southern California.
That project was completed in less than three months. It was part of Southern California Edison's response to electricity reliability concerns associated with the loss of local natural gas storage as a result of large, difficult to stop leak at the Aliso Canyon storage facility.
Unsurprisingly, there was some skepticism among observers about Tesla's ability to deliver a system with five times the power rating and more than three times the storage capacity in the same period of time to a location approximately 8,000 miles farther from the company's Nevada production facility than Southern California.
Rive has an established history of making visionary claims, but his record of delivery on those promises isn't spotless. Before Tesla purchased the financially struggling SolarCity in August 2016, Lyndon Rive had been its CEO for 10 years. He and his brother co-founded the company with financial backing from their cousin, Elon Musk.
Musk stoked intense interest in Tesla's desire to help South Australia – while generating publicity for its new line of grid-connected batteries – by publicly standing behind his cousin's offer. The real attention-getter was the payoff if their company fails to meet the deadline – Musk promised that the system will be free if it is not operational within 100 days after the contract has been signed.
How Much Power Will A Fully Charged Battery Return To Grid? How Much Energy Will It Store?
As the initial flurry of excitement generated by Musk's offer began to dissipate, serious people attempted to determine exactly what Musk and Rive had promised to do and to estimate how much the project would cost.
On Twitter, Musk had made an attractive, but guardedly qualified price estimate of $250/kw-hr for installations larger than 100 MWhr. He quickly admitted that price does not include shipping, installation, taxes or tariffs. He failed to state that the price likely does not include site specific engineering, site appropriate cooling systems or site specific grid connection infrastructure.
Adequate cooling systems are important for high power, energy-dense battery installations. High discharge rates generate enough heat to damage the battery and its supporting electronics. Fires and explosions are more frequent occurrences than desired and are a high risk for improperly cooled or controlled systems.
Within the context of addressing South Australia's electric power system stability needs, a 300 MW-hr installation appears to have been unaffordable. Premier Jay Weatherill has a total of A$550 million available, and Tesla's massive battery is only a part of the necessary capability.
As Gizmodo has reported, the system that Tesla will be installing will provide 129 MW-hr of energy storage capacity, less than half of what Rive originally hinted could be delivered. At a discharge rate of 100 MW, the battery will be totally depleted in less than 80 minutes. As all cell phone, tablet or laptop computer owners should know, it isn't advisable to fully discharge a Li-ion battery. It can dramatically reduce battery lifetime.
Are Tesla Type Batteries Renewable Energy Saviors?
The system will not solve South Australia's grid woes by itself.
The response plan also includes a new government funded, A$360 million, 250 MWe fast reacting gas turbine power plant, a bulk electricity purchase contract designed to encourage construction of a new privately owned power plant, a taxpayer financed exploration fund for additional natural gas supplies, special powers granted to the SA energy minister to order plants to operate, and a requirement for electricity retailers to purchase a fixed portion of their power from SA generators.
The South Australian government and Tesla have declined requests to provide details about the total project cost for the "world's largest grid-connected battery." Musk admitted that Tesla could lose in excess of $50 million if it is unable to meet its promised deadline.
Lyndon Rive, the executive whose promise evolved into this potentially game-changing project, was not part of the final negotiation and will not be involved in the project execution. He announced in May that he was leaving the company in June to spend more time with his family and to perhaps start a new business venture next year. That decision might have nothing to do with the South Australian project.


