A cursory analysis of the historical evolution of Philosophy and Theology, even the most radical and primary histories of both disciplines, reveal an â€˜ecstaticâ€™ romance successfully penetrating to the very basis of their real existence. This becomes even more evident from the product of Karl Rahnerâ€™s analysis of the Philosophy and Theology: â€˜there is a theological element inescapably present in every philosophyâ€™. This is quite instructive from the very fact that there lies concealed in every philosophy right from its beginnings a theology which is either unreflectingly accepted or rejected in a manner which is culpable. These notwithstanding, what is philosophy? What is theology? What are their points of convergence and divergence? Are they of any importance to the intellectual formation of the seminarian? These and more are the basic preoccupations of this piece.
Philosophy is of Greek origin, Ï†Î¹Î»Î¿ÏƒÎ¿Ï†Î¹Î±. The concept is a neologism attributed to Pythagoras; it literally means â€œthe love of wisdomâ€. This presents philosophy as a high and supreme achievement of man, and philosophers as aspirants to or proponents of wisdom. In this relatively strict sense, philosophy implies both the process of questioning and the results of this interrogation as embodied in a personal or public enterprise of value to mankind.
Strictly speaking, there is no definition of philosophy that is agreed upon by all philosophers. However, the Classical and Scholastic tradition and of course the Modern tradition have views of philosophy that are commonly accepted.
Thinkers in the Classical and Scholastic tradition tend to regard philosophy as a habit of the mind or a body of natural knowledge that results from the use of special methodsÂ and that enables one to explain in a more or less profound way the sum of human experiences. It is acquired systematically and takes as its beginning ordinary experience.
Modern tradition concour that philosophy is a reflection on the subjectâ€™s experience; it is the response of the self to whatever appears to be non-self. Their concept of philosophy is thus explained in terms of the interrelationship between the subject and object; as such, the confrontation of the subject and object is what generates the philosophical content.
The concept theology is from the Greek word Î˜ÎµÎ¿Î»oÎ³Î¹Î±, in the sense of the rationale (Î»Î¿Î³Î¿Ï‚) of the Gods. Far back in history, Plato understood theology as an instrument for demythologizing the Greek Poets.Â Aristotle on his part saw theology as an aspect of philosophy that explains the cosmos in terms of an Unmoved Mover. When theology began to assume a Christian tone, Origen defined theology as a tool for expressing the Christian understanding of God as distinguished from Christian faith. St Thomas Aquinas, while working out the theory of theology used the concept in the context of a methodical elaboration of the truth of divine revelation by reason enlightened by faith: briefly the science of Christian faith.
These notwithstanding, theology in the Christian context may be defined in the words of St Anselm as â€œfaith seeking understandingâ€ (fides quarens intellectus).Â It is a branch of learning in which the Christian, using his reason enlightened by divine faith, seeks to understand the mysteries of God revealed in and through history (Ephesians 1:9). These mysteries encapsulates the revelation of God himself and his love for man â€“ mysteries hidden in God but revealed to men through the spirit (1 Cor 2:7-16).
As regards philosophy, it is the popular opinions of Plato and Aristotle that the desire to know , begotten by wonder at the marvels of nature led men to philosophize.
Not all human though is philosophical, it must involve a penetration into the essence of reality. Before the advent of philosophy, credulous acceptance of the theogonies and mythological cosmologies dominated, creating a background for the advent of Greek Philosophy. Greek Philosophy began as a reaction to such dogmatism, when men took experience rather than tradition as the starting point of their thought. Then thinkers like Thales and Pythagoras began to search for the one source ÏƒÏÏƒÎ¹Ï‚ (nature) whence came the particulars of everyday experience.
With the likes of Plato and Aristotle Philosophy embraced the Classical Era when Philosophy passed from the physical world to the contemplation of metaphysical realities. The conquests of Alexandra initiated the Post-Aristotelian period, when Philosophy took a political dimension, emphasizing the commonwealth of men.
History witnessed the dawn of Medieval Philosophy with its spirit of theocentricism. The Patristics began the first dialogue between Philosophy and Christianity. Modern philosophy ranges from the Renaissance to the end of the 19th C. The Philosophy of this period reflects a scientific character, and emphasizing the powerfulness of the rational faculty of man.
As regards contemporary philosophy, apart from the concern with science, philosophers in the 21st C have become increasingly aware of man and his problems. Instead of concentratingÂ solely on the being of all things, these philosophers philosophize about man and his experience in everyday world. They designate man as historical, as consciousness, as transcendence, and in general as a being in process towards a future, and man is the responsible author of his future, with or without God.
While philosophy began by wonder at the marvels of nature, Theology is as old as self-conscious faith in God. As soon as man began thinking about the ultimate meaning of life, about their relationship to the whole cosmos, about the ultimate purpose and direction of human history, about the experience of the holy and the sacred, they were beginning to do theology. Theology precedes not only Christianity but even Judaism as well.
Christian theology, however, begins with the apostles, because the apostles had to reconcile themselves with the message of Christ and because they had to preach the Good News. With the edict of Constantinople in 313, the church acquired a legal status and its theology began to show the marks of the Churchâ€™s new situation. It was influenced by Neo-Platonism, and by Roman Juridical thought.
As circumstances changed, so too did the character of Catholic theology. With the desolation of the Roman Empire in 476 and breakdown of traditional social and political institutions, theology passed to the Monasteries and to Monastic Theologians like St Anselm, Benard of Clairvaux etc.
With time, those who were formed in the spirituality of the monasteries found it most difficult to accept. New theology then began to emerge from the universities headed by figures like Albert the Great. This was when scholastic theology emerged. As controversy followed controversy, the role of universities as centers of theological thought declined, and were replaced by seminaries and schools of religious orders. Manuals of theology became popular with the intention of wedding positive historical element withÂ the speculative, rational element.
The 19th C witnessed a theological transformation, which recovered a sense of history and a sense of the Christian message as an organic whole rather than a collection of theses.Â However, the modern crisis of the 19th C and early 20th C interrupted the course of this new historical and integrated approach of catholic theology. This period deny the capacity of the human mind to grasp and express the supernatural in ways that are open to objective examination.
In the Sphere of Western thought until the medieval ages, there was no clear-cut distinction between the disciplines of Philosophy and theology; they were often conceived as the same discipline. However, with the dawn of the history of Christian theology, philosophy was sometimes seen as a natural compliment of theological reflection, while at other times the advocates for the two disciplines have regarded each other as mortal enemies. Tertullain (c. 160-c.230) disparaged philosophy, seeing it as dangerous as well as useless for the faithful. He asked: â€œWhat indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem ? What accord is there between the academy and the church? What is between heretics and Christians?â€. Others took a more nuanced and conciliatory line. Justin the Martyr (c.110-c.165), for example was struck by the similarity between Greek philosophy and the Christian worldview. An even more exalted view of Greek philosophy is found in the writings of St Clement of Alexandria (c.150-c.215), who emphasized the role of philosophy as a preparatory science for Christianity.
However, at the dawn of theocentricism, which signifies the spirit of the medieval epoch, glaring distinctions began to emerge between the two disciplines. By 1100 AD Abelard had began this distinction when he identified theology with the primary task of methodical investigation of the whole Christian teaching. This distinction came to its full emergence when St Thomas Aquinas worked out the theory of theology as a science of revealed truths, carefully distinguishing theology from philosophy, as such describing a model for the relationship between philosophy and theology. According to the Thomistic model, philosophy and theology are distinct enterprises, the primary difference between the two being their intellectual starting points. Philosophy takes as its data the deliverance of our natural mental faculties: what we see, hear, taste, touch, and smell. Theology takes as its starting point the divine revelations of God. Philosophy as such becomes an autonomous discipline, and its secularization, its emancipation, constitutes the first step in the legitimate process by which the world is allowed to become â€˜worldlyâ€™. Philosophy is the field of theories, systems and hypotheses, each person can say and maintain whatever he likes. He can assign to it the most astronomical nominal value, even to the point of saying that it has the value of â€œthe truthâ€. Orthodox Theology is a different matter from the beginning to the end. It does not assert a proposition; it bears witness. It is not contradiction but confession. Theology starts from a fact: revelation. â€œGod has spoken to us through his sonâ€ (Heb 1:2). While philosophy starts from an idea, for the theologian, the point of departure is Christ, and it is also the point of arrival.
This distinction notwithstanding, does theology as a separate discipline have any relationship with philosophy? The answer is in the affirmative, because Theology necessarily entails thinking, and thinking takes place outside the realm of theology. And provided that this thinking is at a radical level, provided that it touches upon man in his wholeness, provided it reaches to the level of mystery and faces up to it, provided it considers itself and not merely the things about us, it involves the free interplay of the philosophical discipline.
For the Catholic theologian, man is the recipient of revelation which is objectified and institutionalized in the church as a historical phenomenon, and as such he is precisely not a tabula rasa,Â not some materia prima having nothing of his own to contribute to this revelation. In the very process of making revelation his own he must recognize in himself that he is, from the outset, bringing something positive of his own to bear upon this revelation. Regarded as a discipline designed to achieve reflective and critical understanding of the churchâ€™s revelation, therefore theology includes, as an intrinsic element and not merely an external prior condition, manâ€™s philosophical understanding of himself.
Theology must maintain a direct dialogue with philosophy; this explains why along side a theological faculty a philosophical faculty is raised. And this the theologian welcomes because everything human belongs to God, and only so is it truly appropriated to man, and because in the midst of all philosophy the theologian discerns God revealing himself in grace, and since God both created the world which is accessible to philosophy and revealed the text which is accessible to theologians, the claims yielded by one cannot conflict the claims yielded by the other unless the philosopher or theologian has made some prior error.
This Philosophical formation prepares the candidate for the priesthood for a deeper understanding of faith which is the habitus of theology, of man and the phenomenon and lines of development of society, in relation to the pastoral ministry which is incarnate and contemporaneous. As Pope Paul VI once said, â€œChrist became the contemporary of some men and spoke their language. Our faithfulness to him demands that this contemporaneousness should be maintainedâ€. This contemporaneousness required of the minister is ensured by Philosophical network.
In the Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation, Pope John Paul II, in discussing about the intellectual formation of the candidates for the priesthood pointed out that â€œa crucial stage of intellectual formation is the study of philosophyâ€. This cruciality is drawn from the fact that philosophy leads to a better understanding and interpretation of the person, and of the personâ€™s freedom and relationships with the world and with God. This opens the candidates horizon for the elaboration and study of the sacra doctrina.
A proper philosophical training is also vital, not only because of the links between the great philosophical questions and the mysteries of salvation which are studied in theology under the guidance of the higher light of faith, but also vis-Ã -vis an extremely widespread cultural situation which emphasizes subjectivism as a measure and criterion of truth: only a sound philosophy can help the candidates for the priesthood to develop a reflective awareness of the fundamental relationship that exists between the human spirit and truth, and that truth which is revealed to us fully in Christ Jesus.
Philosophy, undoubtedly, greatly helps the candidate to enrich his intellectual formation in the â€˜cult of truthâ€™, namely a kind of loving veneration of truth, which leads one to realize that the truth is not created or measured by man, but is given to man as a gift by the Supreme Truth, God; that albeit in a difficult way and often with difficulty, human reason can reach objective and universal truth.
While philosophy does all these, theology on her part helps the candidate for the priesthood to balance his human and spiritual formation by giving him the avenue to participate in the light of Godâ€™s mind so that he acquires a wisdom which is in turn open to and directed towards knowing and adhering to God, because true theology proceeds from faith and aims at leading to faith which is the habitus of theology. The study of theology has a christological and ecclesial dimension, which are connatural to theology, helping the candidate for the priesthood to grow in scientific precision, and to develop a living love for Jesus Christ and for his church. This love will both nourish their spiritual life and guide them to carry out their ministry with a generous spirit. This was what the second Vatican council had in mind when it called for a revision of ecclesiastical studies, with a view to â€˜a more effective coordination of philosophy and theology so that they supplement one another in revealing to the minds of the students with ever increasing clarity the mystery of Christ, which affect the unceasing influence of the Church, and operates mainly through the ministry of the priestâ€™.
From the foregoing, it is constructive to say that through the instrumentality of philosophy, theology is able to proceed towards understanding religious experiences. Philosophy brings forth a reasonable and loving consideration of the realities of revelation, of the symbols in terms of which the revelation is humanly expressed. It is therefore not surprising that the early Fathers of the Church, while strongly biblical in inspiration and content, was nourished with a great deal of reasoning, closely allied to the Philosophers of the past and of their times. Through Philosophy they were able to make religious experience relevant to the lives and ideas of their contemporaries, all because they were aware that they were involved in a world of human culture and knowledge. They employed several philosophical themes, which were highly honoured in the court of reason; as such, they made the revelation of Christ relevant to their adherents and won many souls for Christ.
Pope Leo XIII, Encyclical Letter on The Restoration of Philosophy, 1 879.
Anambra State was carved out of the former, larger Anambra State on August 27, 1991. It is bounded by Delta State to the west, Imo State to the south, Enugu State to the east and Kogi State to the north.


