"It's a Piece of Cake" is available for $12.99 at Minnetrista's Orchard Shop, and also from Amazon.
MUNCIE – When Brittani Gothard sits down to create art, there's not a pen or a paintbrush in sight.
"I couldn't live without these in my art," she said with a laugh, the tweezers held aloft as she momentarily tweezed empty air.
She also has paper, lots and lots of paper, filling wooden storage boxes on the work table in her airy front-room studio, and more in flat plastic boxes stacked four deep on the floor.
"All forms of paper are used," she said. "It all depends on the texture I want to achieve."
As she spoke, the attractive 26-year-old Californian's friendly dog, a Goldendoodle named Rusty, sat calmly on the floor, its rust-colored hair a soft mass of thick curly locks. A Type 1 diabetic, Gothard is training the dog as a service animal, one that paws at her when it senses she needs to attend to her blood sugar.
"I have never loved an animal so much," she said, giving her dog a warm hug.
But she also loves art, and what she makes with those scissors, tweezers, some paper punches and paper is striking.
Propped against the windows in her studio, a series of fine framed pictures made by cutting forms from paper show children riding bikes, skipping through a garden, playing basketball, learning to read and more. All of them illustrate a new children's book about overcoming obstacles that she has recently published with Laurie Lunsford. The book is called, "It's a Piece of Cake."
An excellent measure of Gothard's substantial talent might be that, while Lunsford is an artist herself, upon seeing her friend's collage-like pictures, she insisted on illustrating the book with them.
"It's amazing," Lunsford said of Gothard's work. "It's very, very unique."
A mother of two boys, Weston and Kavin, whose husband, Levi, is a Marine, the Los Angeles native moved here to be near his family when he served in Afghanistan. A cosmetologist, back home she had worked with models and also styled wardrobes.
"I was never able to have an office job," she recalled. "I always had to keep busy. I always liked to be creative, and hair did that for me."
Meanwhile, she was the daughter and granddaughter of two very "crafty," meaning craft-loving, women. Entirely self-taught, she flirted with painting, but found her true talent and interest in collage making, and even had pieces in galleries back in L.A. Upon moving here and meeting Lunsford, her goal of illustrating a children's book was quickly realized.
The allure of her collage pictures?
"I just think it's not commonly seen," Gothard said. "There's so much texture and color. Laurie couldn't see her illustrations being anything else."
Before working on the book, she also did and still does make paper collage portraits sold through her small business, Brittani Rose Paper, on ETSY. Showing off one she made of herself and her husband on their wedding day, it was nothing less than charming, revealing everything from the pleats in his pants and the tufts of gray hair at his temples to the delicate rose tattoo on her left arm.
In illustrating "It's a Piece of Cake," she sketched out her ideas, then set to the difficult work of making them.
"One page would take me about a week," Gothard said. "I was working 11-hour days on them. There's so much. The cutting is ridiculous. I have so much paper, I probably could open up a store."
As much as she has accomplished in her relatively short stay here, she and Levi will soon relocate back to her family and her California home, a move she is happily anticipating. Still, she is appreciative of her time here, and the collaboration with Lunsford it afforded her.
"She let me spread my wings and do what I wanted with it," she said, gratefully.
Contact John Carlson at (765) 213-5824.


I need to make it clear that I think a conversation around athletes and exploitation really needs to be had. This has come back to me especially with regard to football where these guys may well be risking their lives. I don't reject that conversation out of hand.
But much like I reject lazy indictments of patriotism, I (perhaps more strongly) reject lazy invocations of slaveholding. Longtime followers of this blog probably have some idea why, and maybe I'm taking it too personal. It just strikes that a sloppy comparison between labor issues in pro sports and slavery demeans both. The case for the former is not so weak that it requires the brandishing of the latter.


Wreckage lies at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, or Debre Zeit, south of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Tuesday, March 12, 2019. File photo: AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene.
ADDIS ABABA/SEATTLE - A preliminary report on an Ethiopian Airlines crash will very likely be released this week, the country's transport ministry said on Tuesday, as Boeing prepares to brief more airlines on software and training updates on the 737 MAX.


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The Franklin man whose lemon law case against luxury electric car maker Tesla drew national attention has now made a public offer to settle the case.
Robert Montgomery will dismiss his case, with prejudice, and return his white Model S if Tesla refunds $108,600 and pays attorney fees as set by a court. Montgomery will not agree to any confidentiality provision as part of any settlement.
His attorney, Vince Megna, made the settlement offer public in response to Tesla's comments about the suit on a company blog last week.
"It is disturbing that Tesla Motors, without basis in law or fact, accuses its customer of tampering with a fuse in order to gain advantage under the Wisconsin Lemon Law," Megna wrote in the "offer of settlement."
"This tactic is effective in social media where my client’s character has been brutally attacked. However, in the courtroom, meritless allegations will be replaced by Tesla’s own confirmation of vehicle problems and 66 days in the repair shop."
Megna wrote that he's used to being attacked for being an aggressive lawyer. "But when my client – a medical doctor who cared for U.S. soldiers in war – gets the same onslaught, that’s when the line is drawn. After all, all he ever asked for was a refund for a bad car."
The settlement offer says it is open until 5 p.m CST. April 22.
Proof & Hearsay was named to the 2010 ABA Journal Blawg 100, an annual lineup of the hottest titles in the legal blogosphere as chosen by the Journal's editors.
INTERACTIVE: This interactive provides a detailed look at the current term of the U.S. Supreme Court, including summaries of major cases, profiles of the justices, and legal alignments based on past decisions.


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It wasn’t until Beverly Jones was five years old that she discovered the people she had always thought were her mum and dad were really her grandparents.
It was the day she also found out that her parents had been killed in the worst ever plane crash at Gatwick Airport.
Ann and William Jones died when a passenger jet crashed onto their home - completely obliterating the building before bursting into a fireball, killing another 48 people on board the aircraft.The tragedy unfolded as the plane approached Gatwick in thick fog.
Miraculously, Ann and William’s 18-month-old baby daughter Beverly survived when two ends of her cot collapsed and shielded her from the rubble of the demolished house. She was rescued by two police officers.
The devastating crash which changed her life happened between Crawley and Horley on Sunday January 5 1969.
An error by the pilot of the aircraft, an Ariana Afghan Airlines jet, was later blamed for the crash which claimed 50 lives.
Three aircraft crew members, including the pilot, and four passengers also survived, along with Beverly.
And she revealed this week that her grandparents - Hettie and Harry Simmonds - had very nearly also died on that fateful day.
“They had been babysitting me and were going to stay the night because it was really foggy, but then decided to go home,” said Beverly.
They had been home for less than an hour when a policeman knocked on the door and told them the awful news of what had happened.
A frantic search began for the tot and she was finally saved when PC Keith Simmonds heard her crying and pulled her from the rubble of her parents’ demolished house.
“It took them about 12 hours to dig me out,” said Beverly who had a poignant reunion with PC Simmonds on her 21st birthday. And she is now set to meet up with the former police officer again on Saturday in Devon where he now lives - to mark the 50th anniversary of the tragedy.
“It will only be the second time we have met since it all happened. I don’t know what I will say,” said Beverly.
PC Simmonds, who received the Queen’s Commendation for Brave Conduct for his actions that night, remembered in a statement issued by Surrey Police on the 50th anniversary: “I could see that there was a lot of rubble that the tail was sitting on and part of the tail engine was burning very brightly.
“As I cautiously approached I saw a movement which on closer inspection was a baby’s arm. She was in a cot and two ends of the cot had collapsed inwards, forming a roof over her.
Beverly herself has no recollection of what happened that night, but she has a poignant reminder of the home she once shared with her parents. Her grandmother dug up some snowdrops from what was once the family garden and Beverly now has them in her own garden in Crawley.
And every year Beverly always marks the anniversary of the tragedy on January 5. “I always stay up to 1.37am which is when the plane hit,” she said. This year she happened to be on holiday in India with a friend, but still checked UK time to ensure she marked the event.
Now Beverly, who has received no compensation from the disaster, is hoping that a permanent memorial to her parents could be erected in a public place.
She also has her own permanent personal reminder of the agony she has gone through - she has the names of her parents and her now-late grandparents tattooed on her arms.
She also has a small plaque at Crawley’s Surrey and Sussex Crematorium which she often visits “but I would really like a public memorial,” she adds.