Santos Medical provides exceptional medical care courtesy of the Mercedes-Benz Metris Van.
Every Monday, hundreds of Miami’s senior citizens wake up early to start their week at Santos Medical & Rehab Center, eager to arrive as soon as the facility opens its doors. In Miami—where seniors account for some 15% of the population—more than 1,000 patients rely on Santos Medical not only for exceptional medical care, but also for exercise classes, healthy meals, and a sense of community. When they’re not at the center, patients also trust Santos Medical to deliver important medications to their homes throughout the city, and with the recent addition of two brand-new slim and nimble Mercedes-Benz Metris Vans, manager Yeniset Perez and her team are now able to do so more effectively than ever.
What separates Santos Medical Center from other rehabilitation centers?
We have everything in one place. Over two floors, we have a medical office, excellent doctors, specialists, a pharmacy, pain-management therapy, and a gym. Most of our patients speak Spanish, so we provide interpreters. They feel at home at our center because we treat them like family.
Why does the center put such an emphasis on its vehicles?
We have about 200 patients that come to the center every single day, and we provide unlimited transportation for them with our 15 Mercedes-Benz Sprinters. With our two new midsize Metris Vans, we’re also able to deliver their medications from the on-site pharmacy straightaway.
How do the Metris Vans complement the rest of your fleet?
Because of their large size, our previous pharmacy vehicles couldn’t fit into most parking spaces. With medications, there’s always a rush, and the Mercedes-Benz Metris Vans, being smaller and more agile than your standard bulky cargo vans, have made us far more efficient. Our patients used to get their medication the day after the prescriptions were ready, but now they can order their medication and have it delivered the same day because our Mercedes-Benz Vans aren’t stuck in traffic or wasting time looking for parking.
Why did you choose the Mercedes-Benz Metris over similar vans?
They’re comfortable, reliable, and they drive well. We’ve been working with the brand for a long time; there’s just nothing better than a Mercedes-Benz.
Mercedes-Benz Vans allow for endless possibilities when it comes to customization. How have you upfitted your vans to suit the needs of your 1,000-plus patients?
In the Sprinter Vans, we installed 12 to 15 new, comfortable seats, depending on the vehicle, as well as access for two to three wheelchairs, stairs so the patients can walk right in, and a pole they can hold onto for balance and support. They might be in the van for an hour and a half in order to get to the center, but they don’t complain about the ride because they’re so comfortable! We really didn’t have to do anything with the Metris Vans, aside from adding our banner to the exterior. The boxes of medication already fit perfectly in the vehicle’s cargo space, but it’s great to know these vans can also be customized for our patients should we ever need to in the future.
How are the additions of the Metris Vans helping to grow Santos Medical and better serve your patients?
As much as we evolve and expand, delivering medication will always be one of our most important services. With the Mercedes-Benz Metris Vans, we’ll be able to keep up with the growing demand and take on more patients, and we’re very excited about that.


Attorney General Eric Holder said banking relief is coming for the legal medical marijuana and recreational industry, which regulators have forced into dangerous, all-cash operations. Now the banks have responded in the OC Register.
“... banks run the risk of racking up massive penalties and bad reputations with charges as serious as money laundering if they provide services in California because the banking industry is under a federal microscope,” the Register reports.
Bad reputations, you say? Salon.com notes the extreme irony of it all.
The world’s biggest banks have knowingly laundered billions of dollars in cartel cocaine profits, ponzi schemes and terrorist financing, in exchange for a slap on the wrist from regulators and cops. They remain too big to jail.
Legal immunity aside, banks aren't going to stoop for a few smelly pot dollars. Not when there is pallets of cash and plausible deniability elsewhere.


Illinois-based manufacturer Plano Molding sought to replace a paper-and-pencil data collection process with an automated manufacturing execution system (MES). They wanted a real-time look at production data. Many of their decisions were made based on observations and guesses rather than facts, and they needed deeper insights. To improve shop floor efficiency and anticipate and solve production issues before they occurred, Plano Molding implemented the Epicor Mattec MES system. The insights they gained into the shop floor are helping to drive bottom-line growth. Plano Molding has also seen significant scrap savings. Rather than focus on scrap percentage, the Mattec MES solution allows them to focus on higher-dollar-value products. This has led to the Plano Molding team saving $700,000 in scrap improvements. Read the success story to learn more about Plano Molding’s experience and consider how your business might benefit from a modern production system like Epicor Mattec MES.