Local hoopsters record history and rally together during the deaths of two well-known community figures.
KIMT NEWS 3 SPORTS – “We’ve been through a lot as a team,” said Drew Enke.
Throughout the season, the Clear Lake Lions experienced a rollercoaster of emotions.
The Lions were predicted to finish fourth in the North Central Conference, but they went on to take it much further. Clear Lake defeated Charles City 63-53 to advance to the state tournament for the first time in 40 years.
Little did the team know that the journey would become even sweeter, earning the first-ever state basketball win for the boys or girls on Tuesday, advancing them to the semifinals. That is where things would go awry for the Lions falling in the fourth quarter to Norwalk, placing fourth among Iowa’s best teams. The team would also learn that long-time sports icon, Dave Theiss, had passed away Thursday morning.
While things on the court may have seemed picture perfect for the team on the court, behind the scenes, it never was. They also had to rally around teammate, Nick Danielson, whose father, Jon, lost his battle with cancer in late February. Players and coaches could be seen wearing blue ribbons in his honor.
Through it all, these experiences will make these boys stronger men.
“It’s such a family atmosphere, I’m going to mis playing with them,” added Enke.


Embrace are set to release new album 'Love Is A Basic Need' on March 2nd.
It's 20 years since the band's debut album 'The Good Will Out', but Embrace aren't intent on resting on their catalogue.
New album 'Love Is A Basic Need' contains a number of firsts for the band, including a new duet.
Lead single 'Never' is out now, and it finds Danny McNamara and Kerri Watt partnering on vocals, a love song with a dark twist.


The top Democrat at the statehouse says a wide-ranging bill that’s eligible for debate in the senate needs “additional work” before senators would consider making changes in the state’s gun laws.
“There are people in law enforcement that have suggested they see some things that could be significant improvements in our current law,” says Senate Democratic Leader Mike Gronstal of Council Bluffs.
Gronstal says establishing a uniform license for permits to carry a concealed weapon seems most likely, along with a move to create a statewide database of permit holders.
Gronstal says senators are, instead, working on rewriting their own bill.
Representative Matt Windschitl, a Republican from Missouri Valley, is a gun rights advocate who argues there’s no three-day waiting period in Iowa for the purchase of “long” guns, like rifles and shotguns, so there’s no reason to have it for handguns. In 2010 the legislature made significant changes that made it easier for Iowans to acquire a permit to carry a concealed weapon. Thousands of Iowans applied for and got a permit, which lasts for five years. That means tens of thousands of those permits will come up for renewal in 2016 and Windschitl says legislators should at least take steps to make the renewal process smoother.
“And make sure the sheriffs were having the training requirements in the legislation they felt were necessary for public safety and, at the same time, making sure we weren’t being too stringent or restrictive on Iowans exercising their Second Amendment rights,” Windschitl says.
Windschitl is a trained gunsmith who works at his family’s gun shop in Missouri Valley. He is also employed by the Union Pacific Railroad as a switchman.


Here’s a simple strategy for enrolling more low-income students at elite colleges, but why is it so effective?
The University of Michigan sent packets to students telling them they were eligible for free tuition.
Is a packet and a promise enough to change the trajectory of someone’s life?
Roughly two-thirds of low-income Michigan students who received a branded set of materials from the University of Michigan promising free tuition and fees for four years wound up applying — and 27% enrolled, according to a working paper distributed by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Among similar students who didn’t receive the materials, just 26% applied and only 12% enrolled, the study found.
Of the 15 percentage-point difference in enrollment between the two groups, 7 percentage points account for students who would have otherwise gone to a less-selective four-year public college, 4 percentage points account for students who would have gone to a community college and, perhaps worse of all, another 4 percentage points wouldn’t have gone to college at all.
The reasons why elite schools educate a relatively small share of the nation’s low-income college students are complex.
The impact of the HAIL — which stands for High Achieving Involved Leader, but is also a play on the school’s fight song — program on students’ college application decisions jives with other research indicating that the complexity of our financial system may be discouraging qualified students from applying to college, said Susan Dynarski, a public policy, education and economics professor at the University of Michigan and one of the authors of the paper.
The study’s findings come as policy makers and higher-education leaders continue to be concerned about whether colleges and particularly public flagship institutions, like the University of Michigan, are working as engines of social mobility or replicating the inequality that surrounds them.
The front of the packet students received as part of the HAIL experiment.
The free tuition offer inside.
The reasons why elite schools educate a relatively small share of the nation’s low-income college students are complex. Public colleges may need tuition revenue from wealthier and often out-of-state students make up for cuts in funding from their state legislators. Some schools simply don’t offer enough financial aid to make it affordable for this group.
Others are generous, but they are so selective that getting in can be a challenge for a low-income student who doesn’t get the benefits of her privileged peers, like standardized test prep. (Some student advocates have argued that the University of Michigan is in this group).
In other cases, our complex college pricing and financial-aid system means that a low-income student who could get into a selective college and attend for free or at least at an affordable price feels discouraged from doing so. The HAIL experiment offers a way for colleges committed to increasing economic diversity at their schools to address this problem.
“There are groups of students out there who have not only the potential but the full-scale ability,” to attend a college like the University of Michigan, “that just take themselves out of the running because they think they can’t afford this,” said Kedra Ishop, the school’s vice provost for enrollment management.
The results indicate the power that a simple message telegraphing affordability can have on these types of students, Ishop said. The findings could have implications as schools and policy makers across the country consider creating free college programs. At Michigan, Ishop said early results from HAIL, which began in 2015, encouraged officials to create the Go Blue Guarantee, which promises that Michigan students from families earning $65,000 or less will receive free tuition at the school.
The results of the HAIL experiment drive “home the point that families and students need certainty and clarity,” Dynarski said. Still, she wonders if the effect would have been as large if they hadn’t advertised the promise of free tuition directly to students and their families. A statewide free college program wouldn’t necessarily have the same individualized marketing.
“I suspect that the personalized message played a big role in the size of these impacts,” Dynarski said.
The idea for HAIL came out of a conversation early in both Ishop and University of Michigan President Mark Schlissel’s tenure. As Ishop tells it, Schlissel was lamenting that as he traveled around the state there was a perception among students and families that the University of Michigan was unattainably expensive for low-income students, despite offering them the cheapest education in the state other than community college.
They decided to develop a program to challenge that perception. With the help of Dynarski, a nationally-recognized student aid expert, they created HAIL. Some of the program’s most important features include its simple and direct message, its four-year commitment and that parents and principals receive information about the program in addition to students, Dynarski said.
The dynamics of the state of Michigan and the university’s particular place in it created an environment where the program worked particularly well, the paper notes. Thanks in part to its football program, the University of Michigan is well-known among Michigan students so applicants may have been more likely to respond to its offer than one from a less prominent flagship or one in a state where there was a more crowded market of selective schools.
Public high-school students are also required to take the SAT, which they do for free and during school hours. Expensive and complicated testing protocol can often be a barrier to low-income students sitting for the test even if they might score well.
Dyarnski is hopeful other colleges will try to replicate the program in a way that suits their own needs — as long as they have the resources to ensure that luring a student to their school would provide them with good outcomes, both financially and academically. “This is all behavioral tools and advertising, they can be used for good and evil,” she said.
Despite the promising results, there is evidence the University of Michigan and many other public flagship colleges could do more to increase the share of low-income students in its ranks. Low-income students made up 15% of the school’s enrollment in 2016, compared to 38% of students at colleges in all of Michigan, according to the Institute of Higher Education Policy, a think tank focused on equity at colleges.
Earlier this year, a guide created by two students at the school called “Being Not-Rich at UM,” went viral, highlighting the challenges low-income students may face navigating norms at elite colleges.
HAIL and the Go Blue Guarantee are part of a larger effort to ensure the school lives up to its mission as a state public flagship, Ishop said. That includes efforts like offering a scholarship and mentorship program for first-generation students and ensuring that admissions representatives make as many visits to Michigan high schools as they do to high schools across the country.
One way colleges could be sure they’re serving low-income students well, Dynarski said — rigorously studying programs offered to support them. “Schools try lots of things, but we need an experiment to know whether it works or not,” she said.
(Full disclosure: I graduated from the University of Michigan in 2011 and a block M, the school’s logo, is the only tattoo I’ve ever seriously considered. Still, learning about the challenges public flagship colleges face achieving equity has complicated the way I view my experience at the school as a relatively privileged, out-of-state student).