The trust factor could well determine the tight U.S. Senate race between Democrat Alexi Giannoulias and Republican Mark Kirk with a month left in an attack-driven campaign, a new Chicago Tribune/WGN-TV poll found.
Giannoulias held a 38 percent to 36 percent advantage over Kirk, but that result falls within the poll’s 4-percentage-point margin of error. Another 17 percent were undecided, offering ample opportunity in a contest where both sides are trying to sway voters with millions of dollars in negative TV ads assailing the character and veracity of the other guy. Two largely unknown minor-party candidates lagged behind.
A month ago, a Tribune poll found the race tied at 34 percent, with 22 percent undecided.
Since then, the two major-party contenders have tried to exploit campaign fodder each has provided the other in spades. Kirk has acknowledged embellishing parts of his military record as a Naval Reserve intelligence officer. Giannoulias was a senior loan officer at his family’s failed bank when loans were given to convicted felons.
Voters surveyed seemed to penalize Kirk more severely. Giannoulias had a narrow advantage among those polled on which Senate candidate is more honest and trustworthy — at 35 percent compared with 30 percent for Kirk. An additional 16 percent said neither candidate, and 18 percent said they didn’t know, an indicator the TV ads might be leaving some voters cold on both of them.
A potentially troubling sign for Kirk is that voters in the traditionally Republican-leaning collar counties were almost equally split between the two candidates on the trustworthiness question.
In addition, 41 percent of voters, including 42 percent of independents, said they were less likely to vote for Kirk because of his exaggerated military claims, while 59 percent said it made no difference or didn’t know enough to decide.
About one-third of voters, including the same percentage of independents, said Giannoulias’ connection to the bank and loans to convicted felons would make them less likely to vote for the Democrat. The remaining nearly two-thirds said it didn’t matter or didn’t know enough to weigh in.
Attack ads have been central in the high-stakes campaign. Giannoulias has run different TV spots driving home the message that Kirk “lies.” Kirk’s ad campaign has included commercials ripping Giannoulias on taxes and for making “risky” loans to those with ties to organized crime.
Outside interests have gotten in the game too. A group led by Karl Rove, President George W. Bush’s former political guru, is airing an animated ad accusing Giannoulias of being asleep at the wheel of an SUV as his family’s Broadway Bank imploded and the state’s Bright Start college savings program suffered losses as the economy tanked in 2008.
Expect the non-stop barrage of negative advertising to continue. The campaigns and interest groups spent more than $800,000 last week in Chicago on TV ads, and Rove’s group alone is on tap to spend $1 million this week.
Following the barrage of ads, Kirk’s esteem among voters has dropped since the last poll among voters who have heard of the five-term North Shore congressman. The new poll saw 32 percent of those surveyed with an unfavorable view of Kirk, compared with 23 percent with a favorable opinion. A month earlier, Kirk was liked by 25 percent and disliked by 19 percent.
In contrast, Giannoulias, the first-term state treasurer and one-time protege of President Barack Obama, previously had been viewed more unfavorably than favorably among those who formed an opinion of him. Now voters are equally split — 31 percent favorably and 31 percent unfavorably.
Kirk’s esteem dipped among independent voters, a key swing demographic. A month ago, only 17 percent viewed him unfavorably. Now 34 percent do. Overall, Kirk holds a 38 percent to 27 percent edge over Giannoulias among independents, similar to his margin last time, though 22 percent are undecided.
The survey also suggests that Giannoulias bounced back from problems associated with the federal takeover of his family’s troubled bank in April. The poll was conducted before a Tribune report last week that showed Giannoulias worked at the bank longer than he had previously publicly discussed in gaining a $2.7 million tax deduction from the IRS.
The nationally significant contest for the Senate seat Obama once held remains close, but the new poll reveals movement among some groups of voters.
Giannoulias further consolidated support from Democratic voters, particularly in Chicago, with three-quarters of them rallying behind his candidacy. Previously, only two-thirds of Democrats backed Giannoulias. Kirk consistently has held that level of support among Republicans.
A look at the state’s three major regions shows Giannoulias still more than doubling up Kirk in Cook County, while Kirk held a slight lead in the collar counties and a healthy margin downstate.
The survey of 600 registered likely voters conducted Sept. 24-28 also found Green Party candidate LeAlan Jones getting 5 percent support, while Libertarian candidate Mike Labno received backing from 3 percent.
We are all better voting for Mickey Mouse.


Speed cameras in Cedar Rapids.
The chiefs of police in Iowa’s two largest cities are praising a “middle of the road” approach to traffic enforcement cameras. Yesterday, a bill that would ban traffic cameras cleared its first hurdle in the senate.
Today, another bill that would allow the cameras, but direct the traffic fines to road maintenance has emerged from a subcommittee.
Senator Dan Zumbach, a Republican from Ryan, is working on the legislation.
Zumbach, who is a farmer, has driven semi loads of grain through downtown Cedar Rapids on Interstate-380 for two decades and he appreciates the speed cameras that are placed there.
Des Moines Police Chief Dana Wingert says the traffic cameras along Interstate 235 that cuts through Des Moines are placed because of design issues, too.
One senator who supports traffic cameras suggests the pending legislation could require a warning, not a fine, the first time a vehicle is caught on camera running a red light or speeding.