The man who authorities say walked into the Rancho Cucamonga company that had recently dismissed him and fired a shot was charged Tuesday, Nov. 14, with six counts of attempted murder.
Each count against Tony Valdez, 40, previously identified by the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department by one of his nine aliases, Pascual Ortega, carried with it enhancements of using a firearm in the commission of a felony and having a prior felony conviction.
Valdez has convictions in Los Angeles County for grand-theft auto (two), burglary, assault with a deadly weapon, possession of methamphetamine and being a drug addict in possession of a firearm.
An agitated Valdez entered a training seminar at the Goodyear plant in the 9600 block of Feron Boulevard in Rancho Cucamonga on Friday, Sgt. Marc Bracco said, carrying a .22-caliber Ruger semi-automatic pistol. The 10-round magazine was fully loaded, said Deputy Jacob Bailey, a sheriff’s spokesman.
Valdez’s motive was under investigation, Bailey said.
The person leading the training, who works for an outside company, saw Valdez reach for his waistband. Thinking that Valdez was reaching for a gun, the trainer wrestled with him, Bracco said. Valdez then pulled out his gun and fired a single shot before the trainer took the gun away, Bracco said.
Valdez fled, Bracco said, and squirted the trainer in the face with pepper spray as he gave chase. Valdez was arrested Friday night at his brother’s home in Baldwin Park. Valdez was booked into West Valley Detention Center, where bail was set at $1 million.
The complaint filed in Superior Court in San Bernardino County listed six victims.
The trainer, identified only as a 40-year-old resident of Pico Rivera, declined to be interviewed for this story.


Timothy House of Putnam was found guilty in Dudley District Court of breaking into a Charlton home, assaulting a police officer, failing to stop for police and reckless driving.
Mr. House, 29, was arrested Aug. 27 in Southbridge on a Charlton police warrant on charges of breaking and entering during the daytime with intent to commit a felony, using a vehicle during a felony, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon (car), destruction of property valued at more than $250, failure to stop for police, reckless driving and speeding.
He was committed to the Worcester House of Correction for failing to post $10,000 bail.
Mr. House was trying to break into a house on Dresser Hill Road on Aug. 20 when a witness contacted police. A police officer found Mr. House at the home and tried to stop his escape. Mr. House allegedly grazed the officer with a car, then fled and led police on a chase.
Judge Timothy M. Bibaud recently reduced the felony charges to misdemeanors and found Mr. House guilty of failing to stop for police, speeding, daytime break-in, assault and reckless driving, while dropping the other charges. Mr. House was sentenced to 46 days of jail time already served.


How long before investors lose patience with AOL (NYSE: AOL) CEO Tim Armstrong? The former Google (NSDQ: GOOG) ad executive assumed control of the struggling internet company over two years ago, successfully spun it off from Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) a year later, and has been repeating his turnaround mantra ever since. Over that time, the company has gone through a number of strategic and personnel changes, including the $315 million purchase of the Huffington Post earlier this year. With earnings due soon, Armstrong announced another executive shakeup — but investors weren’t impressed, sending the company’s shares down over 2.6 percent.
Armstrong can take some comfort knowing that AOL’s largest individual shareholder continues to back the turnaround. That shareholder, of course, is Armstrong himself — in a vote of confidence he poured another $10 million into the company in February. Armstrong owns just over 1 million shares, or about 1 percent of the company.
To his credit, Armstrong has made some progress in his mission. Although AOL continued to lose money in the first quarter, display revenue grew 4 percent globally and 11 percent in the U.S, the first time the company reported positive display numbers since 2007. That’s important because Armstrong has made display advertising a linchpin of the company’s turnaround plan.
The CEO continues to maintain that the turnaround is on track (“The future for AOL is getting brighter and we are on the path of returning AOL to growth.”) If so, why the executive shuffle? Why did Armstrong oust ad sales head and former Google colleague Jeff Levick and name Ned Brody as AOL’s chief revenue officer, a brand new post? Armstrong told paidContent Editor Staci D. Kramer in an interview today that the company continues to make progress and that the changes were to make it run more smoothly.
It’s just the latest shakeup at AOL. Last month the company folded 53 AOL sites into 20 “super-brands” in an effort to streamline operations, and improve the company’s “focus.” At that time, Armstrong announced that Patch CEO and co-founder Jon Brod would give up his title as COO of the Huffington Post Media Group to focus on AOL’s local efforts, including Patch.
Investors will be particularly interested in the Q2 earnings due August 9 — it’s the first full quarter with the Huffington Post in the corporate fold. The news and entertainment website has already absorbed several of AOL’s content properties and is hiring professional journalists in addition to its stable of some 10,000 unpaid bloggers. The company is spending more than $160 million on its Patch local news initiative, but those efforts have yet to pay off.
Wall Street analysts remain skeptical: AOL shares have fallen 20 percent since the Huffington Post acquisition, and institutional investors shed some 13 million shares according to the most recent quarterly data. AOL execs, meanwhile, have warned investors not to expect anything too spectacular in the Q2 report.
Here’s is how AOL stacks up compared to some of its competitors by unique monthly visitors and market capitalization.
According to comScore (NSDQ: SCOR), Google’s Ad Network reached 92.8 percent of Americans online in June, followed by Yahoo’s Network Plus (86.3 percent), AOL Advertising (85.9 percent), Yahoo! Sites (83.2 percent) and Google (82.2).