BENGALURU: Sun TV Network Limited (Sun TV) has declared a repeat of sunny results once again for FY-2014. The company’s consolidated PAT at Rs 748.01 crore (33.64 per cent of income from operations or revenue) was up 5.42 per cent as compared to the Rs 709.56 crore (36.9 per cent of revenue) in FY-2013.
The company’s consolidated income from operations (revenue) at Rs 2223.62 crore was 15.63 per cent more than the Rs 1923 crore in FY-2013.
The company’s income from operations figures include income of Rs 105.53 crore (4.72 per cent of revenue) and costs of Rs 142.06 crore (6.39 per cent of revenue) from its IPL franchisee cricket team Sun Risers Hyderabad in FY-2014.The company has paid Rs 85.5 crore (3.85 per cent of revenue) IPL franchisee fees that Sun TV has paid for its IPL in FY-2014.
The company’s press release says that its subscription revenues have maintained a robust y-o-y and q-o-q growth of 25 per cent and that its radio broadcasting operations have maintained a y-o-y growth of 18 per cent and have reported 18 per cent PAT margins.
Sun TV Network Ltd has informed BSE that the board of directors of the company at its meeting held on 23 May 2014, inter alia, have recommended a final dividend of Rs 2.25 per share (45 per cent). This is in addition to the interim dividend of Rs 2.25 per share (45 per cent), Rs 2.50 per share (50 per cent) and Rs 2.50 per share (50 per cent) declared at the board meeting held on 2 August 2013, 8 November 2013 and 7 February 2014 respectively. This takes the total dividend payout by the company to 190 per cent per equity share of Rs 5 in FY-2014.
Consolidated Total Expense in FY-2014 at Rs 1192.19 crore (53.61 per cent of revenue) was 24.76 per cent more than the Rs 955.59 crore (49.69 per cent of revenue) in FY-2013.
The company’s consolidated cost of revenue (COR) in FY-2014 at Rs 215.81 crore (9.71 per cent of revenue) was 17.01 per cent more than the Rs 184.43 crore in FY-2013.
Sun TV’s consolidated depreciation and amortisation (DAA) in FY-2014 at Rs 478.28 crore (21.51 per cent of revenue) was 8.27 per cent more than the Rs 441.73 crore (22.97 per cent of revenue) in FY-2013.
Consolidated other expenditure at Rs 194.06 crore (8.71 per cent of revenue) was 49.21 per cent more than the Rs 130.06 crore (6.76 per cent of revenue) in FY-2013.
The company had other income on a consolidated basis in FY-2014 at Rs 86.61 crore which was 19.94 per cent more than the Rs 72.21 crore in FY-2013.
During the last quarter (Q3-2014) Sun TV had passed the Rs 500 crore per quarter mark for the first time by clocking standalone revenue of Rs 503.84 crore. In Q4-2014, the company has improved upon this by another 2.33 per cent to register standalone revenue of Rs 520.18 crore, the figure betters the year ago quarter Q4-2013 revenue of Rs 472.67 crore by 10.05 per cent.
Standalone income from operations for FY-2014 at Rs 2096.78 crore was 15.36 per cent more than the Rs 1817.62 crore in FY-2013.
Standalone PAT for the FY-2014 at Rs 716.96 crore (34.19 per cent of revenue) was 4.92 per cent more than the Rs 683.34 crore (37.60 per cent of revenue) in FY-2013.
Standalone PAT for Q4-2014 at Rs 197.57 crore (38.98 per cent of revenue) was 6.34 per cent more than the Rs 185.79 crore (36.55 per cent of revenue) in the immediate trailing quarter and 11.31 per cent more than the Rs 177.50 crore (37.55 per cent of revenue) in Q4-2014.
The company’s standalone cost of revenue (COR) in FY-2014 at Rs 185.14 crore (8.83 per cent of revenue) was 19.32 per cent more than the Rs 155.16 crore (8.54 per cent of revenue) in FY-2013. Standalone COR in Q4-2014 at Rs 43.51 crore (8.36 per cent of revenue) was (-18.95) per cent lower than the Rs 53.68 crore (8.54 per cent of revenue) in Q3-2014 and (-8.34) per cent lower than the Rs 47.47 crore in Q4-2013.
Sun TV’s standalone depreciation and amortisation (DAA) in FY-2014 at Rs 453.34 crore (21.62 per cent of revenue) was 9.72 per cent more than the Rs 413.18 crore (22.73 per cent of revenue) in FY-2013. Q4-2014 DAA at Rs 112.33 crore (21.59 per cent of revenue) was 5.91 per cent more than the Rs 106.06 crore (20.86 per cent of revenue) in Q3-2014 and 10.46 per cent more than the Rs 101.69 crore (21.51 per cent of revenue) in Q4-2013.
Standalone other expenditure (OE) in FY-2014 at Rs 170.68 crore (8.14 per cent of revenue) was 57.37 per cent more than the Rs 108.46 crore (5.97 per cent of revenue) in FY-2013. OE in Q4-2014 at Rs 26.01 crore (5 per cent of revenue) was (-23.99) per cent lower than the Rs 32.44 crore (6.73 per cent of revenue) in Q3-2014 and (-19.17) per cent lower than the Rs 32.18 crore (6.18 per cent of revenue) in Q4-2014.
The company had other standalone income of Rs 72.91 crore in FY-2014 which was 19.94 per cent more than the Rs 72.21 crore in FY-2013. Standalone other income in Q4-2014 at Rs 13.17 crore was (-11.31) per cent lower than the Rs 14.85 crore in Q3-2014 and (-39.11) per cent lower than the Rs 21.63 crore in Q4-2013.
Sun TV is one of the largest television broadcasters in India that operates satellite television channels across four languages of Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam and has the largest private FM radio network in India under brand 93.5 Red FM. As mentioned above, it also owns the IPL franchisee Sun Risers Hyderabad.


JOBS and lifestyle are driving a migration boom on the Sunshine Coast with the region attracting more internal migrants than nearly every other region in Queensland.
Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows only the Moreton Bay and Gold Coast council areas experienced greater net gains from Australians moving in the 2015-16 year.
In that year 23,113 people moved to the Sunshine Coast council area from other parts of Australia; 16,913 people moved away from the area. The net increase of 6200 people is the third most in Queensland.
Regional Development Australia Sunshine Coast chair Tony Riddle said many people moved to the region for the economy as well as the lifestyle.
"There's a lot happening on the Coast,” he said.
"People have long moved here because of the lifestyle we have, that's what we're known for.
Mr Riddle said entrepreneurship was growing with the latest figures showing about 36,000 small businesses based on the Sunshine Coast - about one for every 10 residents.
But he said the Coast was also attracting major businesses to the region - pointing to companies such as insurance giant Youi as well as government developments like the Sunshine Coast hospital.
Regional Australia Institute chief Jack Archer said across Australia cities just outside capitals were benefiting from people looking for a change.
"We see the Sunshine Coast as a 'connected lifestyle city', popular with retirees and people seeking a great lifestyle alternative on the coast,” he said.


Becca Kufrin’s journey as The Bachelorette of the 2018 spring season is about to debut on ABC, and plenty of spoilers are emerging regarding what’s on the way. Gossip king Reality Steve has been revealing lots of juicy goodies since filming began in March, and now he’s sharing details breaking down which two guys are the last suitors standing. He’s also teasing some information about Kufrin’s final rose pick, but fans will have to hang tight on that front for the moment.
According to Reality Steve’s Bachelorette spoilers, Jason Tartick, Garrett Yrigoyen, and Blake Horstmann are the three men who joined Becca Kufrin for the fantasy suite overnight dates in Thailand. Now, he notes that Jason was eliminated at that point. For those who have been following the spoilers throughout filming, this probably doesn’t come as a big surprise that Yrigoyen and Horstmann remained for the final rose ceremony.
Reality Steve has previously indicated that Garrett was a frontrunner, and there has been a lot of talk regarding Blake and the chemistry he seems to share with Becca. Much less has emerged about Jason, and Bachelorette viewers will be curious to see him on screen and see how Kufrin interacts with both Yrigoyen and Horstmann as the episodes begin to air on ABC.
What about that final rose pick? Reality Steve’s spoilers have not revealed a solid answer on that yet, and he admits that he doesn’t know for certain at this point. He notes that he has heard teasers about both Garrett and Blake winning, and he isn’t ready to run with one of them as the last man standing until he gets confirmation from one specific source.
The gossip guru has had some trouble in past Bachelorette seasons in terms of nailing this crucial tidbit, so he’s definitely not going to name one of the men as the winner until he knows for sure. Reality Steve also details that fellow bachelor Connor Obrochta had made a comment on one of Blake’s Instagram posts referencing an engagement to Becca. However, there’s no indication that Connor necessarily knew anything solid or was being serious and he has since deleted the comment.
Reality Steve’s Bachelorette spoilers also note that even from the premiere of Kufrin’s season, it’s going to be fairly obvious that this is going to be the Garrett and Blake show. Those are the two who sparked the most with Becca at the beginning, and those are the two she remained the most interested in until the end. Which one is currently engaged to the Bachelorette star? That key spoiler remains under wraps for the moment.
ABC’s The Bachelorette 2018 season debuts on Monday, May 28, and fans cannot wait to watch Becca Kufrin taking charge and handing out roses. Additional spoilers from Reality Steve regarding her final rose pick should be emerging soon, and it’s looking like it’ll be a romantic and exciting season.


The Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client has been updated to fix vulnerabilities that could allow attackers to gain system or root privileges on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X computers.
The AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client allows employees to work remotely by securely connecting back to their company's network. It provides virtual private networking over SSL and additional features like identity services, network access control and Web security.
The vulnerability in the Linux and Mac OS X version of the client was discovered and reported by researchers from Dutch security firm Securify. It can be exploited to execute arbitrary files with the highest system privileges, also known as root.
The Securify researchers also reported a similar vulnerability in the Windows version of the client that allows executing malicious DLL files with the System privilege.
The Windows version flaw was also independently found by researchers from Google's Project Zero team who published proof-of-concept exploit code for it last week, after Cisco took more than 90 days to release a patch and did not ask for an extension to the public disclosure deadline.
Attackers need to first have limited access to a system before they can exploit any of the two flaws to escalate their privileges.
Version 4.1(8) of the Linux and Mac OS X client were confirmed to be vulnerable, but other versions might also be affected, Cisco said in a security alert.
All versions of the Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client for Windows before the new update were vulnerable, the company said.
Cisco customers with active contracts can obtain the latest patched versions through the company's Software Center. Additional details are provided in bug notes that are only visible to registered users.


If nine games can constitute an era, this is a new era for the Mets, one in which they can win despite their pitching.
Bobby Jones could not hold a 5-1 lead today and it did not matter. Behind a season-high 19-hit attack, the Mets came back to defeat the Phillies, 8-6, at Veterans Stadium for their ninth consecutive victory, two short of the franchise record.
The victory extended another streak: the Mets are now 7-0 since Mike Piazza has been in their lineup. They have outscored their opponents, 54-21, and out-hit them, 100-56, in that stretch. They pulled within five games of the Atlanta Braves, who lost to the Chicago Cubs tonight, and have gained four games on the Braves since Piazza's arrival.
Piazza has hit safely in each of the seven games he has played with the Mets, but despite his .419 average as a Met, he has only two extra-base hits (both doubles) and two runs batted in during his seven games. Today he had three singles in five at-bats, with no r.b.i. But his presence in the lineup changes everything.
Valentine meant a team this complete. The Mets have competed all season with strong starting pitching, exceptional defense, a solid bullpen and an uncanny ability to capitalize on the other team's mistakes. There was an occasional offensive outburst, but it was the exception, rather than the rule.
Now they can outpitch, outplay and outslug their opponent on any given night. Today Edgardo Alfonzo, who tied his career high with four hits, drove in four of the Mets' first five runs to give Jones the 5-1 lead. And after they fell behind, it was Bernard Gilkey -- who has benefited more than anyone from Piazza's presence -- who put them back in front.
Even though Brian Bohanon had kept them in the game with yet another strong performance in relief, the Mets trailed by 6-5 entering the eighth inning. They were 3-14 in games they had trailed after seven innings. They had gone 0 for 8 with runners in scoring position since Alfonzo had cued a two-run triple to the opposite field in right in the third.
Now they had runners at second and third with one out after Phillies catcher Mark Parent made an ill-advised pickoff attempt at second base and threw the ball into center field. Gilkey stepped to the plate against Mark Leiter, his six-game hitting streak on the line.
Hitting in front of Piazza, Gilkey has seen more hard stuff, especially later in the count. Against Leiter, Gilkey swung at a 2-1 pitch that was hard enough to break his bat. The ball looped into left-center field for a two-run single, and the Mets had the lead for good.
Gilkey, who had just missed a go-ahead three-run home run off the hard-throwing Jerry Spradlin in the sixth, is 14 for 29 (.483) in the Piazza era, with five doubles, two homers and six r.b.i. Alfonzo has called Gilkey -- and not Piazza -- the key to the Mets' success.
Alfonzo, who is 12 for 23 (.522) with eight r.b.i. on this road trip, is on something of a tear himself. And he is not the only one.
John Olerud, who was 3 for 4 and scored two runs, has had at least one hit and scored at least one run in each game of the nine-game streak, and is 16 for 33 (.485) over that span. Olerud is batting .371, second in the league.
Carlos Baerga, who was 2 for 3 after sitting out the start of today's game because of a blister on the sole of his left foot, is 13 for 27 (.481) with nine runs scored and has, as Gilkey and Olerud have, hit safely in all seven of the games Piazza has been in the lineup.
Baerga hit .368 in May (35 for 95) with 5 home runs and 20 runs batted in. He said his best at-bat today was the only one in which he did not get a hit: when he fouled off a 2-2 split-finger fastball from Leiter, who then bounced another splitter to the backstop for the bases-loaded wild pitch that allowed the Mets' final run.
And Brian McRae (who was 2 for 5 and led off the game with a homer), Rey Ordonez (who was 3 for 5 and made a sparkling barehanded turn of a double play) and Butch Huskey have all contributed, as well, in the resurgence, as the Mets have won 11 of their last 12 games.
But Piazza continues to be the focal point. As he should be. In just seven games, the Mets have raised their batting average 21 points, to .263 from .242.
Whatever his influence, the fire is now ablaze.


Castle McLaughlin, curator of North American ethnography and a principal in creating the exhibition, explains that under Frederic W. Putnam, the museum’s director from 1875 to 1909, it became respectable to extend the study of man from Greece and Rome, the ancient pinnacles of Western civ, to the contemporary species. That prompted organizing donated treasures from the China trade, or vacuuming up Native American ceremonial wares—the precursors to and fledgling work of scientific anthropology. It also became academically sound to treat the Mesoamerican past, at sites like the Maya capital at Copán, with the same respect accorded Athens—a simultaneous broadening of archaeology. This era coincided with Harvard president Charles W. Eliot’s 40-year transformation of a classically oriented New England college into an ambitious research university, curious about everything.
Not quite everything can be displayed on the splendidly refurbished fourth floor: the Peabody holds 2.75 million objects, plus more than 500,000 historic images. But the more than 600 items exhibited are a rewarding plenitude.
The front two-thirds of “All the World” is keynoted by a dog sledge used in Greenland, from Admiral Robert Peary’s Arctic expeditions: a potent symbol of exploration. Surrounding areas highlight Putnam’s directorship, teaching, and research (like the mica Hopewell face excavated from Ohio’s Turner Mound Group, below); some of the ceramic pots collected in the 1880s during expeditions privately underwritten by Mary Hemenway (here, a Hopi water pitcher shaped like a female spirit being); and items gathered by Alice Fletcher, whom Putnam mentored and trained: an outstanding ethnographer active among Native American peoples (see Vita, March-April 1980, page 35).
One archetype of race introduces the rear part of the exhibition, drawn from the World’s Columbian Exposition, the great “all the world is here” Chicago fair of 1893, where Putnam organized the exhibits introducing fairgoers to anthropology. (The Javanese village shown then is echoed in the shadow puppet topping this article.) Peabody curators Diana Loren and Ilisa Barbash have opened this section with the 1893 figures of the “average” male and female: archetypes derived from Harvard and Radcliffe students measured at Hemenway Gymnasium.
Recreating Victorian anthropology in a museum dating in part to that era, reinterpreted for twenty-first-century viewers, provides a kaleidoscopic overview of human cultures, anthropology’s origins, and, the evolution, in real time, of both. In sensitively interpreting what McLaughlin justly calls these “incredible” artifacts, one also senses gains in understanding the rich diversity of the human enterprise.
Updated 4-17-2017 to correct a misspelling of curator Diana Loren's name.


David Robertson will be reading from his newest novel, The Evolution of Alice, at THIN AIR 2014.
A West End resident likes to write about what he knows and what he is passionate about.
David Robertson will be reading aloud on the main stage at The Forks for THIN AIR 2014, the Winnipeg International Writers Festival, on Wed., Sept. 24 at 7:30 p.m. THIN AIR 2014 runs from Sept. 19 to 27. Robertson will be reading from his latest novel, The Evolution of Alice, to be released in August.
A publishing operations manager for the Manitoba First Nations Education Resource Centre (1090 Waverley St.), Robertson is passionate about aboriginal culture and issues, and often incorporates those elements in his writing, including The Evolution of Alice.
“The main character lives on a reserve. You’ll see the struggles of living on a reserve and some of the beauty of a reserve, and what that lifestyle is like,” Robertson said.
"The main character lives on a reserve. You’ll see the struggles of living on a reserve and some of the beauty of a reserve, and what that lifestyle is like," Robertson said.
However, while the story is focusing on an aboriginal issue, Robertson said it is "a universal story of loss and grief and overcoming those painful emotions."
The novel follows a woman named Alice, a single mother who is raising three young daughters on a reserve.
"It’s an interesting book. It’s a collection of 29 linked stories, so there’s 14 longer short stories and 15 microstories. All paint together this picture of this family who are going through the loss of a young child," Robertson explained.
The writer was inspired to write this book because he had spent a lot of time on reserves. Four years ago, Robertson visited a community in which someone told him about a family, which had been living near a highway, whose daughter was hit by a car in the middle of the night.
"She had somehow gotten out in the night and was hit and run over in their driveway, and they never caught who had done it. It was just this profound loss for the family and community," Robertson said.
The story also meant a lot to Robertson because he is a father of four young children.
"For me, writing is processing, and it was important for me to work that out, because it impacted me as well," Robertson said.
Robertson said he will be bringing The Evolution of Alice to Portage and Main Press on Aug. 16. According to the publishing company’s website (portageandmainpress.com), the book will cost $19.95.
Tickets and passes for THIN AIR 2014 will be available in September.