California is turning to solar power and innovative ways of using energy to fight the droughts, floods and fires which climate change worsens.
On California state route 14, about 70 miles north of Los Angeles, somewhere between Mojave and the ghost town of Garlock, Martin Hermann has built what he believes is a small but symbolic slice of electricity’s future: a state of the art solar farm that, for the first time, produces electricity in California more cheaply than a plant powered by fossil fuels.
Springbok 2, as the project is called, was conceived and built by his company, 8minutenergy, a nod to how long it takes for the sun’s rays to reach earth. The company is now one of the largest in the US solar-power market, with 7,500MW of solar power and more than 50,000 acres of land under development in California, Texas and the south-east, as well as south Asia. It has 700MW of power production already in operation and another 800MW to be completed by next year.
Springbok 2, with its shimmering solar modules spread over 700 acres of farmland abandoned more than two decades ago, is part of a three-phase project that, when complete, will supply about 5 per cent of Los Angeles’ electricity requirements during the summer. The 30-year power purchase agreement with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) generates energy at $58 per megawatt-hour (or $35-$38 adjusted for estimated lifetime inflation).
8minutenergy is one of thousands of companies in California, the world’s leading laboratory of technological innovation and environmental regulation, that are trying to fight climate change and the risks it poses to populations, businesses and urban centres. They are doing this both by using less energy and by changing the way it is produced.
California is the world’s sixth-largest economy, with a gross domestic product of $2.6tn, placing it above France and India. Its population of about 39m, on a par with that of Poland, makes it by far the biggest US state.
Its energy use is similarly massive. According to the California Energy Commission, the state consumed 290,567 gigawatt-hours of electricity in 2016 — more than one-third from natural gas and roughly one-quarter from renewable sources.
After years of hype and false starts, the shift to clean power has begun to accelerate at a pace that has taken the most experienced experts by surprise. Wind and solar parks are being built at unprecedented rates, threatening the business models of established power companies. Electric cars are selling fast — Bloomberg New Energy Finance predicted 1m were sold globally in 2017 — and this is driving down the price of batteries. “This clean energy disruption has just started,” says Per Lekander, a portfolio manager at London’s Lansdowne Partners hedge fund, who has tracked global energy markets for more than 25 years.
What makes Mr Hermann, who started 8minutenergy in 2009, so confident is that at the heart of today’s solar photovoltaic (PV) modules sits a semiconductor similar to the ones in today’s smartphones or laptop computers. Between now and the end of the next decade, he predicts, the price of solar power will fall by more than half.
One advantage 8minutenergy has, he says, is its software, developed in-house to manage the energy harvested from the sun’s rays. For example, using battery storage, the software can customise solutions for utilities that want to provide energy from renewables day and night — not just when the sun is shining.
One hurdle for 8minutenergy is regulation and pushback by authorities around the world. Last month, for example, President Donald Trump imposed a 30 per cent tariff on imported solar modules in what was considered a huge blow to the US renewable-energy industry.
8minutenergy has imported almost all of its solar modules, which account for about one-third of the company’s capital expenditure. At 30 per cent, the company estimates that the tariff could increase the total cost of a solar plant 9-10 per cent in the first year across the industry.
Authorities are also trying to seize the initiative in Los Angeles, home to the LADWP, the largest public utility of any US city; the second-busiest airport in the country; and a port which receives 40 per cent of containerised US imports.
Mr Garcetti has set a goal of making Los Angeles run on 100 per cent renewable energy — the first big US city to be so ambitious. By 2036, he says, Los Angeles will be two-thirds of the way there, from one-third at present. Its electricity supply could become coal-free by 2025.
California was already blazing a trail before the December 2015 Paris climate agreement — a voluntary UN accord to limit the rise in global temperature this century to two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
Pivotal to reaching those goals is California’s so-called cap-and-trade scheme, which sets limits on the volume of emissions that companies can produce, lowering them over time to oblige companies either to cut their emissions or buy credits to cover them. Companies that do reduce their emissions can then either sell credits they earn to other companies or hold them for use at a later date.
In June 2017, just as Mr Trump said that the federal government would turn its back on the Paris accord, Mr Brown signed an agreement with China, promising to work together on reducing emissions. (In January 2018, Mr Trump suggested the US could rejoin a renegotiated Paris agreement.) Without taking swift action, warned Mr Brown, “disaster still looms”.
Many others agree. The members of We Are Still In, a movement that now includes more than 2,500 local governments, colleges and companies across the US, have pledged to stick to the goals set out in the Paris accord.
There are few climate-change naysayers more prominent than Mr Trump. On the campaign trail, he often cast doubt on climate change as a threat, and in 2012 he claimed that it was a hoax invented by the Chinese.
Some critics specifically take aim at California’s efforts. Bjørn Lomborg, the Danish author and academic, argued last year in the LA Times that California’s myriad efforts to combat climate change would end up being “expensive for the state while achieving slightly more than nothing for the planet”.
So why bother at all? What are the consequences of inaction? “Longer droughts, more intense floods, potentially more and bigger wildfires,” says Julien Emile-Geay, associate professor of earth sciences at the University of Southern California. There will be “more boom and bust with the implication of escalating costs”.
Climate change is already affecting the state’s snowpack, which forms in the Sierra Nevada mountains and is the centrepiece of California’s water management. Previously, water fell as snow and stayed in the Sierra Nevada, entering the water system progressively and feeding rivers, but thanks to a warmer climate it is now getting dumped in short — but often intense — bursts of rain.
Lying a few miles south of downtown Los Angeles, Vernon is not the sort of place you would associate with clean, green living. There are no parks in the small city, which has a population of just above 100 people, and trees are hard to come by.
From above, Vernon’s five square miles of one-storey warehouses and meatpacking plants look like a grimy mosaic in multiple shades of grey — a fitting monument to how intense urbanisation has scarred the natural landscape.
But inside one of Vernon’s industrial units, Eric Ellestad is piecing together what he believes is the start of a food and energy revolution. Local Roots Farms, the company he co-founded in 2013, takes used shipping containers and, with the help of in-house technology, turns them into highly productive and self-contained farms.
Research points to traditional farming and its accompanying distribution system as a leading contributor to climate change. The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, a collaboration of 15 research centres spread around the world, has found that today’s global food system, including the production of fertiliser, storage and packing of food, is responsible for as much as one-third of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. Any attempt to limit climate change, it concluded in 2012, must include reducing agriculture’s carbon footprint.
Local Roots Farms’ shipping containers, which the company itself fits out and equips, look more like space-age labs filled with cutting-edge technology. An LED lighting system, designed by the company’s engineers, provides specific photon wavelengths that vary in intensity — a precise cocktail formulated for each of the crops inside.
Meanwhile, the company’s team of agronomists work with its software engineers to collect data on plant growth and conditions inside each container, all of which feed into the company’s cloud-based neural network and help to fine-tune algorithms tailored for individual crops. The result is a computer-controlled micro-management of everything a plant experiences during every second of its life.
“Farmers have been trying to control the environment since forever,” says Mr Ellestad. “But we now have an efficient array of tools, data and techniques to make better decisions.” He says that it is difficult to calculate the energy savings of his farms compared to traditional outdoor methods.
But the reduction is significant even when taking the single measure of transportation: studies suggest that fruit and vegetables in the US travel an average of 1,500 miles between farm and consumer; produce from his farms travels 50 miles on average. Businesses such as Local Roots Farms could contribute to the development of a much more localised — and energy-efficient — agriculture sector.
Mr Ellestad, who studied medicine before becoming an entrepreneur, claims that his “TerraFarms”, as he calls the converted shipping containers, use up to 99 per cent less water than traditional outdoor farming methods because they recycle and reuse the water in their hydroponic systems.
Moreover, each container can produce 4,000 heads of lettuce every 12 days — equivalent to the production of about four acres of farmland, according to the company. Local Roots Farms aims to provide efficient farming units that can operate in any climate and within a day or so of point-of-sale locations.
Local Roots Farms, which has raised $10m in an initial funding round and is in the middle of a second, bigger round, already has contracts with several restaurant chains in California as well as a number of other food-service companies. The company is about to move into larger facilities in LA where it will have 50 TerraFarms producing food for local clients.


__Sleeping at an airport overnight, once almost a sport for the young and short of cash, has become a lot more common lately, affecting even older and professional travelers. And a big reason is that airlines are no longer as free with complimentary hotel vouchers as they once were.
"Belt tightening by airlines over the last 18 months, and more so this year," is how Randy Petersen, editor of the online magazine InsideFlyer and the frequent-flier Web site FlyerTalk.com, explains it.
"They have to look at everything they spend a penny on," Mr. Petersen said. And because flights are fuller, he added, "they're not just dealing with a few passengers."
I almost had to sleep in the Los Angeles airport a few months ago. I missed my connection to Reno, and there were no more flights until the next morning. I debated driving--which was a no because it was too far. I saw people in a similar situation who opted to lay their heads on a metal armrest of a dirty chair. Passed on that idea as well. The thought of putting my mouth remotely close to the floor of an airport was so wrong, I was definitely going to a hotel.
The airline--I don't remember which one--handed me a phone number. It was a booking agency that would get me a decent rate at an airport hotel that had two things: availability and some sort of deal with the agency I was calling. The rate was roughly $110 and the hotel was a Holiday Inn. I took the shuttle to the Marriott and paid $150 for a room. I passed on the savings because I wanted the Marriott points.
It's no secret. The act of traveling is currently INSANE. I combat travel anxiety by getting to the airport with more than enough time to catch my plane (always at least two hours before flight time). I'm a member of American Airlines' Admiral's Club ($350 per year) to escape the general clutter of the terminal. This is where I get free Internet access, a TV, reading material, snacks, coffee, juice and water. Some even have a shower, but I wouldn't go there unless I smelled like a petting zoo.
I was just talking with some colleagues--not only is traveling tough on the consumer, but you may have noticed, morale of airline employees is dragging along the bottom of the sea. I can tune out the occasional impolite flight attendant because I have noise-reduction headphones and a power cord to my computer that plugs into the seat of the plane. I can lose myself in music, work or a DVD. Not to mention, we have such little contact with attendants now; they won't help with luggage and I don't want to buy the giant blue tube of the chips they're selling.
I do hope the maintenance crews and the pilots are paid properly. They're the critical pieces of the travel operation, and I feel safer thinking they're happy and enthusiastic about their jobs.
If I were in charge I would eliminate middle seats. They're a flawed concept, and no matter who sits in them, there's an unhappy traveler. I'd like to see only rows of two, TVs on the back of every seat--not just on JetBlue. This way you don't have to pray the pilot is a golf fan in order to get an update during the Monday playoff of the U.S. Open between Tiger and Rocco.
My favorite airports are the ones that get your bags to the baggage claim before you get there to claim them. Airports in Savannah, Ga. and Wilmington, N.C. are good at this. JFK is not. I've waited as long as an hour before the little red siren went off, indicating the bags were on their way. My internal red light was going off after 20 minutes.
Any airport where you don't have to take a shuttle from the baggage claim to the rental-car facility gets a huge plus in my book (Avis is across the street from baggage claim at Orlando's airport).
You've gotta love the Jacksonville airport for its putting green, a great place to settle some bets (putters and balls are provided).
If I'm traveling to the Bay Area, it's Oakland or San Jose--and no more San Francisco, which is one of my least favorite airports. SFO has a rail system to get you to your rental car, which is fine, but you need a mule and a sherpa to get you and your luggage to the train from the baggage claim, and another 30 minutes to get to the Avis counter.
I hate the inconsistency that comes with travel. In most airports, you're required to check in 30 minutes before your domestic flight. If you happen to be running late in Miami, you should know their cutoff time is 45 minutes. I learned the hard way.
Here's a list of the best airports by worldairportawards.com (based on 8.2 million questionnaires completed by passengers over a 10-month time period from 2007 to 2008).Hong Kong has won seven out of the last 10 years. San Francisco, Denver, Dallas and Atlanta were in the top 25, but no U.S.-based airport was in the top 10.
I'll leave the terminal tent concept to the weary traveler in the picture above. I don't like to camp, and I don't sleep in airports.