NEW YORK (Reuters) - A nominee for the federal court in New York whom Republicans had criticized for lack of courtroom experience and liberal views, was confirmed on Thursday by the Senate in a narrow, party-line vote.
Alison Nathan, a lawyer for the New York solicitor general’s office, was confirmed by a final vote of 48 to 44, one of the closest votes for any of President Obama’s district court nominees.
The Senate also voted to confirm two other judicial nominees on Thursday: Katherine Forrest to the bench in the Southern District of New York, and Susan Hickey to a federal trial court in Arkansas.
Forrest, a Justice Department lawyer specializing in antitrust law and a former partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, was confirmed by a voice vote, meaning no official tally was taken. Hickey, a state court judge in Arkansas since 2010, was confirmed by a vote of 83 to 8.
Nathan in particular faced harsh questioning during her judiciary committee hearing over her views on the death penalty, gun rights and judicial precedents.
Nevertheless both nominees were approved by the judiciary committee and garnered votes from both Democrats and Republicans, in keeping with Senate practice of allowing most nominees to face consideration by the full chamber.
The White House did not comment on the closeness of the Nathan vote.
Senator Charles Schumer, the New York Democrat who recommended Nathan to the White House, hailed her confirmation, adding that she is the first openly gay woman to go through the judicial confirmation process.
Curt Levey, executive director of the conservative-leaning Committee for Justice, said he wasn’t aware of any organized effort by Republicans to block Nathan’s nomination, as they had done with other Obama judicial nominees who faced close votes.


OAKLAND TOWNSHIP, Mich. (AP) - Authorities say a 70-year-old motorcyclist has died after he collided with a turkey that was trying to cross a road in suburban Detroit.
The crash happened Saturday afternoon in Oakland Township, about 22 miles (35 kilometers) northwest of Detroit.
The Oakland County sheriff’s office says several turkeys started to cross the road in front of the man and one of them took flight, colliding with him and causing him to lose control of the motorcycle. The man’s left leg was severed below the knee when he struck a guardrail.
The sheriff’s office says the Oxford Township man was stabilized by paramedics at the scene, but he died after being taken to a hospital. The crash is under investigation.