AS cracks appeared in Oxford University's Clarendon Building, library staff became worried the historic structure was sinking.
Once the rumour was repeated, librarians were convinced that the Broad Street building's foundations were slowly crumbling and had subsided 11cm in the past 11 years.
But tests carried out by a structural engineer revealed no significant movement and subsidence of the Grade I-listed building, built on the site of the old city ditch, has been ruled out.
A total of 45 staff have now been relocated so that a £1m refurbishment programme can begin to restore the building, designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor to house the university's printing press.
It is now home to Bodleian Library staff, but for the next 12 months they will be working at offices on the city's Osney Mead industrial estate.
"We were aware of the rumours about the building sinking," said Toby Kirtley, 40, estate projects officer for Oxford University Library Services.
"We called in structural engineers last year as part of the design process for this project and made them aware of the rumours.
"They carried out an inspection and did not find any problems with subsidence.
"It was an apocryphal tale and I would love to know where it started.
"There are some cracks in the plaster on the ceilings and walls inside the building, but they did not appear recently and you would expect some gentle movement over 300 years."
Inside, the building is being refurbished at a cost of £1m to accommodate the directorate of Oxford University Library Services -- which is transferring from the old Bodleian building -- and existing personnel, accounts and admissions staff from the Bodleian.
Partition walls that divide Hawksmoor's original design are being removed and replaced in some areas with glass.
Repairs to stonework, casement windows, roof timbers and high-level plaster will also be completed.
The £1m project follows last year's work at the Sheldonian Theatre to carry out £1m of ceiling repairs. The 17th-century building reopened in time for the Christmas season.
Mr Kirtley added: "The Christopher Wren-built Sheldonian Theatre is slightly older than the Clarendon Building, but there's a connection because the Sheldonian once housed the university printing press."


What happens when engineers run the world?
On Christmas Day 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded a Northwest Airlines plane wearing customised underpants stuffed with explosives. As Flight 253 approached Detroit, he tried to blow himself up – along with nearly 300 other passengers and crew. It was the biggest flop in the recent history of Islamic terrorism. The baby-faced bomber succeeded only in setting his trousers on fire and burning his legs, before getting doused by fire extinguishers and being sat on by some intrepid souls in economy class. Not even Ryanair dishes out that kind of treatment.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Mohamed Atta, 9/11’s mastermind and one of its ringleaders, were both engineers. Imam Samudra, the plotter of the Bali nightclub bombings of 2002, was an engineer. Kafeel Ahmed, who in 2007 charged a Jeep into Glasgow airport, had an MPhil in aeronautical engineering.
Analysing the backgrounds of 178 jihadis, Gambetta and Hertog found that 44 per cent had studied for an engineering degree – while engineers comprised an average of only 3.5 per cent of the male workforce in their home countries. Most of the standard explanations for this vast over-representation are no doubt familiar to diligent New Statesman readers: graduate employment across the Middle East is hard to find and, as Jean-Paul Marat could tell you, frustrated ambition is often a catalyst for radicalisation.
While that accounted for the preponderance of degree-holding jihadis, it did not explain the dominance of engineering. For that, the social scientists turned to what they called the “engineering mindset”. “Engineering is a subject in which individuals with a dislike for ambiguity might feel comfortable,” they wrote. According to a US survey, engineers were “less adept at dealing with the confusing causality of the social and political realms and . . . inclined to think that societies should operate in an orderly way akin to well-functioning machines”.
Had the sociologists panned their lens across from the Middle East to the west coast of the US, they would have found that same mindset not confined to the political margins but flourishing in the commercial mainstream. If this age belongs to any profession, it surely belongs to the engineer – not in the term’s historical sense of builders of dams and railways but in its new sense of makers of technology and software. Look at the Forbes billionaire list, published in March: of the ten richest people in the world, three – Carlos Slim, Bill Gates and Larry Ellison – made their riches through engineering. Run through the companies that have become household names in the past 20 years and they are, at root, engineering companies: Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter.
Three things have converged to make this batch of engineers more prominent than those of previous generations who worked at such venerable giants as BAE or General Electric. First, rather than making bits of public infrastructure – power plants and bridges, for example – this new lot are in your personal space. They produce the iPhone in your pocket or the social media sites you check over lunch.
Second, the IT revolution has triggered a wave of inventions and innovations. Look out for Google Glass spectacles that enable you to browse the web and film what you’re watching. Wearers have already been given a nickname: “Glassholes”.
Finally, the politicians and the commentariat, as well as business executives, increasingly defer to the needs of those in engineering. Think of how David Cameron cosies up to Google or consider how the coalition government has cut public funding for all university teaching except in science, technology, engineering or mathematics.
Precedents exist for each of these factors. Didn’t Harold Wilson get excited about the “white heat of technology”? But add the three together and lob in the propulsive force of venture capital and you have a world in which books emerge with titles such as What Would Google Do?and in which the untimely death of the chief executive of a consumer electronics company, Apple’s Steve Jobs, prompts the kind of mass grief that greeted the assassination of John Lennon. A world in which engineers – and the culture described by Gambetta and Hertog – reign supreme.
As for Lanier, he was one of the pioneers of virtual reality and now works for Microsoft. He is that odd combination, a member of Silicon Valley’s “1 per cent” and a philosopher who has written widely about the limits of technology. He is also the owner of the world’s biggest flute.
In To Save Everything, Click Here, Morozov describes how responsibility for solving social problems has been arrogated by engineers at Google and other private-sector businesses. Need to recycle more? Get BinCam, which photographs your bin’s contents and sends the image to freelancers hired through Amazon. They analyse just how wasteful you’ve been and then stick the results on – you’ve guessed it – your Facebook page for all your friends to see. It doesn’t stop there. Because your pals also have BinCams, soon an entire social network is competing to see who’s the greenest. Result: Gaia is saved. Thank you, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and BinCam!
This is a prime example of “solutionism”, as Morozov calls it: the notion that a messy problem sprawling across morality and politics can be resolved with just a little engineering ingenuity and the latest technology. Solutionism is the natural extension of Gambetta’s and Hertog’s observation about the engineer’s desire to turn society into a well functioning machine – and it’s everywhere.
After a gunman killed 26 children and adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, a residents’ group named the Sandy Hook Promise sprang up, looking for new technologies to increase gun safety. Breakthrough ideas would be put in front of “venture capitalists and angel investors”. The intentions are surely sincere but I can’t help feeling that the most straightforward way to reduce gun crime would be to reduce gun ownership. For the Sandy Hook Promise, however, that smells too much like politics.
Then there’s “big data”, the concept, fashionable across Washington and now Whitehall, that any problem – from underperforming pupils to failing hospitals – can be solved by collecting some tightly focused data, crunching it and making tweaks such as shifting pupils or rejigging nurses’ shifts, rather than dealing with bigger issues, such as the poverty of the catchment area or the spending cuts being made by your local trust.
This is an approach that focuses narrowly on “what works” without ever troubling to ask: “Works for whom?” Its watchword is “smart”, which can easily be appreciated, not “right”, which can’t. Putting trust in highly educated technocrats, it is naturally less interested in public debate. Amplify this by the imperative to deliver financial returns and the result is often easy to admire – and yet to dislike.
In 2010, Google’s chief financial officer, Patrick Pichette, explained how his company “is really an engineering company, with all these computer scientists that see the world as a completely broken place”. Friedrich Hayek would have recognised this sentiment. Over 60 years ago, he observed that the best engineers eventually “develop a passion for imposing on society the order which they are unable to detect by the means with which they are familiar”.
In his first book, The Net Delusion, Morozov rubbished the idea that totalitarian regimes could be toppled by “slacktivists”: Iranian hipsters retweeting badinage about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, say. It was a subtle argument in which both the Belarusian and his opponents splashed around a little too much black and white but Morozov captured how protesters in the internet age often place trust in tools such as blogs and twitter simply because they’re the closest to hand.
The new book develops that picture, suggesting that a cadre of technologists and policymakers is now so depoliticised that it naturally reaches for engineering solutions. The Prime Minister gets a dishonourable mention here, on account of his enthusiasm for nudge policies to prompt voters into eating better and being greener.
All this polemicising is delivered with a delightful bitchiness and Morozov spends much of his book in hand-to-hand combat with some of his “internet-centric” opponents (Jeff Jarvis, Clay Shirky). The result, though, is that he pays too little attention to why we live in an age dominated by zealous engineers. One answer may be generational – that technological positivism has become the reflex instinct for a post-coldwar generation assured that all the big questions in politics have now been settled.
Or you could look at two of the societies driving the IT age. The US and India are both marked by small states, in which the aspirant middle classes cannot rely on government support in good schooling, higher education, health care and pensions. Inside your private bubble, why wouldn’t you steer clear of the hurly-burly of democratic politics and go for pragmatic individualism instead?
By not widening his focus to the political context, Morozov is as guilty of internetcentrism as his targets. Indeed, until reading these books, I hadn’t realised how much serious, non-fiction writing now resembles those quarter-hour Ted talks in which smart people rely on nifty neologisms and tidy framing to make an argument. In his book, Lanier’s only index is of new terms he has coined and where they first appear. And To Save Everything, Click Here concludes with a joke about how Morozov should have produced a book with “one big idea” but can only offer “two middle-sized ideas”.
He’s better than that. For someone who was born in 1984, Morozov has done an obscene amount of reading. Early in the book, he imagines a dinner party attended by Michael Oakeshott, Jane Jacobs, Ivan Illich and Friedrich Hayek; and every time he takes on some wrong-headed internet evangelist, he lets you know just how much of their dreck he’s yawned over.
As a result, To Save Everything, Click Here comes with endnotes that stretch on for 50 pages. By contrast, Who Owns the Future? has a bunch of links to blogs and Facebook pages. And Lanier writes as if pretty much all Engine room: one of Google’s eight data centres he’s read is a bunch of blogs and Facebook pages. It is a shame, because his earlier book You Are Not a Gadget was a bracing polemic on how our reliance on IT is hollowing out culture.
This time, he wants to discuss how technology is polarising the economy between the Larry Pages and Sergey Brins at the very top and the rest of us. It’s a noble, timely objective but Lanier goes about it as cackhandedly as if he were nailing jelly to the wall. From at least the Industrial Revolution onwards, economists and others have been arguing over how technology, be it the loom or the laptop, will change workers’ standing. Yet Lanier seems to be unaware of most of this work.
However sunny and open-minded the author may be, his book bears the unmistakable ring of the Rotary club member unwinding after a two-bottle lunch. He gives a lazy economic history of the world, based on the idea that wealth flows naturally towards a tiny elite. But it is the cash-grab by a few in Britain and the US over the past 20 years that has been remarkable in postwar history.
The future, Lanier believes, stands to be even more unequal. An elite of Facebooks and Amazons and their “siren servers” will gather ever more information on the rest of us, all the better to sell us stuff. Yet the price of technological advance is that van drivers, lawyers, accountants and others have their jobs taken over by robots.
According to Lanier, our only hope is to charge these companies for the data they gather on us. It is a cheerless future, in which 99 per cent of the population are, in effect, digital welfare claimants: doing nothing productive or independent and surrendering their most intimate details in return for spare change.
Whatever Lanier may think, Google, Apple and Amazon are not forces of nature but businesses with workers and stockholders and supply chains. There is nothing inevitable about Apple outsourcing work to China, especially when research shows that it could make its iPhones in the US and still take a gross margin of 46 per cent – one of the highest in the world. Lanier does not bother with such frippery as regulating our internet companies or nationalising these siren servers. Those would be political solutions and he is an engineer who wants to do what works.
Towards the end of his book, Morozov quotes the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset: “I wish it would dawn upon engineers that, in order to be an engineer, it is not enough to be an engineer.” For all his dissident qualities, Lanier is still stuck in the engineering mindset.