The much anticipated Start menu returns in Windows 10, which will be a huge relief for PC desktop and laptop users. The GUI in this technical preview release looks incredibly clean. I am using Build 9841 and Microsoft has preinstalled a range of apps including Weather, Travel, Maps, News etc, all familiar to Windows 8 users. Some appear as live tiles on the right side of the Start menu. There's Skype, and traditional Windows 7-style shortcuts for Pictures and Documents folders. You also get Maintenance,Windows Accessories, Windows Ease of Access and Windows System folders.


James May supporting the campaign.
A trio of famous faces have added their weight to a terminally-ill doctor’s patient empowerment campaign.
Former Top Gear hosts Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May have been pictured holding up personalised #hellomynameis signs in a nod to Dr Kate Granger from East Ardsley.
Amid their busy schedule filming for the upcoming Amazon series The Grand Tour, Clarkson tweeted images of him and his co-hosts showing their support for the campaign.
Dr Granger launched the campaign to encourage medical workers to introduce themselves after her own experiences as a patient.
The consultant, who works at Wakefield’s Pinderfields Hospital, was diagnosed with a rare type of sarcoma which attacks the tissue supporting the internal organs in 2011.
Some 400,000 doctors, nurses, therapists, receptionists and porters across 90 organisations are now backing the drive that has also received high-profile support from a number of celebrities.
The success of the campaign, which has been backed by Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, saw her pick up the Special Achievement Award at the BMJ Awards in London earlier this year.
In her blog, she explains that #hellomynameis came about after she made the “stark observation” that many staff failed to introduce themselves to patients.
For further information visit drkategranger.wordpress.com.


I am struggling to find a candidate for president who will move this country forward and end the divisive politics and gridlock of the last 40 years.
It is time for leadership that inspires us, that is open and honest, and earns our respect.
One candidate who troubles me is Hillary Clinton. Most of the people I know, male and female, vehemently oppose her election. A vote for Hillary will get you two people for one.
Unfortunately, that second person is Bill Clinton.
All of the baggage of the 1990s moves back into the White House — the endless investigations, the unscrupulous donors and influence, Bill’s escapades, and Washington politics as usual.
The winning candidate from either party must have solid support from the party base, a majority of independents and a sizable block of votes from the opposing party.
Honestly, Bill and Hillary can’t unite these groups to be elected.