BERKELEY, Calif. — Nat Courtney’s father had worked for the father of longtime Honda dealership owner Jim Doten. The Doten family, he said, had treated the workers with respect. So Courtney, who started there in 1974 and is now shop steward and a Gold-level Honda-certified technician, naturally thought his job was stable and dependable, the kind of work you could raise a family on.
That is, until the word went around last spring that the dealership was being sold.
On June 1, 2005, Jim Doten sold the dealership to Stephen Beinke, developer of the exclusive suburban Blackhawk community, and his son, Tim Beinke. The new owners forced the 25 service workers to reapply for their jobs, replacing about half with lower-paid recent technical school graduates.
The remaining service workers, members of East Bay Automotive Machinists Lodge 1546, struck the dealership in response. “We feared we were training our replacements,” John McGlinchy, a nine-year worker who had been rehired, told the San Francisco Chronicle at the time.
That the little band of strikers continues to stand tall is due not only to their own dedication and persistence and the backing of their union, but also to strong support from the community, from other unions and from the Central Labor Council of Alameda County. Recent rallies have featured participation by the union coalition at the University of California at Berkeley, the United Food and Commercial Workers, Federation of Retired Union Members, Peace and Freedom Party, Gray Panthers, Progressive Democrats of America and many others.
The Berkeley City Council endorsed a boycott. Mayor Tom Bates’ two offers to mediate were rejected by the new owners.
“What’s important is that the community got together with the union,” said Judy Shelton, until recently co-chair of the Berkeley Honda Labor and Community Coalition.
“What they’re trying to do is just plain wrong,” said fellow Local 1545 member Robert Pintos, a mechanic and shop steward at another area auto dealership, who often pickets with the Honda workers, together with his two young daughters.
Pintos added that hiring nonunion mechanics who have not benefited from the union’s apprenticeship training is a false economy, hurting consumers as well as workers.
For information on rallies — Thursdays from 4:30-6 p.m. and Saturdays from 1-2:30 p.m. — phone the Alameda County CLC at (510) 632-4242, ext. 224.


When I recently wrote about the possibility of a coming east-west schism in the European Union (EU), I focused primarily on Hungary and Poland. They’re part of that eastern bloc countries which joined the EU a bit later and introduced a definite culture clash with their significantly more socialist, globalist neighbors in France and Brussels. Recent events to the east seem to have signaled a swift erosion of the older, established “elites” who have been running the show. But there are still more dominos left to fall.
Herr Kurz is called “the Austrian Trump,” and not, to celebrate his youth, “the Austrian JFK,” which illustrates just how far time has marched on. Two generations have been birthed in Europe that can barely recognize the late president by his mere initials.
The young leader, dubbed Wunderwuzzi in his home country, which translates to Wonderkid, has pledged to cut benefits for all foreigners in Austria and has vowed to stop the European Union meddling in the country’s politics.
Kurz, dubbed the Conservative Macron due to his age and his party reform, said: ‘I would of course like to form a stable government. If that cannot be done then there are other options,’ adding that he planned to talk to all parties in parliament but would first wait for a count of postal ballots that begins on Monday.
Kurz may form a coalition with either the now weakened Social Democrats or with the more right-wing Freedom Party. But he’s also indicating a willingness to simply go it alone if he can’t structure a deal in keeping with his campaign pledges.
But Kurz isn’t the only one. The Czech Republic, also part of that same eastern bloc, is closing in on their own elections and if the current polling is remotely accurate the race won’t be all that close. Their next leader is most likely to be a far less youthful, but equally revolutionary gentleman who is being referred to as “the Czech Trump” or “the new Berlusconi,” depending who you ask.
“We have other enemies than Russia. We have to fight the human traffickers in the Mediterranean. Twenty thousand have died in that sea. We have terrorism blighting Europe. What are we waiting for?” Mr. Babiš insisted that there are no genuine refugees arriving in Europe.
To be clear, I don’t believe any of this signals the absolute end of the European Union, nor will the socialist tendencies of their more western member countries be completely subsumed any time soon. Neither Kurz nor Babis is signaling an immediate move toward leaving the EU and both of their nations still benefit greatly from trade through that organization. But at the same time, they have no interest in having Brussels micromanage the affairs of their respective nations and they want their borders to be secured. And seeing how well Hungary has done in thumbing its nose at the EU, both of these men have little reason to fear reprisal.