With the long black robes, red velvet curtain and secret conference room, the Supreme Court can seem like a pretty weird place. But the court is never weirder than when the death penalty is being discussed, as it was in Wednesday's oral arguments.
On the surface, the justices must decide whether co-defendants can have their sentences determined in a single hearing, and whether a jury must be told that factors mitigating against a capital sentence don't need to be proved beyond reasonable doubt. But underneath these technical legal issues, something more profound is at stake: the immediate, personal involvement of the nine justices in the intentional killing of human beings.
Because the court thinks "death is different," its usual rules for choosing which cases to hear don't apply. It considers cases where there's no split of authority among the courts of appeal or among the states, and it corrects errors that it thinks were made by the courts below. More than that, the court gets into the guts of how the death penalty is determined and administered, making it the de facto supervisor of what Justice Harry Blackmun memorably called the "machinery of death."
The court doesn't hear every death penalty appeal, but the clerks and justices do in practice review every legal argument made by desperate death row inmates and their lawyers as their dates of execution draw near. For decades, the court has employed a special "death clerk," not one of the justices' clerks who typically serve for a year, but a permanent staff member who has developed an expertise in the arcana of state and federal death penalty law. The death clerk monitors the appeals, makes sure the justices vote on them in an orderly fashion, and communicates the responses back to the states and the lawyers.
Although the court prefers otherwise, sometimes all this happens in the dead of night, in anticipation of a crack-of-dawn execution. If it's after hours, each justice leaves a law clerk behind in chambers to monitor developments and communicate with his or her boss at home. I can tell you I've never experienced anything eerier than staying up to the small hours in the darkened, almost-empty Supreme Court building, waiting for someone to die in Texas or Arizona or Oklahoma so that I could go home.
I mention the detail to suggest how closely the justices are involved in administering the death penalty — and how that experience becomes part of the justices' professional routine. There are many fewer executions now than there were in the late 1990s, when I clerked, but reduced numbers don't, I think, reduce the psychological impact — possibly the reverse.
Public attention tends to focus on whether the court will strike down the death penalty as cruel and unusual, which it did in effect from 1972 to 1976. The day-to-day death penalty jurisprudence isn't as legally dramatic. But the right answer often depends on what you think about the death penalty writ large.
Take the question of whether it's fair to sentence co-defendants in the same proceeding. The Carr brothers, whose case is before the court, were convicted of a vicious crime spree in which they killed five people and almost killed a sixth. Reginald, the older brother, seems to have been leader. Jonathan, the younger brother, presented evidence at trial that made Reginald look worse than he is — in the hopes of getting the jury to sympathize with him as a follower who didn't deserve the death penalty. Reginald's lawyers have argued that this was unjust. Jonathan's lawyers, for that matter, argue that sentencing him alongside his brother must've prejudiced the jury against him.
If you oppose the death penalty, you'll probably think the answer is pretty obvious: Each man bears independent guilt, so each man should get a separate sentencing hearing.
But if you think the death penalty is warranted, you might conclude that there's nothing wrong with sentencing murderers together for crimes they committed together. Criminals are tried together and sentenced together all the time for joint crimes. Indeed, a jury that considered the crimes of both Carrs and their punishments could arguably do it better in a single proceeding than in two separate ones.
Two justices, Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, made headlines last term by saying they consider the death penalty unconstitutional in all circumstances. The court's two younger liberals, Sonya Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, kept their powder dry, declining to join their older colleagues' position at this comparatively early stage in their Supreme Court tenures.
The only way the death penalty will be struck down in the foreseeable future is if Justice Anthony Kennedy thinks it should be. Kennedy doesn't like to be pigeonholed as a bleeding-heart liberal, and given his landmark liberal vote for gay marriage in June, it's very unlikely that he wants to become a death penalty pioneer, at least for now.
That leaves the court with skirmishes over procedure that stand in for the real question: How much can the justices tolerate their intimate connection to death? For now, the answer is that they can. Dostoevsky, no stranger to capital punishment, said it best: "Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!"


As an author, speaker and educator Victoria's brings together and translates the best science available on family wellness with an emphasis on emotional and mental health. She offers this expert information to parents and others in a form they can use today.
As a mother she stays close to her two grown sons. Professionally she made her mark as an Emmy Award winning science journalist, and coauthor of five published books in psychology, including: a parents’ guide to childhood OCD, a popular science book on the chemistry of human relationships, and, with Dr. Jack C. Westman, a guide to child and adolescent psychology.
Victoria's articles offer previews from her upcoming book A Lethal Inheritance, A Mother Uncovers the Science Behind Three Generations of Mental Illness, reflecting the decade she spent researching how to treat and prevent mental illness in children and adolescents. Due out from Prometheus Books in Jan 2012, you can pre-order A Lethal Inheritance on Amazon.
Victoria is married and she lives and works in San Francisco where she’s a board member of the S. F. Mental Health Association and a consultant to the S. F. Family Services Agency. Visit her at www.victoriacostello.com and www.raisinghealthyminds.com.
Are You a Perfect, Too Good, or Good Enough Parent?


Luo Bao Bei is a bright and spirited 7-year old girl with a vivid imagination, on a quest to understand the world around her. With her friends and animal companions by her side she navigates the excitement of childhood.
Timmy's pet hamster has died and he is inconsolable. LBB is determined to cheer him up, that's what friends are for, right?


After more than four decades in the music business, the legendary guitarist is back with his 19th studio album. This 14-track CD features collaborations with JJ Cale and Steve Winwood and includes a few original Clapton compositions. He also displays his love for jazz with versions of evergreen tunes such as Autumn Leaves and How Deep is the Ocean; a departure from the blues/rock sound he’s known for.
I'm a 50 year old man looking to meet women between the ages of 25 and 50.


914th Rescue my soul is an enchanting point and click type new escape game developed by ENA games for free. Dramatize a situation there lived a small boy in a village. He was so mischievous and playful. One day, when he was playing in the evening, mistakenly he disturbed a witch. With anger, the witch took his soul and went through the forest. As a player, you followed the path of the witch through the forest. At one stage, you missed the path. There you saw an old lady. So, you seek her to get the path to reach the witch. In favor, she told you to do certain tasks. This could be achievable only if you have determination to do it. Surely you will succeed by finding the necessary objects and solving the puzzles. However, this game is not going to end here. It has a sequel part. Have greater excitement and fun by playing escape games daily.


New details in the Lehigh University student poiosnoing case reveal a possible second poisioning. Yukai Yang was released on bail last weekend but has since been jailed again, prosecutors say.
A former Lehigh University student charged with trying to slowly poison his roommate to death had his bail revoked Friday over fears that he would try to flee to China to avoid prosecution.
The decision to revoke bail comes after Yukai Yang, a Chinese national in the U.S. on a student visa, was rearrested in December after initially posting $200,000 cash bail in hopes of being deported back to his home country.
Yang is being held in Northampton County Jail, with a detainer from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. His visa has also been revoked.
In addition to attempted murder and related charges, Yang is charged with ethnic intimidation for allegedly vandalizing his roommate's belongings with racist graffiti. Earlier reports had indicated that authorities were probing a possible second poisoning, but Northampton County Assistant District Attorney Abraham Kassis said that was not the case.
The former Lehigh University student allegedly used thallium, once used as a household rat killer, to slowly poison his roommate.
Authorities first zeroed in on Yang after the roommate, who is African American, reported in 2018 that his belongings had been vandalized and scrawled with the N-word, Northampton County District Attorney John Morganelli said.
As police investigated that case, they noticed that the roommate appeared to be sick. He told police that he had been ill for some time and contacted law enforcement in March of last year after uncontrollable vomiting.
"This was over a period of time with ... thallium being added to foods and drinks in the refrigerator," Morganelli said. "He was getting worse all the time."
During that time, police officers were called to his room on multiple occasions and found a racially-charged note on the victim's desk.
The victim told investigators he remembered drinking from a bottle and his tongue starting to burn, officials said. Blood tests later revealed an increased level of thallium in his blood.
Yang told investigators he saw the victim's milk and mouthwash change color and that he believed someone was tampering with items in the room, Morganelli said.
Yang, a chemistry student, admitted to buying thallium online with the purpose of poisoning himself if his grades went down, Morganelli said. Thallium exposure can lead to nausea, painful limbs, rapid heart rate, high blood pressure, kidney damage and nerve damage, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The victim, who has since graduated, is still suffering from ill effects of the thallium poisoning.
Yang's lawyer did not immediately return a request for comment.