Professor Pat Utomi is an economist and a politician. He joined LBS in 1994 as a senior faculty member and was at various times Director of School Development, Director of the Centre for Applied Economics and a member of the management team of the school. In this interview, Utomi speaks on the on-going National Conference and the economy among other issues.
One of the biggest issues in the country today is the National Conference. We have optimists concerning the conference. We also have pessimists. There are those who are neither here nor there. Where do you stand?
I have made it part of business to keep challenging us about what our consciousness should be. In recent times, we have begun to focus on two sets of activities to deal with this matter. The first has to do with the hope that was raised that a national dialogue could result in a certain understanding of what has kept us back and how we could look at the future so that we could make the progress that is deservedly ours given the endowment of our country.
In that regard, I was the convener of the National Summit Group which began the formal canvassing for National Conference. But I am deeply sad at what came to be known as the National Conference. It’s a tragedy for Nigeria that we ended up with how the body was constituted.
It is incapable of engaging the future; it is talk on the past and the personal quarrels of yesterday. It lacks the capacity, in terms of many of the people who are there and in terms of their endowment not because they are good or bad people, to engage the future. And so, many people are now dismissing the conference as a waste of good time, good money and all kinds of motives are now being imputed on how it was constituted, why it was constituted, and all of that.
That’s far from what we had in mind, I think there’s an obsession, given the place many of the members are coming from, with perhaps issues of structure and power completely oriented by several decades of primordial politics, the politics of sharing. So how do we share better, how do we share more effectively?
Whereas I think the biggest things that challenge Nigeria today are the issues of national character, rethinking the vision of ourselves, our values and indignity, corruption. Structure matters but, in the opinion of some of us, it comes a very distant place compared to some of the things that hold Nigeria down and we are going to end up with this obsession of sharing power and all of that with a dead document.
Interestingly, in the last two weeks, I have received calls from people who try to hold some of us accountable for pushing for this conference. And we are actually in deep consultations with professional bodies, even with some ethnic nationality groups, especially with the youth groups because young people were significantly marginalized in the process of constituting a group to look at the future. And these are very smart young people. People think when you say youth groups; you’re talking about ‘area boys’, that’s not what youth groups are. Indeed if there’s anything anybody understands about this economy, the new growth in this economy is significantly driven by those who are about 30 years old without us being aware of it.
In other words, nothing good is likely to come out of the conference.
When you exclude that kind of people from discussing the future; then you don’t understand the future that is coming. And this is what this conference has fundamentally done and so we are in consultation with all these groups. There just might be an alternative National Conference that can engage the problems of Nigeria.
I have always thought of Delta as the new UAE where, literally, you can create a Dubai, an Abu Dhabi and all of that. Yet it remains ravished with poverty in the midst of so much. Of course, there have been talks on ‘Delta Beyond Oil’, that oil can bring savings that can help to advance other sectors the way Dubai is.
I am particularity pained because I have been a part of a process of looking at Delta’s prospects.
Former Governor James Ibori constituted a think-tank on Delta State development chaired by Deacon Gamaliel Onosode. I was a part of that think-tank; we marked Delta State. For those who might have followed my writings on matters of political economy, factor endowment, driven value change into global market, those are the basics to grow Nigeria. That is, mark the endowment of Nigeria at the national level. And this has been well marked in all the works of the Delta think-tank on Vision 2025.
But I don’t see change principally being developed to create the opportunity for growth. And so we talk so much, whether in the civil society or in government, but the problem is how do we walk our talks; what can we do to begin to translate our public or private resources, because there are so many things you can do even with private resources? Let us look at the example of the Second Niger Bridge.
Any time somebody wants to run for election, he will promise to build the bridge. But what is the big deal about a bridge across the Niger? (Governor) Fashola (of Lagos State) built one from Ikoyi to Lekki that is not shorter than the Niger Bridge. We can have three new bridges across the Niger built by the private sector and they will be profitable. I frequently cross from Onitsha to Asaba which is now a nightmare, there are people who live in Asaba and are actually working in Onitsha. So it is like crossing a creek bridge from Onitsha to Asaba with only one bridge. And yet we play football with something which simple creative application of the mind can solve.
I can guarantee anybody who wants to try me that three Niger bridges are easy to formulate and execute.
Look at the Australian bank which has become the greatest financier of infrastructure in the world, how they built that expertise; we have the money; the will and all we need to do to show we are serious, trust worthy and will follow laws. This is why a National Conference is not just about how many states and federating units do we have or whether we adopt a British type Westminster parliamentary model or the presidential system; it is national character that can make it easy for an Australian bank to think of coming to build a bridge across the Niger knowing that it will not have the problem of a governor coming it two years’ time to say ‘I cancel the deal’ which is what happens routinely in our country.
What kind of conference would you have loved to see?
The conference should be building national consensus, talking about acceptable norms. To return to Delta, a couple of weeks ago I talked about this movement for a new Delta; I said that one of the easiest ways to characterize a new Delta is a programme that I called ‘Aregbe Times 20’. What does ‘Aregbe Times 20’ mean? There was a lot of talk on how many pupils/students were in school in Osun State because they get free lunch. You can give breakfast and lunch in a state like Delta and not encounter any challenge finding the resources to execute it. If any progress must take place, there are two things government must do: education and healthcare. People who are well and educated will create their future. And so when you look at what (Governor) Aregbesola is doing, you will see it translate, in few years, into a different kind of Osun State. It is not by accident that today we keep talking about the advantage that the South-west has because of Chief Awolowo’s policy on education in the 50s.
I don’t want to talk about how much I have tried to push these issues privately with people who have been in the leadership in Delta State over the couples of years, that it is not a big deal; you stimulate the agricultural economy of the state by simply collaborating with farmers who will provide the food that will feed the children to attract more children to school; and then ensure that you give them the best possible education and training and retraining for teachers by using remote teaching possibilities that technology made possible to ensure that the best education get to kids across the state. You can also create this competitive economy where you can create a new city not far from Bomadi that will grow not like Abuja; if I have my may, I will bomb Abuja out of existence because it is a major part of Nigeria’s problem.
That point I am making is that, nearly 39 per cent of the federal revenue goes to Abuja. North-east takes1.6 per cent of the revenue and you are talking about Boko Haram, why will it not happen? South-east of Nigeria 2 point something per cent; so why won’t you have kidnapping in there?
A federal administrative capital does not grow the way Abuja has grown. It is because of the huge channeling of resources into Abuja for the comfort of the administrative elite that you are creating exactly those conditions that Robert Capland talked about in his anticipation of the West Africa of the future.
But if, organically, you take somewhere around Bomadi and create a base on its factor endowment, the hydro carbon value chain that goes into the global economy; go to another part of Delta like Koko and take an agro allied endowment, say rubber. You create an industry for it through which you generate employment and you take the resources available there into the global economy, invest in all the skills of people getting practical skills through vocational skill and all of that by working within that industrial park. You go to somewhere around Iseluku, create another city that is also based on factor endowment on agriculture into global value chain, you will find Abu Dhabi and Dubai emerge organically.
Any serious minded person can create a full employment economy in a state like Delta. The whole essence of the Bretton Wood institutions after World War Two was to attain a full employment status for the global economy.
Leaders of the free world got together and said, ‘Let us create institutions that will ensure that we are not exporting problems from one economy into another and not exporting inflation and that trade continues to flow’. The thinking gave birth to the IMF, the World Bank and of course their subsidiaries.
And so the idea of a full economy is not a utopian idea. Delta State has the endowment to ensure that everybody, over 21, who has no job is immediately put to work, paid some stipend and, where he or she has no re skill, be programmed and deskilled within a short period of time and then you can create an economy that can become a driver for the growth of the rest of Nigerians.
Our failure as a people is to say why can’t we get our society to do this that is possible? It is something that all of us will be judged one day. And this is the trouble that I have put myself to in the last two years at different levels. And, sometimes, some people think I am crazy, but I am looking at how I will be judged.
My hope is that this movement for a new Delta State will bring in people from all sides of the divide, political, ethnic and wherever, because the strength of Delta is in its diversity. And that through this movement, we can put a game plan in place that is clear. I have an inclination that is left of the political center. In terms of political affiliation, I am a member of APC and I say it very clearly that I am a part of the making of the APC manifesto which is people-centered, and the ideal is that if you take that kind of people-centered approach, you will renew this country and the coming anarchy may be averted. But not to have that kind of leadership orientation, we will thoroughly experience the anarchy that Capland said is coming to Africa.
After Capland finished his analysis, he said that a point where there is a significant convergence of this malfunction and cleavages is a city in Nigeria call Jos. My friend, who was a security chief at a time, when I gave him the book to read, finished reading on a certain Saturday morning, called and said, “I want to find this man called Robert Capland”. Of course Capland is not a magician, he is not a prophet; he is just an intelligent person who inclined himself with a particular trend he saw in a part of the world the way he did and predicted what we are now experiencing. I am sad that many Nigerians have not come into the light that we are in a major war.
More people die in Nigeria everyday than in Syria, than those that die in major civil wars of the world and we talk about war in Syria but think we just have a small problem in Nigeria; what we have in Nigeria is not a small problem because Nigeria is at war, a major war. And if we don’t rise to intervene on the side of the poor, it will consume us all.
The economy is still down despite the efforts of government to revive it. How do we get it right?
Property right constitutes a major part of the constitutional arrangement that makes an economy advance. Now, until the people have a philosophical understanding of what property right means, that country is going to work very hard to make major progress.
For a long time, I was in a position to be called and I still get called by people who want to invest in Nigeria. Before IBM decided to re-enter Nigeria, I spent time with their executives around the world. As the discussion went on, on whether they will be coming to Nigeria with any significant strength, I was contacted from London, Washington and all of the calls I received were laced with skepticism about the system and I kept on persuading them on why they couldn’t afford not to be in Nigeria.
People are scared about Nigeria because there is impunity, and property rights are not certain. Later IBM decided to come into Nigeria, and also GE. So many came to me and said if they have any trade dispute in court, they will never get a resolution. On the basis of this, their thinking is, ‘I would rather go to a place where the challenges of doing business are lower and there is a higher certainty’. Because of this, I wrote a book in 1988, entitled: ‘Managing uncertainty; competition and strategy in emerging economies’. Because of the issues of institutions and economic performance, properties rights are so fundamental and that is why people don’t understand when some of us raise some fundamental issues.
For instance, when this banking thing came, it was a grievous infringement on people’s property rights. And what did the media do? They were cheering, saying “catch those thieves” but Vanguard was exceptional because it was the paper that projected the plan and that it was a conspiracy to do what was done in the banking industry.
This famous reform has set Nigeria back by 20 years, I assure you. Peoples’ banks were stolen to their face. But we celebrated the deception and created one more reason people should not invest in Nigeria because property rights are violated. A Peruvian economist wrote this book on the mystery of capital and the essence of his thesis is that the problem between the rich and the poor is that the poor has assets but it is dead capital, not fundable and not translatable into capital.
The intro of these article partly reads before that Professor Pat Utomi "co-founded the Lagos Business School, now Pan African University…"
It has been corrected that Professor Pat Utomi was NOT a co-founder of the Lagos Business School. Instead he joined LBS in 1994 as a senior faculty member and was at various times Director of School Development, Director of the Centre for Applied Economics and a member of the management team of the school. He left voluntarily in 2007 to pursue his interest in serving the country through participation in politics.
Illusions are built on fantasies. Illusions are the creations of a mind that is steeped in a reality that does not exist. Now, what drives a mind to begin to concoct illusions?