CHELSEA fell to a Champions League group stage home defeat for the first time in 30 matches on a shocker of a night for Jose Mourinho.
Six years ago to the day when Mourinho saw his men struggle to a dire 1-1 draw with Norwegian minnows Rosenborg, the Blues made that result look good in this opening Group E game.
Two days after the Rosenborg upset - watched by fewer than 25,000 at Stamford Bridge - Mourinho parted company with the west Londoners.
Wrong There is no suggestion, of course, something similar will happen tomorrow, but just six games into the second coming of The Special One, something already looks very wrong at Chelsea.
In their last four games, Chelsea have lost to Basel and Everton and also to Bayern Munich in a UEFA Super Cup penalty shoot-out, with a goalless draw at Manchester United the only positive.
Mourinho wanted to sign United's Wayne Rooney this summer, and you can see why, because his team lack a top-class striker.
Oscar gave the Blues the lead in the 45th minute before Mohamed Salah and Marco Streller stunned Stamford Bridge with goals in the final 20 minutes to complete a remarkable turnaround.
Roman Abramovich, who made up with Mourinho to invite him back to the Bridge, was spotted shaking his head after the final whistle. Mourinho was down the tunnel almost as quickly as Egyptian winger Salah, who also scored at the Bridge last season in a 3-1 Europa League semi-final defeat, when Chelsea ran out 5-2 winners on aggregate.
Brazilian midfielder Oscar has two goals, and is leading scorer - with the only forward to have netted this season being Fernando Torres, in the Bayern match.
Dig You have to go back 30 matches to October 2003 for Chelsea's last group stage home defeat, to Besiktas, who won 2-0. On the eve of this match, Mourinho had talked about hatching the eggs in his squad, after laughing at a reminder of how he had moaned six years ago about not being able to buy the Grade A ones at Waitrose.
At the time, it had been a dig at Abramovich for not allowing him to buy big and although the Russian did sanction the £30m arrival of midfielder Willian, you sensed the capture of Samuel Eto'o - when the Rooney deal did not come off - was not what Mourinho was after.
Certainly, the Portuguese coach was left with egg on his face as his men cracked against the unfancied Swiss champions.
It was a pretty dire opening, but Chelsea did go ahead just before halftime with their first shot on target. David Luiz found skipper Frank Lampard, who rolled it into the box for Oscar to drill a low shot across Yann Sommer and inside the far post from about 15 yards.
Mourinho did not smile or react and he was right not to, for after the break his men showed little improvement.
He did clap when Oscar - one of the few decent performers in a blue shirt - struck the bar from 22 yards.
Then Basel seemed to realise The Special One's side were nothing special after all. His defence failed to deal with Behrang Safari's ball in from the left and Streller teed up Salah, who curled a left-footed shot into the far corner. Then Safari's corner found Streller, who glanced a header in at the near post. Eto'o had a late chance to equalise, but using his right foot - when it cried out for a left-footed effort - lifted it straight into keeper Sommer's hands. Even Juan Mata could not lift Chelsea after coming on.
At the final whistle there were a few boos - not something Mourinho would have expected when he returned.
Now come trips to Fulham in the league on Saturday and to League One Swindon in the Capital One Cup four days later.
The yolk could be on Mourinho if things don't pick up and quick!
CHELSEA: Cech, Ivanovic, Cahill, Luiz, Cole, Oscar, Van Ginkel (Mikel 75), Lampard (Ba 76), Willian (Mata 67), Eto'o, Hazard. Subs: Schwarzer, De Bruyne, Terry, Azpilicueta.
BASEL: Sommer, Voser, Schar, Ivanov, Safari, Salah (Xhaka 88), Diaz, Frei, Stocker (Ajeti 83), Sio (Delgado 65), Streller. Subs: Vailati, Philipp Degen, David Degen, Sauro. Booked: Diaz.