It was exactly one year ago today that Donald Trump suggested he was prepared to accept Russian President Vladimir Putin’s denials about attacking American elections.
This, evidently, helped convince the American president that he should trust his Russian counterpart’s word over that of U.S. intelligence agencies.
President Trump pledged Thursday that will “of course” raise the issue of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election at his summit next week with the country’s leader, Vladimir Putin, but insisted that there was little he could do if – as expected – Putin denies that Russia interfered.
The American president doesn’t appear to appreciate how pathetic a line this is. From Trump’s perspective, confronted with overwhelming evidence that Putin’s government launched an unprecedented attack on the United States’ democracy, the president can ask the Russian leader for an explanation. If Putin denies responsibility, Trump can ask again. As the Republican put it this morning, it’s “all” he can do.
Trump is acting as if he’s effectively powerless, but he’s not. If the American president were serious about a tough response to a Russian attack, he could stop taking Putin’s word for it. He could impose sanctions without foot-dragging. He could stop dismissing the investigation into Russia’s intelligence operation as a “witch hunt.” He could stop taking all kinds of steps that appear designed to make Moscow happy, including undermining international cohesion on NATO.
“What am I going to do?” How about anything other than what Trump’s been doing?


The Prince George’s County Board of Education, facing a rocky start in a new era of school governance, has entered into a short-term agreement with a corporate foundation to help ease its transition from an elected board to a hybrid board with government oversight.
Panasonic, which has affiliations with school systems in Elizabeth, N.J., San Diego and Connecticut, will assist the county during the next nine months to navigate the governance structure approved by state lawmakers in April. Prince George’s will be one of the largest school districts to partner with Panasonic.
The agreement is one of the most significant steps the board has taken since the General Assembly gave County Executive Rushern L. Baker III (D) the power to choose the schools chief, name three appointed board members and select the board chair and vice chair.
The move to team with Panasonic also speaks to the challenges that the reconfigured 13-member panel has faced in its early days since the legislation went into effect in June, and about the work that lies ahead.
Eubanks said the board is considering a 10-year agreement with Panasonic that could begin next year.
Since the legislation took effect, the board has experienced upheaval. Two members, citing personal reasons, abruptly resigned within two months of each other. And several elected members have said they feel marginalized, which they think has stifled the board’s working relationship.
Verjeana Jacobs (District 5), who served as chair for six years before the restructuring, cited “a lack of inclusion and collaboration” in schools matters. “I know there are conversations at the county executive level that don’t include the board,” she said.
Edward Burroughs (District 8) said the new structure has created a situation where “there is no accountability to the board” because board leadership is appointed. He said, for example, that a member of Baker’s administration received a presentation from Panasonic, but most board members were excluded. Still, the board was asked to vote on the agreement.
“I’m hoping moving forward we’ll figure it out and figure it out soon so we can have the conversations about student achievement,” Burroughs said.
Some current and former board members said the environment has been tense.
Former board member Donna Hathaway Beck, who resigned earlier this month to spend more time with her family, said she felt like she was moving further away from the reason why she ran for the school board, which was to help students.
Eubanks said it takes time to adjust to new leadership and changes in how things are done, and other members of the board said that despite some disagreement, things are moving in the right direction. Eubanks said that in the past several months, the board has approved the teachers union contract and signed an agreement with a new charter school connected to the University of Maryland.
He said the agreement with Panasonic is “about laying the foundation” for future board work.
Board member Amber Waller (District 3), who originally came to the board in 2007 as an appointed member and was elected to the seat a year later, said she thinks the transition is working well.
“Everyone doesn’t agree, but we are figuring out a way to disagree without a big disagreement,” Waller said.
Hess said he was unfamiliar with Panasonic or its work, but he said it is not unusual for struggling school systems to use foundations for training.
“Learning to mesh personalities, deal with politics and set board norms is a challenge,” Hess said.
Representatives from the foundation will attend board meetings, assess the school system’s needs, lead retreats and help the board devise and implement its agenda.
Panasonic is not new to the Washington region. The foundation has led board retreats and planning sessions, including the work around the development of core values in Montgomery County Public Schools, according to Dana Tofig, a district spokesman. It is also working with 10 innovation schools in Montgomery, providing resources and support to help improve student achievement and narrow achievement gaps.


Archives|O'CONNELL REACHES ROME.; Cardinal Precedes Boston Pilgrims by Auto From Naples.
O'CONNELL REACHES ROME.; Cardinal Precedes Boston Pilgrims by Auto From Naples.


NEARLY 50 per cent of families in Scotland could be left struggling if cuts to working tax credits go ahead, a charity has warned.
Chancellor George Osborne has made clear that he would be looking to make significant savings in Wednesday’s Budget to the system of tax credits brought in under the previous Labour government to top up the incomes of low paid working families.
Barnardo’s Scotland is calling on the UK Government to keep what it called the “lifeline” benefit after it calculated 49.1 per cent of families in Scotland (301,600) currently use working tax credits.
Head of Policy for Barnardo’s Scotland, Mark Ballard, said: “The UK Government has promised to improve support for working families so that parents do not have to choose between feeding their families and heating their homes.
“Unfortunately, the reality is increasing numbers of working parents are struggling to stay above the breadline, and any proposed cuts to the benefits they rely on will only make things worse. Low paid parents with dependent children rely on tax credits to make up the difference between what they earn and what they need to get by”.
Working tax credits are paid to parents on low incomes who are working more than 16 hours per week. Child tax credits are paid to those with a low annual income as help with the costs of bringing up a child.
Welfare Minister Margaret Burgess said: “It is ludicrous for the UK Government to consider cutting this lifeline for thousands of families, who are already in employment, and it will have a devastating impact on children.
The comments come after Labour MP Ian Murray also warned more than half a million children in Scotland could be at risk if the Conservatives press ahead with the cuts.
Appearing on BBC1’s The Andrew Marr Show on Sunday, the Chancellor said savings would have to be made to the system of tax credits.
Mr Osborne said: “It has become a very, very expensive system. When it was introduced, we were told by Gordon Brown it was going to cost a couple of billion pounds.
Responding to Mr Murray’s comments, a UK Government spokeswoman said: “In Scotland, as across the rest of the UK, the proportion of individuals and children in relative poverty are at their lowest levels since the 1980s.
“We know that work is the best route out of poverty, with children in workless families around three times as likely to be in poverty than those in working families. That’s why, as part of our long-term economic plan, our reforms to the welfare system are focused on making work pay, while our reforms to the tax system are allowing people to keep more of what they earn.


Theresa May has publicly challenged a call by the leader of the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead for police to take action against rough sleepers in the town ahead of the royal wedding later this year.
The prime minister, who is the MP for Maidenhead, said she disagreed with comments made by Simon Dudley on Twitter and in a letter to the Thames Valley police and crime commissioner.
Dudley said “an epidemic of rough sleeping and vagrancy” in Windsor was causing concern and presenting “a beautiful town in a sadly unfavourable light”.
Asked about the remarks during a visit to a hospital in Camberley, May said: “I don’t agree with the comments that the leader of the council has made.
Thames Valley police have made it clear that they do not view legal action against rough sleepers and people begging on the streets to be effective, and have called for a multi-agency approach to find solutions to the causes of homelessness and destitution.
Homeless charities have also said that antisocial behaviour powers should not be used against people sleeping rough but local authorities should instead provide help and advice.
In a letter sent this week to the Thames Valley police and crime commissioner, Dudley suggested that the 1824 Vagrancy Act and the 2014 Antisocial Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act should be used against rough sleepers and people begging on the streets.
He also claimed that people begging for money were “marching tourists to cash points to withdraw cash”.
Charities working with the homeless said recourse to the law was not the answer. “Stigmatising or punishing [rough sleepers] is totally counterproductive,” said Greg Beales of Shelter. People sleeping on the street were “often at their lowest point, struggling with a range of complex problems and needs and they are extremely vulnerable, at risk from cold weather, illness and even violence”.
Paul Noblet of Centrepoint said: “Begging and rough sleeping are two distinct issues, and it is not helpful to conflate the two.
The Brett Foundation, a charity in Maidenhead, said it was “deeply disappointed” to hear that Dudley had “sought action against the homeless people in the royal borough, rather than seeking action to help them”.
She acknowledged that “they may not accept help at first, because of their mental health problems, their potential drug/alcohol addiction and, more often than not, their pride”.
Under the Vagrancy Act it is a criminal offence to sleep rough or beg. There were almost 1,500 convictions under the law in 2016, the Local Government Chronicle reported.
The Antisocial Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act replaced antisocial behaviour orders with criminal behaviour orders.
Crisis said that 56% of rough sleepers surveyed by the charity said the experience of enforcement orders had added to their feeling of shame at being homeless, and a third said that enforcement had just made them move elsewhere to sleep.