A woman who was found dead in her driveway on the south side of Great Falls last week has been identified by authorities.
A woman who was found dead in her driveway on the south side of Great Falls last week has been identified by the Cascade County Sheriff’s Office.
Lisa Marie Doty, 48, was found face down in her driveway on the 1600 block of 30th Avenue South Saturday morning after likely succumbing to the exposure in frigid temperatures, according to a media release.
An investigation by the sheriff’s office found that Doty was driving home around midnight Saturday morning when she slid off the road and got stuck in a ditch. After unsuccessfully trying to dig her vehicle out of the snow, a passerby gave Doty a ride to her house about five blocks away and left.
Doty reportedly had dropped her keys near her vehicle and attempted to break a window to enter her home when she was unable to unlock the door.
Doty was found around 11:30 a.m. on Saturday by another passerby. Temperatures dropped as low as 14 degrees below zero that morning, and she was not dressed for the weather. An autopsy showed that exposure was likely a contributing factor as well as alcohol, according to the sheriff’s office.
Doty’s death is still under investigation.
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"SA," in this case, meaning Software Assurance, not South American, South African or Stunningly Awesome. Microsoft has acquired some IP from partner Covast as part of this deal. Check out the details here.


William Wayne Webster passed peacefully away on Jan. 15, 2019, at Pacifica Senior Living in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. “Bill” was born on Feb. 10, 1930, to Barbara and Thomas Webster in Tacoma, Wash.
Bill graduated from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, with a law degree. At the university, Bill met his wife, Diana “Dea” Schade Webster. Bill and Dea were married in 1955, and they moved to Benton, Ark., where Bill was employed by ALCOA and was a member of the National Guard.
Bill worked in personnel for ALCOA and was transferred every three years to ALCOA plants across the country. He ended his 30-year career with ALCOA at their headquarters in Pittsburgh, Pa.
After retiring, Bill and Dea moved to Sterling, Va., to be closer to their daughter, Vicky Webster Rosser, and her family. When Dea passed away in 2015, Bill came to Coeur d’Alene to be closer to his daughter, Kathy Webster Cooper, and her family.
Bill was preceded in death by his wife, Dea; his daughter; Vicky; his siblings, Tom, Reigh and Barbara; and his parents, Thomas C. and Barbara Webster.
He is survived by his daughter, Kathy (Phil) Cooper; son, David Webster; son-in-law, Rich Rosser and grandchildren, Dan Cooper, Mike Cooper, Ben Cooper, Cassie Rosser and Drew (Monica) Rosser.
A celebration of life will take place this summer at Priest Lake.


The film, which is a sequel to the first anthology film, Genius Party, had its world premiere in Washington D.C. back in February at the Kennedy Center’s Japan! Culture + Hyper Culture festival. A second trailer has popped up online, but we prefer the first trailer, which is two minutes longer, showcases these artists’ eclectic styles, and packs enough whoa factor to make James Franco’s face melt.


CABARRUS COUNTY, NC (WBTV) - From Cabarrus County: You have a cart for trash and a cart for recyclables, but what should you do with household hazardous materials? And what is a household hazardous material?
Cabarrus County wants residents to know about materials that should never end up in trash or recycling bins. These include nail polish, oven cleaner, paint, pesticides, bathroom and kitchen cleaners, fluorescent bulbs, brake fluid, gas and other chemicals.
Instead, take them to the Cabarrus County Household Hazardous Waste Facility at 246 General Services Drive in Concord (off Hwy 49 near Hwy 601). The facility provides a safe place to dispose of materials that can hurt the environment and damage the health of humans and animals when handled improperly.
In addition to hazardous materials, the facility accepts recycling, TVs and other electronics and batteries. Residents can also make an appointment to browse the paint room and take paint cans at no charge.
The Cabarrus County Household Hazardous Waste Facility is open Mondays through Fridays from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. However, household hazardous materials are ONLY accepted on the first Wednesday of each month from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. and third Saturday of each month from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. The next collection day is Saturday, February 16.
Get quick access to sorting questions with CARTology, an online, app-based resource offered by Cabarrus County, Concord and Kannapolis. CARTology features a Waste Wizard, which provides information on how materials can be reused, recycled, composted or disposed of in the community. Users in Concord, Kannapolis and unincorporated areas of Cabarrus County can also use the tool to access their household’s waste collection calendar and register for reminders.
2. Download the new mobile app, CabConKan CARTology, for Apple or Android devices. Just search for CARTology in the App Store (iOS) or Google Play Store (Android). From the app, you can learn how to dispose of items, view your collection calendar and receive notifications.
As part of its Government 101 series, Cabarrus County plans to hold a daylong interactive workshop on recycling and solid waste on May 22 at the Government Center in Concord. To register for the free event, email outreach@cabarruscounty.us or call 704-920-2336.
For more information or to make a paint swap appointment at the Cabarrus County Household Hazardous Waste Facility, call 704-920-3209 or visit cabarruscounty.us.


ISTANBUL -- The search for Paris terror suspect Hayat Boumeddiene is focused far beyond France's borders. Surveillance cameras captured Boumeddiene entering Turkey through an Istanbul airport on Friday, Jan.2, a week before her partner - Amedy Coulibaly - killed four hostages in a Kosher grocery store in Paris.
The Turkish authorities said Monday that they were not warned about Boumeddiene by the French government. So they stamped her passport, and let her into the country.
And she wasn't alone. In the surveillance video you can see a man who Turkish officials named as 23-year-old Mahdi Sabri Belhoucine - another French citizen.
Photographs of Hayat Boumeddiene show her transformation from the daughter of a French delivery driver to an armed Islamic extremist.
Turkish authorities believe after arriving in Istanbul, Boumeddiene stayed two nights in a hotel. After she left Istanbul, Boumeddiene spent four days in another city close to the Syrian border before crossing into the war zone on Thursday, according to Turkish officials.
The same day her partner, Coulibaly, shot and killed a French policewoman. He attacked the Kosher grocery store the following day, and the French authorities announced they were searching for Boumeddiene.
But by then, it was too late. Phone records confirmed that the woman who may have vital information about terror networks in Europe was already in Syria.
There is no European no-fly list that would have prevented Boumeddiene from traveling from Paris to Madrid and eventually onto Istanbul. If the French police had been looking for Boumeddiene, that would have been flagged to the Spanish but they weren't when she left France before the attacks took place.
One Turkish official told us that his government is furious that the French did not flag Boumeddiene as a possible extremist. But U.S. officials say it's normal to scale back close surveillance of suspects who are deemed less important.


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Actor Sherman Hemsley, who became a TV icon in the 1970s, died today at 74, ET has learned.
Police report that the Golden Globe nominee, perhaps best known for his role as George Jefferson, passed away at his home in El Paso, Texas.
Hemsley broke into television in 1973, appearing on All in the Family. His character's popularity earned him his own spinoff, The Jeffersons.
During its 10-year run, the program broke barriers as the first prime time show to star an upscale African-American couple. The show was also ahead of its time in casting the first interracial couple on a major sitcom.
After The Jeffersons, Hemsley continued to score choice roles, including guest spots on Family Matters, Martin, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and, most recently, Tyler Perry's House of Payne.