Shasta daisies attract bugs that eat bagworms.
Bagworms are caterpillars that spin protective sacks around themselves using silk and the foliage, twigs and bark of their host plants. The brown, teardrop-shaped bags reach 1- to 2-inches long and typically look like little cones or seedpods. These voracious eaters can completely defoliate host plants, causing them to weaken, look unattractive and even die. Several organic treatments exist to treat bagworm populations without releasing harmful chemicals into the environment.
Bagworms (Thyridopteryx ephemeraeformis) will feed on about 130 plant species, but their favorite foods are the junipers (Juniperus spp.), such as red cedars and Leyland cypress trees, which grow in U.S. Department of Agriculture plant hardiness zones 2 through 9 and zones 6 through 9, respectively. Adult bagworm males are black, fuzzy moths with 1/2-inch wingspans, but the adult females are flightless, worm-like creatures that reach about 1 inch in length and never leave their bags. They lay between 500 and 1,000 eggs inside of the bags before dying. The eggs hatch once warm weather arrives in the spring, and the blackish caterpillars emerge and promptly start feeding on their host plants.
You can typically control small or localized bagworm populations by handpicking and destroying the bags, but you must do so no later than early spring to prevent the eggs from hatching. Drop the bags into a pail of soapy water instead of just letting them fall to the ground. This ensures the caterpillars don't return to their host plants. After you remove the sacks, cut the silk bands that attach the bags to the branches. If you don't, this sturdy silk can girdle limbs and cause branch dieback in just a few years.
Bagworms have plenty of natural enemies, including parasitic wasps and birds. Attract the predatory beneficial insects by planting daisy and aster family members near affected trees. Shasta daisies (Leucanthemum X superbum) and Frikart's asters (Aster x frikartii) both work as attractants while adding pops of color in yards throughout USDA zones 5 through 9. Placing birdbaths, feeders and birdhouses near bagworm-infested trees helps attract birds that will feed on the caterpillars.
Control young bagworms by using a pesticide containing Bacillus thuringiensis var. kurstaki (Btk), a natural soil bacterium that makes caterpillars quit feeding and die within just a few days. You must start spraying Btk on your plants when the bags are still smaller than 1/2-inch long and the larvae are actively feeding, generally from late May through the end of June. Carefully read and follow the mixing and application instructions on the product's label. One Btk-based pesticide recommends mixing 4 teaspoons of product for every 1 gallon of water. Using a handheld garden sprayer, thoroughly saturate all foliage surfaces, including the tops and undersides of leaves. Repeat applications every seven days until you achieve control.
Spinosad is a microbial pesticide made from soilborne bacteria. It poisons caterpillars that eat or touch it, effectively killing bagworms within 48 hours. Follow the directions on the manufacturer's label since instructions will vary. One product recommends mixing 4 tablespoons of product for every 1 gallon of water in a handheld sprayer. Spray the affected tree until you thoroughly cover the tops and bottom surfaces of the host plant's foliage. If bagworm populations persist, apply more spinosad solution in seven to 14 days.
Spinosad is very toxic to honeybees for about three hours following application. Spray in the early morning or late evening to avoid harming the pollinating insects. Spray Btk- or spinosad-based products only on calm days when no rain is expected for at least 24 hours. Reapply pesticide after a heavy rain. Although Btk and spinosad offer organic bagworm control, even these natural ingredients can still cause eye or skin irritation. Protect yourself from exposure by wearing goggles, a facemask, waterproof gloves, shoes with socks, long sleeves and long pants. Keep family members and pets out of the treatment area until the spray dries.
North Carolina State University Cooperative Extension: The Worm Is Out of the Bag!
Kelsey, Amber. "Organic Treatment for Bagworms." Home Guides | SF Gate, http://homeguides.sfgate.com/organic-treatment-bagworms-103670.html. Accessed 18 April 2019.


An Angry Reader Says We Are – Well, He's Angry.
You have reached the blind alley of the treason you committed when you agreed that you had no right to exist. Once, you believed it was "only a compromise": you conceded it was evil to live for yourself, but moral to live for the sake of your children. Then you conceded that it was selfish to live for your children, but moral to live for your community. Then you conceded that it was selfish to live for your community, but moral to live for your country. Now, you are letting this greatest of countries be devoured by any scum from any corner of the earth, while you concede that it is selfish to live for your country and that your moral duty is to live for the globe.
The word "Now" was emphasized in the original, but today one cannot help but emphasize the rest.