ShutterstockA view of warming waters, from Cape Cod.
Would you like some broiled flounder with your serving of climate apocalypse?
Well, you’re going to have to broil it yourself, because record-breaking temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean are driving the fish away from fast-heating waters toward more hospitable depths and latitudes.
The Atlantic Ocean’s surface temperatures from Maine to North Carolina broke records last year, reaching an average of 57.2°F, nearly three degrees warmer than the average of the past 30 years.
That’s according to new data published by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which says the jump in average temperature from 2011 to 2012 was the largest recorded one-year spike in the marine region, which is known as the Northeast Shelf Ecosystem. Last year’s average temperature was also the highest recorded there since measurements began 150 years ago.
That’s not too shabby if you fancy a balmy dip in the brine. But the implications for the ecosystem’s wildlife and fisheries could be profound.
The production of plankton, which forms the basis of oceanic food webs, appears to have been affected. NOAA scientists discovered that fall plankton blooms were smaller than normal in the area last year, which would be making it harder for fish and other species to find food right now. And they found that the shelf’s fish and shellfish were fleeing from their normal habitats, chased north or into deeper waters by the extraordinary heat.
Black sea bass, summer flounder, longfin squid, and butterfish were among the commonly fished species that moved northeast as the temperatures rose, NOAA says.
The record-breaking heat off the Atlantic coastline is typical of a worrisome worldwide trend. The world’s oceans are absorbing a lot of the globe’s excess heat. That’s helping keep down land temperatures in a warming world, but it threatens to throw marine ecosystems into turmoil. And scientists warn that the oceans won’t absorb so much of the extra heat forever. Eventually we’re going to broil not only the seas, but also the land.


HGTV Fixer Upper stars Chip and Joanna Gaines recently appeared on NBC's Today show to open up about their four-month-old son, Crew, and the possibility of growing their family.
"He is a gift. He really, we were talking the other day just saying how... time has just slowed down time. He has just been a gift," Joanna told the hosts after bringing Crew on set.
Crew is the Gaines' fifth child. He came as a surprise to the entire family since the last time Joanna was pregnant was eight years ago.
The couple also hinted at plans for even more children in the future.
Joanna says Chip wants Crew "to have a sister."
"I love the process of being pregnant, I love giving birth," she added.
While some say it's hard to have a large age gap between a newborn and older siblings, Joanna says "it's easy" for the Gaines family.
"They are obsessed with him and it's really one of those things where I have to fight to hold him," she said.


Snapchat today launched its media hub Discover. With bite-sized content blips that mix photos, videos, and text, it could become a millenial entertainment destination. And by mixing in pre-rolls and looping video interstitial advertising, Snapchat may have found how to turn storytelling into a serious business.
Tapping on any Discover button will open that partner’s edition, and possibly show you a pre-roll along the lines of “CNN, brought to you by BMW.” You’ll then see the first chapter of the edition. You can swipe up to explore that piece of content more, swipe down to return to the Discover screen, or swipe left to move to the new chapter in the edition. Each chapter can include photos or looping video clips with overlaid text, scrollable news articles, or videos a few minutes in length that display in a little video player.
For example, CNN’s edition features a chapter on the east coast snow storm with a clip of a newscaster in the blizzard followed by an article full of photos from the storm. Its other chapters include a video on the Ghosts Of Auschwitz, an article on Hilary Clinton’s presidential ambitions, a BMW interstitial, a video on smart drugs, an article on Obama’s trip to India, another BMW interstitial, a quick ‘Did You Know?’ about NASA, and a closing message saying to check back tomorrow.
Snapchat’s smart not to cram ads down people’s throats. Most can be skipped, so you’ll only watch ads you think are actually interesting.
All of Snapchat Discover’s content is designed to fit modern behavior patterns. These aren’t lengthy text articles, they’re quick hits of visual about compelling subjects in the zeitgeist. Discover may have taken inspiration from early third-party media play NowThisNews and its rapid fire, mainstream-friendly recaps of the day’s top issues. If you’re on the go and only have 20 seconds, Discover is designed to still entertain you. And the second you get bored, a swipe in any direction will bring you something fresh.
With plenty of celebrities hoping to tap into Snapchat’s huge audience, its in-house content Snapchannel could become a mobile era Saturday Night Live. It already has “All About That Bass” singer Meghan Trainor starring in a little bedroom skit.
The idea behind Snapchat Discover is, in some ways, the re-invention of the wheel.
Today’s social media functions as a (sometimes overflowed) filtration system that lets your friends pull content from the best producers (publishers, artists, etc.) and throw it into your feeds. Those feeds can be tailored. They can be media-rich like Facebook, constraining like Twitter, simple like Instagram or aspirational like Pinterest. In all cases, the network can sell ads against that content.
But they all rely to some measure on the user’s ability to find content to look at. People will always be sharing links and images and songs and videos and their favorite articles on various social networks, but if you aren’t their friend, if you don’t follow them, you are a loss to that network’s growth and their potential ad revenue.
Snapchat, however, has always used the contacts in your phone’s address book as a way to measure who you should be friends with. Otherwise, you had to go through a more tedious process of knowing someone’s username and typing it in. It’s relatively difficult to follow a publisher or artist to get their content or watch their story.
Snapchat Discover provides a way to do that and gives publishers and brands an awesome front-end product to present to consumers.
Where Facebook and Twitter ask you to rely on your friends and the people you follow for good content, Snapchat goes straight to the content creators themselves. Instead of discovering a cool song from a friend’s auto-posts to Facebook, get it from the artist directly on Snapchat through the Warner Music section. Rather than read a CNN story or watch an ESPN top-ten video looking through your social media feed, get it in an always-updated package directly from those publishers.
Essentially, it’s a portal. A modern day Yahoo.
The product itself is, in a word, beautiful. The ads feel a bit like pop-ups that jump out in the middle of a game or article, but that’s no different than what we experience every day on these news sites. With Snapchat Discover, it’s easier to ignore the ads with the interesting, media-intensive format and UI of the editions themselves.
The only problem, in fact, is that it’s easy to want more. The ability to choose certain publishers from a network, as if they were verified Snapchat users, would be a nice way to customize the feature in a way that feels true to the original Snapchat brand.
Snapchat Discover will give you something to look at, even if you have no friends and hate “social media stars”. Millenials are often sneered at for not caring about long-form news, or even any news. But by reformatting journalism into snackable, skippable chunks, Snapchat might be able to make news fun rather than a chore.


It sounds far-fetched, but some deer are so habituated to people that they have been seen jumping over children on the playground at Missoula, Montana’s Rattlesnake Elementary School. Still, a recent encounter shocked school employee Jenn Jencso: A deer crashed through the passenger-side window of her car, breaking the glass and landing inside the vehicle, hooves flailing.
That account is slightly dramatized, but Jencso said she did have to “push the deer back over” in order to halt her moving car. Finally, it “fell out of the car and ran away.” Jencso told the Missoulian that she likes deer, but they’re getting out of hand.
Though even feral cats don’t go in for carjacking.
“Sweetheart, this doesn’t sound right,” said Helena Byler, 78, as her husband, Gerald, kept driving their rental sedan down an increasingly rocky dirt road. The Texas couple, who were visiting Kanab, Utah, had gone out Sept. 26 just for a day trip to Lake Powell. Her husband pooh-poohed her worries: “No, it’s OK,” he reassured his wife; he was following the directions from a GPS-mapping app. But it was far from OK, reports the Denver Post: The road deteriorated and eventually a tire popped, leaving the couple stranded. They attempted to walk out, but Gerald’s leg hurt too much, and so Helena went on alone. A rancher spotted her six days later, lying on the road, and search-and-rescue found her husband. Both were dehydrated and in need of hospitalization; they’d gone almost entirely without food, and the only water they drank came from muddy puddles.
“It’s an amazing story,” Kane County Chief Deputy Allan Alldredge said.


Cher's longtime go-to fashion designer and costumer Bob Mackie has officially joined the new biomusical "The Cher Show," set to open on Broadway in the fall.
Who better, really? For more than 40 years Mackie, aka "sultan of sequins" and the "raj of rhinestone," has dressed fashion maverick Cher in some of the most iconic and flashiest showstopping outfits ever seen on stage.
"The first time I dressed her she was guest-starring with Sonny on 'The Carol Burnett Show,'" Mackie told the Daily News in an earlier interview. "I put her in a little outfit, it wasn't much of anything, a dress with a bustle in the back.
"It wasn't exactly a creative moment," he added, "but Cher and I got on and she asked for me when she and Sonny started doing their summer specials. That was 1971."
Now, 47 years later they're still going strong. The new musical, which will play a pre-Broadway run in Chicago in June, follows different stages of Cher's life.
Those three chapters will be threaded together with Cher hits like "I Got You Babe," "Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves," "Take Me Home," "Believe," and "If I Could Turn Back Time."
The show's designers will also include Christine Jones and Brett Banakis (sets), Kevin Adams (lighting) and Nevin Steinberg (sound). They join the previously announced creative team that includes director Jason Moore, book writer Rick Elice, choreographer Christopher Gattelli and music supervisor Daryl Waters.


Russia could take a lesson from the U.S. on the matter of adopting abandoned children, children's ombudsman Pavel Astakhov said Monday.
"If Americans were allowed to adopt every single child on the planet, they would. It is their mentality. That is something Russians could learn from," the ombudsman said at a press conference in St. Petersburg.
Astakhov also said St. Petersburg was seeing a worrying increase in the number of children put up for adoption and noted that 300 mothers give up their newborns on a yearly basis, Interfax reported.
"Why do you have so many abandoned children?" he said, adding, "We have to find a different answer to this question than the general 'these are the socioeconomic circumstances' answer."
Eighty-four percent of children up for adoption are so-called social orphans, meaning that the children have at least one parent that is still alive.
"We have to find out the reason for this and fix it to give the greatest number of children the right to a family," Astakhov said, adding that no healthy state should let its children be adopted by foreigners.
The ombudsman is a fierce proponent of a ban on the adoption of Russian children by U.S. families that went into force on Jan. 1.
About 60,000 Russian children have been adopted by U.S. parents since the fall of the Soviet Union.