MANILA (REUTERS) - Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte on Wednesday (Nov 15) heaped praise on visiting Chinese Premier Li Keqiang for what he said was China's "critical" role in expediting the end of a five-month war with Islamist insurgents in a Philippine town.
Mr Duterte credited China with supplying what he said was the rifle that on Oct 16 killed Islamic State in Iraq and Syria's (ISIS) regional point man, Isnilon Hapilon, and said he would present that weapon to China as a mark of appreciation for its help in the war in Marawi City.
"I am going to return to you the rifle so that the Chinese people would know, it was critical, it is a symbol of the critical help," Mr Duterte told Mr Li, the first Chinese premier to visit the Philippines in a decade.
There are doubts, however, about if it really was a Chinese sniper rifle that killed Hapilon, and uncertainty about whether the military has used any of the 6,100 guns Beijing has donated since June.
The Philippine defence minister recently said all those weapons were given to the police.
Hapilon was killed by members of the 8th Scout Ranger Company. "Scout Ranger Books", a Facebook page of one of the ranger officers, gave a blow-by-blow account of the operation and said the shot that killed Hapilon came from a gun mounted on an armoured vehicle.
Members of the unit also told media the shot came from a fixed weapon controlled remotely. Such weapons are typically 50-calibre machine guns.
"The arms you gave us, helped abbreviate, shorten the military fight there," Mr Duterte said.
On Friday, he said something similar to Russian President Vladimir Putin. He told him Russia had "helped us turn the tide and to shorten the war" by supplying weapons that Philippine soldiers used to kill militant snipers in Marawi.
The Russian arms were actually delivered two days after military operations were declared over.
The conflict was the biggest and longest battle in the Philippines since World War Two. More than 1,000 people, most of them rebel gunmen, were killed and 353,000 were displaced.
Mr Duterte told Mr Li China's help came at "the crucial moment when we needed most and there was nobody to help us at that time".
His remarks may not sit well with the United States and Australia, which from the early stages of the conflict were providing technical support to Philippine forces, including surveillance aircraft to pinpoint locations of militants.
Mr Li said China would provide 150 million yuan (S$30.7 million) to help with reconstruction in Marawi. He praised Mr Duterte for last year putting aside festering disputes with China and visiting Beijing, a trip he said was an "ice-breaker".
Philippine security analyst Renato De Castro said the information Mr Duterte gave to Mr Li was inaccurate, but consistent with his policy of "total appeasement" of China.
"I'm really surprised, I don't know whether it's flattery or an outright lie," he told news channel ANC.


Morris, 47, who moved to Ohio County in 2000, stated that the contract on the space was up and Arby’s placed a bid to keep ownership of the building, but that it was denied by the state. The Kentucky Department of Transportation was unable to be reached Saturday night for a comment.
The Beaver Dam rest stop, located at 675 Western Kentucky Parkway — about a mile west of the Natcher Parkway Interchange — has serviced thousands of motorists over the years as a popular stop for gasoline, snacks and a restroom break along the 137-mile stretch of parkway.
Many travelers took to social media to express their displeasure over the news. There is no word yet on how the space will be utilized following Sunday’s closure.


Despite the winter cold that's arrived to welcome 2015, the New Year is a great time to discover new running inspiration. Outline some running goals for the year, put on your warmest gear and keep on trekking. The Chicago area has several great races and challenges to keep you training throughout chilly January.
New Year's Day 5K -- There's no better way to begin the New Year than by running a 5K on day one. In the 30th annual New Year's Day 5K, participants can choose from a timed 5K, a 5K fun run or a 5K walk. In order to accommodate late-night New Year's Eve plans, the race doesn't begin until 11 a.m. The course runs through Lincoln Park and begins at Stockton Drive and LaSalle. A portion of the proceeds will go to the non-profit Lake View Citizens Council, and the registration cost is $35 on race day.
Lifetime Indoor Triathlon -- For those who need the extra training for triathlons, or for those who simply don't want to run outside, Lifetime has organized eight indoor triathlon events in the Chicago area in January. Participants will spend 10 minutes swimming, 30 minutes biking and 20 minutes running on a treadmill. Register for a triathlon in Algonquin, Bloomingdale, Burr Ridge, Orland Park, Schaumburg, Vernon Hills or Warrenville. The Old Orchard triathlon is already sold out.
Chicago Polar Dash -- Run a 15-mile, 10K, 5K or 1,500-meter race in the Polar Dash, or run three of those races and complete the "Yeti Challenge." The Polar Dash is a race for serious winter runners, and organizers are warning participants to dress warmly and be prepared for any kind of winter weather. The different races are scattered to accommodate the Yeti Challengers. The 1,500-meter race starts at 8:45 a.m., the 15-miler at 9 a.m., the 10K at 9:45 a.m. and the 5K at 11:45 a.m. All runners will receive penguin hats and hot chocolate at the finish.
F^3 Lake Half Marathon -- REM-Fit is presenting a wintertime half marathon at Soldier Field for those training for big spring races. All runners will receive a beanie hat and gloves to keep them warm as well as a bottle opener/medal when they finish. The race is followed by a party in the United Club at Soldier Field. The event starts at 10 a.m.
Aon Step Up for Kids -- Forget about running on Chicago's mostly flat streets for a day, and take part in the 18th annual stair-climbing challenge at the Aon Center. Participants will climb 80 floors to the top of the building to benefit Lurie Children's Hospital. The event is also a fundraising challenge for participants who will raise money prior to the event.


(KGTV) - The American Red Cross San Diego/Imperial Counties and Humane Society are providing assistance to East County residents and animals affected by the West Fire in Alpine.
A Red Cross canteen was deployed to Viejas to provide snacks and beverages to evacuees. Services will also include a safe and clean place to stay, emotional support, health services, and comfort kits with personal hygiene items.
Officials opened a Red Cross shelter at Los Coches Middle School, 9669 Dunbar Lane, at approximately 4 p.m. Friday. A pet shelter run by the San Diego Humane Society is also at the site for evacuees.
By about 6 p.m., the two shelters housed eight families, six dogs, six cats and four birds.
The Humane Society is accepting donations here . To donate to the San Diego Red Cross, click here .


The Food & Drug Administration has test results from a probable cancer-causing chemical that’s been popping up in everyday foods like breakfast cereals and granola bars – but is withholding the results, says Sen. Chuck Schumer.
“The federal government is, in fact, investigating this chemical,” Schumer said Sunday, demanding the FDA share the results.
The chemical — called glyphosate and sold to farmers and school ground keepers by Monsanto as a weed killer called Roundup – has been on the FDA’s radar for at least two years, he said.
Scientists with the Environmental Working Group last week said they found unacceptably high traces of the herbicide in virtually every oat cereal, oatmeal and granola bars for sale in the United States.
Schumer said Freedom of Information requests to the FDA revealed the agency has been testing food samples for the weed killer, but is sitting on the results.
In 2016, an FDA spokesman also confirmed the agency study of the chemical to media.
Schumer said Americans shouldn’t have to wait any longer for the results.
“I’m here today to ask them to provide us all with an update on their work so that concerned parents and consumers can get the answers they seek,” he said.


To create a sectional sofa look, you must minimize the arms.
The ideal situation is a one-armed or armless sofa and love seat, which allow you to create a matching sectional grouping, with an ottoman at one end of the sofa that elongates one side. The opposing love seat forms a U-shaped seating cluster. But even with one-armed sofas and love seats that are designed to serve as sectional furniture, an ottoman at the same height and with similar style characteristics fills the space between the sofa and love seat, linking the pieces to create a unified space.
When a sofa and love seat are not designed to serve as sectional furniture, ottomans help to establish a sectional look. An oversized sofa with arms pairs with an ottoman to provide a sectional look, particularly if the ottoman is the same height as the sofa and has a similar composition, including matching fabric, such as an umber sofa and love seat with an umber ottoman. Matching upholstery unifies the elements of a faux sectional grouping via color, and large, strategically placed pillows help disguise the arms.
If your sofa and love seat are smaller and more tailored, the ottoman solution still applies, including for sofas with exposed legs and narrow arms. Two small ottomans create a U-shaped space, especially when the sofa and love seat arms touch at one side, providing room to insert a third, matching, exposed-leg ottoman at the same height in the groove between the sofa and love seat to close the space from behind. From the front, on opposing sides, two more matching ottomans form an intimate cluster.
Create a causal, multicolor, sectional-style grouping by pairing a matching sofa and love seat with contrasting ottomans in a complementary hue, such as a plum-gray sofa and love seat with mustard ottoman. Place a mustard ottoman of the same height in the space in between the love seat and sofa, making sure the ottoman's leg style echoes the legs of the sofa and love seat; then add a matching ottoman at the end of the sofa's front cushion, peppering the faux sectional grouping with mustard pillows and accents in grape and lemon yellow.
, Anya. "How to Arrange a Sofa and Love Seat Into Sectional Furniture." Home Guides | SF Gate, http://homeguides.sfgate.com/arrange-sofa-love-seat-sectional-furniture-105995.html. 18 September 2015.


In many a company, you’ve heard the talk about unconscious bias, and likely attended trainings and so forth, but are these efforts making a real difference the way we see and treat each other?
In Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do, Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt reveals the latest research and data, much of it her own, on racial bias and how it impacts us all every day. A Stanford social psychologist and MacArthur “Genius” award recipient, she is one of the world’s leading experts on racial bias.
Eberhardt works with several major police departments, helping them examine and address racial bias in their departments. It’s vital work when people are harassed, beaten, or even killed during something that should be a routine stop.
As a resident of Silicon Valley, Eberhardt is also in a prime position to observe how tech companies deal with bias, whether in their platform, product, or during the hiring process.
What she’s found is that we all have the potential for bias, as it’s hardwired into our brains thanks to societal stereotypes. What we can do with this science is retrain our brains and better identify when we’re being driven by bias — not logic — so we can slow down and make better, fact-based, humane decisions.
Eberhardt spoke with GeekWire about her book and her work with tech companies.
Let’s talk about bias in hiring, especially in tech. What can hiring managers do to identify even small signs of bias in the process?
There are lots of things we have at our disposal to manage the potential for bias, and one of those things is just slowing down. When people are looking over potential applicants, some data suggests that when resumes come in, the people hiring look at it for six seconds on average. Slowing people down is a good thing. You want to slow people down so they don’t fall back on automatic associations and act without thinking things through.
The other thing is to have people focus on using objective standards rather than subjective standards to evaluate others. When using objective standards, there’s a score, number, or percentage of sales that’s a hard number and it’s the same metric across the board. When you have subjective standards, things can get murky, like whether the person’s a team player, where it’s hard to evaluate. You have to be wary there.
The other huge thing is accountability, so if you have metrics in place where you can keep track of how you’re doing, looking at those things like racial or gender disparities, and if there are things you can do that impact that. You can look back and see if it is affecting your bottom line. That is huge. You want to track how you’re doing, develop metrics to track that and look at the numbers.
You have worked with companies like Nextdoor and Airbnb to help them identify and rid their systems of bias and racial profiling. Can you talk about how they changed their online tools to mitigate bias?
Nextdoor’s whole purpose is to provide this whole platform where neighbors can build stronger, happier communities. That’s their mission. They’d gotten some good results with that. They’ve also had issues of racial profiling come up. That’s how they ended up contacting me.
They heard from users that racial profiling was sometimes an issue. Neighbors would use the crime and safety tab to report mostly black men as suspicious simply as being in the neighborhood, not because of actual suspicious behavior.
They not only reached out to me, but co-founder Sarah Leary and her team began to really pore through academic articles on racial bias to try and understand not only how it emerges, but how to stop it. From that and those discussions, they realized that slowing people down was a huge way to try to address bias. Rather than allowing people to post right away on the crime and safety tab, they decided that they wanted to slow people down before they post it and make them focus on the behavior of person rather than a racial category. They were also asked to give full description, instead of just putting “black guy here.” You have to describe that person in more detail and don’t swoop them into some broad category and expose them.
Slowing down before you fire off a post, those are some valuable lessons for Facebook and Twitter there.
These companies are trying to create products that are so intuitive to use that you don’t have to stop and think. You can use them without complication, you can use them quickly, and it doesn’t require a lot of thinking on the part of the user, but those are the types of conditions that allow bias to thrive. That’s the problem.
Exactly. The whole goal of tech is reduce friction. These companies are trying to create products that are so intuitive to use that you don’t have to stop and think. You can use them without complication, you can use them quickly, and it doesn’t require a lot of thinking on the part of the user, but those are the types of conditions that allow bias to thrive. That’s the problem.
Affirmative action is often a point of debate, in schools, in hiring, in life. Why should schools and companies seek out people who usually wouldn’t be in their application pool?
It takes deliberate effort. It’s easier to go to schools that you know are gonna give you good candidates, so that’s what people do. If you’re in a position where you’re trying to make a call on something, it’s a lot of work and investigation to look into other schools you’ve never heard of. It’s easier to hire people who are like you, who are familiar to you, who you understand. It doesn’t take as much work or effort to bridge those same pages.
People feel there’s a risk involved in hiring people outside who’s familiar. There’s even neuroscience research on this from at Stanford. [The researcher] looks at what happens to the brain when you’re looking at evaluations of people in your in-group vs. out-group.
He finds that when you evaluate in-group members, it’s easy to process positive info and harder to process negative. But it’s just the opposite when looking at people who are outside your group. It’s easier to process the negative and that’s what you’re aware of. It’s harder to process the positives, and takes more work to get there. This is the bias built in that can lead us to prefer our own.
You work with a lot of police departments on bias. How is the technology of body cameras and surveillance impacting police work?
The last I read is that about 95 percent of departments across the country have cameras or are contemplating getting them. It’s a huge and quick transformation. It seems like, at least from the correlation data, that when departments get cameras, you see a drop in citizen complaints and a drop in the use of force, so we know that.
The next thing you want to do is look to see if there is a causal relationship. You can have all kinds of reforms at once, and maybe there are some others that are causing the drop, and there have been a number of these randomized controlled studies that are carefully trying to look at the causal role cameras are playing. Those seem to be mixed.
I think the jury is still out, but at least studies are happening now in a number of places, including New York City. Both individual police departments and academics are looking at the data. Anthony Braga, a criminologist at Northeastern, is doing a rigorous study in Las Vegas with the Vegas police, and he’s heading up the effort with the NYPD. I know that his previous work has shown that cameras lead to a drop in complaints and a use of force.
In your work, especially with California police departments, are you seeing a changed protocol with training police officers and differences in interactions when they pull people over?
I’ve been looking at what impact it’s having on interactions, even when no complaint is lodged or no use of force occurs. I look at the footage itself to see how interactions are unfolding over time, especially looking at the race of the driver that officers pull over for routine traffic stops. I look at how that extent goes smoothly, to its fraughts, and what language officers are using.
I just did a study looking at officers’ language and how respectful that language was and whether the race of the driver made a difference. I provided the department with those results and that was folded into scenario-based training for the officers, using actual language from real stops in those trainings.
I also had the opportunity to discuss how to handle these interactions that’s respectful and so forth. Now I’m interested in looking at whether that training had an effect, pre- and post-training footage, to see if that made a difference, which is huge. A lot of police trainings are rigorously evaluated, but some trainings are evaluated by simply asking if they like the training on implicit bias or did it meet their expectations. You really want to know if it’s changed the day-to-day interactions on the street in a good way. That’s what we’ll be able to do with our new study we have underway with the Oakland, Calif. police department.
Bias: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do by Jennifer Eberhardt is out March 26.


It's not been a good year for the maker of Dulux paint. Since AkzoNobel rejected a $30 billion takeover bid by PPG Industries it's issued two profit warnings. The Dutch firm was looking to touch things up with a deal of its own. But it seems its target - Axalta - has been swayed by a new suitor. Japan's Nippon Paint Holdings has reportedly made an all-cash offer for the US coatings firm, who's largest shareholder is Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway. (SOUNDBITE) (English) MIKE INGRAM, CHIEF MARKET STRATEGIST, WH IRELAND, SAYING: "They're probably regretting not putting more on the table for Axalta. The perfect poison pill for PPG - it would have made the merged AkzoNobel-Axalta entity pretty much indigestible for PPG. And I think to some extent it would have it would have won approval from AkzoNobel shareholders." Akzo has confirmed it's ended what it said would have been a "merger of equals." It's instead planning to either sell off or list its speciality chemicals division, worth an estimated 10 billion euros. PPG has said it won't rebid for Akzo but in theory it could. (SOUNDBITE) (English) MIKE INGRAM, CHIEF MARKET STRATEGIST, WH IRELAND, SAYING: "There was a six month cooling off period from the failed bid back in the summer. That ends on the 1st of December. So we've actually got just over one week before PPG could potentially put another bid in. And who's to say that the shareholders who have suffered two profit warnings since then wouldn't vote for that." For Nippon - Japan's biggest paint supplier - the Axalta deal could help it crack the US market and boost earnings from automotive coatings But an all cash buyout would require considerable capital. A near 5 percent fall in its share price after the news emerged won't help that.